ELECTROPIXEL #9
Electronic bodies and the abstract morphology of the real
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At the heart of the contemporary world and its issues, the question of the body and its development, its improvement, its enhancement through electronics and digital means, poses many questions to both the thinkers, artists and society as a whole. When we imagine “electronic bodies” we immediately think of ideas of the cyborg and the increasing possibilities of evolving the body through technology.
Donna Haraway tells us that “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.”
It would be both a fiction but also a social relationship and a way of seeing the living from the perspective of the cybernetic. We believe that there may be other relationships between body and machine that are not only those of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, but perhaps something more distant.
We are not all cyborgs in the making, the relationship to the machine is still external: smartphones and laptops are still the tools we use and they are not integrated or connected to our bodies. Whilst, in some cases these links are stronger, such as chips embedded under the skin that send out radio signals to communicate with machines, the future seems uncertain, the approaches multiple and open to varying points of view.
Supported by CNC-Dicream