Cyborg Art – Convergence and Disembodiment

In the artwork of Tina LaPorta, Future Body, from 1999, we see a woman body presented as a computer grid.

tina-laporta-future-body

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.

Leave a Reply

2 Comments on "Cyborg Art – Convergence and Disembodiment"

Notify of
avatar
Sort by:   newest | oldest | most voted
Alexander Wilson
Editor
Alexander Wilson

Very relevant example and thoughts.

wpDiscuz