Flesh Machine
Flesh Machine was an installation, performance, and online project that framed In vitro fertilization (IVF) as a latent form of eugenics and proposed that the social conditions of capitalism enabled its widespread acceptance. Participants were invited to have their DNA tested to assess the potential value of their bodies as commodities in the fertility market.
This site documents a lecture and performance
by CAE on biotechnology. The audience takes genetic tests and gives cell samples for DNA analysis.
When it comes to technology, the focus and the hype is on new information
and communication technologies. From a marketer's perspective, this only
makes sense, because these new technologies seem to offer the public a new
utopian frontier; however, those who work with new complex technology on an
everyday basis know that its primary function is to increase the velocity
of market place dynamics, which in turn increases the intensity of labor.
The organic systems--the humans--in the technocracy can no longer maintain
themselves at such speeds: physiological and psychological pathologies
abound in the new techno-environment. Unfortunately, it's too late to slow
the economic engines of technoculture, and so the problem of collapsing
organic platforms can only be solved by drastic flesh reconfigurations.
This new social tendency has arrived at the right time. One of the leading
eugenicists of the 1930s, Frederick Osborn, believed that in the future
eugenics would be a part of everyday life consciousness (as opposed to
being a policy imposed on populations). According to Osborn, in the time
that we now know as the period of the economy of desire/surplus and the
nuclear family, people would not only volunteer to engage in eugenics
practices, but would pay to do so. Because market competition would reach
such an intense state in late capital, and wealth and prestige would be the
only measure of quality of life in death-of-god society (death of the
nonrational), people would be forced by circumstance to acquire whatever
would help to make them more fit for success in the marketplace. That
future is now the present, and the first experiments in developing
voluntary eugenic consciousness and in developing eugenic practices are
underway in clinics for reproductive services. However, unlike its
technological sibling, telecommunications, reproductive technology remains
largely outside of everyday life. It's not something that we experience as
mundane technology (like the telephone or TV) nor as a potential social
problem (like industrial pollution); it is something we only hear about
after it has been filtered through the legitimating signs of science and
medicine. Consequently, the eugenic practices that occur on a daily basis
in the labs and the clinics have no reality for those outside certain
scientific and medical specializations. Such practices are silent
subversions of everyday life that will not reveal themselves until they are
fully deployed and the damage has already been done.
Some artists and activists (particularly in Europe) understand the nature
of this secret technological revolution, and have tried to inject critical
information into public discourse about this hidden development in an
attempt to raise critical awareness about unacceptable medical and
scientific practices; however, no political front or real public debate has
emerged that includes a radical perspective (such as there is in the
critique of information and communications technology). CAE suspects that
the continued lack of concern on the part of the public is partly because
the tactics used to increase public awareness are too tame for such a
well-guarded situation. While CAE does not think the older and proven
methods of representational resistance should be jettisoned, in regard to
reproductive technologies, more extreme experimentation is called for.
Hence, we offer Flesh Machine.