(This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin)
What happens if we alter the traditional methods of sensing by adding an extra sense? What changes if we extend our perception and abilities by enhancing our senses? In her A Cyborg Manifesto, written in the early eighties, Dora Haraway defined cyborg as ‘A cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
Neil Harbisson, cyborg artist, co-founder of The Cyborg Foundation and Cyborg Nest, ‘became technology’ and therefore cyborg more than a decade ago when he implanted an antenna in his skull that allows him to hear colours. Born with achromatopsia, a rare condition of colour blindness that makes him see the world in a grey scale, the antenna, which Harbisson calls ‘eyeborg’ represents the perfect cybernetic union between human and technology. He even wears it while showering. For Harbisson, the son of a Catalan mother and an Irish father, his identity as a cyborg is official — the antenna is included in his British passport.
Harbisson’s cyborg art is mainly focused on creating music and portraits through the new sense. In Piano Concerto No. 1, he painted a piano with different colour paint and then the antenna played the frequencies of the colours while he created portraits in Sound Portraits by listening to the colour of their faces. Another appealing artwork is The Human Colour Wheel, a colour wheel based on the light of the human skins.
Apart from his artistic work Neil Harbisson co-founded together with cyborg choreographer Moon Ribas The Cyborg Foundation in 2010. Its aims are to help people to become a cyborg by giving them the tools and the information to achieve their goal. More recently, in 2016, Harbisson and Ribas launched Cyborg Nest. As Neil says, Cyborg Nest is a company that ‘[offers] senses for people. (...) so people can extend their senses by applying or incorporating new sensory organs in their body.’
How would the world appear to us when we sense it in a broad and different new ways? Exploring new ways of communicating beyond our senses and languages of sounds and signs will allow us to comprehend the world in broader dimensions. The world would not be perceived any longer in three dimensions.
