Prosthetics And The Virtual Body

Technology is irreversibly transforming human possibilities, fusing flesh with electronics. But such complex technologies, requiring large financial investment, will be controlled and marketed by the patent holders, making the new flesh a preserve of the luxury market.

The contemporary representation of the body presupposes an ability to set aside its modern portrayal as a complex but essentially unproblematic natural organism with an unbroken skin separating it from the outside world. The boundaries fixed for the modern body have faded to become shifting and fluid appearances. The human body no longer has the unique identity given to it by God, by nature or by scientific taxonomy. Gender and sexual differences are constructed, not given. The distinction between human and animal has come to seem mere arrogance, speciesism. Prosthetic technological extensions to the body have also blurred the distinction between human and machine.

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?

Donna Haraway

These losses of boundary are reflected in film, especially in those by the cult director David Cronenberg in The Fly we see the loss of a boundary between a human being and an insect; in Videodrome the boundary between flesh and technology becomes permeable, with the emergence of the new flesh. In Ridley ScottŽs Alien, the notorious scene in which the creature emerges from the abdomen of the unfortunate astronaut combines the loss of bodily boundary, where inside becomes outside, with an image of lost gender boundary - male childbirth.

Thirty years ago the overwhelming majority of human communication was face to face. From childhood we learned to appreciate nuance of tone, facial expression, and posture; the body we disclosed to us in such daily experiences. New technologies have changed this, with first-order prosthetic extensions to the bodyŽs powers.

We now speak on the telephone, receive faxes and electronic mail, watch TV, and seek information from computers; the Internet generates communities which never meet face to face; from Nintendo through chess computers to the new interactive technology, children play with computers as well as a football; telephone an TV shopping are on their way, and we all make daily use of various forms of plastic card.

In such communication we relate to other people to a greater or lesser extent, but via software an remote cameras, not directly to their bodies, which remain at a distance. The body and personal experience have parted company.

Medical technologies permit us to visit the interior of our own and other peopleŽs bodies via endoscopes, coloscopes, CAT scanners and ultrasound techniques; Stelarc and Mona Hatoum have produced visceral images of such voyages. We should not underestimate the novelty or impact of such violations and extensions of the bodyŽs boundary. But once we have grown accustomed to the everyday mediation of bodily exchange through technology, far more radical possibilities open up.