Corporeal Technology
Mixed media sculpture with robotics and found footage video collage
Materials
Papier-mâché, drywall compound, aluminum, PLA plastic, latex, acrylic paint, blood gel, DC motor, lithium-ion battery, iPhone
About:
Blurring the boundaries between flesh and machine, Corporeal Technology is a multimedia exploration of technological anxiety, digital desire, and the human body. At the heart, (or the hand, rather) of the project is the notion that technology is the ultimate extension of the body.
Inspired by films of David Cronenberg, the piece explores the tension between technological determinism and social constructivism. A robotic hand endlessly scrolling through historical clips and social media fragments as the director’s disembodied voice narrates the duality of our digital condition:
"The body, for me is the essence of the human existence. It is what we are and everything comes from that, including technology..."
Grounded in posthumanist theory and media critique, the sculpture invites viewers to confront how their use of technologies reshapes our sense of self.
Source Material
Creative Influences:
Videodrome (1983) “Long live the new flesh!”
eXistenZ (1999) “That wasn’t me. It was my game character.”
Crimes of the Future (2022) “Surgery is the new sex.”
In these films, technology becomes inseparable from the human form...
Much like a pacemaker, hearing aid, or prosthetic limb; media and entertainment become one with flesh.
Humans modify themselves for pleasure, survival, and connection, engaging trans-physically with screens, games, and implants. The body, in turn, mutates in response, producing tumors and growing new organs.
In this evolving ecosystem, the body adapts to process even its own technological byproducts. This reflects the tension between technological determinism, the idea that tech shapes humanity, and social constructivism, which argues human desire, culture, and imagination that shape our technologies in return.
Scrolling Video Collage
Video Resources:
The Flesh Gun | Videodrome (1983)
Crimes of the Future - "Surgery Is The New Sex"
The Torso Tape Player | Videodrome (1983)
Model Automat AKA The Age of The Robot|British Pathé
Academic Resources
Tripathi, A. K. (2014). Postphenomenological investigations of technological experience. AI & Society, 30(2), 199–205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0575-2
“Technologies either magnify or amplify human experiences and can change the ways we live. This non-neutral, transformative power of humans enhanced by technologies is essential feature of the human–technology relations. Technologies are the extension of our bodies.”
Ferrario, L. (2022). Segnalibro Videodrome di David Cronenberg, 1983. Materiali di Estetica, 9(1-2), 404. https://doi.org/10.54103/mde.i9.1-2.18408
“In Videodrome, the contamination between human beings and technological devices expresses in McLuhanian terms the internal mutation of man when a new technology is introduced into society, in this case television and in particular home video, a mode of fruition that was revolutionary at the time and worrying for the future of cinema.”
“The relationship between body and technology, the sex-violence binomial, media mind control symbolized by the brain tumor caused by the Videodrome virus, and the loss of the boundary between the real and the virtual.”
Aparicio, M. I. (2021). Life is (not) a game: the abysses of image in the film eXistenZ. artciencia.Com, Revista De Arte, Ciência E Comunicação, (24-25). https://doi.org/10.25770/artc.25289
“The game-pod cocoon is a prosthesis; an extension of one's own body, totally organic... and, consequently, also, the limits of game that is gradually assumed here as the game of life itself.”
Fincher, B. (2025). Evolving away from the human path or performing plasticity? Crimes of the Future (2022) and David Cronenberg’s queer ecologies. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 00(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaf009
“This narrative form is a rehearsal for letting go of hegemonic, petro-fueled attachments that do not serve the plastic paradigm that is unfolding, and that in its ongoing performativity demands a new narrative: one that does not portend a telos of nihilistic self-annihilation or saviorism but rather revels with curiosity and care in the excess of trans-corporeal flesh.”
Holmes, D., Turcotte, P.-L., Adam, S., Johansson, J., & Orser, L. (2023). Toward an ontology of the mutant in the health sciences: Re/defining the person from Cronenberg's perspective. Nursing Inquiry, 00(0), e12599. https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12599
“Cronenberg's work allows us to interrogate the body in all its complexity, contingency, and hybridity and provides avenues of rupture within current understandings of ‘the person’”
Film Recommendations: Tech and Human Interaction
