Sin Título (ciencia ficción). [No Title (science fiction)], 2001
Installation
In the same space, we find two installations that deal with the hybrid, connective nature of new bodies. Suspended above visitors, there are five visions of the prosthetic body that techno-science and its unlimited progress seductively offer. Nine Cyborg bodies where flesh and technological artifact merged in an operative symbiosis flying over the exhibition room. Men and women who have gone beyond the mere expansion of their capacities through the technological to become new beings, half-human, half-machines (satellites, antennae...). Below, at their feet, four black cubes show or point to a detailed look at the symbiosis between artifical network and biology. In each cube, there is a different point of connection between the human body and an indefinite external network (the unknown other). Perhaps only four different biologized IP.
Both visions, although apparently metaphorical like the Cyborg figure was in its moment for Donna Haraway, become progressively less poetic and more descriptive as thesociety of the network advances with its set of connective devices/interfaces. The gradual but exponential unfolding of cybernetic, telematic, and medical technologies on bodies is destroying such deeply rooted concepts in the West as the separation between mind and body or between the interior and the exterior, perhaps constituting the final subversion of our Platonic and Cartesian legacy. Undoubtedly, it is through this expansion of capacities offered by the new technological system that a new and different subjectivity has begun to be built. For the subject cannot exist before historically specific (technical) forces make it possible.
That Promethean tradition, which stopped in its eager investigations just before it passed through the threshold of life, can only remind us of the past, before the techno-sciences and their unlimited appropriation of nature started to work on the final merger between the biological and the non-biological, between techné and physis, between I and the Other. Sin título (ciencia ficción) shows the evidence of our Faustian tradition. The one that has no limits in its investigation and wants to reconfigure relations between what is natural and artificial, between what is inside and outside, between humans and their connections. For if something is definitely emerging from this profound change, it is the generation of a new pattern of networks where there is no separation possible between any sphere, no matter which one it is. Connectivity is already outlining a new landscape without borders, a state of total flux, hybrid and omnicomprehensive: the network of techno-life.
San Pedro, Abraham
Courtesy by Colección de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Junta de Castilla y León, and Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid.
Courtesy of Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia. Museo de Bellas artes de Murcia. Departamento de Artes Visuales. And Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid.
