Joanna Zylinska (ed.) (2002) The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum: London and New York)

The Cyborg Experiments analyses some of the challenges posed to corporeality by technology. Taking as their starting point the work of the highly influential performance artists Orlan and Stelarc, the essays in this timely and important collection raise a number of questions in relation to new conceptions of embodiment, identity and otherness in the age of new technologies: Has the body become obsolete? Does transgender challenge traditional ideas of agency? Have we always been cyborgs? As well as highlighting the playful character of digital aesthetics, the contributors investigate ethical issues concerning the ownership of our bodies and the experiments we perform on them. In this way, the book explores how humanism, and ideas of 'the human', have been placed under increasing scrutiny as a result of new developments in science, media and communications.

Contents

Joanna Zylinska, 'Extending McLuhan into the New Media Age: an Introduction' (available online)

I The Cyborg Links

1. Mark Poster, 'High-tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc'

2. Julie Clarke, 'The Human/Not Human in the Work of Orlan and Stelarc'

3. Meredith Jones and Zoë Sofia, 'Stelarc and Orlan in the Middle Ages'

4. Stelarc, 'Towards a Compliant Coupling: Pneumatic Projects 1998-2001'

II The Obsolete Body?

5. Edward Scheer, 'What Does an Avatar Want?: Stelarc's E-motions'

6. John Appleby, 'Planned Obsolescence: Flying into the Future with Stelarc'

7. Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall, 'Probings: an Interview with Stelarc'

8. Gary Hall, 'Para-Site'

III Self-hybridation

9. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, 'Morlan'

10. Orlan, 'The Virtual and/or the Real'

11. Rachel Armstrong, 'Anger, Art and Medicine: Working with Orlan'

III Aesthetics and Ethics: Technological Perspectives

12. Chris Hables Gray, 'In Defence of Prefigurative Art: the Aesthetics and Ethics of Orlan and Stelarc'

13. Jay Prosser, 'Photography and the Art of Life: Gillian Wearing's Ethical Realism'

14. Joanna Zylinska, '"The future … is monstrous": Prosthetics as Ethics'

Buy it from: