Cyborgs are beings that began to modify
our image of humanity.
This is beginning to be typical of the collective imagination.
In the 80s, we start to see
in films, comics and the whole popular culture
a series of weird and hybrid beings.
Some of them are machines that have obtained intelligence
and they have rebelled.
So we have two processes.
The first one, giving life to machines;
the second one, integrating machines into the body.
What does it happen if we fill damaged beings that had accidents
with some types of devices
so that they get the functions they lost
or even increase them?
There were people who started offering their own body
to become a cyborg.
Roy Orbison is an English technological activist
who had achromatopsia, he could not see colours properly.
One day he decided to implant in his skull
an aerial which received
the electromagnetic radiation of the environment.
They have introduced technology
but they are getting away from humanity.
They call themselves 'posthuman', as if they had other powers.
People start to think...
I am still speaking in the field of the imaginary,
the art, the dreams.
They think these dreams are very important
because they are the ones the engineers will make come true
in the laboratories.
Engineers who sometimes fix things and other times they destroy them.
The fact is that over the course of these 30, 40, 50 years
dreams began to become a reality.
Humanity had always been linked
to a stereotypical way of mind and body,
of intelligence,
'featherless bipeds', as Aristotle said.
Now it was the turn of these beings.
What are they? Aren't they a metaphor
of all those whom we do not consider
people at all, those who are no longer people
or who are in the afterlife?
It starts a new exploration about how to modify the body
adding the cloud.
We are entering into a new territory,
the territory in which perhaps the future of our body
is not the past of the body of our species.
We can...
think of modifying our senses,
contacting with reality in a completely different way.
(ECHO) So far we have some senses:
smell, touch, hearing, sight...
We could think about creating
new senses like, for example...
Well, we already have it: hearing colours.
But why don't we start
having new accesses in the electromagnetic spectrum?
Going beyond the violet,
starting to see the ultraviolet.
Or perhaps to implant new sensitivities,
in our retina or in artificial retinas,
to the infrared,
so that we can start seeing the temperatures of the bodies.
It would be interesting,
because we would start seeing directly
what is happening inside, what is happening with our emotions.
In such cases, if those new senses were implanted,
how would our standards of beauty be modified?
What would be our ways of interacting?
What would be the differences that have separated us so far?
There might be some ways,
some possibilities.
Some of them are disturbing, quite disturbing.
We should start thinking
that perhaps our bodies are already different.
How would we see them? How are they? How to recognise ourselves?
What's this?
(STAMMERS)
For God's sake.
(Soft music)
(Dynamic music)
European Night of Researchers
Communication and Culture Vice-Chancellor
Institutional Communication Service Scientific Information Office