Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness

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Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness
by: Critical Art Ensemble
en

1570270678 9781570270673

&#8226ublisher:  Autonomedia
•Number Of Pages:  160
&#8226ublication Date:  1998-07-16
•ISBN-10 / ASIN:  1570270678
•ISBN-13 / EAN:  9781570270673


Product Description:

Having elsewhere explored the dimensions of social and political control in electronic culture, the Critical Arts Ensemble here turns full frontal towards the body, arguing that utopian promises of virtuality are simple distractions from the real project: the deployment of biotechnologies upon the bodies of citizens in the service of the transnational order.



(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.

Formed in 1987, CAE's focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The group has exhibited and performed at diverse venues internationally, ranging from the street, to the museum, to the internet. Museum exhibitions 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; and The London Museum of Natural History.

The collective has written 6 books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages. Its book projects include: The Electronic Disturbance (1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience & Other Unpopular Ideas (1996), Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness (1998), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2001), Molecular Invasion (2002), and Marching Plague (2006).

According to the introduction the basis thesis of the book is:

Weber’s notion of an “iron cage of bureaucracy” that exists as a construct of purely functional imperatives (the maintenance, expansion, and perpetuation of its structure) has come to pass, so it is little wonder that the only representation of the social that seems to have any descriptive or explanatory value is the machine system. The two key machinic schemata that have captivated the minds of resistant cultural producers are the war machine and the sight machine. These intersecting liquid maps have been used to build an understanding of the structure and dynamics of the current sociopolitical management apparatuses, and in the best of circumstances have been used to develop strategies to resist the hyper-rationalized state of pancapitalism. In this work, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) offers a contribution to the development of a third machinic map—the flesh machine. The flesh machine is a heavily funded liquid network of scientific and medical institutions with knowledge specializations in genetics, cell biology, biochemistry, human reproduction, neurology, pharmacology, etc., combined with nomadic technocracies of interior vision and surgical development. The flesh machine intersects at many points with the other two machinic systems, yet it also has an autonomous sphere of action and its own particular agenda. It has two primary mandates—to completely invade the flesh with vision and mapping technologies (initiating a program of total body control from its wholistic, exterior configuration to its microscopic constellations), and to develop the political and economic frontiers of flesh products and services.


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