A Microchip Inside the Body

Arlindo Machado University of São Paulo, Brazil

After generalizing happenings, performances, and installations, afterquestioning the white cube of the museum and jumping to the public space,after borrowing from industry and employing all kinds of machines and technologicalapparatuses to make images, texts, and sounds, after discussing the tragedyof the human condition and laying bare the embarrassment, the segregation,the unspoken differences of race, sex, geographic origin, and socioeconomiccontingency�after all of this, art seems to orient itself now toward adiscussion of the very biological condition of the species.

For the past few years, artists like Orlan and Stelarc have broughtforward a cultural discussion of the possibility of surpassing the humanthrough radical surgical intervention, through the interface between fleshand electronics, or with robotic prostheses to complement and expand thepotentiality of the biological body. More than anticipate profound changesin perception, in our conception of the world, and in the reorganizationof our sociopolitical systems, these pioneers foresee fundamental transformationsin our species. These transformations could conceivably alter our geneticcode and reorient the Darwinian evolutionary process.

An important landmark of this current took place on November 11, 1997,at the cultural center Casa das Rosas, São Paulo, Brazil. On thisday, the artist Eduardo Kac implanted in his ankle an identification microchipwith nine digits and registered himself with a databank in the United Statesvia the Internet. Replacing the traditional branding with hot iron, themicrochip--a transponder tag-- is used to identify and recover lost orstolen animals. The microchip is connected to a coil and a capacitor, allhermetically sealed in biocompatible glass to prevent the organism fromrejecting it. The number stored on the chip can be retrieved with a tracker,a portable scanner that generates a radio signal and energizes a microchip,making it transmit back its inalterable number. The microchip implant inthe ankle has a precise symbolic meaning: it is an area of the body thathas traditionally been chained or branded.

The description sketched above is oversimplified and incomplete. Kac'swork, entitled "Time Capsule," also included several other elementsthat were directly or indirectly related to the implant. The physical spaceat Casa das Rosas was converted temporarily into something like a hospitalroom, with surgical instruments, a doctor to assist with possible complications,and an emergency ambulance (parked inside the premises by the front doorand visible from the street). There were also seven original photographson the wall--the only surviving mementoes of the artist's grandmother'sfamily, who were entirely annihilated in Poland during World War II. Inthe space we also saw computers that enabled access to the database inthe United States, allowed the artist's body to be scanned via the Internet,and transmitted the event worldwide as a webcast. The next day an X-rayshowing the position of the microchip inside the artist's body was addedto the site next to an enlargement of the database record. There was alsoa live broadcast of the whole event by a commercial television station(Canal 21), two more taped broadcasts by other commercial television stations(TV Cultura and TV Manchete), and great response in the local press beforeand after the event. The Argentinean daily newspaper La Nación publisheda full-page story and the New York magazine Intelligent Agent covered theevent with an extensive article. The artist himself may not have been ableto anticipate and contemplate all of the implications and consequencesof his intervention. Due to the broadcasts and the press coverage, forexample, the implant and netscanning of the artist's body went beyond theintellectual ghetto and acquired a public dimension: the next morning thestrange story of the man who had implanted a microchip in his own bodywas told and retold in cafes, subways, and in corporate offices by peoplewho do not even remotely follow developments in the art world.

Kac's intervention touches on difficult and uncomfortable points inthe debate on the philosophic, scientific, and ethical future of mankind.One month before the realization of "Time Capsule" at Casa dasRosas, the event was commissioned for the exhibition Art and Technologyby the Instituto Cultural Itau, also in São Paulo, and then cancelledby the same institution under the pretext that a microchip implant in ahuman being could bring serious legal problems for the sponsoring institution.In the United States, important research centers requested copies of thevideotape of the broadcast to analyze the experience while the WearableComputing list discussed the event on the Internet. The fact that the workbecame polemical both inside and outside the country in which it was realizedis a clear indication that Kac's intervention touched something important.As the placement of a foreign body (Duchamp's urinal) in the sacred spaceof the museum had unpredictable consequences for subsequent art, the implantationof a microchip inside the body of an artist will intensify the debate onthe paths that both art and the human species will travel in the next millennium.

Because Eduardo Kac is an artist and not a political activist, the eventhe realized at Casa das Rosas remains open to multiple interpretations.One can read the implant as a warning about forms of human surveillanceand control that might be adopted in the near future. The Brazilian pressapproached the event mostly from this point of view. The scenario evokedis that a microchip implanted in our body from birth could become our onlyform of identification. Whenever we needed to be identified we would bescanned, and immediately a databank would show records revealing who weare, what we do, what kinds of products we consume, if we are in debt withto Internal Revenue Service, if we are facing criminal charges, or if weare hiding from the judicial system.

However, one can also read Kac's work from another perspective, as asign of a biological mutation that might eventually take place, when digitalmemories will be implanted in our bodies to complement or substitute forour own memories. This reading is clearly authorized by the associationsthe artist makes between the implant of a numerical memory in his own bodyand the public exhibition of his familial memories, his external memoriesmaterialized in the form of photographs of his ancestors. These images,which strangely contextualize the event, allude to deceased individualswhom the artist never had the chance to meet, but who were responsiblefor the "implantation" in his body of the genetic traces he hascarried from childhood and that he will carry until his death. Will wein the future still carry these traces with us irreversibly or will webe able to replace them with artificial genetic traces or implanted memories?Will we still be black, white, mulatto, Indian, Brazilian, Polish, Jewish,female, male, or will we buy some of these traces at a shopping mall? Inthis case, will it make any sense to speak of family, race, nationality?Will we have a past, a history, an "identity" to be preserved?

Until recently humanity was understood, both philosophically and atthe level of common sense, as essentially opposed to machines and to prosthesesthat simulate biological functions. Human essence seemed to reside exactlythere, where the robot failed and revealed its limitations. However, withthe development of robotics, the automaton has progressively acquired competencies,talents, and even sensibilities we once considered unique to our species,forcing us continually to redefine our notions of what constitutes ourown humanity. More dramatic yet, the development of wet and biocompatibleinterfaces are enabling the insertion of electronic elements inside ourown bodies. These elements then become part of what we call ourselves.Kac's emblematic event seems to suggest that in the future the robot, sooften presented in science fiction as an invader usurping men's and women'splaces, might be inside us�might become ourselves.

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Arlindo Machado is a critic, curator, and professor at the Universityof São Paulo, Brazil. He has researched and published extensivelyon visual arts and new technologies. His books include The Specular Illusion:an Essay on Photography, The Art of Video, Machine and Imaginary: the Poeticsof Technology, and Pre-cinemas and Post-cinemas (in Portuguese). A. Machadoreceived the National Photo Award from the Brazilian Foundation for theArts (FUNARTE) in 1995. He is the Chair of the 1999 edition of "Invenção",an international symposium on electronic art sponsored by ITAU, CAiiA andLeonardo.

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