No, there are no real insects that exchange their legs, but an interesting suggestion is made in this iconic little comic by illustrator Schwantz. Of course it's just a joke, but it very much suits today's 'Zeitgeist', and it's interesting to think about the interchangeability of body parts isn't it.
Body architect Lucy McRae is taking her extraordinary transhumanist aesthetic from low-tech to high-tech as she is currently collaborating with Harvard scientist Sheref Mansy to create a pill that acts as a perfume. This pill would contain cells that are engineered to be recognized by the human body as fat cells, and absorbed in a similar way. As these cells are broken down then, they could release certain molecules that come out through the skin and act as a perfume.
Lucy has come up with an interesting teaser to wet our appetites, which you can see below.
I'm not so sure that the appetite for these pills will be big though, from a commercial perspective. Of course there are the early adopters who like to show off or provoke the people around them by showing them something new and radical. These are the important people through which a new technology can start evolving, as Kevin Kelly also explains in his book 'What Technology Wants.' But for the larger public, there would probably be more to these pills than just acting like a perfume. One major selling point where a pill may take over from spray-on perfume is that the scent may last for several days, but even then I think the threshold may be too high to start ingesting things.
What is happening here seems to be the same as happened to other major technological breakthroughs like the automobile, movies, and radio. They started off as literal replacements of the previous technology, but in a new embodiment. The first cars were designed like horse carriages, and the first movies were made in the same way as written stories and theater plays. It was only later that the larger inherent potential of the new medium revealed itself, and people started to align themselves with what almost seems like the intention of the technology. The technology then ends up not just a more efficient replacement of the former technology, but bringing about an entire shift of behavior and mindset in its users.
This will probably be the same for these new intimate technologies that enter the human body. The mindshift this will bring about is that the body is just another object that we can manipulate. It is not us, our identification with it that started in early age was too limited a conception, it was an illusion keeping us blinded from the larger whole. Now, this technology opens us up towards this mindset, as we can continually alter our own body to the needs of the situation, or simply to play around with it. The swallowable perfume pill will probably not remain just a perfume, but integrate more functionalities inherent to the capabilities of the pill-form. Maybe it will turn out to become an 'experience-pill', where different pills are created to generate different sensory and mental experiences. Next to fragrance molecules, it might also contain skin and hair colorants, or neurotransmitters to generate a certain subjective experience. Who knows what will happen. But that the next major technological shift is coming is certain.
A screenshot from the third movie of Matthew Barney's magnum opus The Cremaster Cycle, where a main character, the apprentice, has landed on the surgery table, and doctors reveal what seems to be a turning knob from under some kind of horizontal labia. As the movie is from 2002 it is not very recent, but still very relevant and worth bringing under the attention.
The thought of having mechanical parts substitute for the body parts I have now somehow creates an enormous feeling of aversion. Unless grown from within, in continuous interaction with the rest of the body, it will always be a misfit, resulting in many unforeseen problems for the whole body.
Anyway, where Barney set the stage by provoking questions about such issues by means of metaphorical imagery, it is now time that we lose symbolic thinking, get real, and seriously plow through these issues for ourselves. We really want to gain some wisdom and sensitivity about our bodies and their interaction with their world, before we start to use our entire body as an open platform for modification the way we do with tattoos and piercings now. From consciously designing an identity that actually represents only a part of us, we need to learn how to revert to our core selves and attune to our unconscious processes.
If you combine my recent post about the T-1000 and the previous one about resolving the mechanic-organic dichotomy, you get this.
It is a robotic exoskeleton for humans, meant for lifting heavier weights, so you do not have to go to the gym anymore. It has a variable ratio with which it amplifies your muscle power and is connected to the skin, from which it detects the faint synaptic impulses from the brain.
How literally can you empower people? How lazy can we get? How evolutionary inferior can technology make you feel? How is this not the first step in becoming fully hybrid? How can this never be made in another country than Japan?
A few nice trivia are that this device is actually called HAL (while it is actually the opposite: physical, non-intelligent, unobtrusive). But the best, or the scariest, is that it is developed by a company called Cyberdyne. Yes, the same company that invented the Terminator! I'm getting paranoid.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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