On the Corposphere Mechanical Body, Digital Body: from Robots, to Cyborgs, to Avatars

Correo E: [email protected] / Web: www.joseenriquefinol.com

Dr. José Enrique FinolVicepresidente de la Asociación Internacional de

Semiótica (IASS-AIS)Consejo de Regulación y Desarrollo de la Información y

Comunicación SENESCYT – Proyecto Prometeo – Quito ECUADOR

On the Corposphere Mechanical Body, Digital Body: from Robots, to Cyborgs, to Avatars

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New bodies: from robots and cyborgs

to avatars


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What deep meanings do we find in the continued efforts of different societies that, both in the representational and the real order, try to subvert the natural model of the human body?

What are the drives, symbolic forces, passions and emotions that lie behind the continued efforts of man to transform his body? Fo

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1. human body + animal body or by 2. animal body + animal body.

It is surprising that at the same time that Greek philosophy valued harmony of the body, which it understood not as the “absence of contrasts” (Eco, 2004: 72) but as grounded in balance and proportion, its myths and legends expressed a recurring search to transform into another body, into a hybrid, which is expressed in three modalities: either by the combination

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A third modalitywould include beings that are transformed from one species to another, which is no longer a combination of body parts from distinct species in a single unit, instead is carried into a completely different species, such as what occurs in Dracula or in the case of the werewolf, who transitions from the human condition to the animal.

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Among the first we find, for example, the Minotaur, man’s body and bull’s head, resulting from the mating of a bull and a woman; the Centaur, horse’s body with the head, torso, and hands of a man; Nereids, half woman, half fish; the Caco, half man, half satyr; the triton, half man, half fish; the sphinx, man’s head with a lion’s body; the faun, whose upper part is man and lower part is goat.

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Among the second we found numerous examples, including the basilisk, half rooster, half reptile; the hippogriff, half horse, half eagle; the chimera, which has a goat’s body, the hindquarters of a snake or dragon, and the head of a lion; Quetzalcoatl, a snake with feathers; Cerberus, which beside its four heads has a snake’s tail.

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These transformations also abound in comics: Spiderman, the man spider, Batman, though not possessing any supernatural powers, operates primarily at night as the bat; Aquaman, the fish man; also the Thing, Elastic Man, the Invisible Woman, and the Torch of the Fantastic Four. A similar phenomenon occurs in literature, the most famous case from The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, a story in which the main character, Gregorio Samsa, wakes one day having been transformed into a huge bug. But also in the bulk messages like comics or movies, new super heroes appear or mythological titans and gladiators rise again, many of them with modified bodies, with superhuman powers whether physical or mental.

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Why all these body transformations?

Do they reveal, perhaps, dissatisfaction with the many bodily limitations or do they express a vocation for the superhuman, the heroic, and the divine?Does man want, at his core, to convert himself into a god or, at least, a demigod? Foto tomada de

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In reviewing the history of distinct varieties of metamorphosis that fill both fiction and reality, it is not pointless to ask whether, in more than one way, cosmetic surgeries are the metamorphosis of our time. Thanks to that beauty technology, our dreams of being this

“other”, this successful, attractive, sexy and young, but also consumerist and hedonistic “other”, which fills the film and television screens, have a chance of fulfillment.

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Sometimes that desire to be the other is also expressed, at the borders of social pathologies, by the transformation of the “other” into “our other”, in itself designed according to our desires, our anxieties and appetites for possession and control, as is expressed for example in the inanimate bodies that we buy in order to be one of “our other”.


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Those appetites, which often mortify the loneliness of being a contemporary human, who while having the best forms of communication, communicates less, now assume two classic expressions: real dolls and virtual dolls. The former were, in the beginning, inflatable dolls, one of the most famous of which appearing in the movie Grandeur Nature (1974) (Natural Size), from director Luis García Berlanga, in which Michel Piccoli is a dentist that leaves his wife and lives with a doll that he ultimately tries to kill and throws himself, both he and the doll, into the river Seine where he drowns while she… floats.


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Today dolls have been refined and offered, for example, in many styles, colors, and genres; these include designables according to the tastes of the buyer. Anyone visiting, for example, the website www.realdoll.com will find the latest generation of doll models –RealDoll Classic, RealDoll2, Male RealDoll2, Wicked RealDoll, Boy Toy Dolls—; these are beautiful imitations of actual-size human bodies, usable in all imaginable forms of sexual penetration, and whose cost goes from 5,000 to 6,000 dollars.

I have taken this information from the excellent articule by Armando Silva on Global Imaginaries. Fears, bodies, doubles (1999: 91).

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Meanwhile, the site www.fantasydoll.com.au specializes in dolls designed to look like young Japanese, made in Australia. “with a special mix of high quality silicon. Each doll is developed with a skeletal structure. The skin is soft. The breasts have been modified to facilitate petting and a softer and more realistic feel” (Fantasydoll, online). The dolls are flexible and come with a fabricated vagina made from elastomer, an elastic and viscous polymer, and it is removable so it can be cleaned easily.

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mannequins, but while these favor its visual and exhibitionist function, in as much as they were created to show clothing and other accessories in the windows of shops and storefronts, dolls favor the haptic system, in other words the perceptive systems that allow an individual to obtain information from the world immediately to his or her own body, a perception that in the dolls’ case goes beyond the visible to accentuate itself in touch.

After the first inflatable dolls made of vinyl, the latex and silicon types already have some time on the market and apparently are a successful business. They are not only representations of the human body, but further still, of its reduction and substitution. In fact , humanized dolls are new forms of


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In this privileged semiotic touch a special communication is established, vicariously, that is not limited to the erotic and the sexual and the exclusion of the pornographic, but even turns on the verbal since users are also talking with their dolls. This is a vicarious communication because the same person, as in a dream, assumes, alternatively, the roles of both interlocutors (sender and receiver), thanks to a re-coding brought as a result and product of the object’s humanization.

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In regard to virtual dolls, one of the most recent examples appears in the film Her (2013), directed by Spike Jonze, starring Joaquin Phoenix, in which the main character, introverted, solitary, and in the divorce process, subscribes to the services of a digital Operating System (OS) that comes with a woman’s personality, whose technological capacities allow her to evolve and adapt progressively to her owner, and which eventually leads to the point of verbal sex.

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Even though in the film the interaction between the main character and the OS is exclusively verbal and lacks a visible body, in the future these types of limitations can be overcome, whether by the incorporation of bodily images on a screen or by a robot.

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From robots, cyborgs

and avatars

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What does the incessant search to develop powerful body extensions that today we know as robots, androids, cyborgs, or avatars reveals to us about mankind, and about societies that man has formed and the cultures he has created?

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In technological history robots were created separately from the human body, while in imaginary created by science fiction, comics and popular literature, and later by film, they were technological artifacts that copied human forms.

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In the first fictional exhibition of robots, these robots were manufactured from organic materials, so that in their beginning they were copies of the human body, a phenomenon that is repeated in the construction of Frankenstein, a being created from parts of different human bodies.

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Usually robots have, similar to a human being, a head, arms and legs, eyes, ears and a mouth. Today is customary to add the qualifier humanoid to robots copying human forms; among them, the most famous and complete is the humanoid robot made by Honda, whose name is Asimo (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) and, after twenty years of work, was presented on October 21 of 2000. Asimo understands spoken commands and gestures that he has been preprogrammed with and is capable of recognizing faces and voices.

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The functioning of the humanoid robot ASIMO is based on powerful computers and sophisticated computational programs. It has great agility and control (it can accurately kick a soccer ball, lift a tray with cups and go up and down stairs, for example). Its design copies two distinct features of the human body: anatomy and voice.

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Still more recently, NASA and General Motors have constructed an android that has been baptized as Robonaut 2 “an anthropomorphic robot of the latest extremely skilled generation. Like Robonaut 1, it is capable of handling a wide range of instruments and interfaces but is a significant advance in comparison to its predecessor” (NASA, online).

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However, how do we interpret the robot body in relation to the human body? Is it, perhaps, a new corporeity, a product of new body regeneration? Where are the limits and borders erected between the robot body and human body? If, as we said, the robot is, in its beginning, a copy of the human body, how does it resemble it and how is it different?

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of body, at least in the case of humanoid robots, resemblances in anatomy; however, as far as being created by man and their functions, the robot bodies are duplications, by resemblance, but also, in the sense that McLuhan gives it, an extension of the human body.

Resemblances and differences let us sketch the identity of the robot body, its place in body anthropology that takes on its reality and not only its abstraction. We have already seen both types

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If we think, now from a religious isotopy, that man does not procreate, in other words, does not engender, but creates the robot “in its image and resemblance”, it is impossible not to think of the biblical god that, in the same way, created man.

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This sort of desire to imitate god, of man’s “rebellion” that in his arrogance presumes to be as powerful as the god that created him, as in the myth of the tower of Babel, brings with it the destruction of man itself. It is precisely there where modern mythologies of divine castigation of human arrogance arise, in which robots, androids, and computers rebel against mankind and destroy it, such as what occurs in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Stanley Kubrick, where the computer HAL kills nearly all the crew of the space ship.

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The next step in the evolution of new body forms was the appearance of cyborgs, that did not copy or imitate the human body, but that constitute a hybrid between it and machine.The term cyborg uses two English morphemes: cyb, that comes from cybernetic, a discipline created by Norman Weiner, and –org, which comes from organism.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: “A person whose tolerance or physical capacity is extended beyond human limitations, made possible by a machine or external instrument that modifies bodily functions; an integrated man-machine system”. For some, the first cyborg was Frankenstein and for others the beginning of cyborgization of the human body started with the use of the first vaccines, since these signified an eruption of technology in the natural body of human beings.


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But really the use of prosthesis to modify and improve the performance and survival of the human body has as its precedent the remote wishes of human beings for eternal life. Since Greek civilization there has been an interest in combining the organs of different animals into one, as is evidenced by the chimera, and also in Mesopotamian mythology, where the lammasu appears

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Perhaps one of the first prostheses used in mythology are the wings of Daedalus, the great Greek architect, made with feathers collected by himself and his son Icarus. Later, these primitive creations would pave the way for the development of allogeneic transplants, organ and cell transplants inside the same species, and, later still, to xenogeneic transplants, transplants performed between different species.

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Although today the transplanting of organs between humans is common, xenogeneics transplants continue being difficult due to infection and immunological complications. In any case, it is from these types of transplants that lead to, later on, the possibility to use prosthetic technologies that will improve the capacities of human beings.

Valdettaro (2010) notes the cases of athletes Oscar Pistorious and Nadya Vessey, and of the film director Rob Spence, as emblematic cases of the transformation and technological betterment of the human body.

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From the anthropological point of view, transplants, in themselves, pose questions about the notion of body that range from religious conceptions that consider its sacredness inviolable, as evidenced in religions like Jehovah’s Witnesses, who object to blood transfusions, which are based, among others, in Genesis 9:4 and Leviticus 17:10, up to the notions of body that are

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For Santone there are two interpretations of cyborgs: as a “reconceptualized post-human body” and as a “monster controlled by the machine” (2003: online). The middle road between fiction and clear reality, the cyborg, simultaneously fascinates and terrifies us; it fascinates us by the appeal derived from its secrets and possibilities, by its insertion and membership to our own body, what differentiates it from the robot; and it terrifies us because we have lost our “humanity” to become “artifacts”, “prosthesis”; we fear that the delicate equilibrium between the human and the technological tilts the balance, every time, in favor of the latter.

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Thus, in a changing ecology of bodies, the human would not only shift towards the technological, but would be end up being the technological itself. It is, ultimately, a transitional conflict between nature and culture, between organic body and cybernetic body, in which our biological roots are eclipsed by the penetration of technology.


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Throughout our research on ritual, we have sustained that the real, carnal body, is a fundamental and pivotal component in all the known ritual practices; somehow, it becomes the center of multiple semiotic interactions of ritual action, of its choreography, of its ornamentation, of its gestures and movements, of its clothing and objects; but, how does the body operate in the digital world? What transformations does it undergo? How is digital corporeity defined? What are the meat and bones of the physical corporeity of rites transformed into when this is transferred to the digital?

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In a study on gender and sexuality in interactions on MySpace, Van Doorns notes that the profile with which each user is self-described, built in the continuous social interactions inside virtual environments, constitutes its digital body, which “then provides social context for interactions in a space that lacks both a physical infrastructure and a visual audience (…) Users can add meaning to each profile by adding comments that include text, images, or video, transforming the form of their ‘digital bodies’ online” (Van Doorns, 2010: 585).

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In this perspective, the digital body is, therefore, a purely semiotic form, its identity is not physical, is not flesh and bones, but only meanings constructed in the framework of successive interactions between users, during which a set of records are created that contain the activities of internet users.


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Two major types of virtual worlds can exist: those of games and those destined for social interaction. From inception in 1979, with a technology based on texts and where one could participate in a small group of users, today there exist more than a thousand virtual worlds where you can take part in, and at the same

time, millions of users that pay a subscription where 3D technologies are used with enormous efficiency and speed.


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“As the technology behind virtual worlds evolved fromsmall text-based worlds to massive 3-D worlds, the userbase also evolved. In this co-evolution, players of virtualworlds became residents of virtual worlds, and what were once fantasy worlds over time became mirrored worlds: worlds complete with social and financial dynamics that seeped out from cyberspace into real” (2009, online).

Joe Sanchez, who is called “virtuoso of virtual worlds”, notes:

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In other terms, virtual worlds are today as real as physical worlds; they are not only in cyberspace, but in our daily world where millions and millions of people spend millions and millions of daily hours playing and interacting, entertaining themselves and socializing with other human beings, and in any part of the world.

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of new technologies; such a discourse, emerged from cyberspace where it was confined, has been autonomized and has entered real life, has returned to our lives where it was created.

Virtual spaces, created by man, fanciful and imaginary, are a new literary discourse constructed not with movable type on a printing press but with the most powerful and refined means


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Cyberspace was a term utilized for the first time in 1980 by William Ford Gibson, in his novel Neuromancer, and Lévi defines it as “communicative space open for global interconnection of computers and computer memory” (2007: 70).


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But, which are, how are, what are the characteristics that the body’s presence/participation have in virtual worlds?

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images of human beings or animals that are our alter ego in such worlds, and as such we can take them to various places, wear them in many ways; within certain limits, we can also give them their own bodily characterizations. They are our bodies, our way of speaking, walking, and interacting.

In virtual worlds the users are self-represented with images called avatars that users must choose; these are


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Sánchez Martínez, in his book on Body and identity in virtual worlds, notes that “the feeling of bodily presence in virtual space must be understood and is bound to the body’s representation and techniques. The representation is an image of course, but this image of the body is present as arising from a resemblance of the physical body” (2013: 23).

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Thus, our relation with the other – bodily, cultural, social—is, more than anything, a phenomenon of extreme mediatization. Naturally, before the creation of virtual worlds there were also mediatizations, among them the letter, the telegraph, the telephone, photography, the press, radio, and television. Agreeing with Eliseo Verón, who made a distinction between mediatization and mediation, the former is, in the context of the species’ evolution, “the sequence of historical media phenomena that result from determined materializations of semiosis, obtained by technical procedures” (2013: 147. Author’s italics). Mediation is, in return, the material support necessary for semiosis and meaning to occur.

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However, in the virtual worlds of today, mediatizations are converted into hypermediatizations because mediations are transformed and mediatizations are multiplied: even between the sender and receiver of a letter, for example, the medium of ink and paper’s materiality, and the communication is mediatized thanks to the technology of the alphabet. In cyberspace mediation is made virtual, that is to say, desubstantialized (Lévi, 1999), what allows the body to exist in various dimensions because, as Sánchez Martínez says, “the desubstantiation allows the potential of the substance to be altered” (2013: 67).

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Thanks to which the “avataric” representation can act, exist, and be in other dimensions which our physical body could not. But also, in virtual worlds the mediatization becomes multiple, complex, integrated so that your chances are enhanced beyond traditional media taken separately which are integrated in a new mediality in the virtual world. In this framework, the body acquires some new dimensions of representation that, with due license, “avatarize”, not to make it disappear, but to make it into another.

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But new corporeities are not always constructed towards the other, namely, towards new technology, be they real or virtual; it is not always a transformation and extension of the body outside itself; in other contemporaneous strategies, for example, such efforts of modification, signification, and communication are developed in the in itself body, processes observed, for example, between groups called modern primitives, a movement born in the 70s, where such processes are performed, at least, in two directions.

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body resistance, and, consequently, challenging pain thresholds, as in the body suspension test and what is called pulling, which consists of hook insertion into parts of the body and the subsequent forceful pulling of said hooks.

The first has to do with body writings (tattoos, perforations, scarification, branding, implants, and mutilations), while the second has to do with challenging the limits of


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Wentzel has studied these works on the body among primitive modernists in Argentina, and concludes that these neotribal practices are a “dialogue between resistance and power” that “…reflect new forms of subjectivation that redefine the parameters of the given culture, where the desire to decorate, affirm and explore the individual comes with the need to question established values, proposing new ways of relating to the body, of feeling, of being exposed to the gaze of others” (2010: 316).

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In principle, we believe that it is lawful to establish body-space boundaries to singularize these new corporeaties. For our perspective, while the robot is a copied and separated form of the human body, the Cyborg is constitutive as part of it, whereby it becomes an articulation of two distinct natures, biological and electronic, transformed thusly into a mixed reality; then the avatar, meanwhile, is constituted as the substitution of the human body, where it is based on new nature of a digital character, a reality that we have yet to fully define.

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This progression copy mixture substitution, initially activated by science fiction and that today forms part of our reality, has generated parallel social imaginaries that affect our conceptions of the body, with content ranging from its original

consecration and its consequent untouchability, through its modification and technologization up to its disappearance.Fo

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One could, however, argue that the avatar does not signal the human body’s disappearance, but rather its transubstantiation, a religious phenomenon that occurs when the catholic priest transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; consequently, just as the wafer (bread) does not disappear in the ritual, but its substance is changed, the human body in the virtual worlds where avatars exist does not disappear, but equally changes its substance.


Human body Robot Cyborg Clone Avatar Replica Mixture Identity Substitution

Sacred Untouchable Modifiable Adaptable Substitutable

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In an anthropo-semiotics of new corporeities and their hybridizations—robots, cyborgs, avatars—, it is necessary to not limit ourselves by comparing them to the human body, but to compare them against their own identities that today range from the technologic, from whose prestigious imaginary they feed, to the virtual, whose new insubstantiality, paradoxical as it may seem, they nurture.


Thank you

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Diccionario Oxford. www.oxforddictionaries.com. Consultado el 14/05/2013.

Eco, Umberto. (1994). Segundo diario mínimo. Barcelona: Lumen.

Lévy, Pierre (2007). Cibercultura. México: Anthropos.

NASA. http://www.nasa.gov. Consultado el 18/05/2014

Sánchez, Joe. (2009). A Social History of Virtual Worlds. Disponible en: http://gscfall09.pbworks.com/f/A+Social+History+of+Virtual+worlds.pdf. Consultado el: 20/03/2014.

Sánchez Martínez, José. (2013). Cuerpo e identidad en los mundos virtuales. México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.

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References

http://www.nasa.gov/

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Santone, Jessica. (2003). Cyborg. The University of Chicago: Theories of Media. Disponible en: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glosary2004/cyborg.htm. Consultado: 08/04/2014.

Valdettaro, Sandra. (2010). Más allá de Dolly y Michael Jackson. La moda del tecno-cuerpo: mutantes, clones y cyborgs. deSignis 16: 49-57. Van Doorns, Niels. (2010). The ties that bind: the networked performance of gender, sexuality and friendship on MySpace. New Media Society 12: 583-602.

Verón , Eliseo. (2013). La semiosis social, 2. Ideas, momentos, interpretantes. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Wentzel, Marlene (2010). Ser herida y cuchillo. Reflexiones sobre la modificación corporal extrema de las modern primitives. En Cuerpos plurales. Antropología de y desde los cuerpos. Silvia Citro (Editora). Buenos Aires: Biblos.

www.fantasydoll.com.an . Consultado el 15/05/2014.

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On the Corposphere Mechanical Body, Digital Body: from Robots, to Cyborgs, to Avatars