This image and text piece presents some of the issues which preoccupy me in my role as an artist working with video and digital media. Most of my works are concerned with ways in which new media technologies are changing relationships between audience, artefact and gallery. Representations of the body and its virtual and/or remote presence are central to a number of these projects, and build on my early background in installation and performance work.

“The Imaginary Internal Organs of a Cyborg” 1 is a CDROM which takes the physical form of the cyborg as a vehicle for exploring philosophical and cultural spaces. The piece employs digital techniques to build up layers of images and sounds - these range from the use of low resolution QuickCam video sequences to 3D computer modelling, from interviews with surgeons and medical researchers to the use of ready-made images from the Wellcome Photo Library and from PhotoDisc. While on the one hand the images appear to represent a body, or a series of bodies, my intention has been to create a transfigurative work which investigates ways in which our sense of self has a fluidity that defies a spatial containment within ‘the universal’ body. The focus of the work is the impermanence and dissolution of boundaries between the human and machine, the inside and outside and the natural and the artificial. The sense of self that this cyborg has is based upon an awareness of unbounded territories. Christine Battersby 2 contrasts the cognitive semantic view of the body as a container for the inner self, all bodies basically the same, over which cultural differences are laid, with the body as an open permeable and fissuring space. Battersby states that:

“...feminists need - for political ends - to exploit the difficulties of containing female identity within the schemata provided by classical science and metaphysics, and use the resources provided by contemporary science and the history of philosophy to think selves, bodies and boundaries in more revolutionary terms. In this respect I agree with Donna Haraway in the alliance with the cyborg. It is time to turn our backs on those forms of feminist theory that castigate all science and all Western philosophy as rationalist, masculinist and weapons of the enemy. It is time to investigate the imaginative schemata that old philosophies and new sciences offer us for re-visioning the female self.” 3

It is an attempt to re-vision and imagine the female self which underlies “The Imaginary Internal Organs of a Cyborg”. The first stage of the project, completed in spring 1996, involved exploring the heart, a rich and contested site, and one which offered up a turbulent eddy of associations. The heart is simultaneously considered as a Cartesian pumping machine contained within the body and as the seat of Romantic love, which seeps out of the confines of the body, merging fantasy with flesh. The ability to feel and express emotion, especially love, is commonly held as that which sets the human aside from the machine. In science fiction writing it is more often the brain that becomes the focus for exploring cyborg identities, this is epitomised by the recurring theme of a human personality - the contents of a person’s brain - being transferred onto a computer chip. As the project developed I turned my attention to the brain which is treated as the site for exploring distributed memory, neural networks and artificial intelligence. I then concentrated on the stomach which embodies ideas of the digestion and assimilation of data and becomes the centre of the cyborg as a flow of information. Here too are references to everyday associations of the body with emotional states, and its attendant focus on nausea and appetite.
The images and sounds that make up “The Imaginary Internal Organs of a Cyborg” are a collection which form a figuration of the cyborg - it parodies the world of advertising and the culture of medicine. Sarah Kember has argued that figuration (as opposed to representation) has a self-conscious relationship to epistemological structures. Figuration is representation plus. It offers a partial and situated knowledge and tends towards shifting subject positions, it:

“ ...is an alternative verbal or visual language which embodies a transformation in the terms of knowledge, power and subjectivity. It strategically resists and competes with the structures of patriarchy and the Enlightenment - specifically a gendered and hierarchical dualism which priviledges culture over nature, mind over body, male over female. It’s usual mode of operation is parody.” 4

The body has long been used by women artists as a site for intervention 5 (Betterton, 1996) and the cyborg body, or bodies, provide a rich philosophical and cultural locus. This territory is unfixed and constantly shifting, more like duned desert than solid ground, with cyborg identities appearing like mirages, shimmering and difficult to make out, disappearing and then re-emerging changed elsewhere. I have found the metaphor of the mirage particularly useful as I try to imagine the cyborg body: the mirage is an optical illusion in which images of distant objects, hidden or beyond the horizon, become visible by the refraction of light. New medical imagining technologies have brought images of the interior of our corporeal ‘landscape’ to us which are invisible to our unassisted vision. The cyborg has occupied a space somewhere just beyond our event horizon and images of the augmented body appear before us in science fiction films, medical journals and popular science TV programmes like images from a place just beyond our reach. Each of the cyborg identities is a refraction of our earth-bound desires and fantasies about our bodies, of our drive to improve our longevity, to extend our physical and mental capabilities or to circumvent social and cultural restrictions.

Issues of gender permeate the piece, though I deliberately chose to work with internal organs which were not sex-specific in an attempt to move away from a biologically determinist reading of femininity. However I am mindful of the problems of adopting a liberal theory stance on the body, as Donna Haraway argues:

“Liberal theory was a resource for feminists, but only at the expense of renouncing anything specific about women’s voice and position, and carefully avoiding difference, for example race, among women. The ‘neutral’ body was always unmarked, white and masculine 6.”

Rather than trying to visualise a non-specific or universal body by focussing on its potential for neutrality, it may be more useful to shift the emphasis to the position and identity of the eye that looks at it. Baxandall’s 7 idea of the ‘period eye’ provides a useful framework for looking at images of the body. Simply put, the ‘period eye’ refers to the skills of interpretation and the cultural context that viewers in a particular chronological and geographical location bring with them when they look at images. The eye with which we view representations of the contemporary body is located in a period where we have become familiar with images of simulacra and our late twentieth century beau ideal frequently turns out to be surgically altered or digitally enhanced. The contemporary notion of ideal beauty incorporates a post modern philosophy of transience - a belief that the nature of being is subject to change, that our physical states need not be fixed by nature, but can be altered utilising new technologies such as genetic engineering, surgery and pharmaceuticals to produce a cyborg which might embody excellence.
If the cyborg can act as a philosophical space,then it is a territory criss-crossed with tracks left by malevolent super-machismo man-machine hybrids from sci-fi films and books - these are the emotionless killing machines that figured strongly in the popular culture of the 1980s, whose bodies were high tech, high performance weapons. Overlaying these are other traces: the cyborg as a chimera, a blend of human and animal organs, the embodiment of wild fancy and imagined horror 8. The chimera is chemically ‘fixed’, rather like a photograph, its hybrid form is held together with pharmaceuticals which prevent the human body rejecting donor organs, and the relationship between the host and foreign bodies, once established is monitored by imaging technologies. Here also is the mark of the analogue cyborg, the woman with the mechanical heart valves or the artificial hips, the child with the metal plate in its head or the steel pins in its shins.

The cyborg occupies spaces between flesh and information, straddling the boundaries between the natural and artificial. We have become used to the notion of the body as ‘meat’ and while many cultural theorists emphasise that this view is not a continuation of the Enlightenment ‘Flight from the Body’ they pay little attention to the hardships and pain that a journey of physical augmentation or alteration entails. The transformative journey from human to post-human invokes a keen awareness of the physicality of the flesh through the experience of surgical and pharmaceutical intervention. The body is meat and we need cleavers, knives and saws to open it, clamps and braces to hold it open while it is worked upon, staples and stitches to close it up. Its meatiness is prone to rotting and degeneration, and renders the corpus in need of preservation.

Stored in formaldehyde and held frozen in cryogenic tanks, opened butterfly-like, brains are a sign of the mysterious flowering of our intellect. Imaging technologies are used to expose the inner workings typified by the vast and uncharted territory of the synapses. Rows of jars in museums: the brain of a serial killer, Einstein's brain, so many uncontextualised and unexplained disembodied brains free-floating, held as the measure of criminality or genius. We have become used to the idea that our intellect, somehow seated in our brain, is what separates us from other animals. The development of our brain, in particular its larger size, is used as an indicator of our superiority and elevated position in relation to other primates. Medical imaging systems expose the formerly invisible processes and recesses of the body to a technocratic gaze, drawing out our innermost functions from the private to the public sphere of visual culture. Here again is a confusion of boundary, a subsidence of the private into the public and an eruption of the public into the private, as ultrasound images of the foetus and MRI scans of the brain are tucked into family albums, passed round at parties alongside snapshots of the exterior body.

The heart of the cyborg beats in time to the metronomic pacemaker. Airbags are inserted along collapsing arteries by surgeons trained on virtual reality simulations. Metal valves click like old clocks. Animals are bio-engineered for human transplant compatibility. *** The meat-market economy of ‘Third world’ organ donation is wiped out by the increased use of pigs from medical farms which are owned and controlled by the ‘First world’ medical infrastructure. Thus each operation and transplant forms an integral part of the financial structure of the architecture of medicine.

“The Imaginary Internal Organs of a Cyborg” returns us to the malleable architecture of the imagined cyborg body, to the cyborg stomach where there are remnants and semi digested fragments of many a cyborgian fantasy. These include traces of the digital cyborg which has become immaterial - a pure information space - with a digital body of algorithms, which ingests zeros and ones of ‘pure’ information like an expensive drug. Virtual cakes and sweets lie next to real ones, eye-candy and cake to fuel and fatten the meat. Performance enhancing vitamins, steroids, antibiotics, artificial hormones create a soup of biotechnology navigated by self-propelling pills containing bite sized nano-surgeons. This cyborg has devoured medical science, pulled the surgeon in through the wound and kept ‘him’ prisoner within walls of flesh. Like the woman who swallowed the spider, augmentation wriggles and wriggles inside her. The fairy cakes, lamb chops and fresh vegetables all hold within them the traces of a drive to improve performance and longevity: faint tastes of pesticide, the feel of waxy skin and the endlessly fresh bloom of irradiation. The stomach contents of this cyborg are held in a small space, the stomach tucked to create a flatter outer appearance and the intestine shortened to make room for a Hi NRG Carbohydrate Converter and more information technology.

The cyborg body as a subject for philosophical enquiry is, like all bodies, inscribed with the values and beliefs of the culture from which it emerges. Biotechnical advances and cybernetic developments embed the cyborg within military and industrial commodity 8, but its identity splits and fissures as we import ideas of Artificial Intelligence and neural networks which challenge our notions of what it is to be human. There are two linked concepts, interpolation 9 and interpellation 9, which may help explain our fascination with the notion of the cyborg. They both contain the sense of interruption 9 - the first in relation to tampering with matter by the insertion of new or strange material; the second in relation to the grabbing of attention. Mathematicians and computer programmers commonly use the term iterative interpolation 9 to mean a series of digitally defined, sequential alterations to a model or image, which cause it to change from one structure to another. The cyborg bodies discussed previously are the first iterations in our journey from the human to the post-human and offer us the opportunity to fantasise about the process of continual transformation and the power this implies. In Cultural Studies, interpellation is used to describe the process by which a subject feels they are being hailed 9 and considers how we recognise ourselves in the representations and messages offered to us. As the cyborg in all its manifestations becomes ever present in popular culture, so does our fascination with cyborg bodies. This begs the question: why do we embrace these new forms with such vigour and what does this recognition imply for our sense of self?

1 Prophet, Jane. The Imaginary Internal Organs of a Cyborg. CDROM. Email: jane@cairn.demon.co.uk
2 Battersby, Christine. Her Body/Her Boundaries: Gender and the Metaphysics of Containment, in Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts: The Body. The Academy Group: London, 1993. pp30-39
3 ibid p38
4 Kember, Sarah. Unpublished notes which accompanied her seminar given at Wired Women: Virtual Worlds/Real Lives. A conference at Univerity of Portsmouth 8th March 1997.
5 Betterton, Rosemary. An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body. Routledge: London, 1996
6 Haraway, Donna 1990 p148
7 Baxandall, Michael Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Clarendon:Oxford, 1972.
Levidow, Les and Robins, Kevin. Cyborg Worlds: the military information society. Free Association books: London, 1989
8 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a chimera as either a grotesque monster in archaeological or painting etrms, or figuratively as a wild fancy or unfounded conception. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Volume 1, A-Markworthy. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1991. p325