Body as a Weapon Aimed at You

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2011:  

• Secure Insecurity

• Body as a Weapon Aimed at You

• Marta Heberle

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: Secure Insecurity

  We’re ob­sessed with num­bers, codes, and al­go­rithms. As Berg­son points out, since our in­tel­lec­tual ca­pa­bil­i­ties are in­suf­fi­cient to per­ceive re­al­ity as an in­sep­a­ra­ble whole, we bring it to a stand­still, at­om­ize it into par­ti­cles and as­cribe nu­mer­i­cal value to com­pound phe­nom­ena. We live in the times where even the very rudi­ments of life have al­ready been mea­sured and ap­pro­pri­ated by the do­main of tech­nol­ogy. The code of life. The body de­scribed by in­tramol­e­c­u­lar se­quences looses its fleshy char­ac­ter and be­comes ab­stract, in­or­ganic, to use Freud’s ter­mi­nol­ogy: un­canny. Processed and trans­formed into num­bers: al­most an ab­ject. The feel­ing of es­trange­ment as­sists ex­er­cis­ing of power. Along with the recog­ni­tion, ma­nip­u­la­tion and patent­ing of human genome, we’re be­com­ing owned, our bod­ies turn into com­modi­ties, tar­gets, bio­cap­i­tal. Our el­e­men­tal data is con­verted into ex­clu­sive prop­erty of in­flu­en­tial com­pa­nies, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal moguls, rul­ing elites, se­cu­rity ser­vices then sold, ex­changed, re­leased into cir­cu­la­tion. Asym­met­ri­cal ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion re­sults in a hi­er­ar­chy be­tween „us” and „them” and en­ables wield­ing of power. Such im­bal­ance is the prin­ci­ple of human man­age­ment and gov­ern­ing. The body is turned against you. It serves as a pow­er­ful weapon of the state.

  An arm of dis­ci­pline and con­trol. In­vol­un­tar­ily the body may be­come a medium, a car­rier spread­ing the dis­ease at the same time en­tan­gling it­self in the net­work of pol­i­tics, med­ical ser­vices, in­for­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion, trans­port, data­bases etc. The knowl­edge and pos­ses­sion of life code data may af­fect free­dom of mi­gra­tion, de­cide upon in­clu­sion or ex­clu­sion, fa­cil­i­tate human seg­re­ga­tion alike eu­gen­ics, re­veal weak points in human con­sti­tu­tion thus de­liv­er­ing in­struc­tions where to strike to crash our bare sys­tems or even pro­vid­ing for­mu­las for cre­at­ing a bioweapon ca­pa­ble of ex­ter­mi­nat­ing par­tic­u­lar eth­ni­cal groups due to their slight DNA dif­fer­ences. Se­cu­rity state ex­ists upon es­ca­lat­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of these threats, upon ex­cit­ing the at­mos­phere of haz­ard. This leads to a con­stant state of emer­gency, to a per­ma­nent war. „The body is under at­tack on all fronts”. The body ab­sorbed and ex­ploited by the state ma­chine. The war is being fought via biopo­lit­i­cal body, a gun pointed at you.

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