When you see this body wired up in the performance you'll see sensors, electrodes, transducers, computer connections. It's as if we're externalising the human nervous system with a network of technological apparatuses.
In a small studio theatre in Florence a performance artist called Stelarc is preparing to go on stage. He'll physically wire his body to the web of computers called the Internet. The ebb and flow of data round the world will be converted into bolts of electricity which will make him move involuntarily.
You see your body move but you know that you've neither initiated that movement nor are you yourself responsible for contracting your muscle to produce it. So you have this kind of experience of a split body, not a split personality but a split physiology.
In his dressing room Stelarc attaches electrodes that will connect him to the network through a special interface - a muscle stimulation box. Stelarc's performance called 'ping body' is his latest work exploring the boundaries between people and technology. Outside the theatre evening is closing in and there's anticipation in the air. The audience is looking forward to a spectacle; a bizarre, theatrical display of sound and movement. But there's something deeper. A sense that Stelarc might be predicting the future for all of us.
Stelarc's concept that the physical body is perhaps obsolete is really showing us how we can go in the future. Links between humans and machines.
The interface that used to be mechanically separated between the technology and your flesh has broken down and we now live in a world of digital flesh and of data flesh.
A revolution in communication technology is leading us to ask whether we control our technology or whether our technology controls us. Under the control of the Internet Stelarc's plight might perhaps also be our own.
And as our connections with communication technology increase, some scientists and engineers are even beginning to rethink what it is to be human.
KEVIN
WARWICK
We're a tool using species and always have been. At the present time our
links with computers, with machines are relatively slow. The keyboard
and the mouse is a very slow way of communicating from our brain to computer.
We look to the future and it seems a natural progression to link much
more closely. Even to become one physically.
STELARC
We try to design our instruments so that our body can use them, can adequately
toggle or press or manipulate them. I think now we've come to the point
where we possibly have to think of redesigning the human body to match
the capabilities of its machines.
A silicone chip has been successfully implanted into the arm of a British scientist so that his movements can be remotely tracked by a computer.
NARRATOR
On
August the 24th 1998, Professor Kevin Warwick had a set of silicon chips
inserted into his flesh. He didn't have a medical need. He just wanted
to see what it was like to be wired like a Cyborg directly to his technology.
This is a silicon chip transponder. This was surgically implanted in my left arm and for nine days it was part of me, allowing the inside of my body to communicate with a computer. Half of it is a coil, which when it passes through a radio signal produces an electric current and in the other half of the circuit the electric current is used by the silicon chips to send out a unique signal - an identifying signal which when it's picked up by the computer it knows it's me. It knows where I am.
If we all had similar implants, locked doors would know who we were and keys would become obsolete. And we'd never have a credit card stolen, or forget to carry our passport, or driver's licence. Our bodies would become communication machines. And we'd become something scientists are beginning to call digital flesh.
Hello Professor Warwick.
KEVIN
WARWICK
I think the biggest surprise that I had with the experiment was the mental
aspect of it. Very much I felt at one with the computer. Signals were
going from inside my body! The implant was in me and that made a direct
link, so I think it was as though we were friends or something like that.
That's me and the computer. Certainly when I came to have the implant
taken out I definitely missed the link there. It was definitely as though
a friend had died or something like that. When I no longer had that link.
The most significant planetary pressure now is not the gravitational pull but the information crush. You know, we're sort of overwhelmed by information that we can't creatively process any more. And we can't subjectively experience.
Nomadic, wake up!
Okay. I am listening.
But technology always seems to have an answer. In research labs all around the world, new machines are being invented to help us manage information. Linking us ever closer to the digital world. At MIT in Massachusetts researchers have created the nomadic radio - a universal pipe for information. The technology is wearable and hands free, making communication across continents as easy as chatting to a neighbour.
We're already carrying cell phones, pagers, all kinds of devices on our body. And this is just integrating a lot of them. So if you can walk around discreetly and be able to listen to things in your world. Information that you need and be able to access things by controlling it with your voice, that's an interesting world. Where people aren't sort of impeded by technology. They sort of have a very free way of using technology. For example, if I'm home cooking this is a fairly useful device because I don't require - didn't need my hands to use it. I just walk around, make my Punjabi curry and suddenly my mother calls in. She tells me, well you know the recipe you were using requires spinach and not beans. So that's really good because now I can talk to her and take her message and asynchronously send her back a message at some other time.
And say 'thanks a lot Mum, that was really useful!' So now we have a device that lets you do every day things and doesn't make you feel like you have to stop your, you know your task and attend to a message coming in or phone call coming in. Nomadic sleep.
Okay, I've stopped listening to you.
The nomadic radio is just one step along the road to our digital future. Imagine wearing a whole computer. Being able to read e-mail on the lens of an ordinary pair of glasses.
The actual display is in the ear pieces back here. And images routed through the ear piece up to the corner and then sent through the lens to my eye. Allows me to see the computer screen in an unobtrusive manner. As a matter of fact, when it's turned off I see right through it. In the future you'll see much better frames for this. Fashion designer frames. And this little cube that you can see right now will disappear. But it kind of shows how the lab prototypes that you see in the different universities are becoming something you'd wear every day. And we have a display in the eye glasses. We have this keyboard that will soon disappear - not just this sort of form factor - could be woven into your fabric. But also see the computers now start disappearing into a form factor like this, where it's just a credit card that fits in your pocket. Now you can actually buy these things right now. But we're starting to see similar machines that will have long battery life. You stick in your pocket and just use every day and forget about.
Wearable technology was pioneered in the nineteen eighties by self styled Cyborg Steve Mann. And he has taken it into completely new territory. His wearable computer also connects to a video camera. Turning man's body into a whole communication centre. Linking his eyes to the Internet.
Many people nowadays are very positive about technology and in fact it's in some ways excessively positive about technology. We're often told about the great wonders of smart rooms, smart floors, smart furniture, smart toilets, smart elevators, smart light switches. All these things around us that are smart. And what I'm trying to do is suggest something pretty obvious. How about smart people?
For twenty years Steve Mann has been exploring systems which extend his body into cyberspace. In some experiments Mann has seen the whole world as a video replay from his head mounted camera. Inventing brand new forms of communication.
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