posthuman anatomy

I've always wanted to create a new physical form, a body that could exist without the daily requirements of food, sleep, shelter that tethers it so closely to the rhythms of the Earth. I ask myself why- it's a complicated question- my initial desire to make this body cannot be understood without putting it in the context of a time period of deep isolation and injury. As a teenager I had a devastating injury to my ankle that haunts me to this day. There are times, even now, when I walk and fall suddenly because of it. While I was recovering from the initiating injury, I was left alone in my room for months, unable to walk without crutches. I stood on one leg stringing up baskets, and pulley systems around my room to make a sort of string-based remote system that I could control from my bedside. Lying in bed, I felt every ache and pain of my body, and groan of my hungry belly that was often so difficult to soothe that I went without attempting it for days. Night and day became interchangeable as there was no community around to establish an ordered relationship to the hours. It seemed only natural to begin thinking about how to create a body without organs, a body without needs, a body unrestricted by dirt, sun, food, heat or time.

In isolation, a lone wanderer body could exist solely for the purpose of understanding the universe, curious about community but always recognizing its singularity. The center of the body would be replaced by a core of sensitive magnet, energized by the magnetic field of the Earth. The skeleton would be made of pure carbon fiber. The nervous system would be there to recognize sensations but give little weight to the bothers of pain. One's sex would be rendered moot and reproduction would exist in the hands. There would be no need for food, sleep or shelter.

But now that I am older, and the science has been changing to respect more nuance of the depth of integrated life on earth, and reflect more ancient knowledges that have been hidden and erased from the western world, I know this body could not act without the Earth but must be one with it. I now imagine the skeletal system would be reinforced by titanium in the way that certain beetles replace their organic mandibles with zinc, rendering it stronger less prone to injury and quicker to repair. The organic and the inorganic intermingle in this body- drawing from the potential that exists in the non-human world to reorder the structure of a living organism- like putting a magnifying glass to the way that viruses and bacteria form much of our human bodies, this new body would more readily harness the local potentials of integration in its environment with every step as it encountered new microcosms of life on each square inch of the world. It would be vulnerable but that vulnerability would allow for deeper understanding- all processes of the body felt without fear of harm or change, but observed deep curiosity. Like a bee hive as an entity - with thousands of individuals populating the infrastructure, keeping it alive and making it hum- only immortal as an ever adapting, self-renewing group.

Would this body be born, would it be created as before? My mind continues to swim in the vastness of the possibilities of posthuman evolutions. Now here I am going back to those ideas with the experimentation of form- beginning with the skeleton- I am building outward, a twist on the recreation of an ancient creature, a godlike form- a monster, a bird, a human and technology to create something altogether new.