Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution. Scientific advances of the future may thus be utilized to permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as we know it.[1]
Any environment other than which we are capable of living in (outer space, deep water, or even on earth at extreme weather conditions) requires biological changes in our bodies. Technological devices, vehicles and artificial atmospheres encapsulated in some sort of enclosure, are not only unsustainable but can also be dangerous like a “fish taking a small quantity of water along with him to live on land”[2]. Instead of insisting on carrying his whole environment along with him, man can attempts partial adaptation to extreme conditions. For the “exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments”[3], Clynes and Kline propose the term Cyborg. “The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel”[4]; releasing him from being a slave to the machine.
The discourse of the cyborg seems promising not only as means for the conquest of new territories differ than our natural environments, but mainly because it describes well (definitely as a metaphor but also in reality) our contemporary culture and its possible future directions. The idea of the cyborg permeates our lives from physical transplants through the eccentric to information systems, texts and ergonomically designed apparatuses. According to Donna Haraway, a cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine, “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”[5]. And as she later expands her definition to cyborg-culture[6], is not as much about hybrid-humans as it is about their relationships with their Companion Species – animals and machines.
Proposition for redesigning of the human epidermis
Anthony Vidler implies this term to architecture as he offers a new home, home for cyborgs, that unlike “the promise of the house as a bubble container that frees human contents from the vicissitudes of external environment”[7]; the home for cyborgs is about the interstices of the differences between the organism and the machine. Opposed to the artificial environments perpetuating the distinction between nature and culture and between the organic and the inorganic - the home for cyborgs can be conceived as “prosthesis and prophylactic”[8].
William Mitchell claims in this discourse that “our buildings will become less like protozoa and more like us’ and we will ‘increasingly think of them as robots for living in”[9]. If to elaborate on this, maybe we won’t even need robots to live in as we will become our own environments, one with nature and technology. If the Cyborgs discourse suggests the revocation of categorical binaries between society and nature; human and animal; domesticated and wild, and claiming that they are intellectually and politically moribund – it redefines the meaning of being human. Maybe it suggests that being human is actually being everything simultaneously – organisms, machines, environments. So what will really be the role of the home in our future culture, the role of space and the meaning of place?
Fritz Kahn, the Man as an Industrial Palace, 1926
[1] Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, Cyborgs and space, Astronautics, (September 1960)
[2] ID.
[3] ID.
[4] ID.
[5] Haraway, Donna, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980’s, Socialist Review, No.80 (1985).
[6] Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the renovation of nature, Routledge, New York (1991).
[7] Vidler, Anthony, Home for Cyborgs, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (1992).
[8] ID.
[9] Mitchell, William J.: E-topia: Urban life, Jim — but not as we know it, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (1999).