Flesh&Metal: Article

I found Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Enrivronments by N. Katerine Hayles a fascinating if not intellectually challenging article on what she terms the "flux" between body and the experience of embodiment.

The article mentions her book, How We Became Posthuman, which I went ahead and reserved at the library to continue to discover more on her ideas. The idea that the "body is seen from the outside", while "embodiment is experienced from the inside--from the feelings, emotions, and sensations that constitue the vibrant living textures of our lives" provides an interesting context for analyzing the differences between what we are as a physical human and how technology may enable us to "live as disembodied information patterns."

I've read a lot of psychology, and her mention of how computer games have actually effected a 21st century american adolescent by changing the neural connections is something that I don't find hard to believe. Its a fascinating idea if not scary concept to think that we are changing the nature of human beings by the rapid development and expansion of computing technologies. As we strive to be "developing cars and highways with interlocking computer systems that will enable cars to drive themselves," we also have to analyze the implications for how it is changing our embodied interactions with the environment.

I looked up the artworks she mentions in the article, including Einstein's Brain, and while the artists in these works didn't care for the aesthetically pleasing art that I am more drawn to, I do relate to their belief that the "world of consensual reality does not in any sense exist out there in the forms in which we perceive it."

It is new for me to start thinking along the terms of the posthuman, where consciousness is no longer the "seat of identity" and can now only be "reinstated by losing the body and resituating the mind within a computer," but will continue to integrate this into my knowledge and thoughts about the 21st century world we are in.