Miłosz Markiewicz
FABRICATED BODIES. IN SEARCH OF CYBORG IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Il. Magdalena Lazar

Dying or incomplete bodies which, rather than being pushed to the furthest fringes of society to stay there for whatever time they have left, find themselves on the operating table from which, having undergone technologically advanced augmentations, they come off fully capable of continuing to live on or, in fact, reborn with a fresh set of faculties – this is the picture of a cyborg popular culture has been painting for us for decades. The best‑known cyborg characters are, first and foremost, Robocop (the first film trilogy from 1987–1993), Inspector Gadget (the protagonist in the animated series broadcast from 1983 to 1986 who might have been a prototype of Robocop), Darth Vader (his first on‑screen appearance was in 1977)¹ and, finally, Iron Man (a hero of the Marvel Universe, existing since 1963). Interestingly enough, not only are they all male, but their principal task is to “uphold the law” (imperial, too) as they originate from a military/police order that primarily involves fighting in defence of values.

A look at the provenance of the term “cyborg,” even if, as Grażyna Gajewska points out, various studies dealing with the subject pass over its early origin,² could help to understand the reason behind this. In 1960, two NASA employees, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, presented a lecture at a scientific symposium, later published in the Astronautics journal, in which they suggested that enhancing the human body with advanced technological solutions was worthy of consideration. “The idea was to create human‑machine hybrids able to work in extraordinarily difficult environments and tolerate the extreme conditions in space.”³ They believed that this was doable at the then stage of technological, medical and scientific development. The creatures, for which they proposed the name “cyborg,” were expected to overcome the restrictions that stopped humans from exploring the universe.⁴ The goal of creating the “cybernetic organism” was to make the human body autonomous from assorted machines and elements of the spaceship that maintained its vital functions while in space and required constant monitoring and regulation. This “exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously” was therefore tasked with automating the processes by means of technological extensions, in order to allow man freedom to “create, to think, and to feel.”⁵ In this connection, the Greek origin of the word cybernetics, the word kybernán – which stands for control or steering, is also worthy of attention. The original idea of a cybernetic organism is therefore a body in which technology aids biological processes viewed as a hindrance.

It should be stressed that cyborg bodies or, rather, cyborg warriors that came later, were a product of the Cold War. Iron Man is a prime example, the first such hero of popular culture – Tony Stark was an arms industry tycoon involved in the American campaign against communism (which becomes apparent when one considers the chief enemies of his superheroic alter ego). For years to come, it was this type of cyborg that would capture the imagination of the masses. As Grażyna Gajewska observes: “[…] cyborgisation defined a certain horizon of power – he who controls the body can tame and subjugate hard‑to‑reach areas on Earth and beyond.”⁶ Pop culture – to stick to the Cold War – imposed on us a military way of thinking about cyborgs, connected with conquest and the establishing of order. He was to fulfil the dream of “becoming equal to God, of power, of doing away with natural determination, of eliminating the painful split between soul and body, interior and exterior, the »I« and its representative in the world.”⁷

Yet this reading of cyborg seems tricky, paradoxical even. If the cyborg is supposed to assume control of the natural, robotise bodily processes in an attempt to prioritise conquest, then it should also be pointed out that the more the cyborg escapes from the human, the less capable it is of abandoning being human. Not abandonable, the imperfect body in need of technological improvement is a constant reminder of this. Interestingly, a being that has to rely on technonatural processes to control its own body, unable to do so otherwise, was originally conceived, was created to carry out the mission of seizing control over the universe. The cyborg represents an endeavour to tame the bodily microcosm with a view to launching a conquest of the macrocosm. This is a way of confirming that such expansive objectives are out of reach of people with their organic limitations. This subjectivity is thus a trap, and striving towards it leaves us in limbo. Therefore, in this article I shall focus on overstepping this paradigm towards a completely different understanding of the figure of the cyborg.

Twenty‑two years after the Marvel comic featuring Iron Man was first published, and two years before Robocop’s first appearance, a new voice is heard – at least theoretically – within the cyborg discourse, suggesting that the military perspective is one to be challenged. In her famous 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” published in the Socialist Review, Donna Harraway proclaimes: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”⁸ She also stresses that “social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world‑changing fiction.”⁹ In doing so, she sketches the horizon of a new ironic myth, blasphemous (in systemic terms) in its faithfulness to the principles of feminist politics.

This subversive effort to snatch from the patriarchal, phallogocentric and militaristic world one of its most important tools for capturing the imagination of the masses turns out to be entirely justified. The term ‘cyborg’ came to describe a “hybrid that annuls the traditional divide between mind and matter, mind and machine, animal and human, natural and stimulated development and, finally, life and death.”¹⁰ The cyborg thus became a figure which went far beyond the classical dualisms related to corporeality (and, in consequence, also sexuality) or biopolitics – what Rosi Braidotti was yet to consider a pillar of contemporary feminism, i.e. the nomadic¹¹ and, as a result, posthuman¹² subject. This type of subjectivity is processual in nature, defying attempts at essentialisation and leaning towards casual relationships that aim at “intensive interconnectedness.”¹³ In this way, it stresses its constantly reconfiguring relationship with the surrounding world. That being so, it is the opposite of the Cold War model of a militarised cyborg. “It is being at the in‑between stage, continually becoming of some kind and someone.”¹⁴

I shall continue along the same lines as Donna Haraway, a clear sign that I see the cyborg body as a speculative project – a world‑changing fiction immersed in social relations, understood in their broad form. A cybernetic organism is one in which soma and machine merge as well as one which, through technological (that includes digital) mediation, reveals that human bodies are created by discourses. This is a corporeality produced by social and political fictions that lead to various forms of hybridisation found in the reality that surrounds us.¹⁵ A corporeality that is more‑than‑human, based on the assumption that the body is not restricted by the boundaries of the soma and both that the animate and material and the inanimate and digital can constitute its extension.¹⁶ Faithful to the original concept though supplemented with Donna Haraway’s feminist manifesto, a cyborg exceeds the limitations of what is natural to set off into the macrocosm – not in order to conquer it, however, but to connect with it.

Shifting between the cybernetic, organic, urban, and machine orders, I suggest that we should interpret various forms of contemporary art as cyborgian. In order to do so, I choose projects with a tangible link with the figure of the cyborg as well as those seemingly not consistent with it. The art I am interested in demonstrates in a variety of ways our deep‑rooted dependence on technological extensions, especially when they take on an apparently immaterial character.¹⁷ The distinctive features of cyborg art allow us to define it as vir(ac)tual, or an art that, on the one hand, is embedded in embodied and situated activities focused on the here‑and‑now,¹⁸ and, on the other, projects the potential of coming futures that materialise in artistic works and actions. Piotr Zawojski observed: “[…] technoculture finds its numerous manifestations in the activities of artists who treat new media as tools of cognitive exploration […], as a research laboratory.”¹⁹

I will not direct my attention to representations of non‑human bodies found, for example, in the work of Patricia Piccinini, an artist exposing corporeality born from experiments in biotechnology,²⁰ but to artistic (or even artistic‑scientific) modes of activating this type of relational extended subjects. To me, cyborg art encompasses transdisciplinary activities undertaken at the intersection of artistic creation, science and technology. Jacek Wachowski calls this type of performative strategies transactions: “[…] they combine multi‑disciplinary activities from different disciplines and explore the border zone which hides significant and untapped potential […]. They allow for this potential to be extracted, given a recognisable form and introduced into social circulation.”²¹ Importantly, the very creation of art has a relational character here because this type of activity requires the involvement of people from non‑artistic disciplines, including biotechnology, computer science, data visualisation or mechanics.

This performative, rather than representative, character of the creative work I discuss in this article, which I refer to as ‘cyborgian’, is important because it allows for the potential and speculative nature of this type of narrative to be realised, which springs directly from the writings of Donna Haraway, who views the cyborg as “a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.”²² Artistic projects that apply technology as extensions or mediations for human bodies become in this way a space for experimentation, creating imagined worlds that challenge the existing order along with the hierarchies that establish it, going across systemic exclusions and inequalities. This is an art which, as described accurately by Monika Bakke, “[…] is not an illustration […] but a research and experimental field for trans‑species bodily contacts. […] Artworks addressing these issues expand the area of ​​knowledge to include what an anthropocentric subject finds inconvenient and uncomfortable in relations with non‑humans; by creating their own epistemologies, they take us to a realm of experiences not yet deeply reflected on, although undoubtedly lived through.”²³.

Seen in this way, cyborg art is to be considered a form of social laboratory. It generates narratives that aim to go beyond the horizon of limitations imposed on us by the polycrisis that we are contemporarily facing as the diverse crises gnawing at the world (ecological, humanitarian, social, economic, informational) overlap and combine, resisting being seen in separation or hierarchised.²⁴ As a result, I see the cyborg as a speculative figure, which, by being indicated in multiple artistic activities, facilitates the development of critical reflection on this issue and suggest methods of dealing with it.

Imperfect bodies

The most recognisable and pioneering creator of cyborg art is undoubtedly Stelios Arcadiou, an Australian artist of Cypriot origin better known under the pseudonym of Stelarc. Although the beginning of the most popular segment of ​​his work is marked by the artist attaching to his body the Third Hand (1976) – a mechanical arm which, in response to signals from the muscles, moved according to the artist’s will – or the Suspensions series (1976–1988), his art has, in fact, been revolving around the limitations of the human body, its imperfections, and the various possibilities of transcending them from the very start which dates back to only a few years after Iron Man or Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline’s concept of the cyborg. The artist recalled that his actions “are not aimed at improving the body or updating it, but rather at experimenting with alternative anatomical architectures. […] I do not see these projects as improvements or updates in the sense of updating a computer, but rather as experiments with different types of anatomy.”²⁵

Already his earliest works that formed the Helmets: Put On and Walk series (1968–1972) can be seen as cyborg art. The six objects contained within it, intended to be worn on the head, played with human sight, breaking up binocular vision into a kaleidoscope of impressions, combining frontal, rear and side views. This kind of body expansion was definitely not a way of improving it, but an area in which to search for new possibilities and, at the same time, to test the flexibility of the boundaries of perception.

In such works as Ping Body (1996) and Parasite (1997), which, in a way, acted as extensions of Amplified Body (1970–1994) that saw the artist connecting his body to muscle tension and energy flow (including brainwaves and blood pressure) sensors – Stelarc’s body became part of the Internet’s bloodstream of data as a specially designed algorithm made connections between the information received and sent and his body. “This created a somatic‑technological loop consisting of interactive neurons, muscles, and video code cooperating with a prosthetic model controlled remotely by the artist.”²⁶

This type of postbiological chimera whose body is to be seen – according to Stelarc – as a combination of meat, metal and code that creates an elaborate operating system,²⁷ is manifest in his possibly most famous project, Ear on Arm (2006). An ear‑shaped implant placed under the skin, fulfils a purely aesthetic function, but was originally supposed to be an extra receptor, facilitating the reception of sound and digital signals, transmitting them directly to the artist’s brain and to the network. Stelarc himself was thus to become a post‑biological, post‑human and post‑technological node, presenting the body – to be precise: the body of a cyborg – as just one element of a complex data flow system. Wojciech Sitek pointed out: “[…] the ear implant, evidencing feedback in the human‑technology relationship, is an expression of the aspiration to expand the possibilities of receiving content in a world of overproduction and excess of sensations.”²⁸ The artist demonstrates that the human body is no longer an entity isolated from the rest of the world, if it ever was – as rightly suggested in the title of Stefan Lorenz Sorgner’s book.²⁹ It is not a shell that separates our inside from reality, but a set of receptors that allow us to process the world and respond to the signals it sends. We are constantly decoding stimuli and encoding the data flows associated with them, both external and internal. Supporting these receptors with technological additives is taking just one step further from the systems that already support and extend our capabilities. The questions posed by Stelarc concern a potential future of human bodies, while the artist also ponders on the cyborg nature of our participation in a world that consists of casual relationships constantly entered into.

While the artist seldom uses the term “cyborg,” an artistic duo with Catalan roots (whose members also work solo for individual projects) even established the Cyborg Foundation in 2010, with the intention to support international scientific research and artistic exploration focused on the possibility of expanding human perception through technological advances. Perception is not to be related solely to sight here, it is a multifaceted sensorium that is “organoleptic and networked,” and “its essence is constituted by many interconnected systems of impulse transmission.”³⁰

Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas call the art they make cyborg art, it mainly relies on the idea of body as a node of receptors. Apart from the Cyborg Foundation, they also created the WeTooth project (2016) that involved each having a tooth implanted which could be activated to act as a Bluetooth transmitter and trigger vibrations in the other person’s implant. As a result, they are able to communicate with one another using Morse code. In all their activities, they try to broaden the possibilities of experiencing the world which is perceived by humans through the senses.

One of Moon Ribas’s works was a sensory glove that enabled her, via vibrations, to know the exact speed of anything moving around her (Speedborg, 2008) – the glove was later converted into earrings which made it possible for her to experience both sound and vibrations related to movement speed through her ears. Eventually, the improved system allowed her to sense and detect seismic movements of the Earth after it had been implanted in her feet (Seismic Sense, 2013).

Neil Harbisson’s best‑known art project and perceptual extension is Cyborg Antenna (2004). Since he was born, the artist has been suffering from achromatopsia – an incurable retinal condition that causes loss of colour vision (meaning that, rather than not being able to recognise them, he sees no colours at all but perceives the world in shades of gray) – an antenna was implanted in his occipital bone to help him experience colours through vibration‑triggered auditory sensations. In consequence, he can “through bone conduction hear the frequencies of colours, including those invisible to the human eye, such as infrared and ultraviolet, and to receive colours via satellite transmission.”³¹

The artistic activities undertaken by Neil Harbisson are therefore of synesthetic nature – they result from a combination of sensory experiences, allowing him, for example, to paint sounds heard (the Colour Scores series of paintings, 2009) or transmitted directly to his antenna (Skull Transmission Painting, 2014) or to create colouristic musical compositions (Colour Concert, 2014).

Thanks to the sensory experiments of Moon Ribas and Neil Harbisson as well as Stelarc’s explorations the world appears to be much more complex, and traditional human perception which assumes that the body is self‑sufficient and separate from the world seems inadequate for comprehending or even perceiving this complexity. We are surrounded by various impulses that try to break through the boundaries of soma. The purpose of technological augmentations is to help both in their reception and decoding, and in sending one’s own impulses into the reality in which we are immersed – thus creating an endless feedback loop that is the essence of post‑humanist subjectivity.

Beyond the body

Data flow is not the first concept that springs to mind when we think of the human body, yet such processes occur continuously within and outside our bodies. For example, the lungs are not the only organs that breathe as so does the entire skin – letting in the seemingly external world and releasing secretions in various forms. This is a special way of communication between living beings and their surroundings, which emphasises the relational nature of the subject defined as post‑human. Reflection of this kind was taken up by the Brazilian‑American artist Eduardo Kac, a pioneer of bio and transgenic art who claimed that “the animate and the technological can no longer be distinguished,”³² in his Natural History of Enigma (2003–2008) cycle. The series of works calls into question the relationship between humans and plants as it is traditionally understood, transgressing the food chain towards a perspective of co‑existence. Apart from sculptures, lithographs, seed packs and paintings that make up the series, its most important element is Edunia – a new form of life, a genetically modified flower, a hybrid of the creator’s DNA and that of a petunia. Created in this way, as the artist states, has been an “animal‑plant” whose hybridity is only revealed on the outside by the red veins visible on its delicate pink petals.³³

Although what we are dealing here with is seemingly not a cyborg, it is worth noting that the body of Eduard Kac (an animal that the human being is) has transcended the limits of the soma, giving rise to a new more‑than‑human life, through the application of technological tools used in laboratories. Born from a biotechnological relationship, Edunia has become a symbol as well as a real and tangible proof that humans share their lives with other living beings, not only animals, but plants too. The fundamental part of this molecular process was technological mediation without which the whole procedure would not have been possible. By means of scientific and technological interventions, Eduard Kac’s body was expanded onto another organism – in this way becoming a zoe‑geo‑techno‑assemblage,³⁴ growing in a rhizome‑like fashion among both living organisms and minerals like silicon which make up the technosphere.

What matters here is that “all commercially available petunias today are hybrids, and an intervention of genetic engineering that results in the creation of a plant‑human chimera is just another step in the long‑running process of producing taxonomic mongrels.”³⁵ Consequently, Edunia is not an artistic curiosity or prank, but a feasible proposition to widen the family of beings that inhabit the Earth whose presence should be taken into account in the situation of co‑existing on a planet changing dynamically in the face of ecological crisis. A co‑existence of which technology is a vital part.

Noteworthy here is the work of the artistic‑scientific collective Grow Your Own Cloud (Cyrus Clarke, Monika Seyfried, Jeff Nivala). They are exploring the possibilities of ecological zero‑emission data storage that is powered by nature and, as a result, intended to be freely available, as opposed to the solutions offered by Big Tech companies. Given that the data storage industry emits significant amounts of greenhouse gases on a global scale,³⁶ the collective is trying to spark off a debate on “data warming,” or the impact technologies exploited by the data industry – concerning both storage and retrieval – have on climate change.

Their activity commenced with the Data Flower Shop project (2018) that involved running a flower shop; they encouraged visitors to send data to a plant of their choice. In the process, people also learned about the basic issues related to the data industry and its links with climate catastrophe. This was taken further with the Data Garden project (2020) that afforded the opportunity for the audience to interact with plants the genetic codes of which stored digital data. It was possible to download music, images or text files in real time in the garden. All these had been added to the DNA of the plants on display through genetic sequencing.

These actions seem to be the next step in the artistic process of developing a cyborg body set off by Eduardo Kac. Donna Haraway points out: “[…] machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self‑developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively […].”³⁷

That is because they are not what could so far be viewed as elements of the inanimate world – on the contrary, technology is what might bring about a symbiosis between humans and other organisms within naturecultures. Performing the cyborg figure in this way – not only exceeding physical limitations, but also reaching far beyond the body thanks to technological mediation – enables the opening up of a space of speculative future in which “[f]ar from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling,”³⁸ taking into account the complexity of political and environmental reality. A disruption of the previous hierarchy of beings, postulated within the framework of post‑humanist reflection, no longer constitutes a utopian idea, but becomes a feasible world in which the principal category that organises planetary co‑existence is community.

Research projects carried out by the multidisciplinary Forensic Architecture collective, demonstrating the results of their investigations in the form of artistic visualisations at exhibitions and major international art festivals since its inception in 2010, should be interpreted similarly. Associated with Goldsmiths at the University of London, with architect Eyal Weizman as its head, the group consists of people active in art, data visualisation, programming, investigative journalism, digital modelling, law, archaeology and urban planning. In their work, they make use of online data and materials (including visuals), generated by official government or institutional websites, as well as social media, which allow them to remotely investigate human rights violations, armed conflicts, destruction of cultural heritage, or environmental devastation around the world. Given the artistic, design, and research character of the group, their activities primarily involve accumulating evidence and giving it a visual form that is accessible to wide audiences.

It is for this reason that they show the results of their work at all sorts of art exhibitions, thus being able to reach a larger public familiar with the visual code they use. Forensic Architecture prove Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that has long become classic that media constitute an extension of the human nervous system.³⁹ Here, they become an element of a more‑than‑human or, more precisely, cyborg body. They are a suggestion that we should escape “the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”⁴⁰

As a result, the cyborg figure becomes a promise of new social principles, while the definition of society is expanded to include the non‑human. This is no longer only a transgression of the body, but the crashing of the boundaries of situated cognition, the production of knowledge, which, due to technological extension, takes on a more‑than‑human, communal and, above all, counter‑hegemonic character. Practices of this kind constitute a form of “decolonising knowledge, involving not only the production of one’s own tools, but revealing the political and economic relationships between big data, simulation models of disasters, information made available to the public and the actual harm inflicted on human and non‑human communities.”⁴¹

The cyborg turns out to be a fiction which, by revealing the discursive nature of fabricated bodies, can have a real impact on social reality. In line with Donna Haraway’s post‑humanist postulate presented in her manifesto, it thus fulfils its political mission.

***

Cyborg corporeality can take the form of both mediation and extension – yet it is invariably based on the production of more‑than‑human bodies, stressing the highly technicised nature of the world around us. This is a significant ontological distinction between a cyborg and a robot or an android. The last two are machines, even if – as in the case of the android – human‑like. They are fully mechanised and programmed entities able to function more or less autonomously. Cyborg bodies are, dissimilarly, chimeras, their existence is relational, based on various connections of an exogenous nature. In so being, they exceed the traditionally understood boundaries of human corporeality – whether through the fabrication of new organs or the concretisation of its networkedness.

Grażyna Gajewska indicates: “[…] there are various variants of cyborgisation in contemporary technicised society: all sorts of artificial organs, limbs or technical additions (e.g. a pacemaker), medicines and pharmacological substances which help us eliminate diseases (e.g. vaccinations against infectious diseases) or psychotropic drugs.”⁴²

A cyborg is not a science fiction figure, it is a tangible reality with and in which we live every day. It is not a project to be done, but an actual form of knowledge which – in accordance with its tendency to transcend dualisms – allows us to think about the world not only in the perspective of the here‑and‑now. On the one hand, it grounds us through embodiment, highlighting the key role of the human body in the process of cyborgisation (after all, no boundary can be transcended unless it is set) and, on the other – it opens us to speculations about potential futures at the same time. The cyborg helps materialise what remains virtual, stopping us from breaking away from our situation in the present body. Hence my claim about cyborg art being vir(ac)tual. That exactly makes it able to escape the cognitively limiting dualisms – in this case related to the perception of time – that have constituted the reality of polycrisis.

In her manifesto, Donna Haraway accentuated that “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organisms; in short, cyborgs.”⁴³ This means that escaping the relationships discussed in this article is beyond our capacity – they are, even if invisible, an inalienable part of our existence. Cyborg art exposes them, allowing a better understanding of them and revealing their complexity as well as the broad scope of the post‑human reality in which we all co‑exist.