In 1997, the artist Eduardo Kac tested out a form of cyborgian art in his project, 'Time Capsule' (
Time Capsule Record), which involved the self-injection of a microchip, allowing viewers around the world to 'read' his body.
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| Images of Eduardo Kac's self-implantation from 'Time Capsule' |
This
artistic performance, more than twenty years ago, is perhaps a
watershed moment, when it became possible to incorporealize digital
technology outside the lab. Now, such body modification comes in many
forms: from boundary-pushing piercings and subdermal implantation to
voluntary biohacking (practised by Grinders) and the transhumanist
movement. Some of this body transformation is aesthetic, some ritual or
religious, some--as with Kac--artistic. The body can be 'read' in terms
of its data output, with internal chips linked to computer networks
thousands of miles away. Such experimentation is lauded (
See Professor Kevin Warwick's work)
and at the forefront of (neuro-)engineering research; or modified
bodies can find themselves at the center of legal cases between employer
and employee (
Cloutier v Costco).
Motivation
for body modification might be the individual pursuit of self-expression,
or a collective impulse--to identify as part of a community. A body
modifier may deliberately reject society's insistence on bodily
perfection; conversely, some of the most curious body transformation
attempts to reflect impossible conceptions of beauty (
Valeria Lukyanova, 'Russian Barbie'). Efforts to mark the body as one's own canvas, writing a
text of oneself in effect, is as old as the British Museum's Egyptian
mummy recently identified as having of one of the earliest known figural tattoos (
Gebelein Man); or it can be as socially and cultural significant as the lip plates of the Mursi tribe (
Afritorial on the Mursi).
For longer than recorded time, then, the embodied text has been a means
of self-identification, or noting a communal belonging, a resistance, a
compliance. Yet all such efforts are transitory (despite the grandiose objectives of Ray Kurzweil and his followers [
Immortal by 2045]), for each of us is, and should remain, ephemeral and time-bound.
