Did I mention that I have been becoming a posthumanist recently?
^^ Some of you might have got that already, so here’s another piece of that from the last couple of months.
I mentioned this Robotic Exoskeleton in the foregoing post, so let me tell you some more about it. It is part of a perfomance artwork by Suguru Goto. I was, together with a couple of other persons, involved in the development of the shoulder mechanism. What we did was figuring out how a wearable, computer-controlled mechanism could be achieved that would allow for a human shoulder joint to be externally controlled. We did some research into anatomy, mechanics/mechatronics, did work out some ideas, built some simple prototypes, and finally came up with what we got now. It is quite a simple mechanism consisting of two motors per shoulder. Lots of testing and adjustment followed. Then it had to be integrated with other parts, i.e. elbow-, wrist-, and head control. Suguru came up with a lot of that. Here’s him and the Exoskeleton in an in-between stage:
The performance will be next Monday, a post on this is following soon. Everybody will be invited!
Tags: cyborg, exokeleton, robot, robotics
are you sure you’re not a TRANShumanist?
Yes, I am pretty sure that I am not a transhumanist. I can understand, though, that some things I say sound like it might well be, but also mind that I talked about something in particular.
Also, there is much confusion about a cybernetic, as well as a Deleuzian, notion of machine. Putting the difference to transhumanism in sketchy terms might amount to this: I try to investigate the human condition as it might have been for some time already. Ideas in the context of distributed cognition, cognitive artifacts, materiality, corporeality, affect, or an other which forms one point in an action–perception loop try to find out about something that would not depend on an actual ‘cyborgisation’, and that maybe got lost due to the cartesian tradition, information theory, and digitisation. Ideas like processuality, ‘real’ movement etc. also connect here. As far as I understand, transhumanism is based on the very idea of a mind–body dualism, a reductionist notion of both the body and mind, as well as a state of subjectivity enclosed in itself (so that it might as a complete whole be transferred to a robotic body).
Also, the ‘post-human’ is used as a term by transhumanists. However, there is some info out there on the difference, as well as this book of which I’ve only read three chapters so far, which I would recommend however: Catherine N. Hayles, How we became posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
if you say posthumanism was about figuring out what got lost due to the cartesian tradition then it would be part of transhumanism — as it is part of your own definition of transhumanism. i would deny this strenuously. in my mind <h lies beyond/trans a mind/matter dualism and is concered with what would be human anymore. but i do not deny that there is little work about this yet. however, thanks for your reference. try this: Young, Simon (2005), Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto, PB.
Thanks for commenting again!
I cannot see why there should be any confusion about what I say about trans- as opposed to posthumanism. As to the ‘transgression’, I think that transhumanism from its basic assumptions relies on the mind/body dualism, at least inasmuch as its reductionist conceptions rely on it. That is not to say that you have to reject e.g. neuroscientific approaches (mind that there is also a reductionism between the dualist poles in favour of mind or spirit).
As far as my vague impression of Young’s work goes (I only had a peek at his blog and some other ressources on the web) it seems to me, though, that on the systems level ‘cultural’ phenomena indeed get reduced to functions on a more reactive level.
Nothing against functionalism, but maybe we should think more about system properties that do not e.g. model cognition as recognition, but rather inquire corporeal and interactional preconditions. One reference point for me is Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, another the work done in cognitive and social neuroscience by persons as Michael A. Arbib (“Crusoe’s Brain” and “Towards a Neuroscience of the Person”, In: Russell, Murphy, Meyering, Arbib: Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).