ABSTRACT
The new relationships between body and technology whose emergence was identified by Haraway have not produced strange new amalgamations as she had hoped, but rather a homogenisation that dissolved everything into a soup of information. The boundary separating human from machine has already been crossed in popular consciousness, but the result is a monolithic and all-encompassing new term that subjugates categories such as human and machine, rendering them fundamentally interchangeable: information. The sense that human bodies are becoming saturated or even replaced by information flows has been influentially discussed by & Katherine Hayles in her work on 'virtuality', which she describes as 'the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns'. From ATMs to the Internet, from the morphing programs used in Terminator II to the sophisticated visualization programs used to guide microsurgeries, information is increasingly perceived as interpenetrating material forms.
