God made him simple, technology made him a god.
Lawnmower Man

Computer programmers are striving to develop artificial intelligence and simulated growth by emulating the structure of the brain and processes of evolution of the body. If there is the potential for robots to be 'human', is the reverse also possible, that humans may incorporate robotic features? When we consider the substitution of digital jargon for biological terminology or the proclivity in medicine to replace failed body parts with mechanical replicants, Neil Postman's notion that "the fundamental metaphorical message of the computer is that we are machines" has a ring of truth.(1) An understanding of anthromorphised computers as autonomous responsible agents with human failings such as susceptibility to viruses has a flip side in the circumscription of subjectivity and disturbance of our relations to all things 'natural'.

Our love/hate relationship with the machine and the desire to invest personality in them has been a leitmotif in sci fi writing and film. Recent work by a number of artists investigates the interplay between corporeality and popular representations of robotic, medical and consumer technologies. In Elena Popa's Robot Cycle (1992), an animation on video, two heterosexually gendered robots imitate the lifestyle of a suburban couple. The female robot appears subject to feeling or emotion and gives birth in a clean, clinical fashion prior to falling victim to the built-in obsolescence of commodity culture. Although more in tune with dreams of futures past, Popa's self-generating robots are pictured as replicating the human rather than subscribing to the common agenda of mechanical serfs created and controlled for human ends.

Biotechnology and robotics share a driving force, creation, and both have become ultimate consumer products. Robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and genetic engineering have all been subject to media hype but quantifiable outcomes, commercial recognition and forecast profitability have recently thrust the latter, in particular, into public discourse. The advent of genetically-manipulated foodstuffs has attracted as much controversy as human gene engineering. With the mapping of DNA and the potential to design genetic makeup, fundamental distinctions between technology and nature or the virtual and the real (already increasingly ambiguous) come under critical attention.

The increasing recourse to biotechnology suggests a need to develop new terminologies and ways of thinking about bodies in reference to definitions of natural and artificial. Elective Physiognomies (1995) by John Tonkin, records and charts viewers' responses on a computer based interactive to associations between facial features and characteristics of trust, intelligence, sensuality and homosexuality. Strings of genetic code map the individuality/sameness of genetic makeup on computer generated prints. Tonkin's work implies the pursuit of exhaustive knowledge of human genetics might escalate the subjective stereotyping and prejudices that were evident in enlightenment science.

Machinic physiologies have been drawn into a political discourse with Donna Haraway's well-known essay, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, which proposed the cyborg as an ontology, a model for understanding the ways in which knowledge, institutions and cultural practices can impact on biological bodies. Haraway's blend of systems and organisms is not a binary model of difference but manifests hybrids of the partial and perverse, "oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence".(2) In biogenetic practices, life is a synthesis of the legitimate and illegitimate, the moral and unethical, polarised concepts with uncertain boundaries. The natural body can no longer be presumed to precede the artificial.

Give your children more than just a chance in life. Don't leave it up to Nature... runs the caption on one of Patricia Piccinini's promotional images for her fictional biotechnic corporation, T.M.G.P.TM (The Mutant Genome Project) allows prospective parents to create, view and cost their desired child on Piccinini's Genetic Manipulation Simulator 1995. The Simulator offers a range of characteristics for the individualisation of the infant L.U.M.P. (Lifeform with Unevolved Mutant Properties): multi-ocular vision (six eyes or two), arms, ears, tanned skin, in-vitro education therapy, enhanced glandular system, gender and genitalia and a bigger brain. The consumer has ultimate power to 'give birth to the future today', at a price. The ultimate immaculate conception.

Like Tonkin, Piccinini's imagined reproductive technology also references the Human Genome Project, the multinational initiative to map the chemical sequences that comprise DNA in each of the twenty-three paired human chromosomes. While Piccinini's project shadows the commercial strategies of medicine, especially the seductive gloss of advertising, implicated in the work of both artists is the tension between the positive effects of prevention or cure for personal freedom and the potential for misuse of knowledge in both private and public sectors.

The synthetic entity holds both promise and danger, not being required to simulate existing form or conform to any laws, it imitates nature whilst being completely artificial. Robots, computers and even the synthetic superhero body is rendered vulnerable when unsheathed from its protective casing or if apertures in its housing reveal internal blinking lights and spinning cogs. So too L.U.M.P.'s susceptible nudity has been exposed further in a series of mannerist digital prints where internal musculature and organs are drawn with forensic verisimilitude by Piccinini. The future corporeality of L.U.M.P. is the mutant 'illegitimate offspring of militarism and capitalism', the hybrid cyborg made possible by post-industrial society and accessible primarily by a white, upper-and middle-class at ease with sophisticated communications and medical technologies.(3)

As Mark Dery notes, when sex re-assignment, cosmetic surgery and the implantation of pacemakers, artificial hips and electric prostheses into defective bodies is an everyday occurrence, 'morphs' and cyborgs are no longer the fantasies of sci-fi and VR.(4) Whether the rise of 'text sex' and the changes of identity possible in the Internet signify Dery's 'body loathing', the computer, like other machinic tools controlling our communication, vision, travel, entertainment or environment, opens the impregnable body to other more revolutionary possibilities.

The cyborg of digestible bodies and fast food nanotechnologies has been served up by the artists collaborative CyberDada, Troy Innocent, Elena Popa and Dale Nason, in the performance and video Techno Digesto Fetishism 1994. A blend of sales hype, gluttonous consumption and the disruptive potential of medical, scientific and popular discourses for the future of technological bodies is the point of intersection for these artists. The ever-digestible/reproducible organism has no fear of obsolescence. In the imaginary digital landscapes of Troy Innocent's interactive <Idea-On!> 1993-4 synthetic body shapes and surfaces also transmute according to human curiosity and digital logic.

For these artists, flesh is problematised, transcended by fashion, profit and the voracious sales pitch of technology's owners. They imagine the monstrous bodies produced at the boundaries of the mutually constitutive relations of science, culture, politics or multinational commerce and popular forms of entertainment. The historical conjoining of body and machine is being reconceived in diverse ways; contrasting polymorphous hybrid forms with renewed fixation on beauty, intelligence, sexuality and financial investment.

© Zara Stanhope, 1996
MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is published by Experimenta Media Arts

Footnotes

1. Neil Postman, Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage, New York, 1993, p.111.
2. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Free Association books, London, 1991, p.151.
3. ibid.
4. Mark Dery, Escape Velocity, Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996


Captions:

Elena Popa
still from Robot Cycle 1992
animated video

Patricia Piccinini
still from Genetic Manipulation Simulator 199
computer interactive

Patricia Piccinini
I Love You Baby 1995
digiprint