As our relationship with technology has become increasingly intimate in the
second half of the twentieth century, the figure of the cyborg - the hybridised
human-machine - has become one of our most culturally charged entities. The
fascination of the merging of machine and human is evident in documentaries
about the latest medical advances in biotic component implants as well as in
more speculative science fiction including television's Six Million Dollar
Man and The Bionic Woman as well as films like Ridley Scott's Bladerunner,
James Cameron's Terminator and Verhoeven's Robocop. The cyborg
traverses the discourses of medicine, robotics, cybernetics, science fiction,
artificial intelligence and popular culture and explores the boundary conditions
of what it means to be human. Where do we draw the line between the humanoid
robot and the technologically augmented human? Images of the cyborg reflect
our cultural ambivalence about technology, its potentialities and dangers are
embodied in conflicting narratives of the cyborg as victim and aggressor, hero
and villain, seductress and saviour.
Real life cyborgs exist side by side with their fictional counterparts. In Split
Subjects, Not Atoms; or How I Fell in Love With My Prosthesis, cybertheorist
Allucquere Rosanne Stone describes a lecture by the well-known physicist Stephen
Hawking who is severely paralysed and unable to speak without the aid of a computer
program connected to an artificial speech device. Talking of his lecture, Stone
comments, "Hawking doesn't stop being Hawking at the edge of his visible
body... a serious part of Hawking extends into the box on his lap. In mirror
image, a serious part of that silicon and plastic assemblage extends into him
as well."1 This transgression of human-machine boundaries is only a more
extreme version of the integrated circuits human users form with their computers
as a matter of common practice.
Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto also uses the culturally charged figure
of the cyborg and further complicates its signification. For Haraway, the cyborg
entity is an 'ironic political myth' that includes not just the high-tech cyborg
figures we have become familiar with from sci-fi books and films and the technological
implants of modern medicine, but the myriad couplings and alliances that make
up our personal, social, economic and political as well as our technological
selves. "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are
all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short,
we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics."#2
The merging of the discourses of genetic engineering with cybernetics and new
information technologies has resulted in a new image of human identity and behaviour.
The idea that humanity's genetic 'coding' is played out like a computer program
by the passive human machine-body has become a common trope in both scientific
discourses and in popular culture. Qualities migrate across the hyphen in human-machine
in both directions. Just as humans are increasingly described in mechanistic
or cybernetic terms, so too are computers increasingly attributed with human
characteristics, they 'think', they have 'memory', they even have 'viruses',
they certainly communicate.
Some people want computers to act like people. Some people want to be more like
computers. The hyphenated entity human-computer is a fantasy of the merger of
the qualities of both. The suggestive potentials and complications of shared
human-computer attributes are explored in films like Total Recall and
novels such as Pat Cadigan's Fools where memory implants are as easily
inserted into the human body as they are into computer hardware. In the art
world, Patricia Piccinini's genetically and digitally engineered LUMP babies
(Lifeforms with Unevolved Mutant Properties) look disturbingly like computer
monitors as they waggle their stunted little arms at us asking to be picked
up. In Troy Innocent and Elena Popa's interactive game Nano in NewSOS,
you take on the role of Nano, an electronic lifeform who has an EAT AN ICON
system installed, allowing you to assimilate information by eating computer
icons.
This confusion of electronic and human lifeforms is already a part of the everyday
experience on the internet. If you wander about for long enough in online text-based
virtual realities like MUDs (Multi-User Domains) and IRCs (Internet Relay Chats),
sooner or later you'll meet a new type of robot, a softbot. Softbots are autonomous
pieces of software that roam throughout the internet, analysing data, collecting
information and interacting with human users. Softbots, or intelligent agents
as they are sometimes called, are often anthropomorphic, they will talk to you
just like any other participant in a MUD or IRC. Human users have been known
to mistake 'bots' for humans, in a text-based world it can be hard to tell.
How do you know when you're talking to a 'bot'? Do you put all the entities
you interact with in cyberspace through some sort of Turing test? As 'bots get
more 'intelligent' and better able to simulate human conversation it may be
difficult to tell the difference.
As new technologies are developed, new robotic manifestations appear. Stelarc's
performance work incorporates both old and new robotic paradigms. His robotic
'third arm' performances have, in the last few years, been expanded to include
a virtual arm and his most recent performances utilise the internet to animate
and manipulate these various bodies. From flesh to robotic augmentation and
virtual prosthesis, Stelarc's various arms cover the spectrum of robotic manifestations.
As we head toward the twenty-first century, it is the figure of the virtual
cyberbody that is increasingly making its presence felt in the popular imagination.
These new robots are ephemeral machines of light, bits of data inhabiting the
cyberspace terrain. These insubstantial, virtual bodies projected in cyberspace,
exist in parallel with flesh bodies as their extensions or alter egos, not as
their replacements. Despite cyberpunk fantasies of disembodied consciousnesses
existing within the computer networks of cyberspace, these virtual bodies are
irremediably dependent on the material realities of flesh bodies just as cyberspace
itself is dependent on the material world for its existence.
In cyberspace, these virtual bodies can interact with anthropomorphic bots fulfilling
the old fantasy of being able to relate to computers as if they were people.
But, theorists like Jeet Singh and Sherry Turkle believe that the most important
interactivity that computers offer is not interaction with the computer itself
but interaction with other people through the computer. Sherry Turkle comments
"For 20 years, people have been talking about the computer revolution.
And after 20 years of hype, we now find that using a computer to interact in
new and different ways with other people is what the revolution really is."#3
... and Jeet Singh, "in the long term, the most stimulating interactions
will continue to be with human beings, and with human proxies."4 The participants
in virtual worlds are active creators of their virtual communities and they
inhabit and animate their virtual robots rather than passively watching them
as they would in a film, in a themepark or on TV.
In Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snowcrash, these new virtual robots
are graphical personas called avatars. Your avatar can look like anything you
want it to be, human or otherwise. If you don't know how to program one yourself,
you can buy one from off-the-shelf.
Brandy and Clint are both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high
school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down
to the computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy.
The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous.
Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute
and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her
eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are
rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can
almost feel the breeze.#5
You can already find versions of these Ken and Barbie clones in the various
graphical-based virtual worlds on the internet like Fujitsu's WorldsAway, Time
Warner's The Palace and Microsoft's V-Chat. These new robots obey the laws of
dreams and the imagination rather than the laws of mechanical engineering, Newtonian
physics or even rudimentary biology. In WorldsAway you can change your avatar's
persona by going to the 'Nu Yu' shop and trying on new faces, bodies and clothes,
you can even change your sex and species. Some virtual worlds like The Palace
allow you to construct a persona from your own images, opening the way for all
sorts of interesting possibilities. For the moment these virtual worlds are
largely limited to rather clunky cartoony visuals with a limited range of movement,
gestures and facial expressions. Your speech and thoughts appear in a text bubble
above your persona's head. In many ways these virtual worlds are a lot more
limited and less creative than the wholly text-based MUDs where you can be and
do anything you can put into words. Donna Haraway describes science fiction
writers as "theorists for cyborgs".(#6) What we need now are some
'designers for avatars and virtual worlds', perhaps a role for some of our new
media artists? Cyberspace could use some LUMP babies, not to mention a few of
Linda Dement's Cyberflesh Girlmonsters and VNS Matrix's DNA Sluts. Ken
and Barbie won't know what hit them!
© Kathy Cleland,
1996
MESH film/video/multimedia/art,MESH is published by Experimenta Media Arts