TECHNO FASHION
Modern-day Cyborgs amongst us.
Below you will find a selection of modern-day cyborgs that I've come across. These are real people like you and me, but with technologically enhanced bodies. The 'auxiliary organs' these people have acquired are both fundamental to their existence, but they simultaneously also change their perception and experience of the surrounding world.
British artist Neil Harbisson is what one might call a SONOCHROMATIC cyborg, or how he himself likes to call it: 'eyeborg'. He was born with a rare condition called achromatopsia, which limits his color perception to black and white. Due to chip installed at the back of his head, and extended to the forehead with an electronic eye, Neil can hear color and therefore perceives the world very differently than the average human.
Click here to watch the TED video
Tattoo artist Dave Hurban implanted his arm with four magnets that can hold an iPod Nano thus creating his own strapless watch / mp3 player. He calls it the iDermal. Increased hands-free mobility was the main goal of this bold engineering of the human body.
Click here to watch the YouTube video
Having lost an eye, filmmaker Rob Spence naturally decided to turn his prosthetic one into a video camera. Rob is currently working on a documentary about how video and humanity intersect escpecially with regards to surveillance. Appropriately, he is retro-fitting his prosthetic eye to become a wireless video camera.
The BrainPort vision device is an investigational non-surgical assistive visual prosthetic device that translates information from a digital video camera to your tongue, through gentle electrical stimulation.
According to the device’s creators, the BrainPort enables users to find doorways and elevator buttons, read letters and numbers, and pick out cups and forks at the dinner table without having to fumble around.
In the same way Neil Harbisson learned a new language in order to understand the world around him despite his color blindness, the BrainPort vision device will create a new semiotic system. It will be interesting to see how this new technology will be embraced by media artists and adopted in other areas beyond its original scope.
A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident decided to replace it with a prosthetic one consisting of a USB drive. Jerry Jalava got the idea from his doctors who, when operating on him after the accident, jokingly suggested he replace the finger with a USB stick after learning he was a computer programmer.
Prosthetic limbs are by no means a novelty. What is novel, though, is the technology employed to integrate them as "natural" parts of the body as much as possible. It has now become possible to connect prosthetic arms to the existing neural networks so the extremities can exchange sensory information with the organic body. Physiatrist & engineer Todd Kuiken develops arms and hands that are wired into the nervous system and can be controlled by the same impulses from the brain that once controlled flesh and blood.
Click on the image or the title of this post to see a TED presentation of Todd's work and a live patient demonstrating how she intuitively and naturally controls her physical extension.
The cochlear implant has been around for ages. In fact, we have grown so accustomed to the possibility of enhancing human hearing that we take this technology as a given.
The video to the right shows Sloan Churman who was born deaf and only at the age of 29 heard her own voice for the first time. This was due to the Esteem Implant designed and manufactured by the Minnesota-based company Envoy Medical. The implant utilizes ear drum vibrations to bring hearing back to patients who suffer from sensorineural hearing loss.
IntendiX by Austrian Guger Technologies (g.tec) is the world's first commercially available brain-computer interface. Initially designed for paraplegics or otherwise impaired patients, IntendiX is a system that uses an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap to measure brain activity, allowing for the translation of certain thoughts onto a computer. For instance, if the wearer thinks of a keyboard and picks a letter, the signals will be transmitted and the letters will be typed on the computer. A trained user can type up to one letter per second. Not much per se, but a really good start.
In March 2012, g.tec debuted its new module to control Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft®, one of the most popular computer games in the world. The user sees the game running on the screen as usual, but a few extra icons appear around the edge of the monitor. For example, there are arrows pointing in different directions, which could be used for navigation in the game world. Other icons may be used to execute special commands in the game.
Kevin Warwick is by some regarded as the world's first real cyborg. His experiments at the University of Reading, UK, include remote control of a robotic arm that was connected to his own nervous system via the Internet. He had an implant wired into his nervous system in 2002, and he used it to control the arm across continents. He was located in NYC while the robotic arm was in England.
In 1998 he had a chip implanted in his body that would control his immediate surroundings at the University of Redding. Lights would turn on as he walked through the hallways, doors would open, and his inanimate office would greet him verbally as he walked through the door.
Today, Warwick works on reversing the man-machine hybridization, by equipping robots with rodent brain cells in an attempt to develop a living machine.
Kevin Warwick also experimented with brain to brain communication by having chips implanted in himself and in his wife in order to see whether it would be possible to transmit sensory infor- mation from one person to the other and communicate
remotely.
The implants were linked to specifically designed jewelry worn by Warwick and his wife Irene. The jewelry was linked each to the other's nervous system and expressed the other's moods through colors. When calm, the necklace and bracelet respectively flashed blue, and when agitated or uneasy, it flashed red.