ABSTRACT
During the development of this book the research project Hyperdermis evolved into a proposition that focused on particular aesthetic and inhabitable qualities of flesh that have been discussed in the three preceding Sections I, II, III. The resulting project, Cyborgian Interfaces, was informed by the conceptual image of a Cyborgian Body. It pursued the image of an interactive, networked and extended environment where a hybrid and grotesque body aimed to express architecture corporeally in a fully technological manner. As a continuation of earlier design experiments, the proposed cyborgian interfaces develop further the figural – rather than figurative – dimension of the work, prompting the body to engage in an intensified manner with its physical surroundings. A wall in this project is what the historian Mark Poster describes as ‘a liminal object, an interface between human and the machine that invites penetration of each by the other’.1 A variety of semi-living conditions are inserted in the interfaces in order to enable the earlier proposed service devices to function, i.e. ‘storage capillaries’, ‘in-wall seats’, ‘relaxing cocoons’, ‘communication suits’ and ‘gestural tentacles’. There are also neoplasmatic conditions embedded in Cyborgian Interfaces that turn the interfaces into a bio-technological environment. In this sense the project fits well into what Anthony Vidler describes as a ‘home for cyborgs.’ He reckons that ‘[i]f, for the first machine age, the preferred metaphor for the house was industrial, a “machine for living in,” the second machine age would perhaps privilege the medical: the house as at once prosthesis and prophylactic.’2 Cyborgian Interfaces embody in full what I have defined as Neoplasmatic Architecture, implying the hybrid nature and methodology by
which it was developed. The free form, as well as the material qualities of its architectural flesh, including its nakedness and skin colour, is vital in defining the architectural identity of the project. The move from hand-made clay and latex models in Walls for Communicating People towards three-dimensional CAD drawings in Cyborgian Inerfaces was a conscious and complementary transition. While I was not certain initially whether the materiality of earlier maquettes could be explored in computer renderings, the digital medium allowed exploring with higher precision different formal and spatial aspects of the project. It provided the opportunity to recreate and improve previous models with a morphological control, without at the same time giving up the intuitive method by which they were produced. Formlessness acquired here more formal and structural rigour, and was rendered with a material quality of inlucent depth. On the whole, the change of medium added to the design of Cyborgian Interfaces something more than an aesthetic, architectural and neo-biological flesh; it added to it a new sense of digital flesh.
