The Cyborg — Science Fiction or Reality?
My comments to follow are in regard to a required class reading of the following:
On Stelarc: CTheory articles by Stelarc and Julie Clarke at: http://www.ctheory.net/home.aspx
This particular set of readings was all about the marriage of organic and technological, the fusion of creature and machine, the cyborg.
The selection from the Paul text, presented some very interesting in-depth explorations of the theme of “cyborg”. Of the artists covered in the reading, Stelarc is the one who really stands out. His works are extremely extensive toward the modification of the human body with prosthetic extensions. His Exoskeleton (1999) performance was one to really stir up the mixed emotions from the viewer. The coupled horrific spider-like legs below the platform on which he stood, paired with the intriguing arm extensions (all controlled by Internet activity) were very disturbing and inspiring at the same time. This really was the primal makings of a cyborg in the science-fiction-turned-reality sense!
Here’s a link to an image of Stelarc’s Exoskeleton (1999): http://www.sztuka-fabryka.be/amaze/stelarc-01.jpg
I’ll be perfectly frank about Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”. I understood very little of this reading. She seemed to be caught up in the use of extremely long words to try and show her extensive vocabulary and baffle the reader into believing that she had great knowledge of the topic. I do understand that she was pairing feminist themes with the cyborg’s uni-sexual (or even non-sexual) capabilities. She seemed to be glorifying the fact that in a dystopian future, a cyborg-ruled community will be unbiased in regards to sexual influence over society’s many working elements. She talks about with the increase of time, the boundaries between animal and man, man and machine, and physical and non-physical have become thinner, blurred, and constantly breached. She foreshadows that essentially the boundaries of such things will eventually lead to the fused reality of the cyborg and the social dynamic of such a society to go along with it.
The third reading further explored the studies of Stelarc. One of his more current projects investigated the possibilities of a prosthetic head rather than his earlier prosthetic bodies. Granted, it was only a virtual prosthetic head, not a concrete one – it showed that without a consciousness behind the face, there could still be all the functions, however it lacked the inner pathos of imagination, creativity, and emotion.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Stelarc’s work, I’ve provided a link to a video presention on some of his artistic endeavors regarding the “posthuman”, the existence beyond that of a normal human, something that greatly resembles the science fiction cyborg:
These readings make me wonder, how far off are we from an actual society where cyborgs (like the ones formerly dreamed up in science fiction) are a part of every day life… It’s quite disturbing, to say the least…
Are we bringing about a golden utopian age of enlightenment or a dark dystopian age of the apocalypse? 
