Escape Velocity (36 page)

If the narration of dissolution often seems ecstatic in tone and promise, it also frequently ignores the real-world politics of new bodily technologies. . . . The real bodies at stake are often forgotten while consuming . . . the Krokers.^^

Meat Hell

-mindbody meatbody deathbody stinking sagging shitting fetus bursting organs hanging buried alive in a coffin of blood oh god not me don't let it be me got to get out of this bucket of tripe it's

248 Mark Dery

sucking me down throwing me up take it away this pulsing writhing spurting spinning body-go-round, BODY—

-David SkaF''

The opposition of the dead, heavy flesh ("meat," in compu-slang) and the ethereal body of information—the discorporated self-is one of cy-berculture's defining dualisms. The belief that the body is a vestigial appendage no longer needed by late twentieth-century Homo sapiens-Homo Cyber-is not uncommon among obsessive programmers, outlaw^ hackers, video game junkies, and netsurfers cruising electronic bulletin board systems.

TM . . . TRAPPED IN THIS WORTHLESS LUMP OF MATTER CALLED FLESH!" rants a BBS user whose "pseud" (on-line pseudonym) is MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY. "I WANT TO BE FREE

TO CRUISE THE WIRES AND MOLEST PEOPLE'S APPLIANCES

LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH! FUCK THE OLD FLESH!"^' Giving vent to a body loathing born of a Nietzschean will to power, MODERNBODY quotes the last words of Max Renn in Cronenberg's Videodrome, just before he mutates into a video hallucination ("long live the new flesh"). Simultaneously, he evokes Cyberjobe in the movie The Lawnmower Man, who announces his transmutation into a digital deity by ringing every phone on the planet in unison ("I want to be free to cruise the wires and molest people's appliances").

MODERNBODY and those like him are well represented in the fandom of cyberpunk SF, a genre that draws its narrative juice from the polarization of cyberspace and the physical world. William Gibson's Neuro-mancer, the urtext of cyberpunk, can be read as a lengthy meditation on the mind-body split in cyberculture. "The key to [the protagonist] Case's personality is [his] estrangement from his body, the meat," Gibson has noted.^^ In a radio interview, the novelist revealed that his 1984 novel was largely an extrapolation of

some ideas I'd gotten from reading D. H. Lawrence about the dichotomy of mind and body in Judaeo-Christian culture. That's actually what I was thinking about, and it's all in there [in] that wool-gathering Case does about the meat and what it needs.^^

Stelarc with Laser Eyes,Third Hand, and Amplified Body. Photo: Polixeni Papapetrou

AMPLIFIED BODY/THIRD HAND/VIRTUAL ARM

Amplified Body/Third Hand/ Virtual Arm schematic. © 199S Stelarc

Sitting / Swaying Event for Rock Suspension Handswriting (1982). Photo: J. Morioka

(1 980). Photo: Kenji Nozawa

Amplified Body, Laser Eyes, and Third Hand Elapsed Horizon /Enhanced Assumption (1990).

(1986). Photo: T. Shinoda Photo: T. Figallo

The Virtual Arm clones itself in cyberspace. Photo:T. Figallo

Video still with virtual limbs

superimposed on Stelarc, from

Graft/Replicate: Event for Virtual Arm (1992).

©Stelarcl995

Stelarc performing with industrial robot arm. Photo: Martin Bi

D. A.Therrien with members of Comfort/ Control.

The Body Drum.

Information Machine: Ideological Engines

(1993). © Paul Markow / Southwest, Comfort/Control

© 1995 bOING-bOING. ^rt and design by Mark Frauenfelder; photo by Clayton Spada

Siliconsensual Acts: bOING-bOING and Future Sex imagine the ultimate commodity fetish.