Performance Enhancing Body Modification

There have been a couple of items in the news over the last week which have caught my eye They have been to do with issues of the body and technology. Alongside these to stories I am currently reading Flesh by the architects Diller and Scofidio which investigates the relationship between people and modern technologies and how this rapidly developing relationship is changing the way we engage with the world and therefore architectural spaces.

The first was of a Serbian man called Milo who has become the second person to voluntarily have a natural limb amputated in favour of having a bionic replace it. The second came from the world of cycling, a sport which probably more than any other combines the body with technology/machinery which pushes the body to its limits and regularly beyond, where Lance Armstrong has yet again been accused of taking performance enhancing drugs. The two stories both display examples of a human desire to master nature and improve their bodies beyond any natural physical process such as exercise could ever achieve. As is often the case sex, sport and war spearhead the investigations and experimentations until everyday life begins to take on what was initially a fairly perverted pursuit.

Cycling is as close to the ultimate marriage of body and machine that can be reached without invasive surgery. Unlike a car or motorbike the human provides the motor for the bicycle which then via a series of mechanical parts turns that energy into forward propulsion. The technology would go nowhere without the human, the humans ability to travel is greatly improved by the technology. References to this relationship can be found in popular culture, perhaps most notably in the work of Kraftwerk. The music of Kraftwerk deals with the themes of de-humanizing, modern technology, and the marriage of technology and body not least in songs such as “The Man Machine”, “The Robots” and “Computer Love”. Famously, Kraftwerk became obsessed with cycling in the early 80’s and didn’t release any new music for almost 20 years as they were too busy cycling. To Ralf Hutter cycling encapsulated everything Kraftwerk represented regarding the relationship of machines and humans. The 1983 single “Tour de France” featured the sounds of the bicycle chain and gears mixed with the cyclists breathing. In 2009 Kraftwerk played at the Manchester velodrome whilst the GB cycling squad rode around them.

The story of Lance Armstrong is one amongst many in the cycling world of doping scandals. The intense nature of cycling events which call on massive reserves of physical strength and endurance. Even in the earliest days of the sport, participants were taking drugs to improve the performance beyond what was physically possible. The earliest examples of doping originated in the six day events before the turn of the last century. These extreme events saw men cycling around the track for six days covering vast distances pushing their bodies to the limit. One report of a New York six day race from 1896 described the winner as being,

“like a ghost, his face as white as a corpse, his eyes no longer visible because they'd retreated into his skull.”

 It was almost accepted that the only way they could sustain themselves at that level for that length of time was by taking drugs. One example was the “speedball”, a crude concoction of cocaine and heroin that were less performance enhancing as massive jolts to the system.

Since the early races drug taking has persisted and become more advanced but are the practice of taking performance enhancing drugs is seen as totally unacceptable. We are at the point where riders have been accussed of having blood transfusions inbetween stages of long races to clean their blood ready for the dope testing they will be subjected too. Over the past years cyclings blue ribbon event, the Tour de France, has been plagued by drugs, notably in 2006 the winner Floyd Landis was striped of his title as he tested postitive for performance enhancing drugs on a stage where he had been untouchable by any of his opponents. Last week Tyler Hamilton, a former team mate of Landis and more importantly Lance Armstrong the 7 time winner came out and said that nearly everyone in the peleton was doing EPO in the early 2000’s including Armstrong who he says saw injecting himself.

The interesting point is that if everyone is doing it just to compete at that level, they aren’t human, they are super-humans and yet at the same time de-humanised. They have crossed over to a realm where, like the six day racer they are more like corpses, machines that need drugs for fuel to complete the task.

Other examples of performance enhancing drugs are similar. The Zulu’s were said to take hallucinagenics before going to battle to send them into a fearless trance, making them super-human warriors but ones that were unable to percieve the horror of war around them with a rational mind. Viagra can give an impotent man the chance to become a super-human for the night but his inability to loose his hard on must deny or diminish the human pleasure of climax. (Not sure if this is true or not...just wanted to point out that viagra was a performance enhancing drug, I’ll have to give it a blast before I can say whether not loosing a hard on is bad or not)

People take all sorts of drugs in every day life for various reasons as petty as loosing weight for vain reasons. Is this any more acceptable than taking a drug which can actually be useful in enhancing your performance? The film Requiem for a Dream is a powerful portrayal of how “social acceptable” drugs such as weight loss amphetamine pills can be as dangerous as “social unacceptable” drugs such as heroin. Perhaps society needs to re-evaluate drugs. Perhaps the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or a range of specific performance enhancing drugs should be prescribed and vain and pointless drugs should be seen as irresponsible.

The story of the bionic hand is interesting in that the man volunteered to have his hand amputated. The natural hand was severely damaged in a motorcycle accident and is practically paralysed so with a bionic replacement, Milo can once again have a functioning hand. The hand works by utilising the embodied memory of the arm when it functioned. In January 2010 National Geographic ran a leading article on modern prostheses or “bionics” in which it explained how the technology works using the example of Amanda Kitts whose arm had to be amputated after a car accident.

“Within her brain below the level of consciousness, lives an intact image of that arm, a phantom. When Kitts thinks about flexing her elbow, the phantom moves...Kitts is the living proof that, even though flesh and bone may be damaged or gone, the nerves and parts of the brain that once controlled it live on.”

“The nerves in an amputee’s stump could still carry signals from the brain...nerves conduct electricity, but they can’t be spliced together with a computer cable. (Nerve fibers and metal wires don’t get along well. And an open wound where a wire enters the body would be a dangerous avenue for infections.) ...An amplifier [is needed] to boost the signals from the nerves, avoiding the need for a direct splice...When muscles contract, they give off an electrical burst strong enough to be detected by an electrode placed on the skin. He [Todd Kuiken; physician/bio-medical engineer] developed a technique to reroute severed nerves from their old, damaged spots to other muscles that could give their signals the proper boost. In October 2006 Kuiken set about rewiring Amanda Kitts. The first step was to salvage major nerves that once went all the way down her arm...to different regions of Kitt’s upper-arm muscles...[5 months] later she was fitted with her first bionic arm, which has electrodes in the cup around the stump to pick up the signals from the muscles...the challenge was to convert those signals into commands to move the elbow and hand.”

Since the time of writing the technology has surpassed the bionic arms that were being talked about. For example there were no pressure pads so Kitts couldn’t perceive how hard she was grasping things to the point where the strength of her arm would crush items such as paper cups. She had no notion of being able to feel the texture of an object. Now arms have been developed with blue-tooth pressure sensors that allow the person wearing one to feel textures and understand how firmly they are holding something.

The article also talks about the potential to create a bionic skin within 20 years which can sense touch and temperature. It is conceivable that within our life time prosthetics will be as good as, if not better, than natural limbs. The Paralympics could become an event where the athletes are far better than their natural limbed contemporaries. There was already the case of Oscar Pistorius the South African sprinter who was born without both legs below the knee and runs on prosthetics made of carbon fibre in a J-Shape. He started to compete in able-bodied race-meets and wanted to qualify for the Olympics as well as the Paralympics. The International Association of Athletics Federation established a new rule that banned the use of:

 "any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device".

There may well be a time when people with perfectly functioning human limbs opt to have them amputated in favour of an advanced prosthetic that will allow them to enhance their performance in some specialised field. Or, for example, people may have bionic devices inserted into their retina’s to give them incredible eye-sight capable of seeing microscopic elements at long distance. Even more incredible is the possibility that bionics will be developed that do things that human limbs could never do. The bionic arm already has a wrist that can swivel the full 360 degrees. Is it then so hard to imagine that a bionic prosthetic could be manufactured, for example, that instead of an arm and hand has several tentacle like appendages or other such configurations that would allow the person access to a whole realm of activities previously unfeasible to those with a human limb.

There are ethical implications with this sort of suggestion but why should people not modify their body for the valid reason of enhancing their performance. In the society we live in it is seen as acceptable to conquer one’s own body in the pursuit of “beauty”. Diller and Scofidio discuss this in Flesh,

“Consider, for a moment, so called aesthetic surgery, which adds to and subtracts from the body: what strikes the imagination is the heroic will to voluntarily subject one’s body to an endless cycle of repeated operations, in order to repair it, perfect it, and make it into an ideal object, instead of accepting it as a place of difference and otherness.”

If it can be seen as heroic to undergo potentially dangerous surgery* just for reasons concerning vanity and sex appeal then why should it not be seen as heroic and socially acceptable to undergo similar surgery for a bionic body replacement/enhancement. Instead of having an inert volume of silicone inserted into you to increase your sex appeal why not have a dynamic intelligent bionic inserted into you to increase your sexual performance?

*only recently there was the tragic case of Claudia Aderotimi who died 12 hours after having silicone injected in her buttocks. The silicone was suspected of being more like an industrial grade sealant than a clinical silicone which is used in breast implants.

In the world of sex there already exists technical parts that can be attached/inserted into the body to enhance performance from vibrating cock rings which make the male last longer whilst stimulating the female clitoris to full on gender reversing strap-on dildos which are essentially  a prosthetic allowing the female wearer access to activities previously impossible.

Cynics of Bionic Prosthetics might claim that the reason they have been developed and are developing at such rapid rates now is because with improved body armour soldiers are returning from wars with horrific wounds to limbs instead of returning dead because of catastrophic wounds to the torso. It might be through the worlds of sport and sex though that it becomes socially acceptable for able bodied people to undergo voluntary surgery to have a performance enhancing bionic installed becoming a super-human whilst simultaneously de-humanizing themselves.

Two quotes quoted in Flesh perhaps sum some of these ideas up better than I have attempted:

Querzola: “In a liberal society with democratic pretensions, why should only the handicapped have the right to prostheses? Isn’t the real market of the future among normal people instead?”

Robinett: “One vision of the future is the human being whose sense and muscles are greatly amplified, a human decision-maker, aware and powerful...Personally, I find it preferable to be the cyborg running the show, rather than the pet of a robot.”