ABSTRACT
What are the consequences of fixating our gaze upon the machine? Are we like Ovid’s Pygmalion, who so romanticized his statue that he replaced extant human relations with a supernatural one? Alternatively, do we subscribe to fictions like those exemplified by Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 (Raimi 2004), the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact (Frakes 1996), or even Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood 2004), through which we project such irresistible, unmitigated power upon the apparatus that we doubt its constructive contributions to our lifestyle and fear its role in our communities? Our cultural narratives suggest that we often forge dangerous connections with creations that, in our imaginations, border between two realities: the objectified subject and the fantastic. We begin responding to machines that bridge those realms in ways that compromise or obscure our sense of humanity. Certainly, as Donna J. Haraway (1991) asserts, “human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture . . . Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies” (163–164). Yet, when the unfamiliarity with or data-production generated by a machine dominates relationships with the human body, interpersonal relationships can become pre-scripted by the interface in ways that discount the human mind’s positive creative powers—something we accept more readily when machines (e.g., cell phones, computers, and touch pads) appear outside of medical contexts or accessorize rather than meld with the human form. In the collaborative artwork Augmented Spirit: Extreme Embodiment, we highlight fragments from Deshae’s life text in an effort to achieve our artistic missions. Debunking human–machine melds as fantastical or impersonal, this investigation uses an interactive sonic art installation to poeticize both the uncomfortable and aesthetic aspects integral to the life of a mechanical ventilator-dependent individual. The sustained life becomes a locus for recognizing that our fascination with the supernatural capabilities of the machine in fact translate into something very basic: a high-maintenance form of survival that presents acute vulnerabilities and impositions as well as ordinary celebrations of life. This collaborative artwork seeks to activate the observer, the observed, and the social infrastructure toward co-constructing a polyphony that, if not harmonious, goes beyond any cacophonic, fantastic, and horrific stereotypes that characterize dominant cultural narratives on disability and its accompanying apparatuses.
