Jeffrey Cook, Sam de Silva, Gary Zebington: Metabody: From Cyborg to Symborg


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    • Photo from ccp.org.au

Title:


    Metabody: From Cyborg to Symborg

Artist(s) and People Involved:


Symposium:


Artist Statement:


    The Metabody assemblage is an animated mapping of the territory of the human-machine interface: the avatar/golem; the robot or automaton (recently cyborg, now symborg) through the ages; and the body as performance installation site connected to other bodies and sites around the world. It encompasses the body as alternative interface using a vocabulary of gestural and performative twitches needed to establish a bodily dialogue with a representation in symbolic space. The ROM comprises three main sections: the Stelarc archive; the human-machine historical section; and various simulations (hypercells) of ideas explicated elsewhere. The components exist as a colony or loose assemblage of cells, some of which will integrate into a larger multicellular whole at a later date; some which extend the cyborg’s organomechanic role by virtue of digital appendages or layers (pro)creating the symbiological organism — the symborg; or react in a connective soup of humans across time and space; or linger in an unresolved phase state, as submerged ideas of an emergent humanity and humaneutics. A technology-induced symbiological body plays tangent to various prosthetic or bodily add-on potentialities and strategies and tends toward inclusion in a growing set of options: the melding of some aspects of organic, web and internet sensorial spaces; interactive anthropomorphic digital symbols; software simulations; attachable hardware augmentations and other interconnected humans via local and remotely distributed computer systems.

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