BOT I performance project

The expanding merger of biotechnology, nanotechnology, cognitive neuroscience and information technologies has the potential to revolutionize the very nature of human life. When one looks at the writings and theorizing of the cybernetic sphere one finds a deep desire to erase and transcend the body. There is nothing revolutionary in this, as it is based upon a historical cleavage between the mind and the body. Popular futurists like Ray Kurzweil write about uploading our humanity - the mind - to machines within fifty years. The ‘meat’ body will be left behind. Clearly marked in these ideas is that the mind exists separately from the body, and constitutes the basis for human existence. The emphasis of this prognostication is that humans will finally achieve immortality by uploading our minds, and therefore our beings, to machines. Within this construction is the notion that we are constituted solely by pure mentation.

This separation of the body from mentation has deep historical roots in patriarchal power structures. Feminist writers Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price note in Feminist Theory and the Body, that “The status of the body within the dominant Western intellectual traditional has largely been one of absence or dismissal.” Descartes introduced a thinking subject that split the body from the mind, creating a disembodied rational subject, with his ‘I think, therefore, I am.’ The body was associated with the feminine, the feminine with nature, the masculine with the mind and rationality. Feminists have challenged this construction. Stating that “the body matters, not just to women, but to all forms of theory” they challenge this Cartesian inheritance. Humans are in a physical form, and that physical form has been shown by Foucault to be disciplined and part of the sphere of power. The disgust with the body is particularly aimed at women, as the female body is seen as “intrinsically unpredictable, leaky and disruptive.” The ability to transcend the body is seen as a solely male ability.

BOT I is a situated performance project, written and performed by Praba Pilar in 2010 and directed by Nitza Tenenblat, that explores this discursive and practical erasure of the body within technoscience. The performance investigates multiple erasures while problematizing prevalent normative views of the primacy of Western scientific knowledge production and the erasure of the body, of the advantages of computing, of the militarization of robotics by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, of biopiracy and indigeneity, of the nano bio info cogno convergence and its revolutionary elements, of the increasing trafficking of women over the internet for sexual exploitation and of the proliferation of ewaste.