Death Machines

Humans have been called death machines, genetically programmed to self destruct through a disposition to the onslaught of particular diseases. Our history tells us that we have inflicted death and damage on other human beings and creatures in our environment. Our bodies ~ more bacterial than human are periodically invaded by dangerous viruses. We create death machines capable of destroying individuals, populations and the environment. We elevate the notion of the human ~ its intellect and achievement and yet many see human life as worthless, viewed purely in terms of its use value, as pure commodity. What is this hu(man) then in this world in which the female is still the poorest of all individuals, are subject in many countries to rape, abuse, under-age marriage and slavery, where they are still the primary object of the pornographic imagination and the object in cinematic as well as game play scenarios, of attack, mutilation and humiliation? Some individuals and cultures elevate animus (spirit) above the human (homo-sapien ~ of the earth) and the value that they place on the notion of the afterlife inspires them to suppress, oppress or attempt to eradicate those who do not value their values, especially the beyond human expression of another worldly state. Likewise, those who do not applaud the notion of the resurrection of the spirit, adhere to and promote longevity as a mark of the contemporary human and one which we should all aspire to, one that finds us entering into an alliance with non-humans (animals/machines/technology) in order to enhance or extend human life, thus valorizing the human’s relationship to land/place/the environment. Philosophically the human is perceived as a ‘work in progress’, however some would argue that evolution of the human ended as soon as individuals mastered genetic engineering and became capable of altering the human genome, creating a synthetic evolution of life on earth. Life takes on different currency in virtual space in which aspects of our lives are played out in social media and other internet forums that proffer our (selves), selfies and other images as code. Traces of our lives, strange phantoms that stand as avatars of our imagination, together with electronic footprints of our monetary and other transactions form a picture of the human as information that can be circulated ad infinitum. Indeed these ephemeral and ghostly aspects of self continue long after the demise, decomposition or cremation of the material body. Our ‘humanity’ then, alive or dead, material (actual) or virtual, animus (spirit) or of the earth, a conglomeration of hybridity is a hotly contested zone of enquiry. The question remains: how can we be ‘anything but (except) human’? Might we aspire to be anything beside (outside) the human, indeed, how may this otherness be imagined? Is this quest to be beyond the human pure fantasy, simply a desire to be different from, an escape from the pleasures and perils of being such.

COSMOPOLIS - a short review

If a city may be thought of as a body because it moves to some internal beat, then the city, its people and its waste is the viscera strewn outside a pristine interior space in which much of the activity and dialogue occurs in Cronenberg's latest film Cosmopolis (2012). That main space, simultaneously a virtuality, a coffin, or exoskeleton that protects the Billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) is a luxury twenty two foot stretched limousine in which he slowly rides as it makes its way across Manhattan. I call this interior space of the limousine virtual because it all but cuts off Packer from the outside world of fragmented reality seen through his car window all the while being totally absorbed in a world of computer screens, virtual cash, information data and the fulfillment of his own personal fantasies that include a desire to engage in philosophical speculation, have illicit sex and purchase the unobtainable Rothko Chapel. The Chapel, which houses fourteen canvasses by the Russian born abstract artist Mark Rothco is considered an intimate sanctuary for private meditation and is akin to Packer's private and inviolate space of the limousine protected from the protestors outside it who rally against the invasion of rats and the demise of humanity through capitalism. A previous David Cronenberg’s film Crash, not only engages with the notion of what J.G. Ballard called 'the spectres of sinister technologies’;and the 'death of affect',but also with a desire to achieve an intense or ecstatic state of embodiment. The bodies of the individuals have been anaesthetized and desensitized to horror through the bombardment of information and images by the media, resulting in a closing down of emotional responses to sex and death. Paradoxically, Crash reveals that it is through images of horror that life itself is heightened. This is also true in Cosmopolis for Packer, who owns almost everything, appears detached from ordinary life, his wife and his sexual escapades and so when his business begins to fail in the hours that we are witnessing him, he begins a journey that is about reconnecting to flesh and opening himself up to horror; for it is only in this way that he can experience something that money can't buy. His downfall (if you like) is heralded in the scene in which the Occupy-like demonstrators defile his limo with graffiti. This is a philosophical tale that references some of Cronenberg's earlier films. Packer's 'asymmetrical prostate' (is discovered when his doctor performs an examination on him in his limousine) allows us to recall the fact that Cronenberg’s films the human body is almost always mutant. However, Packer's mutant state is not that his prostate is asymmetrical, but that he is obsessed with death - 'we die everyday' he says to one of the visitors to his car.I found Cosmopolis to be engaging, philosophical, thought provoking, stylish and elegant - Cronenberg refined. However, it may only appeal to those willing to listen carefully to the dialogue.

GEMINOID F - slave woman of the future?

(Credit: AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno: news.cnet.com)

In cyber-culture human beings have become increasingly reliant on machines, and as a result, a question has arisen in science fiction films as well as in research on artificial intelligence and robotics as to whether a machine might be considered worthy of the rights afforded to individuals, rather than exist just simply as the property of its owners. This reflects a concern for non-human others as well as human values. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 35 ‘The Measure Of a Man’ (1989), issues such as free will, agency and slavery are broached in relation to whether or not the android, Lieutenant Commander Data is a sovereign subject. 

In Bicentennial Man (Chris Colombus 1999) and AI: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg 2001) the androids are introduced into a family to serve various domestic needs, and strive to become recognized as human because they have been programmed with the ability to express human feelings and emotions. Although Andrew (Robin Williams) in Bicentennial Man is one of many that have been mass produced, David (Hayley Joel Osment) the android child is unique for he is the first Mecca of his kind and is programmed to bond with his organic mother, Monica (Frances O’Connor). The emphasis on the real (organic) rather than the artificial (android or mecca) is stressed in both films. Paradoxically, the view that emotion is an expression of a human essence is challenged in the film by the fact that both human emotion and android emotion are exhibited by facial expressions, emotive language and behavior in contrast to the dispassionate and expressionless robots familiar to us from earlier science fiction films. Since machines do not have a psychology as such, they are not meant to exhibit anything other than rational detachment in all situations.

Emotions are said to be the product of chemical and neural responses in the body produced from the affects of the external world, the reflection of an internal psyche, as well as learnt behaviour. They are usually inscribed on the face by the tensing or relaxation of facial muscles, which raise or lower the eyebrows and affect the contours of the mouth. As such it is possible to argue that both humans and sophisticated androids are able to produce external markers of an emotion as well as being able to mimic them. However, regardless of whether a person is expressing a real or feigned emotion, we generally react to such expressions as though they are real. However, even the lack of obvious emotion maybe an expression of an emotional state.
In both films aforementioned, the androids look human and although they tend to interpret information literally, they also seek to belong to the family or community, to be loved and recognized as subjects in their own right. However, it was the fact that they were programmed to express emotion that created alarm for their families, who expect them, as machines, to be unfeeling, rational and controllable. For both androids, it is their very display of human qualities as well as their lack of human biology that betrays them.
Geminoid F, a speaking, singing fem-bot designed by Japanese robotic engineer,  Hiroshi Ishiguro, is an actual android, not a character from science fiction. She is equipped with twelve motorised actuators, powered by air pressure and flexible rubber facial skin that allow her to mimic human expressions and emotions. However, she is more than this for she is an exact replica of a real life Japanese woman in her twenties. With the development of such a technology we are not far from realizing a world that mirrors Surrogrates (Jonathan Mostow, 2009), in which remote controlled surrogates - basically a robotic clone of the exterior of a human being, undertakes a persons life for them so that they may live in safety, away from the real world, away from human touch and potential danger.
Although Ishigura developed an android of himself in 2006, it is not a surprise to me that Geminoid F is female and is primarily designed to 'work' as a receptionist, museum guide or patient attendant in hospitals. She could work in a factory, vacuum floors or make sushi. This attractive, twenty something,  individual (if I may call her that) is essentially a smiling, well behaved, compliant slave who does what she is told to. Isn't that every man's dream? Could Geminoid F eventually become a sophisticated sex doll? What will the feminists think?
Concern about this kind of technological development (at least for me) is not that Geminoid F is uncanny for her ability to look and behave human, but that she is paid for and owned by the company that purchases her and unlike a human counterpart, who she will replace, she will not complain, strike or walk off the job, thus becoming a threat to humans who continually seek better and more equitable working conditions. Automatic teller machines replaced humans in the 1970s and today there are about 1.2 million industrial robots that have replaced humans in the workplace. GemF is another robot that has the potential to replace us in more ways than one!

How will science shape the human?

I watched with interest How will science shape what it means to be human on ABC2 last night, with various panelists from the fields of psychology, ethics, technology, physics, medicine and business.  Paul Davies was the only person to use the term 'post-human' but grappled with the notion and this might be, because in my mind at least, it is only by freezing a point in time - like now, that we can label the moment of change as something definitive, whereas in fact the humanimal has and always will be a potential to be something other than, or different to its present state of being.  Peter Singer thought it would be more fruitful to ask questions other than what it is to be human and that we might consider instead how future science might develop strategies to make us more ethical & less aggressive. One can only presume that he meant using genetic tampering to rid us of undesirable genetic traits and diseases, but he did not discuss whether this might be an ethical endeavor. The panelists did agree that future developments to physically and mentally enhance the human, would most likely be accessed by those who could afford it, creating a divide. The suggestion that access to enhancing medicines or technology would be equitable was just outrageous, since millions of people world wide live in poverty and that $1,000 fee to have your own personal genome sequenced for designer drugs, stem cells or gene modification to cure your current or future disease, would be out of reach for many people in the western world. I couldn't help but think of the film GATTACA whilst watching these well paid academics speak of a future in which science and technology will change our current notion of what it means to be human. On the point of desirable or undesirable human qualities, Liesl Capper-Beilby who has been developing 'conversational agents' (a computer system designed to converse with a human) for older or less mobile individuals, noted that if the conversational agent, as companion, was too amiable (that is, not aggressive enough) then individuals were less like to see the 'machine' as human and therefore not likely to interact with it. It seems that rightly or wrongly what made us human may have been our aggressive streak, our ability to fight for what we wanted and instigate change. She spoke of a future scenario in which those who were housebound or confined to a wheelchair could deploy virtual avatars to complete some of their social and business duties. However, I'm wondering if we are already, as Paul Virilio has said,the equivalent of the equipped disabled, since we rely so heavily on the internet and our communications technologies. Almost gone are the days when we would write a letter and go down to the post office to post it, or look forward eagerly to receiving correspondence in our letter box. Luckily, I don't fall into that category for I still have friends who send little things in the mail. Nostalgia is definitely human and I suppose that as the years go on there will be more nostalgia for the past?

Thoughtcrime?

My son sent me a link to a recent article by John Pilger entitled You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it? Pilger states that because Echelon exists and identifies words associated with terrorism that we may all be considered terrorists if we use any of these words in our electronic communication with others. This is such old news! I remember in the 70s provocatively using the word 'bomb' or 'explosion' in my telephone conversations, knowing full well that any intelligence system in place would have to be going on more than words to identify someone as a potential threat to the security of a country or people. We are NOT all suspects as Pilger suggests! Basically he uses emotive language to attack America, to defend the actions of Julian Assange and to criticize Julia Gillard -  again, old news.
But it's not any of the above which concerns me, it is his question What are you going to do about it? that fills my thoughts. He gives absolutely no clue as to what the ordinary, everyday person can do and if even they really want to 'do anything' about such surveillance systems, instigated to protect them against potential threat of those who wish to cause damage to person and property & who would, if allowed, destroy personal freedoms by disrupting our hard won, peaceful life. Fact is, that what Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) says in A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner,1992) is true: 'We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns'. I'm not saying that I like living in this kind of world, I'm just stating facts.
Newer weapons in the arsenal against our real or perceived enemies include surveillance systems. However,regardless of the thousands of CCTV, video surveillance systems, spy satellites and signals intelligence systems operating to monitor human communication and behavior, if you're not a terrorist and not planning to commit a crime then there's nothing for you to be concerned about. Sure, it might be a bit unnerving to think that a mechanical instrument can track your movements and take a photograph of that pimple on your nose from space, but other than that, this 'Big Brother 'world is not going to go away anytime soon and no amount of signing petitions on Face Book is going to make any difference!
I think the worry is that many of us have read 1984 (George Orwell) and we think, like Winston that we might be arrested and persecuted for 'facecrime': 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. (Book 1, Chapter 5).
I for one am glad that large shopping complexes have CCTV, which can help identify an individual who has unlawfully absconded after abducting a small child, or the security mirrors in place so that you know that you can go to an isolated toilet area and a least feel that you have a level of safety. But really, we cry about our lost freedoms, but we bought into the convenience of EFPOST, even though it records electronic information about our location when we made that financial transaction and would, if necessary, aid police officers if we suddenly went missing. We enjoy our email, social media sites, new technology, iPhones, GPS tracking devices, but cry out that our personal freedoms are being infringed upon! Give me a break!
Pilger writes his article amidst a background of person freedoms, when he knows full well that we already have limited personal freedom. We can't just do what we like, especially since our behavior impacts on the welfare of others.However, having said all this, if we ever get to a time, described in 1984 in which thoughtcrime is punishable, then I'll be careful to avoid surveillance and start wearing a mask!

LINGUA: Cyber-poem by Julie Clarke 1999

 

In 1999 I worked closely with Komninos Zervos and the State Library of Victoria to create an interactive cyber-poem, four of the frames are above. When you enter my site you click on the words, which should lead to text, sensuously move the cursor over the words until you find another click-able word, which should also lead to another poem. I created the text over the cover of an old Photo Album., which I colored.  The words - Lingua, Mirabula, Machina, Desire, Body, speak of language, the mirror and my take on our relationship to technological screens. I've been looking for this site for a number of years now and thought that the work was lost. Happy to report that it has been archived through Pandora at the National Library of Australia.

LINGUA: CYBER-POEM BY JULIE CLARKE 1999

Barbarians at the gate

So it is true, there are no girls on the internet!

Internet activists The Pirate Party won 15 out of 130 seats in elections for German State Parliament yesterday, with 8.9% of the popular vote. But all fifteen are male.*

“Gender politics has not arrived for the Pirates yet, and that is not a step forward but a step backward,” Berlin Mayor and Social Democrat Party heavyweight Klaus Wowereit told German media.

The Pirate Party are anti censorship, pro file-sharing, and support transparent government by Wikileak.

The rise of the German Pirate Party represents a much larger threat to media and entertainment conglomerates than the Green-sponsored Finklestien inquiry into Australian political comment does.

The Pirate Party opposes privately owned monopolies, especially in media markets, and supports strengthened privacy statutes and civil protections. Media monopolies and the governments they influence are characterised as enemies of the people. Ordinary people are everywhere oppressed, they say, by invasions of privacy by media conglomerates with excessive influence on the State, and by the criminalisation of legitimate private activities like, for example, file sharing over a peer to peer network, by governments urged on by the same multinational media conglomerates that install them to office.

The New Zealand Government has recently legislated to restrict internet access to individuals caught file sharing by private investigators working for media corporations. Internet traffic through New Zealand dropped ten percent when the new laws took effect.

The Pirate Party wants to abolish international copyright protection for media corporations, especially those it labels monopolistic. The Australian Pirate Party is pro hactivism and anti internet regulation. It champions unhindered access to the internet, and by implication unfettered bit torrent downloads of copyright media, as a fundamental human right.

Australia has been spared, so far, the public spectacle of teenagers and broke and unemployed mums hauled into court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars compensation to mega corporations for sharing popular music tracks on torrent trackers. But Australian Julian Assange and his wikileaks website is at the centre of international debate over corporate and State transparency issues.

Any political party strong enough to flex its muscles will, and short of a collapse in the Australian Green Party's vote we can expect the Greens to muscle up to what it thinks are their opponents more. But the emergence of organised opposition to communications monopolies in the European Green's own back yard illustrates how out of mainstream, and out of touch with grassroots sentiment, the Greens have moved since their early parliamentary successes in Europe and Australia.

I remember the late media boss Kerry Packer shaping up to a Parliamentary inquiry in the early 1990s, telling astonished parliamentarians "I don't think you have any power to regulate me". The Australian Greens might disagree, but the up and coming Pirate Party may be much more in touch with the preoccupations of mainstream internet users, and media consumers in general, and much more likely to take on media bosses about issues people actually care about.

* I was wrong - Susan Graf, a 19 year old member of Berlin's Chaos Computer Club, was elected as a Pirate Party member of Germany's Berlin State Parliament last week, along with 14 male colleagues.

The God and other particles are missing

I think I posted before that history is characterized by discontinuity and revolutionary change. Histories only appear continuous through the prism of whatever narrative structure is imposed upon them. Historical narratives usually reveal modernity as a pinnacle, with the bulk of history serving only to elevate modernity above the rest. Narratives which don't focus on modernity often elevate one particular time and place to which all other times and places ascend and after decline. You can trace the image of the light on the hill right back to Western culture's Anatolian dawn.

From ancient times people believed that phenomena arose from the interior structures of stuff. Aristotle taught that objects affected the world around them. Feathers fall more slowly through the air than lead, he supposed, because heavy objects fall fast, and light object fall slowly. A rolling ball slows and stops because rest is “natural and preferred, whereas motion requires a motive force keeping it moving", he said.

Galileo's heresy of gravity and Newton's equations of force revealed natural powers acting upon all objects equally. In the centuries since, people observed other natural symmetries, discovering electromagnetic and atomic forces, and irrevocably changing the way we live.

History is littered with examples of its end. More, Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama each signaled the end of humankind's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. Modern science has its roots in a similar series of attempts to circumscribe the boundaries of scientific inquiry by anchoring its pinnacle on one particular set of certainties or another.

The latest scientific pinnacle is exemplified in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an experimental machine so large it sprawls across national borders.

The LHC was created to test physics Standard Model, a conjecture that explains the existence of symmetrical natural forces, gravity, for instance. Symmetrical forces are theorized, in the Standard Model, as a consequence of interactions between physical and immaterial particles, the most important of which is the Higgs, or God particle, an immaterial particle that gives physical particles mass. Since physical particles can't exist unless they have mass, the immaterial Higgs particle became known as the God Particle.

Next week, on March 30, the Large Hadron Collider will have operated for 12 months, and has another 36 months to go before the current series of experiments ends. So far there has been no sighting of the God Particle, or any other phenomena associated with the fundamentals of physics' Standard Model that the LHC was expected to produce. Maybe it is not so much the end of history as it is the end of that particular grand narrative of it. Big news either way.

Cyclone Yasi/Queensland Floods/Protests in Cairo

Recent storms, flooding, as well as Cyclone Yasi in Australia have spurned some to think that these 'unusual' weather patterns are due to climate change. The primary reason may be due to the scale of the event  and its presentation, rather than the event itself. Almost instant televised news accounts that lead up to the pending catastrophe, such as ABC24's constant coverage of the Queensland Floods, Anna Bligh's almost hourly updates of the impending disaster and then following that, the prelude to and persistent reportage of the anticipated impact of Cyclone Yasi as the worst event that individuals in Queensland would  ever experience - in other words the unfolding event(s) as they occur, gives a remote audience a sense of being there - a presence in their absence; anticipation, anxiety and feelings of sympathy for those caught within the occurrence and its destructive aftermath. In fact, the high drama inflicted on the viewing public prior to Cyclone Yasi far outweighed the actual event!

Constant media saturation depicting loss and devastation as well as  interviews with people who have endured hardship because of the happening, lead us to believe that these events are worse than those previously experienced by individuals in our country. I would argue that it is due to the fact that we are drawn so easily into the drama via ubiquitous communications technologies that we experience local as well as world events as all encompassing, frightening, life threatening and catastrophic. Note the outpouring of sympathy and solidarity from people world-wide for protesters in Egypt. Would this have occurred without media intervention and  up-to-date reportage of the unfolding event? Indeed, the heightened sense of being there (participation via  virtual means), seeing things as they unfold, engenders a relationship between the viewer, others and world events, one unprecedented in world history, however this does not necessarily mean that the events themselves are essentially different from events from the past, or that people did not experience high levels of hardship and pain, it's just that these recent occurrences are experienced and perceived in divergent ways. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center is probably the best example here, not only because of its impact on the social and economic life, the number of deaths that occurred but on the psychology of people throughout the world. Indeed, footage of the United Airlines Flight 175 as it impacted on the south tower of the World Trade Center may possibly be the most iconic image of the 21st century, transmitted repeatedly until it infiltrated the world psyche.

Before the Internet (blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc), mobile phones, i-phones, televisual link-up to other states and countries, there was only telephone, radio and newspapers and although the radio provided regular news it certainly could not convey the immediateness that our advanced communications technologies engender. However, the reader here may find it interesting in light of the recent extreme weather  in Australia that in 1934 in Melbourne 36 deaths were attributed to a flood that occurred in November of that year. The remainder of that summer, and also autumn 1935, was noteworthy for several other unusually heavy rain events in Victoria, a departure from the otherwise generally dry decade of the 1930s.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology 'floods are a fact of life in a Queensland Summer'. The benchmark was set by one in 1870 when, legend has it, men drank in the hotel while up to their chests in water.
After a cyclone in Queensland in 1916, 61 people died. In 1963 I experienced the flooding in Melbourne and in 1974 I remember what the BOM refers to as 'The Big Wet'. The year 1973 was one of the wettest known over much of Australia, and in keeping with the strong La Niña event that prevailed, the 1973/74 northern wet season started early. By the end of 1973 large areas of the country were saturated. Then came January 1974, which featured probably the biggest continent-wide drenching since European settlement, inundating vast areas of the country.
It seems to me that Australia is a country of extreme weather patterns and that at least once per decade, perhaps more often, we experience floods, fire, tornadoes, flash flooding, hail storms and drought. 
I'm not saying that we shouldn't reduce our carbon emissions, of course we should try to reduce the amount of pollution in the air and its obvious impact upon our environment, but what I am saying is that whether or not we do this or not, it's not going to change the fact that 'weather' is a fact of life and that the media plays a big part in the way we view events and their disastrous consequences. Around about this time two years ago (actually 7 February 2009) Victoria experienced 47 degree heat and the Black Saturday bush fires were responsible for 173 deaths, 400 injuries and the destruction of thousands of homes.
Images slow-burnt into our memories somehow fade in recent media accounts of the deluge that continues to cover our land and I'm sure that unfortunately even these memories will fade, only to be usurped by media images that seize us in more compelling ways.

Being there, but not quite

I received an email early on Australia Day from Alan Rauch, editor of Configurations: Journal for the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in the USA, who asked whether I would review an article submitted to them for publication. Of course I was happy to spend a couple of hours reading and making measured comments, which I did. It was almost, but not quite a pyjama day. Already it was 1.30 pm and I hadn't been outside, so I took a short walk and then spent the rest of the day pottering about at home.

I reflected a little on what it meant to be Australian and then, thinking about the email correspondence I'd had that morning I began to view myself in the way that Kris Hemensley (Melbourne writer) had always spoken about himself in the mid-eighties, as being 'a person of the world'. Patriotism aside, I think that the Internet can certainly make us feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves or the country in which we reside. In this sense then, we become people of the world - all connected in cyberspace described by William Gibson in 1984 as a 'consensual hallucination'. So what was this hallucination?

Twice in one day I'd been drawn to the USA - I'd already watched President Barack Obama's State of the Union address and his call for Americans to 'reinvent themselves' - a reinvention that would include supporting technological advancement. Then last night I was watching Photographers in the War Zone (UK) a documentary on SBS2 about seven photojournalists' experiences of war - from conflict in Vietnam to the current battles in Iraq. The documentary revealed how extensively photo-journalists put their own lives on the line when they photograph the impact of pain and loss of life of all those involved in warfare.

Interestingly enough, one of these brave individuals bemoaned the fact that anyone with a mobile phone or digital camera who managed to take a picture of sudden conflict, accident, terrorist attack or better still (according to newspapers and glossy magazines, who pay large amounts for such photos) celebrities; were suddenly thought of as 'journalists', when in fact the everyday photo-journalists who risk their lives on the front line were paid very little for their photographs, which were not always published because the editors wanted to 'protect' the public from viewing emotional content, such as body viscera.

I thought again how nice it was to think about oneself as being a person of the world, very easy when you are sitting safely at your computer, touching the world and the world touching you in the most disembodied sense and the being-thereness of technology that works to create closeness as well as distance. Perhaps in some ways we are like Chance (Peter Sellers) in the film Being There (Hal Ashby,1979) who 'likes to watch' but can't quite get involved and only knows about the world through its technological mediation.

Child of the future

For those interested in the image in the previous post by Steve Middleton, I've included this link to the relevant section of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Without Steve's title one might have easily read his image as a commentary on the struggle for power and control between the Arab world and the west or Islam and Christianity. Here, the cyborg (overman or ubermensch) representing the contemporary, armored soldier is literally the 'load bearing spirit' of an aging and perhaps disintegrating human replete with prosthesis. Flanked on either side with the lion of courage and the camel of awkwardness, the human/machine is seized in an impasse; deadlocked between its desire to be brave and its obvious encumbrance.

Regardless of Haraway's embrace of the cyborg as transgressive figure, one that subverts binaries, it still continues to represent masculinist control and domination. No amount of armoring is going to rid the solder of her fleshy body. And, on this note, although Nietzsche spoke about transcendence he was not talking about body denial. Indeed, be would not have applauded current theorists (Stelarc) who maintain the human body is obsolete. ‘I do not go your way, you despisers of the body! You are not bridges of the Superman!’ (Nietzsche, 1969:63).

I'm thinking that we need to jettison the cyborg as metaphor of heroism and invulnerability and instead see the prosthetic body for what it is, a technological husk that masks our fragility and dependence. After all, most hybrid, human/machine entities from science fiction films and television series have depicted humans as damaged. In The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) Colonial Steve Austin (Lee Majors), an astronaut with NASA lost the sight of one of his eyes and the use of his legs in an accident. They were replaced with bionics, which gave him greater strength, telescopic vision and the ability to run faster than the average person. The six million dollar man was intended to showcase actual development in bionics and was a contemporary version of the Superman figure of the 1930s.

It was Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) that depicted the first proto-fascist cyborg in the form of Darth Vadar, who had a prosthetic hand and wore an armoured helmet and life-support suit because he was asthmatic. Darth Vadar, who was presented as a powerful dictator with spiritual underpinnings (he is, after all, Lord Darth Vader a Jedi Knight), is, in his all black attire suggestive of Adolf Hitler’s SchutzStaffel (SS) Storm Troopers who were armoured in a very psychologically intimidating way against the terrors that they inflicted prior to and during World War Two. Both Darth Vader and the SchutzStaffel represented the evil, dehumanised and dehumanising other, and the mechanical, ordered and disciplined body.

Militaristic cyborgs in films such as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Testsuo (1989), Circuitry Man (1989), Cyborg (1989), Total Recall (1990, Terminator II (1991), Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Eve of Destruction (1991) just to name a few, represented the greater use of medical prosthetics and computer technologies during the 1980s and 1990s and with this an acknowledgement of human frailty.

But returning here to Steve's image. Perhaps Zarasthustra as cyborg is the child that Nietzsche speaks of. It's a place of new beginnings, fragile and armored with so much technology upon which to draw, we advance headlong into something not yet imagined! Who are these individuals, capable of finding their creative abilities? They are "only the rarest and most lucky" capable of the "most sublime human joys in which Life celebrates its own glorification". (Nietzsche: Will to Power )

Sorry to HAARP again, but

In June 2010, rings, loops, starbursts and other strange patterns showed up on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology radar, and given that cyclones Olga and Ului lashed Queensland, and Melbourne was bombarded with hailstones in one of the most intense and costly storms in the city's history, conspiracy theorists decided that it was all due to HAARP. However, these radar images were explained on one Australian website as subject to anomalous propagation of the radar signal which results in false echoes...anomalous propagation is easily identified and is displayed as a mass of low intensity echoes constantly changing shape with no apparent direction of movement.

Two of the primary sources for the conspiracy theory citing HAARP are Colin Andrews, an avid UFO believer and Dr Nick Begish, author of many articles on HAARP, including The Military's Pandora Box and on technology and mind control.

The heatwave in Russia in 2010 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 combined with recent intense rain and flooding in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria as well as the 7.5 earthquake in Northwestern Pakistan in January this year, has incited more conspiratorial conjecture resulting in a literal flooding on the Internet, Twitter and mobile text of concern that the USA may be targeting particular zones on the world map.

I'm sorry, but if the USA are so clever with this technology why have they sent so many troops to war, why didn't they just direct their high powered radio frequency device, like some kind of gamma ray from a 1950s science-fiction movie on Afghanistan, or is this what the conspirators are trying to say: that the USA was a little off target when they fired on Pakistan? Using this kind of perverse logic may we assume that someone on Capital Hill has it in for Mr Rudd? And why were we Melbournians targeted. Ridiculous! I'm just not convinced! However, having said this there are some articles by people with more noteworthy credentials than Andrews and Begish. One such article is by Professor Michel Chossudovsky - Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa who has published an article entitled: It's not only greenhouse gas emissions: Washington's New World Order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change. However, he does conclude that, While there is no concrete evidence of HAARP having been used, scientific findings suggest that it is at present fully operational. What this means is that HAARP could potentially be applied by the US military to selectively modify the climate of an "unfriendly nation" or "rogue state" with a view to destabilizing its national economy. Just as I thought, it's all fear mongering. If people have someone to blame they won't feel out of control, after all the weather is an uncontrollable and sometimes extremely destructive force.

Tony Abbott - a luxury we cannot now afford

So Her Majesty's loyal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott wants the Australian Federal Government to stop building the National Broadband Network (NBN).

"The National Broadband Network is a luxury that Australia cannot now afford. The one thing you don't do is redo your bathroom when your roof has just been blown off" Mr Abbott told reporters in Brisbane yesterday.

There is some consensus world wide that the world economy has moved from the industrial age to the information age. Workers in industrialized economies are already competing in a global job market for work which involves the jobs remaining that are not easily automated. Process workers, factory foremen, data processors and supervisors, occupations that sustained a comfortable Australian middle class for generations, have been made redundant by machines. Middle class workers displaced by workplace automation must up skill to become engineers, lawyers, scientists, teachers, executives, journalists, or similar knowledge workers, or settle for no or low-skilled, low-wage service jobs. The machines have seized the middle ground and show no signs of loosening their grip.

As automation polarizes the world's workforce between skilled and unskilled the chasm between rich and poor grows wider, and deeper. Although the world's industrial output has increased, the wealth of the world's workers has decreased. Where the fate of a nation's workforce once depended on national economies it is now coupled with the globalized economy. Workers are working harder, for longer, but the value of their work is decreasing.

Australia has always been slow to adopt new technology. For example, the railway networks that are now seen to have been the backbone of the industrial revolution that changed the world and stimulated the rise of the now impoverished middle classes were only completed, in Australia, during the 1950's, when a Liberal Government standardized rail gauges across the nation. Before rail gauges were standardized, passengers and goods needed to be transferred between train wagons running on different tracks, in different states. The Albury railway station, the longest covered rail platform in Australia, stands as silent witness to the failure of private enterprise to deliver standardized services across an economy.

Her Majesty's loyal Opposition, the Liberal-National coalition, failed to win government in 2010 because of its communications policies. The disastrous privatization of Telstra and other communications policy failures by the former Howard Government led to the current great disparity of communications services between rural and urban Australia. Even urban areas are not fully serviced by Telstra's main rival, Optus, leaving country and urban consumers equally disadvantaged by the high cost of poor services.

"While many urban locations currently have high-speed broadband, usually upload speeds are much slower than download speeds, and reliability can be patchy. Both of these are substantial impediments to telehealth, which would be remedied by the NBN", Access Economics reported in 2010.

Her Majesty's loyal Opposition of course opposes the NBN because its ideology insists that governments should not intervene in markets. If there were a need for high speed broadband, private enterprise would provide it, the theory goes.

"The Coalition does not believe that it is the role of government to force taxpayers to spend billions of dollars to build and or buy businesses in areas where the private sector is able to perform the role."

An Australian high speed broadband Internet is not a luxury. It is as necessary as the railways were to the industrial age. The Liberal-National coalition proposes a similar service to that provided by the Australian railways in the nineteenth and twentieth century - ad-hoc, asymmetric and urban-centric. Just when Australia needs a level communications playing-field that allows a diminished middle class to compete in a global economy, the coalition vows to wreck it.

For the sake of our future, Tony Abbott's belief in the panacea of private enterprise is a luxury we cannot now afford.

Witch scientists?

In response to Lauren's question 'why don't we consider the views of our leading scientists'? I would like to ask 'Which scientists'?

On the Popular Technology website you can access 800 peer-reviewed articles that support skepticism of 'Man-made' Global warming. Indeed it will link you to another website called Global Warming Facts and their list of 'experts' who are drawn from numerous Universities around the world who are skeptical of existing facts. But if you are solely looking at scientists, then Wiki provides a list of scientists (living and deceased) who oppose the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming. As far as I can see there is a colossal amount of information being provided on either side of the fence ~ those who support the notion of global warming and those who oppose it.

But I think, rather than get into the issues of whether there is or is not global warming that we might consider the function of 'uncertainty', since this is what occurs to our state of being when confronted with information that is in its totality a dense forest to navigate.

Uncertainty generally occurs when we don't have enough information about a forthcoming event, and in the absence of information we generally begin to imagine the worst, however, when it comes to Global warming and climate change debates, we have been provided with so much information that we become uncertain. According to Bar-Anan, Wilson and Gilbert, 2009, writing for the American Psychological Association, Uncertainty enhances our experiences, making the pleasant experiences more pleasant and the unpleasant even more unpleasant. Maybe we need these doomsday, apocalypse or world salvation scenarios in order to feel alive, in order to believe that in some small way (regardless of war, hunger, poverty, persecution, corruption) we can make a difference !

I cyborg...Kevin Warwick and Stelarc

Last year I read I, cyborg by Kevin Warwick, published by the University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago in 2002. I was interested in whether there were affinities between Warwick's project and some of Stelarc's. I am aware that there is much research to do here, but offer the following as some preliminary ideas.

In 1998 Professor Kevin Warwick, British scientist and Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, underwent an operation to have a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted into his forearm. This experiment allowed a computer to monitor Warwick as he moved through halls and offices of the Department of Cybernetics at the University, using a unique identifying signal emitted by the implanted chip. He could operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.

Warwick explains:

In Spring 1998, the building was being wired up so that at different points the central computer could detect the presence, at a certain time, or devices such as the radio-frequency identification device (RFID)...at the Cybernetics lab at Reading we had in our possession a relatively small radio-frequency identification device (RFID) in a small glass capsule, which, under certain circumstances, might be used as an implant. (63)

Strangely enough the program they intended to use was supposed to  'emit the code 666, which…is the mark of the beast from the 'Book of Revelation' in the Bible. For some reason, though, when 666 was tried nothing worked. The code for the implant was therefore changed to 161. (78)

After a local anaesthetic, the surgeon, George Boulos ‘...burrowed a hole...through the fascia, the outer layer of the skin, down to the muscle’ (80). The implant was pushed into then stitched into place, so that it wouldn’t migrate to another part of Warwick’s body. It enabled Warwick to open doors and switch on and off lights in the laboratory. After this experiment he decided to become more cybernetic by having his nervous system connected to a computer via electrodes implanted into the median nerve in his arm.

According to Warwick the only thing that had been done that was remotely similar to what they were doing was the work of the artist Eduardo Kac who  'barcoded his ankle and read himself into the Internet to symbolize the human race being captive to technology’ (76). He maintained

Stelarc uses a technique called functional electrical simulation (FES) by means of surface electrodes. The same method is used to improve the quality of life of spinal-cord injured subjects, so that they can live a more independent, everyday life. (107)

Indeed,

It was found that the external stimulation method using electrodes on the skin surface, as in Stelarc’s case, didn’t provide the necessary precision for stimulating the individual muscles to grip and hold objects. Implants are therefore required for the accuracy necessary to achieve the coordinated movements for grasp and lift (117).

He was of course referring to some of Stelarc's earlier work with his Third Hand and muscle stimulation performances.  Warwick concluded, in terms of his own project that ‘An FES system, externally connected, such as that used by Stelarc would not get us very far as it would only allow for muscle stimulation’ (122). He said the main difference between the 1998 implant and the new experiment,

...was the connection that would be made with the nervous system, most likely using the Utah array. The main body of the implant would be a radio transmitter/receiver to send the signals from my nervous system by radio to the computer and to receive signals sent, again by radio, from the computer and play them on to my nervous system via my arm. (131)

A micro electrode array consisting of 100 individual electrodes was implanted into his median nerve.This technique would provide highly selective recording and stimulation of sensory and/or motor neurons with the nerve fascicles. (183)

Peter Teddy, the neurosurgeon who undertook Warwick’s second implant made an incision approximately two inches long below Warwick’s wrist. He inserted a bodger which tunneled up Warwick’s inner arm through the incision. This enabled the micro electrode array, with attached wires to be inserted. This implant enabled Warwick to change the colors on a computer monitor by moving his fingers. By flexing and closing his hand, he was able to directly affect the movements of Peter Kyberd’s articulated, metallic hand, which they had also connected to the computer. Warwick said that they had witnessed the first experiment to prove that the array in his median nerve was capable of transferring the signals from his brain to a computer and then on to a robot. He also managed to move a Lego robot with signals converted from his median nerve into infra-red signals into the computer, control the movements of a wheelchair and achieve a ’…direct electronic connection between his ’nervous system in New York and the Madlab in Reading’, via the Kyberd hand. (257) He explains:

As I closed my hand, we could see the hand in Reading follow my own movements exactly, with a slight time delay due to the distance involved; when I opened my hand, the articulated hand followed suit…We had shown how signals from my brain could be transmitted around the world, via the Internet, to operate a piece of technology...with the visual feedback received, I could control the technology as desired.(258)

Other experiments included changing the colors on a necklace devised by his wife Irena. Eventually Irena and Kevin decided that they would like their nervous systems to be connected to one another via electrodes and a computer. Needles half a millimeter in diameter and just over three centimeters in length, made of a composite of platinum and iridium, were inserted into Irena’s median nerve. They achieved the first direct nervous system to nervous system communication in June 2002. Warwick describes the event in this way:

After a period where Iain adjusted the tolerances that were being measured by the computer, we reached the stage where, when Irena closed her hand, a green light flashed on to the screen, and when her hand was open, the light changed to red. So we now had signals traveling from Irena’s brain, via her nervous system and the electrode, to the PC, which changed the light when she moved her hand. At another bench in the lab we were able to send a signal from a different PC through the stimulator unit, via the interface card on the gauntlet, down to the array, on to my nervous system and up to my brain. (281)

The differences between Warwick’s project and Stelarc’s various project are manifold. Whereas Stelarc uses current developments in technology to modify the human body in an aesthetic way, Warwick is interested in how technology will upgrade the human. Influenced by Hans Moravic’s ideas about uploading the human brain into silicon, expressed in his book Mind Children (1988) Warwick said:

As a result of the experiments carried out I have no doubts in my own mind that, by direct brain implants, it will be possible to upgrade the intellectual capabilities of humans, by turning them into cyborgs. Extra memory, clip-on maths abilities and multi-dimensional processing would all appear to be there for the taking, as indeed are numerous extra-sensory powers...When linked to the network, a cyborg has the potential for an intelligence way beyond that of a stand-alone human. (295)

Stelarc’s Ear on Arm may be compared to Warwick’s Cyborg 2.0 project because both are concerned with technological augmentation of the human body in order to expand human communication. However the primary difference is that Stelarc's extra ear, a construct that was implanted under the skin is mostly human, cells and skin, whereas Warwick's implant was solely technological.  Although Stelarc intended the Ear on Arm to be capable of being connected to blue tooth, wireless technology, it remains an incomplete shell awaiting some form of electronic connection. Warwick and Stelarc are similar in their philosophy, since both believe that humanity needs to incorporate technology into the body in order to enhance its capabilities, or if not that, then so that technology won't surpass the human. 'There is no way I want to stay a mere human' says Warwick. Both may be considered transhumanist, since transhumanism proposes the idea of an augmented, enhanced human enacting a kind of Nietzschean prophecy of the superman, a human that not only embraces but encourages technological development to enable greater human capabilities and possibilities for permanent physical and mental enhancement. Founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in 1998, the manifesto of transhumanism advocates:

The moral right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. We seek personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.

On the World Transhumanists’ website, under the banner of The Better Humans Newsletter, an article declares that James Watson, the person who along with Francis Crick discovered the shape of DNA in 1953, said, ‘Going for perfection was something I always thought you should do’ (Better humans Staff, 2002).  More recently the notion that technology could be used to create a more perfect, superior human being is echoed in Krishna R. Dronamraju’s statement:

Instead of merely developing technologies to correct or prevent genetic defects in human populations, one can go beyond such methods to higher goals of improving existing qualities such as intelligence, musical abilities and physical strength, etc. Furthermore, it may even be possible by applying redemptive technology to create whole new beings of ‘superior’ quality or add on new organs with multiple functions  (1998. Biological and Social Issues in Biotechnology Sharing, Aldershot, Brookfield, USA, England, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate Publishers, p.153).

We might ask: Who would decide which human beings would be chosen to be more intelligent and physically stronger and why are these characteristics are so important as opposed to others such as the ability to be empathetic or kind, and to whom do we owe this philosophical legacy?

Cyborgs

Cyborgs everywhere, in the streets, on the trams, mobile phone in hand, head phones in their ears and iPod's close to their body. Vibrations of the hard-drive penetrate their flesh, sounds penetrate their mind. They're connected to their music, their friends and their fantasies. No longer just an instrument, technology is an extension of their body, their memory, their life. And everything else is closed out. You can't talk to them, they're absorbed in their own world. 'Excuse me', I say to the girl sitting next to me in the tram, 'Would you mind turning down your music because all I can hear is a high pitched repetitive sound? But she doesn't answer, she's sending a text with her thumbs moving at lightning speed, juggling the novel on her lap and listening to music. I tap her gently on the shoulder ~ 'Would you mind...', my voice trails, it's no use, she's cocooned, enveloped in an invisible protective shield. Things aren't so different I guess, I remember falling asleep most nights in the sixties, transistor radio on, headphones in my ears and twenty years later listening to cassette tapes on my Walkman. The world suddenly became cinematic, instead of a quiet ride on a tram along the Yarra River, I could accompany the scenes with the heroic and passionate sounds of Wagner or the pounding goth beat of Nine Inch Nails. Technology changes, but people don't. We all want our own private space, to think, to feel, to hear.

Human?

Spent two hours yesterday afternoon assisting my student with her Anthropology essay on Cannibalism. It was fortuitous that Shannon Bell had mentioned in her book Fast Feminism that the Aghori tribe (Hindu sect) "...embrace pollution...live in cremation grounds, purify their body with ashes of corpses, ritually consume raw corpse flesh and drink excessive amounts of alcohol...they believe that the distinction between purity and impurity is deceptive" (Bell, 2010:155), so, I was able to pass on this information and also discuss how the word cannibalism, which means 'savage' also conflagrates the idea of the primitive and by association, the inhuman or non-human. In fact, cannibalism functions as an othering device. And, speaking about what is considered human or not, I was watching 'Great Ormond Street' on ABC2 last night, which documented premature babies in the intensive care unit of this major UK hospital. I found it rather disturbing that these tiny babies are subjected to multiple operations and intensive technological intervention just to keep them alive, even though by all accounts they are not expected to survive. Indeed, one of the surgeons raised the whole issue of what is human when he said that he believed that being human was about person-hood and quality of life, not just about being alive, or being kept alive. If someone is so brain damaged that they cannot hear, speak, feed themselves, walk and participate in our society should they be considered not human? This is a difficult one, because if it is your baby and you want it to survive then you would desire that the medical fraternity do all it can. But really, and this was raised in the documentary, how much of scarce medical resources should be spent on people who really can't be helped? What quality of life do these people have and do we have the right to determine whether they are happy or not in their limited experience? Perhaps the issue at state has less to do with how we define a person and more to do with us as people. Whether we can embrace and bring people into the fold? I, like others, continually struggle with the ethical issues that surround medical intervention and pervasive technology. For some reason here, I am drawn back to an image of a member of the Aghori sect, who, after burning a corpse, covered his rather dark-skinned body with the white/grey ashes of it, thus incorporating that person's body into his very being and transforming himself into something quite other.

Over proximity!

I've been reading Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End Times and it's been a slow read, not because Zizek's writing is difficult, quite the contrary, it's interesting and provocative, but because I just haven't spent enough time alone with the book. Soon that situation will be remedied. Yesterday I was struck with a passage of Zizek's that appeared to resonate with recent thinking I'd had about my relationship with others on Facebook, even though he was actually discussing the 'neighbour' and American versus European attitudes towards disclosure of private thoughts and deeds. I quote:

Why are we so traumatized by the neighbor's over proximity? Habit and custom are the predominant ways in which we maintain a distance towards the "inhuman" neighbor's intrusive proximity, and we are today effectively witnessing a decline of habits: in our culture of self-exposure and "sincerity", they no longer provide a screen ensuring our distance from the neighbor. (2010:123)

The unusual thing about Facebook is that the very interface, which provides a certain safe distance, enables and encourages private disclosure. It's so easy to reveal information that remained hidden, secreted in one's mind and really ever only told to people you're really close to. How are our special people special anymore if we have already revealed our inner most thoughts to strangers? On reflection we realise it might have been better not to tell. Suddenly it's like a bright search-light has been flashed into your face ~ you are/have been exposed and to someone who really doesn't know you. You find solace for a short time in the fact that others too have exposed their lives ~ laid themselves bare for all to see. So, is this the humanizing aspect of it; to reveal our vulnerabilities and fragile nature, to expose our narcissistic tendencies, our competitive behavior, our desire to be recognized, to be seen and heard? Does our accumulation of fb friends verify to others that we are worthy, valuable members of society? To be removed from someones fb friends list considered a trauma ~ you're just nobody unless you're virtual with your virtual friends! I remember a time when men used to go to the pub after they'd had sex with a girl and they'd tell all their friends. They'd never really had sex until the experience was shared. But it's not just the men now, women too heighten their experiences by telling all ~ nothing is really experienced until is it told and re-told. Can we no longer savour the experience by holding it close to ourselves as ours and only ours? I am as guilty of this as others ~ may I blame technology, its predisposition to encouraging communication and revelation, superficiality and repetition. And I haven't even mentioned those of us who are OCD. The obsessive compulsive desire to check our Facebook messages, to make posts, to continually be there, to have a virtual presence ~ not to be forgotten, not to be left out. I've considered all of this and I've decided I'm the person of whom Zizek speaks. I am traumatized to a certain degree by my neighbor's over proximity, on screen. Since my time on Facebook coincides with the period of time I've been taking photographs of people in Melbourne, I'm thinking perhaps that I've had too much exposure to the other, to their similarities and differences ~ time to put up the screen, even if it is an illusion ~ perhaps when I venture out of the cave I will see things with new eyes!

Micmacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs a tire-larigot (France, 2009) is a delight. In the film Jeunet returns to his usual methodology of using societal misfits in bizarre fantasy situations (see: The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, Amélie ). I'm assuming that Jeunet has used the word Micmac because Micmac's are indigenous, native Americans and the word literally means family. The strange family that is brought together in Jeunet's film includes: Bazil (Danny Boon) a man hit with a stray bullet, which remains lodged in his head. Buster (Dominique Pinon) an obsessive record-breaker whose name is in the Book of Records. Elastic girl (Julie Ferrier) a female contortionist, Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle) an expert lock picker, Remington a note taker who writes everything on an old typewriter and speaks only in cliches, and Calculator (Marie-Julie Baup) part mathematician/part tailor who can look at you and immediately know your measurements. The group also includes a cook - Mama Chow (Yolande Moreau) and a man who makes mechanical toys from bits and pieces collected and recycled from the local junkyard. Indeed the concept of recycling pervades this film. From the start there is a collage of ideas - Bazil, a video store employee watches The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) for the umpteenth time and recites every line delivered by Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) just before he is hit by a stray bullet. There's a flash back in which Bazil's father is killed by a landmine and the film begins in earnest with orchestral music and the film's title and list of characters scrolling down in period typeface over a glorious scene of a cloudy sky, suggesting the Black and White era of film-making. But what I loved, apart from the zany narrative in which Bazil, along with his recycling comrades, decides to avenge his father's death and his own brush with death by finding those who manufacture and deal in weapons, is the rather obscure way that Jeunet alludes to the value attributed to human body parts and our strange relationship to technology. One of the chief employees of a weapons company that Bazil spies upon, is Nicolas Thibault de Fenouillet (Andre Dussollier) who collects the body parts of key historical figures and is willing to trade weapons and cash to acquire an eye of the Italian politician Benito Mussolini. The bullet in Bazil's head is a constant source of anxiety, causing him headaches and facial spasms, and technology in its various forms throughout the film often fails. However, the ingenuity of the toys and other technological contraptions that pervade this film, along with the quirky characters and incredible humour made this film a joy to watch.

An awkward toy? Stelarc's Third Hand

I was doing a search on 'Google Books' yesterday for something on Stelarc's work that I hadn't read (and I'm sure that there is an abundance of material). It was primarily because I had been sent an email from an overseas student doing a PhD on Stelarc, who enquired whether she could ask me questions about his work from time to time.

I came across Petra Kuppers book The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. She mentions Stelarc's works several times, but concentrates primarily on his prosthetic third hand (she makes the mistake that many do, by calling it a third arm) and his 1993 performance Stomach Sculpture. I found it intriguing that of all the things she might have said, she made the following statements:

The hand goes where it will, touching what it wants, groping, inelegant, an awkward toy. Stelarc bring this hand into class-room workshops as well and lets others play, and inevitably genitalia are touched, inadvertently or not, mates grin at one another, and slightly forced as well as open audience laughter characterized every time that I have seen him perform, teach, or lecture (Kuppers p.117)

And further on:

Stelarc's carnival laugh makes possible the risque nature of many of his third arm presentations and the grotesque balletic movements that might be uncomfortable if they weren't funny - all this play with body extensions and with taboo zones (Kuppers p.117).

I decided to look again at my Masters thesis (Transhuman Aesthetics: Performance Artists and Cyberculture, 1997), because it was there that my first impressions of Stelarc's Third Hand were written. I quote:
The third hand, developed in 1975 prior to his first suspension event, is a transparent attachment to Stelarc's right arm. It is a machine composed of two distinct parts: the arm , which contains the mechanics to operate the hand and the hand itself, which has Grasp/Pinch, Wrist Rotation, Release and Tactile Feedback functions. The third hand is the double and phantom of both the left arm in involuntary movement and the right arm to which the prosthesis is attached. It replaces neither but serves as a bridge between the human and the cybernetic. It makes a division, but invites connections between the hand of the person who creates (teckne) and the tool created (technology). The Third Hand is a mechanism exposed, and although the boundary between exterior and interior appears thin and impenetrable, its perspex casing is the transparent skin that protects the mechanism allowing easy access for the eye to view the components. The machine has been humanised to a certain extent - it has touch-sensitive finger pads. The Third Hand closes around an object (or other hand) gently, but firmly. The gesture/action mirrors a human hand that grasps for survival - food gathering, tool usage, intimacy. The prosthesis does not augment Stelarc's body, because he has no biological need for a third hand. It is a conceptual and aesthetic attachment which allows Stelarc to raise questions about technology and the human. The prosthesis is a bridge, an idea, and so the third hand as imagined dismemberment is the path to memory. As augmentation it is a link between human and machine. As recently as 1990, Helen Thomson said of Stelarc's performance at La Mama; that he makes his body a technological construct alien to our notions of nature, and yet medical prosthetics have been used by amputees for the past 30 years. Whilst there has been no amputation, Stelarc's re-membering and addendum to his body, silences the arm to which it is attached. The Third Hand although originally covered with a skin-like synthetic substance, is always left uncovered. The boundary between the interior and exterior has been removed allowing easy penetration. As Didier Anzieu as said: 'Since the Renaissance, Western thought has been obsessed with a particular epistemological conception, whereby the acquisition of knowledge is seen as a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core or nuclei'. (The Skin Ego, Translated Chris Turner, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989, p.9 ). Stelarc creates through this third hand construction, a vehicle for rendering everything as pure surface. What is revealed in the looking at this mechanism is machine components instead of human bone and viscera; and the third hand, with very minimal reflex action does not in fact mirror the human hand in motion. The casing is an aesthetic element and protection for the machine components. It is a prototype. In contrast to the human body, the prosthetic third hand, although elegant and sophisticated is an inferior simulacrum, a sculptural element. Its seductive nature is in its apparent transparency which invites contemplation. (Julie Clarke, 2007)

I find it fascinating, given Petra Kuppers is a disability activist that she didn't make more of Stelarc's prosthetic Third Hand and the significant influence it may have had on perceptions of those with prosthetic limbs - cyberbodies as sexy bodies - cyber chic - look at the press given to model, athlete, actress, double amputee Aimee Mullins. Film theorist and amputee Vivien Sobchack (1995:213) cautions against the sexiness of the cyborg identity, instead, stressing the vulnerability of flesh, and rightly so, for there are about a quarter of a million amputees worldwide who experience poverty, discrimination, pain and trauma because of the loss of a limb. I'm certainly not saying that Stelarc's intention was to draw attention to the plight of those with amputated limbs, but much of his project is about how we are augmented or improved by medical and communications technologies.