We had an interesting discussion in class this week that focused on the idea of posthumanism. A difficult question left over from the discussion is what do we do (ethically and morally) in the face of technology that may privilege the mind over the body. For our kabinet project we are going to create a controllable video project that specifically addresses these theoretical difficulties. By creatively recording a single head in a recursive set of movements and speech patterns we intend to create a controllable virtual person with joysticks to move the eyes and the head, and buttons that make the head speak. We have already begun designing the speech tree which will allow for thousands of combinations of sentences which the head will say through the kabinet’s speakers and which the user will control. The idea is that the interface with the kabinet is a tool of both creation and destruction. Creation in that it will exercise control over a recognizable talking head and create language from inputed sequences and destruction based on the fact that by controlling the virtual head you are actually making your own flesh less important. This viewpoint is based on the fact that our prostheses’  (our arms and legs) are simply electrical extensions of our brains. It is this idea, that our cyborg selves as conduits of electrical energy are actually controlling prosthetics all the time, that drives our project. By highlighting the control we have over our limbs and by directing our energy onto a virtual object we will hopefully illuminate the idea that our bodies are simply tools we use and that we already are cyborgs.

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