Body Upload 2.0: Downloadable Cosmetic [Re]Birth
Body Upload 2.0: Downloadable Cosmetic [Re]Birth

Summary/Abstract: Hans Moravec’s Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind remarkably blueprints a future where rapid technological feats will grant humans the ability to upload/ download their consciousness into computer software and/ or computer chips, preserving their lifelong memories and identities. This blueprint is edi ed by Robert Mitchell’s and Phillip Thurtle’s book, Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, further problematizing the im/material and immortalized information/terminal eshy bodies. These dichotomies are shattered as bodies and information become innate scions, continually grafting onto the other’s multilayered epidermis. Flesh is trans gured into information and information is trans gured into esh. Bodies are edi ed by information; corporeality and dis/embodiment are further problematized while we live in the age of informatics. Interesting questions arise as a result: What does it mean to have – or occupy – a body when it becomes part of a downloadable network? Advantageous, directed by Jennifer Phang, depicts a future where female bodies are continually represented as easily replaceable vessels. It is my contention that Advantageous cinematically presents a future where digitized mechanical reproduction is possible. Bodies become updated, evolving into informatically-structured bodies. Following a similar cinematic line of vision, Oshii Mamoru’s lm Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence depicts how human consciousness is arti cially implanted onto sex dolls, reproducing them into sentient gynoids.

• Details
• Contents