The human body is the last frontier of technisation. Many developments indicate that a new kind of technical environment, a technosphere, is evolving, which encompasses and possibly even reconstructs the individual. What will the consequences be when - and if a number of technological breakthroughs succeed - the natural boundaries of the human body are transcended and the "microcosmic" worlds of human manipulation become accessible? Cyborg as a concept stands for the tendency of biological organisation and technical control to join forces. Yet precisely what lines are to be drawn between man and machine? It seems absurd to regard the mere wearing of contact lenses or taking of "smart drugs" as cyborg qualities. In diverse fields of science, work is being done to link man and machine. In the fantasies of some scientists from the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence research, the body will in the future be redesigned and reproduced in its forms and functions. What advances have been made, for example in medical technologies for the execution o f operations? Prosthetics, which equips the human body with technical aids, is viewed positively in the technosciences, because it can help human cognition and perception to reach new dimensions. Medical and surgical operations on a nanotechnological basis are said to be in the offing; operations in which the tiniest machines - similar to leukocytes - can be Inserted in tissues, and take reparatory measures directly inside the body, to keep the body young and perfect the man-machine symbiosis. If the aspired inventions succeed, an elementary shift of cultural criteria - "life", "body", "nature", "man", "evolution" - will occur. In emerging cyberculture, new fantasies about technologies, the human body and society are surfacing. A whole string of ambivalent cyborg motifs has already invaded popular culture. How can this thematic boom be understood? What prospects are hidden beneath these models? Making predictions in this context constitutes a serious challenge for the description of cultural processes of meaning and for artistic debate. Opinions vacillate between the extremes: either the individual will become irrevocably an appendage of technology - the French media theorist Paul Virilio speaks here ofa"crucifixion"of the human body - or he will be confronted with totally new possibilities of existence, made available by the technisation of thought and the body. Will the reconstruction of the body, of objects, become the stock of a new (ideological) "metaphysics" in the attempt to transcend the physical? The human being is in the process of leaving his existence as a natural being behind him and is seeking his technical (re)production, his "self-deification".
A vision which is for the most part articulated without regard for society by its apologists. The American biologist and historian Donna Haraway considers the cyborg also a critical metaphor, a fiction, from which the nature of contemporary social and physical reality can be read. She believes that the body is as such denaturalised, and must be seen as a construct: Moreover, the scientific and technological circumstances of society, as discernible in electronics and biotechnology, are powerful methods to intensify the commodification of all things. This occurs in part through the displacement and redefinition of the fundamental boundaries by which objects are socially constituted. And
we are ourselves such objects. Haraway sees the cyborg as a new model of interpretation: the technologically altered circumstances affect questions of identity and the (self)definition of human culture. Is the cyborg a new model for societal emancipation in which new cultural chances for life and new freedoms for intervention into nature are opened, or the dismal foreboding of a new "totalitarianism" in which the body is forced into a technical "body armour" aspart of an "informatics of domination"? What a cyborg might be materially speaking must remain speculation. Technologies for linking organism and machine are only in their infancy. They are still far from being able to reconstruct the body, no matter how this may occur, and at the end of which death might be overcome. The Cyborg motif is currently experiencing a renaissance in various cultural areas. Various themes point toward this phenomenon: the visual portrayal o f the man-machine connection in pop culture, the vision of hybrids in artistic creations, cyborgization as a metaphor for new Patterns o f utilization o f technology and the embodiment o f new experiences, and then, the cyborg as a Tact, the concrete man-machine interfaces and a look at what is technical feasible and conceivable. Andreas Broeckmann, Sabeth Buchmann and Dierk Spreen present their interpretations. The subsequent discussion will by moderated by Wolfgang Neuhaus. "Pandaemonium", a Then by Richard Curson Smith and Teslie Asako Gladsjp, produced by Illuminations Television will be Presented as an opening. Pandaemonium
- Leslie Asako Gladsjo,
Richard Curson Smith