On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (46 page)

Orlan is not an escaped mental patient. She is a respected member of the international art community, displaying herself and her work at the Pompidou in Paris and touring England with a show titled “This Is My Body, This Is My Software.” She is supported by grants from France’s Ministry of Culture and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The art world has embraced this controversial play of nature and technology with open arms.
¹³

To some viewers Orlan is blasphemous. Some critics decry her project, claiming that it is playing God to rearrange the face or body that God gave her. Is she transforming herself into a monster? Perhaps there is something sacrosanct about the natural state of affairs. Then again, it seems far too late to raise such a nostalgic objection. The natural state of affairs is already increasingly the product of human intervention. Our tomatoes are genetically engineered to ripen sometime after the apocalypse, our corn is genetically designed to detassel itself, frogs are designed with see-through skin for anatomy students, and human beings walk around with pig-valved hearts and pharmacy-bought psyches. As prosthetic gods, we lengthen and strengthen our arms and legs with machines. We expand our vision and the other senses with amplifiers. We alter our biology and psychology with synthetic chemicals. But the idea that technology makes us more god-like is premised on the assumption that we will be able to maintain
control
of the augmentations, that our human
will
can continue to retain its mastery over the mechanical and digital equipment. If it slips away from us, if the tools become constraints
rather than emancipators, then we may be in for unprecedented forms of alienation. Technology may alienate us from ourselves, dehumanizing us and turning us into self-made monsters of a new sort altogether.

The Australian artist Stelarc finds ways to fuse his own body with robotic technology. From his Web site
www.stelarc.va.com
. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist.

Japan has been refining the cyborg “robo-roach” for over a decade. Microrobotics teams and biologists, like those at Tsukuba University, have successfully outfitted cockroaches with microprocessors and replaced their antennae with pulse-emitting electrodes. The scientists can actually control the movements of the roach, making it turn left and right and move forward and backward. Here, then, is the real-world manifestation of our worst fears. Are we creating technology that will eventually put us in the place of these hapless roaches?

The artist Stelarc (Stellos Arcadiou) takes a different approach to the interface between biology and technology. This performance artist, who is funded by an Australian Council Craft Board Fellowship, fuses his own body with electrical and digital technology. According to his official Web site, “He has used medical, robot and virtual reality systems to explore, extend and enhance the body’s parameters. In the past he has acoustically and visually probed the body—amplifying his brainwaves, heartbeat, blood flow and muscle signals and filming the inside of his lungs, stomach and
colon. Having defined the limitations of the body, he has developed strategies to augment its capabilities, interfacing the body with prosthetics and computer technologies.”
¹⁴

The artist Stelarc plays with cyborg technology. He pushed the robotic camera down into his stomach to create a sculpture inside his body. From his Web site
www.stelarc.va.com
. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist.

One of Stelarc’s early works was his “stomach sculpture.” He first built a finger-size capsule sculpture that contained a camera. Next he fasted for a day to clear his gut, and then he piped this capsule down his gullet, tethered to a flexidrive cable and external control box. Once inserted into his stomach, it moved about and lit up LEDs by external control.

Again the burning question: Why do this? And again no clear answer is forthcoming, though the artist’s statement is provocative:

The idea was to insert an artwork into the body—to situate the sculpture in an internal space. The body becomes hollow, with no meaningful distinctions between public, private and physiological spaces. The technology invades and functions within the body not as a prosthetic replacement, but as an aesthetic adornment. One no longer
looks
at art, nor
performs
as art, but
contains
art. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.

In Stelarc’s “Ping Body” performance, audience members in Paris, Helsinki, and Amsterdam were electronically linked through a performance
Web site (with a video feed) to the main performance site in Luxembourg, where Stelarc stood with wires and circuitry dangling from all parts of his body. These wires, which were muscle-stimulation contacts, were fed into a central computer, and audience members from around Europe were invited to manipulate Stelarc’s body from their remote sites. There is something phenomenally strange about this. A person stationed thousands of miles away can push a button and make another person’s arm go up in the air.

One of the reasons it’s difficult to make sense of Orlan and Stelarc is their clever confusion of the means and ends relationships. When technology serves an engineering purpose or solves a practical puzzle, its role as a tool is clearly defined. As I write this line on my word processor, the computer technology slavishly follows the parameters that lead to effective typing and storing of data. The computer is a means to my goal of writing a book. But in Stelarc’s “Ping Body” performance, the technology is almost an end in itself. He is literally playing with technology rather than pressing it into service for some preset goal. The parameters are not clear because the function of the technology is not clear. What will come of Stelarc’s technological achievements is difficult to say, though we can bet that electric-organic cyborg fusions and remote-control manipulation will not go unnoticed by people with very definite ends in mind (e.g., the military).

So, too, in the case of Orlan, the means-end distinction is blurred. Plastic surgery and implantation is a technology that’s becoming cheaper, more widespread, and more acceptable to popular culture; the public now expect celebrities to be accessorized in this way, and many well-to-do teenagers get new body parts as graduation presents from their parents. When we compare Orlan and Cindy Jackson, for example, the means-end distinction becomes highly relevant.

Cindy Jackson is an American woman who holds the world record for most plastic surgeries, around thirty operations, to transform herself into that cultural icon of beauty, the Barbie doll. When she was thirty-four her father died and left her a sizable inheritance, which she straightaway began to invest in her future face. She had surgery to remove the bags under her eyes, she had implants put into her cheeks and lips, and she had her chin chiseled, her eyes enlarged, her makeup colors permanently tattooed onto her face, her jaw broken and sawed shorter, and more.

Most people recognize a significant difference between Orlan and Jackson. Both employ the same cutting-edge medical technology (pun intended), but though the means are comparable, the ends or goals of the two differ greatly. When asked why she has been reconstructing herself to look like Barbie, Jackson replied that she does it for the power: “I used to seek pleasure from men and now they seek it from me….This
is the ultimate feminist statement. I refuse to let nature decide my fate just because I missed out on the genetic lottery.”
¹⁵
Orlan, on the other hand, has a different goal; it is more abstract, more philosophical, less personal, and indeed less understandable than Jackson’s. But for all that, intellectuals and connoisseurs seem quite sure that Orlan’s goals are more legitimate. The use of plastic surgery is vaguely respectable in Orlan’s case because her goals are
artistic
, whereas in Jackson’s case, they say, the practice seems just sad. I feel less confident about this tidy distinction. Perhaps they are both artists, but one of them has not realized it yet. Orlan has expressed interest in meeting Jackson, but she refuses and is confused by the “artist” designation that some want to bestow on her. Can you be an artist and not know it? Unclear. Can you be a kook and not know it? Doubtless.

As we have seen repeatedly, monsterology is an ironic field of inquiry, and here we find another example. Monsters are symbols of the disgusting, with their decaying flesh, mottled limbs, and rotting, putrefying tissues and organs. In short, monsters are thumbnail sketches of our own destiny. It is our human fate to slowly fall apart and to cause revulsion in younger, healthier witnesses. If we think about the limping, moldering state of most imaginary monsters, we can see our own elderly selves in much exaggerated form. In this view, part of our odium for monsters can be understood as fear and loathing of our own mortality. Cyborg research and development will certainly have great benefits for those of us who become injured or otherwise find ourselves in need of sophisticated prosthesis, but we can also see an emotional meeting place of posthuman philosophy, cyborg research, and mundane plastic surgery—namely, the all too human urge to escape aging and death. In our attempts to live forever or at least ensure that we’re, like, totally hot, we may be hybridizing ourselves into new
uncanny
territory, where the cure looks worse than the disease. On the other hand, human beings who have freely chosen cosmetic surgery have a remarkable ability to avoid anything like
regret
; I suspect that Michael Jackson, for example, is entirely happy with his uniquely engineered visage. And one can imagine a thoroughly accessorized human head, floating in a vat, feeling sincerely that his radical new weight-loss amputation program was indeed well worth it all.

The idea of a head floating in a jar or perched in a pan dredges up the memory of many bad B-movies, among them
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
(1962),
Who Is Julia?
(1986), and
The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant
(1971). But bad horror films aside, the assumption of most posthumanism
is that the human mind, and therefore self-awareness, can be theoretically and metaphysically divorced from the body. It’s only a couple of short steps, it would seem, from rebuilding human bodies with computer and robot parts (cyborgs) to downloading a human mind into a digital and robotic substrate. Extreme forms of posthumanism contend that one’s mind, one’s
self
is capable of disembodied (or at least transplanted) existence. In part, this view is descended from a strong tradition of Platonic and Cartesian dualism in the West, but it has taken on more credibility lately because of the computer model of consciousness.

As we’ve already seen, a dominant premise in the science of artificial intelligence is that a person—a being with intellect, self-awareness, and self-interest—might come to exist in a nonbiological substance. Alan Turing (1912–1954) suggested that if a computer
acts
as intelligently as a human, then we must concede the probability that it
is
displaying intelligence; in other words, if it
looks
like intelligence, it
is
intelligence. He proposed a thought experiment, the Turing test, in which human interrogators in one room ask questions and converse with computers and real humans who are hidden in another room. Interrogators are not privy to which conversations are human and which are algorithmic. If a human participant identifies a computer conversation as a human conversation, then the computer’s intelligence has crossed over into real intelligence. A computer that deceives a human subject could be said to have passed the Turing test, and there would be no grounds on which to deny it some agency. Now, add to this assumption (thinking
is
as thinking
does
) the fact that mental activity appears to be a product of brain electrochemistry and you have a platform for arguing that mind is just a software program of functions running on a hardware foundation, the brain.