Forget Nature vs. Nurture, What About Nature vs. Technology?

Since we have entered an age in which technology is universal, many artists have embraced the ambiguities inherent in a technological representation of reality. They have explored themes ranging from our fear of our own technological creations, to our somewhat hesitant affinities with these creations, often exhibiting a hope that somehow these creations can “save us” from annihilation at the hands of nature, society, or aliens. From as early as 1923, when E.V. Odle (in The Clockwork Man) depicted a man with a mechanical device in his head that allowed him to explore alternate realities, visual, auditory, and textual artists have played with the capacity for mankind to “be one with the machine.”

Among this newer breed of artists are those who explore technology by immersing themselves in it and helping us to immerse ourselves in it. One of these is Edrex Fontanilla, an artist who plays with the new media of computer-generated visual graphics and sound to find that place “in between,” where the “physical world” and the “technological world” merge. Via a combination of computer generated audio-visual techniques and “real world” physical objects, Fontanilla shows that the boundaries between technology and nature which we often assume to be clear-cut are not always so unambiguous. They are, like Fontanilla’s art, mutable and fluctuating, a place where nature merges into technology and technology merges into nature.

For example, Fontanilla explores this fluctuating boundary with an “interactive audio sculpture” called Rope and Wood. When one physically experiences this exhibit he or she engages in a merger between the physical world, the virtual world, and the human world. One pulls on ropes that provide a great deal of resistance and they in turn engage a mechanical pulley. As one turns this pulley, a whole range of mechanical sounds emerge, immersing the “viewer” in a full-range of sensory experience. The sounds are remarkably realistic, but they are computer-generated and the overall experience leads one to question the boundaries between the physical, “real” world and the computer-generated world.

In June, 2006, during a talk at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia, Fontanilla related a personal experience in which he actually underwent a blurring sense of reality while engaged with one of his own works. One evening he happened to “play” with his creation for a moment, pulling on the ropes. The sound he thus generated (electronically) was so realistic that he jumped – for a moment he was convinced that this was a mechanically generated sound, and this moment of conviction jarred his intellectual knowledge that the sound was actually created by a computer! He commented that it gave him the shivers and a moment of fear, because he knew it wasn’t “real” and yet his experience was such that it was physically real. He found a place “in between” technicality and physicality.

Also during his Summer Institute lecture, Fontanilla shared an audio-visual work which provides an even eerier experience of the mutable boundaries between the virtual world and the physical world. While viewing Overlooked, a video he created with cognitive scientist Robert Goldschmidt, one is not entirely certain at any point in time whether he or she is viewing truly natural phenomena or “merely” digitally created phenomena. (Note: the video is best experienced with headphones.) One can indeed distinguish some obviously digitally-created sounds amid the overall soundscape, but they continuously merge with visual and auditory forms, many of which are taken from the “natural” world. At no point is one clearly aware of which is which. The overall effect of this work is a boundary-blurring that seems to point past both virtual nature and physical nature, and into a third realm lying between, a realm that can indeed send shivers down one’s spine.

Just Where Does the Buck Stop Anyway?

Much of our artistic fascination with technological art probably derives from our combined fear and fascination with the possibility that human beings may be becoming a little too much like their own technical creations.

The term “cyborg” was first used by NASA scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in an article discussing the potential benefits of enhancing the human body with machine parts in order to make space exploration less physically debilitating and more productive. (See reference at end.) And indeed, as we have moved from the early twentieth century when they coined the term, to the twenty-first century, we have clearly begun to become cyborgs in the original sense of that term. For example, heart pacemakers are commonly placed within the human body to mechanically lengthen life. In addition, less widely heard of, but perhaps more significant “cyborg” features have become part of our lives as well. For the past twenty years, medical and scientific personnel have been implanting single electrodes in the cochlea, to stimulate hearing in the deaf. More recently, they are now implanting electrode arrays, “consisting of more than twenty electrodes aiming at selectively stimulating limited groups of auditory nerve fibres." There are now deaf people that can use the telephone. Likewise, blind people are getting “jacked in,” as well. The Dobelle Institute creates “artificial eyes” by sinking computer jacks into both sides of a patient’s skull. Of course, recipients of this artificial eye must undergo some training to learn “how to see” and to interpret the visual stimuli, which is experienced as a dot-matrix pattern. Generally, however, the recipients are quite positive in their assessment of their newfound bionic eyes. Since the Dobelle Institute’s success, a number of researchers have created and continue to refine their artificial eyes.

What will we become in a world where our physical limitations are seemingly transcended by electronic implants? How will our perceptual understanding change when we are able to see things that our ancestors could not perceive? We have already been offered the chance at orgasmatronic titillation, in the form of a device that stimulates the spinal cord. While using the device to help a female patient find relief from chronic back pain, Dr. Stuart Malloy accidentally located a spot at which electric stimulation would invoke an orgasm. Not surprisingly, the women who participated in the first clinical studies were reluctant to part with their devices when their study was completed.

However, one should not assume that the results of our bionic inheritance are necessarily to be desired. One of the darker aspects of this newfound man-machine merger can be found in yet another artistic representation, based upon the blending of art and science. Garnet Hertz builds off of the work of renowned Japanese scientist Isao Shimoyama, who has created what has popularly been dubbed the “RoboRoach.” Shimoyama was granted five million dollars from the Japanese government to engage in research involving the use of electronic implants to control the movement of cockroaches. Numerous spin-offs of the story abound on the Internet, some quite humorous, but the basic content of the story is fact, not fiction. Shimoyama’s team is able to surgically implant tiny electrodes on the backs of cockroaches, who are also equipped with mini-backpacks that carry the man-to-computer-to-roach interface with them. Using these interfaces, human beings are able to make the roaches (and other insects, such as moths) move in the direction that they are instructed to move. Similar work has been done on rats.

Based on scientific work such as this, Garnet Hertz has created his own cockroach interface. He offers exhibits of his work, and apparently believes that his enterprise is one of artistic expression. Hertz places his cockroaches on tiny mouse balls and lets them drive small remote-controlled vehicles around. He notes that unlike the work of Shimoyama and Holzer, which significantly lessens the lifespan of the roach, his work doesn’t harm the roaches at all. They are “simply” strapped to the mouse balls for short periods of time and allowed to freely “drive” their vehicles wherever they want.

“Art” such as this seems to exist in stark contrast to the earlier discussed attempts to find a middle ground between nature and technology. Ratbots, Roborats, and other assorted bio-borgs not only lead to questions about the gap between scientific research and ethical behavior; they point to a very conceivable future in which such electrical stimulation and control could be used on humans. Some released prisoners are already being equipped with electronic chips that are monitored by law enforcement agencies to ensure that these ex-cons do not travel to areas to which they are not supposed to go. Besides the Japanese government’s willingness to fund such research, DARPA has also been engaged in funding and research for this type of endeavor.

What Is Natural and What is Not?

Nonetheless, advances such as these which diminish the boundaries between man and machine point to a central question that we have as yet not been able to answer definitively: what are the boundaries between the natural and the technical? Is a man with a bionic eye less natural than one with two "real" eyes? If so, is a man with a hoe also less natural? What about a man who catches his prey by hitting it with a stick he hurls through the air?

In a society where man-machine apparati become commonplace, it is hard to believe that the nature of our relationship with nature and indeed with other human beings will not undergo significant changes. If science is successful allowing us, for instance, to “jack in” to a network at will, it is almost certain that our views of privacy will take yet another leap toward the primacy of the social and our belief in the separation between man-life and machine-life will probably erode as well. If I am human, but I see the world through machine-eyes, will my children be so inclined to distinguish between the life in the machine and the life in the wild such that life in the wild holds primacy?


References:

Clynes, Manfred and Nathan S. Kline. (1960). Cyborgs and Space. Astronautics, September. 26-27, 74-75.

dub dub dub

So, on a more serious note, what would I have thought if, in my early teens, someone had told me that within a decade and a half the phrase "colon slash slash dub dub dub" would be part of everyday conversation and that within a year or two after that, "dub dub dub" would suffice, the "colon slash slash" being implicit? Probably something like, "Huh?"

The Life and Death of My Own Personal Blogosphere

If, as Derrida has suggested, every autobiography is in fact a thanatography, when “blogging,” to whom do I really speak? Or as Lacan would have it, is the very act of creating an ‘I’ an act of repression? In such a case I select those aspects to include in my story that at this moment (or rather, at the moment just passed) appear in harmony with the “I” I choose to represent -- while at the same time, an infinity of other aspects never appear, and are in fact, obliterated by my choice.

Where is the repression, one might ask? When I write of myself, of my life, there are three actions taking place: the choice of what to write, the choice of what to ignore, and finally, the act of forgetfulness, where no conscious choice is made because the possibilities never rise to the surface. In this realm, neither history nor law can take part – it is the gap that is never filled as itself, but only as a representation of something else, a Secret peeking out from between the lines.

If this is true, then Derrida’s assertion that the archive is both constitutive of the self and simultaneously destructive – the essence of pure evil, as he says, in which the act of representation kills all that is outside its explicitly named, its legal, boundaries – is at heart an assertion that life and death co-exist eternally in the moment passing by, with death continually triumphing until life emerges superior in that interminable, yet final breath. (Ala The Life and Death of Ivan Ilych?)

As I write about my thoughts, about my life, the I who writes and the me to whom I speak temporarily seem to merge, but this is fantasy. The gap between I and me can never fully be closed in rational thought. And when I write of my life to myself, where are the boundaries between myself and others, since I sense that the me to whom I speak is not the same as the I who speaks? If no one ever reads this post, do I as I constitute myself at this moment cease to exist? If people read and respond, does this post not reconstitute me according to their words?

Auto-Icon

Contrary to popular American intellectual belief, Jeremy Bentham is dead. He died in 1832, at the age of 84.

When he died Bentham bequeathed his body to his friend Dr. Southwood Smith, hoping that it would be used as an ‘Auto-Icon,’ a “man who is his own image, preserved for the benefit of posterity.” Eventually it ended up at the University College London, where it has since become part of the university’s lore and legend, and a cool object for student pranks.

Ultimately, Bentham wanted his body to be dissected to further the cause of science. Think of it as the rationalist’s Holy Communion.

Here it is:






The head between his legs is his *real* head, a result of a New Zealand embalming technique gone awry; the head on his body is made of wax. Make of that what you will.



References

Marmoy, C. F. A. (1958).
The ‘Auto-Icon’ of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London. Retrieved on 2007-08-22. Originally published in Medical History 2:77-86.