Posted 26 May 2004 - 11:24 PM
I have just made a quick transcript of this film but it is far from perfect. Anyone with better English skills than me is welcome to perfect it. When it has been perfected, any editor, feel free to replace or remove my version of this transcript below.
--- transcript below ---
We were formed and framed by the earth itself. Fashioned by the parameters of reality of the earth. So were like a hand made to fit an existing glove.
There will always be the ...., and wonted to be a specific for but we will augment it and improve it
Medicine is being revisiulized a technology in the service of the liberation. Nature is no longer the norm. Some kind of ideals of the norm.
Some people have written of the possibilities of engineering people to have wings. And it seems to me that this sort of desire might become preferment.
We are the shape of freedom. We are a general purpose organism. That means, any modifications we make to our selves in the direction of a specialized purpose, are going to cost us.
During the late twentieth centaury, individuals start taking a look around at wants going on in the world which was predominantly the mass watershed of advances in technology communications and biotechnology. So with all that in mind, what would be the most important thing in the world to almost every human being. Health, vitality, long life.
People tend to be adaptable. … that’s how we didn’t get destroyed during the evolution. There is always a desire to have a better life.
Transhumanism. Humans in transition. The transhuman is this stage from being biologically human to being post human witch would no longer be exclusively biological.
The deadilus effect, refers back to deadelus figure in Greek mythology who sought one problem but created others in the process. And we are doing this all the time, so we now have technology to detect and intervene in genetic disease. But in the process we have created the dilemma of what’s called toxic knowledge. Knowing a little more than you wanted to know about your biological grounding.
But this does not apply in a world where the particular variability is something that could be combated by technology. So for example if we knew how to change this particular gene from the unsafe form to the safe form nobody would give this argument and not wanting to know, they would just go ahead and make the change and that would be that.
Any problem that comes to light be course of maybe going to far so to speak, will solve that problem to.
Where our lives find meaning is right there at that interface between natures possibilities and constraints and our normal natural bodies and the relational dynamics those provide.
As a piedmont project for me as an artist I created a future physique with is now called radical body design. We call it pretty primo to date for short. Its primo third millennium culture plus.
In terms of abandoning the existing body that’s a substran of human existence, I think that’s a another unrealistic scenario. It comes from a lack of appreciation of just how complicated and flexible our biology actually is. This is a remarkable structure you and I dwell in. Not easily modified.
If we could percuse a body, what would it be. What would we want to look like. How long would we want it to last. Can we trade it in. what upgrade do we want. What color do we want. What shape do we want. Primo signifies an engineering of design in human physique.
Its not like Mr. potato head, where you stick on a new nose or a new ear. And its not like logos either where you sort of connect them up and you add a function. Every intervention you make is going to intervene against a great many things.
We don’t have to have the dieses that we were genetically born with or that we gain from our environment or through whatever viruses are around. We don’t have to be burdened with the albatross of death lingering around in the back of you mind non stop.
We are now reaching the degree of technological sophistication where we can engage in rational design and engineering design of ways to really combat ageing.
People who tell you that human beings are going to live forever are speaking complete nonsense. Those who say that can extend life span will take if with a grain of salt, because maybe 100-120 years will become fairly common, but I don’t think it will be easy to go on much beyond that.
If we have the same degree of control over aging in humans that we know have over infectious decease’s, then neither of them would be a major course of death. So the major courses of death would then be by default the other things that we die of these days. Car accidents, wars, …In that sort of world would be more in the region of 5000 years.
Well look at this time as being a time where we where just on the preset of understanding what courses disease and death. Death is a disease.
The truth is that we should rejoice of what we are. But if you start playing around with scenarios that are holey unnatural and holey competitive and holey flying of the handle like individual fantasies of what they want to do. You are going to end up without as meaningful an individual of communal life.
People who are afraid of augmenting and upgrading the human body will not be afraid of It 10 years or 20 years from now when it hits the mainstream.
Technology that can happen, does happen. So we have to accept that sooner or later this is going to be developed. Some people are going to like the idea and take advantage of it. Probably most people are going to do so.
