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An experimental organism chronicles modified phases of the human life cycle.
As biotic engineering and older myths of transformation promise freedom from the ancestral, mechanical life cycle, the CD-ROM reworks tales of form and process borrowed from natural, technological and imagined species, and plays a quasi-scientific proposal for hacking the human life cycle, through conception to technological afterlives.
Dredged from the Darwinian dark ages, the life cycle's natural narrative is extracted from its humanist form and configured for the new organism. Random access to normally sequential life phases helps break the cycle while the phases act as linked, though self-contained species, schismatising autopoietic purpose (self) through a chain of mythic metamorphoses rather than preserving its monolithic continuity. This blueprint for a posthuman pleomorph, camouflaged in body phases familiar to humans, harbours markers to some insects (Holometabola) which undergo complex metamorphoses, as well as to the human experience of multiple personality disorder, sometimes mistakenly called schizophrenia. Here, a potentially desirable posthuman 'schizophrenia' or multiplicity, between the human and its post self, the organic and technological, the simultaneous and chronological, imagines itself into existence. As 'split personality' refers to a split from (Darwinian) reality, and as technologically enhanced perceptions grade into 'hallucinations', some supposedly schizophrenic inspirations - for example, visions and hearing of voices - can perhaps be channelled positively toward the posthuman condition. A sharing of consciousness and identities within a single body, which characterises multiple personality (or dissociative identity) disorder, might also offer a partial model for transgressing the generic cyborg split. The multiself, where various technological and organic selves inhabit and collaborate within a single bodily system, mirrors the pleomorph's life cycle phases which, sequential and mutually exclusive in humans, can now live simultaneously, as organs coexist in a body. If the bodyssey organism's phases temporarily seem to alienate each other, its variable sequence of severed selves remains held together by names which humans ascribed to their cycle - birth, death, etc - as lingering biological inertias of identity circulating through a life of experimental memories. Discontinuous biologies, psychologies and patterns of matter suggest that our traditional notions of progess might be askew, that nonlinear purpose and quantum identity jumping can generate more than hypothetical, absurd, or deranged organisms. The ancient human symbol of perfection and wholeness - the circle/cycle - appears like a defensive structure, or membrane, closing off insiders, outsiders and other options alike. The bodyssey pleomorph's psychle is more permeable. Its random-access nature and hyperlinked phase species coax digression and perceptual projection, like responsive thinkblots, rather than boning being into its traditional conveyor belt of biological boxes in time. As digital symborg it embraces computer technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech, vrml, responsive texts and 2D image environments to de-mechanicalise itself - inscriptions and conjurations transmute image matter, notions are cast that form follows function, that sufficiently advanced technologies and magic are indistinguishable. The functional ecology bears a more adaptable time form, a protoplasmic process of whirlpools and eddies rather than a frozen and inviolable object-in-an-instant. Bodily time and cycle phases incarnate as a wandering web of digital cellular nodes, containing and contained by their life cycle phases, as organic cells contain and are contained by their genetic scripts. Likewise, the phase cells feedback and embody an embedded bodyssey narrative. A colony of futuristic cells, isolated from the past by a singularity/time membrane and with almost no knowledge of its natural ancestors, has taken the form of one of its few inherited memories and one of the earliest earthly life forms - blue-green algae. After aeons of introspecting its equivocal database (an 'ancient inland sea') and the subsquent discovery of fragmentary humanithic artefacts which source the human life cycle, the colony is given the opportunity to experience and mis/interpret the imagined human time form. It does this by incarnating into its perceptions and interpretations of the fragmentary artefacts. The posthuman therefore cycles back to infest the human form which simultaneously reincarnates. The future is free to decrypt the human present, flipping human speculations about posthumanity. Initially, the colony perceives the human cycle phases as akin to a scrolling succession of mythical creatures, a calculational string of beaded nodes. The colony can access portraits of famous humans via its database and these inhabit various parts of the altered cycle, so that what were once whole, historically human lives become pixellated visions for the posthuman pleomorph. As human events become hosts for posthuman perception, each host phase allows futuristic artificials of varying shades to augment, infest, colonise, symbiose, collaborate, infect, or mate, so the newly durated body behaves more permeably, allowing tangents and exits from the traditional, deterministic cycle. The natural life cycle in fact exhibits a continuum not found in human-constructed time - artificial, arbitrary and modularised into hours, weeks, life cycle stages, etc. Via its medium, the oscillations of a digital clock, bodyssey mixes artificial time with natural bodily time to glimpse the reconfigurabilities of posthuman duration. A hybrid sundial, a semi-natural clock which incarnates time by natural light, periodically recurs in bodyssey to portray and measure the biological rhythms of the temporal spectrum, to touch some moments of cyborg time. The transfigured sense of time is inscribed into life cycle phases as ontogeny - the embryonic sequence which micro-mimics an organism's evolutionary ancestry - compresses evolutionary time. The pleomorph's rehearsal for existence shadows technology's compressions of human rates of change; how technological time is experienced and expressed by words as much as by natural rhythms and how novel voices accelerate alongside novel experiences. Some are contained in the pleomorph's own site-specific codes - the abracadabras of speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies, and 'alphabots' or robotic alphabets which cellularly wander, flock and congeal into human words before dissipating again into the pixel abyss. Utterances recall and predict, cause mitosis, changes of skin and nonhuman facial expressions, and dialogue with the robotic alphabets as they leave epiphenomenal scars, trails and markings; utterance and alphabot voice connections between human spectator, pleomorph and its temporal parts, as the deranged split from the pragmatic to experience audiovisual hallucinations, including the anthropic myth. If the schizophrenic subject splits from reality and, among other things, hallucinates, so technology split from Darwinian reality aeons ago and increasingly hallucinates the human via motion capture, speech recognition, optical recognitions systems, techcetera. The human, increasingly a technological phantom, was perhaps always a memory of itself, cohabiting with humanised, multiple technologies as they integrated into singular bodily colonies. Each phase of the bodyssey life cycle micro-mimics some of these technology-personalising and personality-technologising processes in order to perform pleasurable symptoms of multiple personality anarchy for its other embryonic selves. Their voices act with digital imagery to outline worded bodies as a phase we went, or have yet to go, through, and time-slice some wandering word-matter couplings and transmutations. The voices, to and from human and computer, also prefigure some real and imagined, desirable and dangerous, technological schizophrenias. (c) copyright 2000 Gary Zebington :::::::::::::::::::::::
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Bodyssey CD-ROM
Developed with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission
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Gary Zebington : graphics/software design/text
Mez Breeze: text
Andrew Garton : sound
Dmitri Aronov: additional programming
Philipa Veitch : additional research
Gina Fenton : project management