We are all Cyborgs

The Futurists were artists who burst onto the 20th century in 1909, led by Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, obsessed with speed, electricity and the new machine age. I went to the exhibition at the Tate Modern the other day and found it fascinating and repellent at the same time. The exhbition shows the sculptures, paintings and written manifestos of the key figures and sets them within the context of Cubism, Vorticism and the Great War. It was repellent to me because the ideology of the movement is repellent. The Futurist Manifesto of Marinetti and his gang seem like the rantings of fascists:

“9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

Perhaps, it was easy before the First World War to glorify war and machines. But in a world that has known the horror of that war, the Holocaust and other genocides, the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Sept 11, here at the dawn of the 21st century, we are not so certain about glorious war and beautiful ideas that kill. And, of course, as a modern woman who has the right to vote and work and live pretty much as an equal with men in the Western world, the misogyny of the movement raises my hackles.

But the exhibition is also fascinating for giving an insight into what it must have been like to first experience speed and electricity. We take these for granted now, at the dawn of our new century, but in the early years of the last one, cars and electric lights were only just starting to become commonly available.

Night time became full of possibilities with electric lights - cabarets and other entertainments, decorative lights in the street and around buildings made the dark exciting and alluring. The Futurists write about how electric light transforms the human face at night into a myriad of different colours and complexions.

Speed also changed how people experienced the world - streaking past familiar scenes which were previously static, watching the world blur out of the windows of trains and automobiles. The possibilities of technology and machines excited the Futurists. One of them writes about driving his new car, feeling like a modern centaur, part man, part machine.

They tried to convey these experiences on canvas - creating streaks and lines of colour, a blur of light and shade, kaleidoscopes and fragments of dancing and movement. Their sculpture shaped half monstous, half human figures and machine-like objects swirling in motion.

Their most iconic piece, to me, is the sinister cyborg like creature inspired by a drill bit - see first photo. It has inspired a lot of our modern vision - or perhaps nightmare - of androids and cyborgs: machines that were originally created to help humanity but then turning against their creators and becoming efficient killing machines. In particular, see the second photo of a cylon soldier from the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.

While the Futurists glorified machines and technology without question, we are much more ambivalent. Perhaps because we know now the horror of the First World War - the first war that used machines and technology (tanks, nerve gas, grenades, bombs dropped from planes, machine guns) for mass destruction - which they were still to live through. Yet, even as we carry the burden of our anxiety about technology, it continues to evolve and permeate every part of our lives.

Some philosophers have written that we are all cyborgs already, especially those of us in the so-called First World - we do not wait for the full integration of the human biological with machines to become part human, part machine: we are already there. Think about it. Most areas of our lives are mediated by machines and technology in some way. In order to go anywhere beyond our narrow neighbourhood, we use cars, buses, trains, planes. Our communications with each other are mediated through phones, email, webcams, SMS, instant messaging. Our music lives in electronic form. Our books, newspapers and knowledge are produced via digital technology. Much of business and enterprise rely on computers and the internet. The logistics of moving goods around the world and of our economy depend on computers. Without electricity, we would be lost in a dark, still and silent world.

A hundred years after the Futurists, machines and technology may not be welded to our bodies but we are so dependent on them, they may as well be.

Photo: of cylon figure from slashfilm.com