In the artwork of Tina LaPorta, Future Body, from 1999, we see a woman body presented as a computer grid.
It reveals us the shift from the material biological body towards the informatic pattern, retaining only the form in order to be recognizible. It is a sum interfacing of the material and immaterial, and although we do see the body form presented, it is faraway from the body – it is a paradoxical body, made of digits, patterns and based on virtuality. This artwork shows the posthuman subject as considered by Catherine Hayles (1999: 3) – the amalgam of heterogenous components, the material-informational entity.
However, this kind of posthuman body production leaves us with questions: Is the informational pattern body capable of developing a consciousness? What kind of consciousness it would be, having in mind that its way of sensoring and experiencing the reality (factual or virtual) is different from ours? Can we understand and therefore name this kind of experience? It is as we were talking about a early-born child, in 6th month, that doesn’t have the same sensorial and cognitive system, and is living the reality in a different way than a 9th month born baby; or as we were talking of a baby whale while communicating with its flock.
Humans are inevitably engaged in their centric vision of the world and all its beings, and cyborg art shows us how astranged we feel as we encounter the bodies that resemble us, but are not us. This way, the cyborg artworks can open our conceiving of the verb “to be”, as not applicable only to us, but to all dynamic systems around. As Nagel (1974: 449) pointed out reffering to our understanding of being a bat (not as a bat!): “At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination”. That is why posthuman art in general can serve us as a prosthesis of our cognition and perception of the others – digitalised, animal, cyborg… and in this realm we encounter that body and mind are to be related as a converging patterns.
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2 Comments on "Cyborg Art – Convergence and Disembodiment"
Very relevant example and thoughts.
Thank you very much, I really appreciate your comment. I would also add that maybe we could relate the concept of body as represented in LaPorta’s works with Spike Jonze’s famous movie “Her” (2013), that provokes quite remarcable thoughts on disembodiment! At moments I believe that it advocates disembodiment, supporting the possibility of development of the consciousness of an OS (operating system)independently from the body, and still capable to relate to the embodied human.