Cybernetic Strait Jacket

Technological culture has crossed all lines. Science progresses by leaps and bounds. The changes are swift, far-reaching, revolutionary, fascinating, alluring, worrisome and overwhelming, so much so that they can no longer be stopped. Historically, these times of change are replete with extensive cultural activity, where everything familiar is given a new meaning. The new technology permeates all fields of life and culture, infiltrating everywhere - even our bodies.

The body continues to be the center of attention in a world of art which for a long time now has been exploring the issue of identity. Yet the questions posed by the human body and identity and their representation alter as new technologies in the fields of telecommunication and biotechnology effect the discussion about the policy of identity. The exhibition Babylon indicates the social and scientific tendencies which merge together in the digital era rendering a new perception of self.

Reuven Cohen endeavors to reconstruct the meaning of being “human” by posing the body as a basis for a different mode of organization and thinking. Harnessed into an alternative cultural system, the body is deconstructed and reconstructed over and over again during the work process. The familiar bodies of friends, figures taken from science fiction literature, and childhood fantasies are Cohen’s raw materials, which he cross-breeds by mixing, tearing, photographing, distorting and duplicating. At the end of the “game” he casts the hybrid figures - the lab objects he created into showcases adding to them metallic hi-tech prostheses. The display space becomes a documentary site of hybrid-artistic, scientific, ethnographic and poetical sculptures, and the viewer can walk among them while contemplating the remodeling of the body. Furthermore, the figures function as mannequins in a department store window, yet the merchandise they display for sale does not come down to articles of clothing and assorted accessories alone, but also includes prostheses, body parts and bio-technological aids.

Eighty years after the Manifesto of Surrealism, the electro-mobile man - which operates on electricity - uses prostheses in order to perform in the world. We are already cyborgs. Many cyborgs walk among us. Anyone with an artificial “attachment” - whether an organ or some other addition - is, in fact, a cyborg. But the issue of cyborgs is an intricate and complex one, since it can be read and classified in many ways. The cyborg’s anthropological consideration focuses mainly on the social repercussions of the human-machine integration, and speaks in terms of the “society of the cyborg”. From an anthropological point of view, the cyborg regards the post-modern state as a mixture of human beings, systems, mechanisms and various complicated programs - in short, a cybernetic organism. Our immediate environment is already composed of multiple technological textures and the very use of appliances and instruments establishes new relations between man and machine. These relationships are accompanied by a subconscious dependence. Modern man internalizes the machine, and technological instruments become a second nature to human existence, to the point that they become inseparable. You hardly ever notice the instrument’s existence anymore. It shrinks, conceals itself, ceases to be seen, until it penetrates into the body, possibly operating possibly operated therefrom.

Out of his illuminated containers Reuven Cohen produces a new species of man. Creatures of mind-zapping bits who feed on the fantasy of the deconstructed body. We are accustomed to perceiving memory and identity as inseparably intertwined. The body tells the story of man who has experiences and memories imprinted on his skin and face. A digital awareness which can be saved on a disk still seems like a faraway dream, but in an era where the body undergoes formal changes by means of plastic surgery and genetic engineering and where memories can be detached from our consciousness by chemical means, identity becomes merely a matter of identification. In terms of memory, the body was previously one of the barriers of technological invasion - a “host site” for the human alone. If the 1980s technology allowed the body’s expansion and elaboration through prostheses which cling to the skin responding to touch, such as the personal computer, the walkman, the cellular phone and the contact lenses, then the transplant revolution transforms altogether the definition of humanness and the nature of autonomy. The body opens its doors to technological invasion: prosthetic organs, threaded circuits, gene modification, brain interfaces, computers and artificial intelligence.

The conviction that “one day it’s going to happen” becomes more and more real. In fact, this “day” is already here. It is our responsibility to at least try and understand non-conventional views too. After all, these will play an important part in the shaping of our future.