I, Cyborg

Neil Harbisson, a slight, blond, Catalonian artist and musician, is co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation, along with fellow Catalonian choreographer and dancer Moon Ribas. The Foundation, according to its website:

helps people become cyborgs (extend their senses by applying cybernetics to the organism); defend cyborg rights and promote the use of cybernetics in the arts based on the research, creation and promotion of projects related to extending/creating new senses and perceptions by applying technology to the human body.¹

Cyborgs can be grouped into three basic types: those that use mechanical elements, those that use electronic elements, and those that just use cybernetics as part of their body. These categories are not fixed and can easily overlap. For example, someone with a hand prosthesis could be categorized as mechanical, but if the prosthesis was equipped with a camera it would become electronic. If the prosthesis could sense and relay to the user the difference between feeling a hot or cold surface, the device would be defined as cybernetic.

Cyborgism is not just a social movement, it’s also an art movement. In August 2014, Harbisson and Ribas performed at Hyphen Hub in New York City, a former underground rehearsal space with a fifty-year history, repurposed by codirectors Asher Remey Toledo and Mark Bolotin as a place where art, technology, and business intersect. Ribas performed a dance whenever she experienced the vibration of live-time earthquakes transmitted by the sensor on her arm. If there were no earthquakes, there was no dance. Harbisson executed the world’s first skull-transmitted painting Skyped from audience members in Times Square as they painted simple colored stripes onto a canvas. Their actions, Skyped into Hyphen Hub, were projected onto the wall. Haribisson, whose permanently-implanted Eyeborg antenna juts out from the middle of his head, was able to receive the color frequencies of the painted surface via Internet directly into a chip implanted in his brain. He correctly identified and painted the same color onto the canvas that was being painted in Times Square. He performed this in front of the Hyphen Hub audience without ever turning around to view the actual painting being Skyped in from Times Square. He did it via the wireless transmission of transposed color to sound frequencies delivered directly into his skull.

EARLY DEVELOPMENT AND THE FIRST EYEBORG

Harbisson was born with achromotopsia, a congenital condition where cone cells in the eyes are unable to register color. This meant he sees the world only in black, white, and grey. As a child he was unaware of his condition until he was ten years old. Before that, his parents thought he just had difficulty conceptualizing and talking about color. Once diagnosed, his art class teachers allowed him to draw and paint in black, white, and grey.

Harbisson says his non-experience of color was not just a visual difficulty; it rendered the concept of color mysterious, and created social and cultural problems. Well-known brand names like Red Cross, Pink Panther, or Greenpeace left him clueless, and color-coded subway maps were a nightmare to decipher. He could not tell the difference between the hot and cold water taps in a sink, traditionally color-coded red and blue. He would ask people to describe color, but they used superlative adjectives that did not make much sense.

He tried to construct a theory of color through research and reading, but unfortunately none of the different artists and scientists he read were in agreement. On Halloween 2003, he attended a lecture at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, UK, where he had enrolled as a music student, given by cybernetics expert Adam Montandon. Afterwards, he asked Montandon if it was possible to extend senses to perceive color, since color light and audio sound are essentially both frequencies, a fact he had learned through his research. Adam said yes, and in 2004 they put together the first prototype of the Eyeborg. It was a small camera that sensed the frequency of color...