How much is my body still my body—to the extent that it ever was?

The body serves as a point of attack for power, to access the subject on the one hand, and the entire society on the other, states Michel Foucault. Today it is above all the big tech companies that are exercising their power—not only in an economic sense—and expanding it further. 

Only too eager for self-control, we train, repair, rehabilitate, shape, beautify, and technify our bodies. In the process, our self-optimization is constantly recorded by all kinds of programs and the data voluntarily and mostly uncritically handed over to the corresponding industries. Under their influence, the pressure to independently invest in our “physical capital” is increasing. 

Not only in the era of Futurism were models of the “machine human” still associated with promise and supposedly positive expectations. The beginning of the internet age, too, sparked the hope of overcoming established biographical, cultural, sexual, and sociological definitions. In the meantime, we have understood the degree to which norms, prejudices, racism, and sexism inscribed into algorithms exert their influence on (especially female) bodies. 

Is it the vision of Google developer Ray Kurzweil, who claims that humanity, with the help of biotechnology and artificial intelligence, will have overcome its biological limitations—and thereby also physical decline and death—by the year 2045? Or are we already well into the process of abandoning our physical existence so that our decommissioned bodies are—as imagined by Paul Virilio—only shells of our selves, and our existence a constant being online in a never-ending flow of data?  

Link

https://2022.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/events/3825/esc-medien-kunst-labor