I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate. -- David Cronenberg "No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?" Dr. James Watson, Nobel Laureate, Co-Discoverer with Francis Crick of the Structure of DNA, and Founding Director of the NIH Human Genome Project. "The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new." -- Norman O. Brown "The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation." -- George Santayana "An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloating." -- Marie Carmichael Stopes "Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." -- Henry David Thoreau If you ask me, any species that naturally prodices flammable growth on top of it's head is begging for trouble. - Sam, in Freefall "For forty years now, doctors have been telling us that the way to keep fit is to exercise more and eat less. That's great fucking advice, as can be demonstrated by the number of trim, fit residents of Northern California that can be found waddling around any shopping mall off Interstate 101. Look at exercise, Jesus, what could be stupider? Exercise doesn't burn fat, exercise just satisfies the condition in which your body is prepared to burn fat off. It's like a computer that won't boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you're a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you're a leet hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what's wrong with the computer and fix it. You don't sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune. "But your meat, it's not under your control. You know you have to exercise for 20 minutes before you start burning any fat at all? In other words, the first twenty minutes are just a goddamned waste of time. It's sacrificing a chicken to your metabolism. Eat less, exercise more is a giant chicken-sacrifice, so I say screw it. I say, you should be super-user in your own body. You should be leet as you want to be. Every cell in your body should be end-user modifiable." -- Cory Doctorow, "0wnz0red" "If you think the human body is dirty, complain to the manufacturer." Lenny Bruce "The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta." - Eduardo Galeano, Windows on the World ' Robert Hooke calls for augmented senses Micrographia preface 1665: "The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is a supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural... and as Glasses have highly promoted our seeing, so 'tis not improbable, but that there may be found many mechanical inventions to improve our other senses of hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching." Same person. No difference at all... just a different sex. Orlando It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it so it can be devoured by worms." - Christiaan Barnard, quoted in Time Anatomy is destiny--but anatomy is malleable. "We need first to understand that the human form - including human desire and all its external representations - may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism." (Prometheus as performer - toward a posthumanist culture ?, in Michael Benamou/Charles Caramello (Ed.), Performance in postmodern culture, Madison 1977) My body seems to crowd out my awareness; sometimes I've time for nothing else but to cater to its pressing, undignified needs. Stephen Baxter, Ring Technology transforms the nature of human existence, equalising the physical potential of bodies and standardising human sexuality. With fertilisation now occuring outside the womb and the possibility of nurturing the foetus in an artificial support system, THERE WILL TECHNICALLY BE NO BIRTH. And if the body can be redesigned in a modular fashion to facilitate the replacement of malfunctioning parts, then TECHNICALLY THERE WOULD BE NO REASON FOR DEATH - given the accessibility of replacements. Death does not authenticate existence. It is an out-moded evolutionary strategy. The body need no longer be repaired, but could simply have parts replaced. Extending life no longer means "existing" but rather "being operational". Bodies need not age nor deteriorate; they would not run down nor even fatigue; they would stall then start - possessing both the potential for renewal and reactivation. In the extended space-time of extraterrestrial environments, THE BODY MUST BECOME IMMORTAL TO ADAPT. Utopian dreams become post-evolutionary imperatives. THIS IS NO MERE FAUSTIAN OPTION NOR SHOULD THERE BE ANY FRANKENSTEINIAN FEAR IN TAMPERING WITH THE BODY. Stelarc the body can be amplified and accelerated, attaining planetary escape velocity. It becomes a post-evolutionary projectile, departing and diversifying in form and function. Stelarc Unlike Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, we telemanipulating cyborgs cannot be encircled by neat arcs swept through our outstretched limbs. Our grasp has no limits-upper or lower. We have no fixed scale. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits "That's my BIRTHDAY! I get to be my own gender on my birthday!" --- "Now, what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffer, not the state." "This has enormous potential for good, There should be no limits on human knowledge, none whatever. To those like President Clinton who say we can't play God, I say OK, fine, you can take your side alongside Pope Paul V who in 1616 tried to stop Galileo, they accused Galileo of trying to play God too. [...] I don't think cloning is demeaning to human nature, to attempt to limit human knowledge is demeaning. It's not legitimate to try to stop cloning. What nonsense, what utter, utter nonsense to think we can hold up our hand and just say "stop". Cloning will continue, the human mind will continue to inquire into it. Human cloning will take place and it will take place in my lifetime, and I don't fear it at all. I want to be on the side of the Galileos and those who say the human mind has no limits, rather than trying to stop something that's going to happen anyway." --US Senator Tom Harkin, (D) IA Responsibility starts with a satisfactory coalition between one's self and the demanding 10^12 cells of one's own body. Lilly The important thing now isn't freedom of information, but freedom of form, freedom to mutate and modify your body. Stelarc. No retractable claws, no opposable toes, no prehensile tail, no compound eyes, no fangs, no wings.. .. SIGHHH... -- Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson Laura Creavalle, hanging near my desk: "When I started bodybuilding I realized immediately that I had ultimate authority over my body and its appearance, and I loved that sense of power. You are what you wish to be." I am attracted to plastic surgery because it is a fight against nature, the idea of God, the programmed, the DNA which is in charge of representation. I believe the body is not sacred as religion taught us, it is just a costume that can be changed. Through my performances, I want to address the status of the body in our society and in future generations, since we must prepare ourselves to genetic engineering. -- Orlan ALTERING THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BODY RESULTS IN ADJU STING AND EXTENDING ITS AWARENESS OF THE WORLD. Stelarc It is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche or the social, but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified - the body not as a subject but as an object - NOT AN OBJECT OF DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING. Stelarc