[Synapse elist] Exoskeletons...

[ju90]

Although I've been finding Stelarc's contribution fascinating, I hope  
you will forgive me if, rather than responding to it at this time, I  
come back to one of my main concerns. This is how the cyborg/ 
posthuman discourse has been affected overall by the absence of  
disabled voices and experiences, and how wide the resulting gap now  
is between social and cultural beliefs about the possibilities of  
body augmentation and the reality. This in turn affects everything  
about our society, including our readiness to go to war (the biggest  
cause of impairment after poverty). Stelarc wrote:

> One of the better articles on my performances, in reference to the  
> prosthetic and the chimera in Kant was written by Howard Caygill. See-
>
> http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n1_v56/ai_19827691/pg_1

After reading the article, I clicked on one of the ads - http:// 
www.alatheia.com/ - a prosthetics manufacturer 'where function meets  
art'. Although their products are indeed 'state of the art', I  
thought it was an interesting example of where prosthetics are today,  
and how far they fall short of scientific expectations post-second  
world war and cultural beliefs today.

I've seen a variety of work by artists who are affected by  
Thalidomide, and one performance in particular by Mat Fraser which  
stayed in my mind looked at the experiences with prosthetics of  
children affected by Thalidomide in the 1960s. Engineers who hoped to  
be able to replace limbs with functioning prosthetics eventually  
conceded defeat, but not before many children had had non-standard  
limbs and digits amputated to make prosthetics easier to fit. Video  
footage that Mat obtained and used in his performance showed small  
children screaming in distress as they were forced to try out  
different designs.

Today - as in centuries gone by - it's fairly straightforward to use  
a prosthetic foot or leg for mobility. Few people will use these  
continually when inside their homes, though - media stories about  
'cheetah feet' miss out the effects of walking and running on stumps,  
which range from blisters and soreness to abscesses and open wounds.  
Modern prosthetics have failed to relieve these problems completely -  
the response to augmentation is biological.

Be that as it may, the Alatheia site shows the real limitations of  
prosthetic hands and upper limbs for anything other than cosmetic  
reasons. Since these cosmetic upper limbs often impede function  
rather than enhancing it, the artists I know with one hand and/or arm  
all choose not to use these. Some people have also articulated their  
distress at the loss of function caused by amputation of 'abnormal'  
parts of their body, although this is obviously not true of everyone.

The myoelectric upper limbs on the Alathiea site does show that in  
some cases it is possible to use signals from the body to make a  
simple command, in this case: open/close 'fingers'. However, these  
myoelectric designs have made little significant progress in the past  
two decades. Meanwhile the experiences of Julie Hill, a woman with  
spinal cord injury who volunteered to work with scientists at  
University College London to see if her muscles could be stimulated  
by electrodes to enable her to walk again, explain why spinal cord  
researchers are now concentrating on stem cell therapies. The team,  
including Julie, concluded that walking was a far more complicated  
process than they had previously understood, and that there was  
little point in pursuing the research further.

Which brings me back to augmentation as an exotechnology. While  
scientists are still unable to make an artificial joint that will  
reliably last for more than a decade, or a spinal rod that cannot  
snap, surgeons controlling robots can now - in some procedures -  
operate more successfully than using their hands to operate directly.  
Robots can also become an expendable part of the augmented body when  
looking for mine fields and making unexploded bombs safe. (As Stelarc  
says, "It's not easy to avoid medical-military discourses when  
considering human augmentation.") We are rapidly reaching a point  
where the robotic 'extension' can exist in a different place, or on a  
different continent. Stelarc's work can make us consider all of these  
issues and many more, as well as, rightly, problematising them.

Just to finish, congratulations Lizbeth on being named 'Outstanding  
Woman in Technology' at the Blackberry awards. (Isn't the Blackberry  
the most popular augmentation to have come out in the past few years?)

Ju
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