TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

About thirty years ago I first observed my heart beating through the skin, my tiny skeletal chest shifting shape with each heartbeat. Years later it occurred to me that all muscles must make a sound, just like my heart. This was the beginning of my research into muscle sounds, that led me to combine performance art and sound art with biomechanics, wearable robotics and physiological computing. A juvenile curiosity expanded into an interest for the bodies of others and eventually became a decades-long inquiry into body politics. Integral to this was the practice of making transgressive machines to perform the body’s limits: I conceived, designed, engineered and handcrafted numerous prosthetics, including a biophysical instrument creating music from a performer’s body, a robotic limb jutting out of one’s face, a self-cutting AI-driven robot arm and prosthetic spines without a body. Only recently though I noticed a flaw in my practice. Despite my own disability and scholarly engagement with the relevant theory - I'm late-deafened - the machines I had created were detached from the experience of others living with prostheses. This made my practice prone to be associated with discourses of augmentation, and sometimes, to my despair, with a transhumanist desire to transcend the body’s vulnerability. To address this I began doing artistic research together with fellow d/Deaf people, exploring the multiplicity of knowledge enshrined in our bodies. In this talk I’ll share my journey. I’ll discuss how this work enabled me to redefine the very idea of prosthesis, creating machines that by celebrating d/Deafness invite those taking their bodies for granted into unfamiliar perceptual territories. I hope this will highlight how disabled knowledge is too often a taboo in the discourse on body technologies in the arts, and how that knowledge can nurture radical approaches to art, science and technology.