Flesh Machine; Cyborgs,Designer Babies, Eugenic Conscousness

by Critical Art Ensemble

CAE's interventions into the sacrosanct territories of authority represent a provocation directed at both the worn traditions of public sphere cultural politics and a reckoning with the accelerating implications of technologies for a generation inebriated with virtualization--Tim Druckrey.

Genres: Nonfiction

155 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. For CAE, tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.[1]

Since its formation in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida,[citation needed] CAE has been frequently invited to exhibit and perform projects examining issues surrounding information, communications and bio-technologies by museums and other cultural institutions. These include the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C.; the ICA, London; the MCA, Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the London Museum of Natural History; Kunsthalle Luzern, and dOCUMENTA 13.

The collective has written 7 books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages.

Its work has been covered by art journals, including Artforum, Kunstforum, and The Drama Review. Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of awards, including the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation.

Reviews

[M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book in a free box. This jawn was written in 1998. Reading it in 2017 was pretty wild, since much of the infrastructure and cultural/capitalist developments predicted have most definitely come to pass. Various essays discuss methods and techniques that "pancapitalism" is/in the process of employing in order to further consumption, alienation, and production across the masses as it establishes new markets from the microscopic entirety of our surveilled human flesh bodies, behaviors, and worldviews. The essays tie capitalist white supremacist/nazi eugenics to ongoing trends of normalizing unnecessary medical procedures and interventions, passed off as desireable procedures by empire to ensure a(n upper class) child's future "success." One essay in particular discusses the utopian virtual body (anonymous) of the early web in relation to the data body (totally identified/surveilled by government, military & corporations). Specters of empire's social control capabilities via social media abound.

It's a bit beyond me at the moment to list off what else is discussed, but overall the topics of class, race, and gender as controlled/shaped by global pancapitalism come off as VERY contemporary -- this book discusses them in the contexts of violent heteronormative white western medical science in precise ways that I appreciated and heavily underlined. It should be said, though, that contemporary discussions of these matters must explicitly include the functions of anti-Blackness, rather than casual mentions of race and class, haves and have-nots. I would be interested in reading such a book, and in the meantime recommend this one, smartly paired with a current text on Afropessimism or similar.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

this work clarifies the specter of eugenic ideology in Medicine, as well as Medicine's role in perpetuating state ideology and repression. the rest of it, for me, was kind of uninteresting. i'm not well-read on the whole cyborg and machine stuff, but it didn't strike me as an interesting departure or metaphor for analysis. moreover, it leaves a taste in the mouth... a taste I don't like, but can't articulate.