‘Forms Such as Never Were in Nature’: the Renaissance Cyborg

Abstract

Standing two metres tall, with arms and legs splayed in the familiar Vitruvian posture, ‘Clear Man’ is a resin model of the human form which can be seen at the Science Museum in London. Embedded within his transparent body are over fifty different ‘devices’ ranging from the banal to the very edge of science fiction.2 Dentures and glass eyes have an ancient history, but the anterior cervical plate — a device which fuses the head and the neck bones — or the artificial larynx used to replace damaged or diseased vocal cords, hint at cyber-fictional fantasies as much as they represent the advances of medical technology. Prosthetic surgery — the replacement of damaged body parts by artificial features — has a long history. But ‘Clear Man’ shows us how prosthesis has now reached deep into the human interior. Of course, ‘Clear Man’ does not represent a mechanical or robotic figure: the organic body still predominates. Neither do the supplementary parts enhance the basic design specification of the human being. The individual fitted with a carbon fibre bone plate cannot run faster or further than someone who has not been so modified. Rather, damaged or worn-out organic features — hips, knee joints, blood vessels, heart valves — can now be made to function once more, at least after a fashion.