Five Sense Baby
April, 2021
Five sense baby started from a small sculpture made during the isolation time, mimicking the virus images I could find online, interpreting them into the sea animal, giving her name, and allowing her to grow and perform. This project was based on a critical position on what we could see on the internet and what we allow ourselves to take from them, this further could be understood as a manifesto towards power in and out.
In a way, we are no longer human beings.
Everyone has become a cyborg.
artificial, the human being.
The screen, the body.
Once we start connecting with the world.
each of us becomes the alien.
In A Cyborg Manifesto published in 1984, Donna Haraway expressed their opposition to the idea that formal feminists take the body as identity politics, draw out various gender boundaries, and therefore cannot reimagine A fluid identity.
Frankenstein cannot bring himself to create an artificial eve for fear that the female is more malignant than him, the union of both would propagate a race that could threat the humankind. Shelley was not emphasizing on the binary of male and female individualism, rather, the complex set of relations in the process of reproduction for the future has been noticed.
Amber Case as a biologist argued that technology is evolving us into a new kind of screen-staring, button-clicking human. We now rely on "external brains" (like phones and computers) to communicate, remember, and even live in a virtual Second Life. Those behavior patterns in between the screen and the being reconstruct the human nature and bring us the reality of the body from physically conflict evolution to the invisible moments.
In modern psychology, self-consciousness has been highlighted since its invisibility and has been considered part of our perception system. Psychologists tried many ways to test consciousness to create a guide for mental illness. An example would be Hebb's Sensory Deprivation Experiment in 1954. Subjects confined in a small cubicle for varying periods of time up to 72 hours, with restricted visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic stimulation, reported gross hallucinations, delusions, visual disturbances, distortions of body image, and other assorted affective, cognitive and perceptual experiences. Hebb’s later synaptic mechanism and cell assembly helped him create The Organization of Behavior, this research on the neural basis of cognition, machine intelligence, robotic engineering, and artificial intelligence has been widely adopted in both psychology and neuroscience today.
However, what we can notice from those experiments are intentions, it treated humans as a machine that can easily be tested out with some of the data being deleted and encouraged to highlight consciousness within the testimony. The body in the isolation has been identified as a solid process that only could have feelings, while that consciousness was left out for further development, which is the beginning of separation from their own body.
I cannot see, you draw me the eyes.
I cannot speak, you gave me a name.
I cannot hear, you plug video into my body.
I cannot smell, you colored me and made me look delicious.
I cannot feel, you allowing everyone to perceive me as if I can.
