My work explores the ways in which the body and technology come into contact with one another and are incorporated, integrated, fused and reciprocal. Interfaces between body and technology operate in dynamic tension with the body, we tend to speak of technologies as things we take in, and forget that we are as much in the prosthesis as it is in us.

 

Recent developments of neuroprosthesis directly taps into the body’s nervous system, and the body reciprocally extends into the device, producing a system that is inter-constitutive beyond the interface between body and prosthetic part; the body is radically and deeply reorganized. We incorporate devices into our bodies, the word incorporate literally means “bring within a body” and seems to imply an absorptive process in one direction, when it is actually always a conversation between the body, the technology and the world. When contemplating human machine interfaces my mind always comes back to Jean Baudrillard’s frenzied warning of technology: …everybody is now nothing but an invariant reproduction of the prosthesis: this point means the end of the body, the end of its history, the end of its vicissitudes. It means that the individual is now nothing but a cancerous metastasis of his basic formula.

 

It is a terrifying thought, to have one’s being reduced to a cancerous metastasis of one’s essence, but throughout our long history with technology (beginning from the first instances of reshaping a rock into a spear) we have learned that the body, its histories, and its mutability have not become fixed by technology, to deny that is to be ignorant of all the ways that the body can and do take up various forms of technology. Informed by these general concerns that arise around the confluence of the human and technology, I am much more interested in the degree of agency that the assistive technology allows its user, the intimacy and vulnerability of body-machine unions and questions that arises out of it. Where does theboundary lie between the person and the prosthesis? Where does one stop and the otherbegin? How do we understand our place and placement in a multiplicity of approaches to ever changing conditions of borders and bordering?