Technology
These artists and performers are biohacking in incredible ways
From mind-reading prosthetics to a super-human drumming arm, meet the mavericks blurring the lines of art and science through their work.
Biohacking is on the rise. From CRISPR gene-editing to chip implants, this cyborg-styled subculture is constantly raising the bar on what humans ever thought possible.
With that in mind, here are some of the boundary-pushing artists and performers using technology to transform our view of the world – and shape the future of it.
The cyborg who hears in colour
Implanted in his skull, the antenna converts colour data into sound waves
© Hector Adalid
Born with achromatopsia (total colour blindness), cyborg artist Neil Harbisson has never seen colour, but thanks to technology, he can ‘hear’ it. “Although I’ve never seen it, colour has dominated my life, so I became interested in the theories relating colour and sound,” he explains. Fifteen years ago, Neil had a permanent antenna implanted in his skull which converts colour data into sound waves, allowing him to hear and feel colour through bone conduction.
“Colour is a vibration, a light frequency,” he adds. “When you put vibration in a bone it becomes a sound. Red, for example, travels at 420,000,000,000,000 sound waves per second. That’s a specific musical note. This allows me to hear and feel colour in my skull."
Harbisson’s antenna allows him to sense, feel and hear colours that go beyond the visual spectrum, including both ultraviolet ("very high pitch, aggressive") and infrared, his favourite colour ("low frequency, very peaceful"). Harbisson has translated this into musical compositions and artwork, but as a cyborg artist he sees the creation of his new sense, which he calls Sonochromatism, as the art itself.
Currently, Harbisson is working on a new implant – a heat source that will be implanted in his head to give him the sense of time. “It will be a point of heat that will take 24-hours to complete a circle around my head,” he explains. “If my brain gets used to the 24-hour cycle I can then start creating time illusions; by making the heat source spin several times I could create the illusion that I’m time travelling and could change my perception of age in the long-term. I could feel I’m 150-years-old when biologically I’m just 70."
Harbisson is working on an implant that will give him a new sense of time
© Neil Harbisson
As he no longer feels 100% human, Harbisson identifies himself as a transpecies and a cyborg. An activist in both areas, he has co-founded both the Cyborg Foundation and the Transpecies Society, which supports the rights of people with non-human identities and offers the creation of new senses.
Amy Karle: the bioartist growing bone
Amy Karle's artwork uses technology to explore what it means to be human
© amy-karle-biohacker
Thanks to bioartist Amy Karle’s artwork, growing bone and organs from our own genetic material is closer to fact than it is to fiction. Karle was born with a life-threatening birth defect that gave her an early interest in healing and enhancing the human body. Her work of art, Regenerative Reliquary, [above] is a project aiming to grow bone from human stem cells. If it works, it could revolutionise how we approach transplants, and even organ creation. “If this kind of process is viable, it means we can make replacement parts for humans using their own genetic material with a much lower risk of rejection than if we use foreign materials,” Karle explains.
Karle had already worked with bone when her own pregnancy and a trio of contributing factors, including an interest in religious relics, a friend’s need for a double lung transplant and Karle’s work printing 3D prosthetics for children with upper limb differences, inspired her to think about 3D printing implants. “I thought, instead of making implants that could potentially be rejected, what if we made 3D prints from someone’s own genetic material?"
Amy Karle's Regenerative Reliquary
© Amy Karle
Working in collaboration with nano-scientists and materials experts on the project, Karle 3D printed a hand-shaped scaffold using biodegradable hydrogel. Human stem cells were then seeded onto the scaffold which is housed in a bioreactor. All going to plan, the cells will grow into tissue and eventually mineralise into bone. The project is ongoing, but Karle hopes it will be successful. “The process takes about two years. We can’t grow any faster than the bones of the human body can grow,” she explains.
Future applications could see a patient’s own genetic material being used for their own benefit. “Say you’re missing a piece of bone in your face; we could medically scan the other side of your face, make a replica piece, make a mould and then 3D print a scaffold out of the hydrogel and seed your own genetic material on to it. Over time the scaffold would disintegrate and the bone would grow,” explains Karle, who is keen to point out the ethical and moral challenges that come with new technological advancements.
Karle hopes her work could one day help transplant patients
© Amy Karle
“Do I see a future where we can grow our own body parts and organs? Yes, I can envisage that future, but it brings up a lot of ethical and moral issues,” warns Karle. “This is where bigger exploration comes into play and we really have to consult a lot of different fields – philosophers, ethicists and policy makers – [before we go ahead], not just have the ability to do it scientifically. We have to think about our good as a species and the long-term effects on humanity too."
Jason Barnes: the ‘bionic’ drummer
Barnes can drum at a speed twice what is humanly possible
© Georgia Tech
When keen musician Jason Barnes was electrocuted by 22,000 volts of electricity in a freak work accident in 2012, his right wrist and hand had to be amputated. Little did he know that six years later he’d be involved in developing ground-breaking technology that could give amputees their functionality back.
A musician from a young age, Barnes was days away from applying to the Atlanta Institute of Music when a transformer exploded, leading him to require amputation. Undeterred after his surgery, Barnes returned from hospital and taped two drumsticks to his bandaged stump in a bid to continue drumming. Next, he fashioned a basic custom prosthetic. But it wasn’t until he teamed up with Gil Weinberg, roboticist and professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, that things got interesting.
Gil and his team developed a prosthetic drumming arm for Barnes, which included two drumsticks: one controlled via electromyography (EMG) and designed to read signals from the flex muscles in his forearm; the second, essentially a wearable robot, which utilised a mix of pre-programming and artificial intelligence to ‘listen’ to Barnes’ tempo and rhythm and improvise. The result was a super-human drumming arm capable of a combined hit-per-second rate of 40 – more than twice what is humanly possible. It enabled Barnes to create a new genre of music.
Inspired to push the boundaries, Gil and Barnes wanted to find a clearer, stronger signal than EMG could provide and turned to ultrasound, leading them to develop what’s been dubbed the ‘Luke Skywalker Hand’ – a five-fingered prosthesis that Barnes can control using his mind. Ultrasound picks up the signals sent from the brain to his muscles, effectively giving him functioning fingers.
It’s still a work in progress, but future applications, if successful could transform the lives of amputees and people living with disabilities.
Moon Ribas: the seismic sensor
Moon Ribas
© Lars Norgaard
Whenever an earthquake hits, Catalan cyborg artist, dancer and choreographer, Moon Ribas, can feel it, regardless of where in the world it takes place. Ribas’ non-human sense – which she calls her ‘Seismic sense’ – allows her to be finely attuned to the earth’s movements, feeling every earthquake the planet experiences via implants in her feet which are connected to online seismographs. Ninety percent of quakes are imperceptible to humans, Ribas says, yet she feels every one. “I have two beats in my body; a heartbeat and an ‘earth beat’,” she explains. “Depending on the strength of the intensity of the earthquake, I feel a strong or less strong vibration, and I experience at least two every hour.”
Like Harbisson, Ribas is a co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation and the Transpecies Society, and as a cyborg artist, sees herself as the audience of her own art, which she experiences internally via her implants. “As artists that we no longer have to use technology as a tool – we can use technology as part of ourselves and change our perception of reality,” she explains.
In order to share what she feels, Ribas creates external artwork through performance and percussion. Her ‘Waiting Room’ performance is carries out in real-time and requires her audience to wait until an earthquake takes place, which she interprets via movement, depending on the strength of the vibrations. “It’s a bit like a duet between the earth and myself – earth is the choreographer and I’m just interpreting the data,” she explains.
The Cyborg Foundation is bringing biohacking to the mainstream
© The Cyborg Foundation
Does she see a future where it’s commonplace for people to modify themselves using technology instead of the planet? “I think that’s definitely an option. Everyone now accepts [people] uniting with technology for medical reasons, and many people also accept people doing it for practical reasons, like people who have chips [implanted] to open doors. But it’s also a human choice. I think in the future there will be another type of diversity: people who have modified their bodies, people who have not. People united with technology, people who are not. There will be many different ways of modifying or identifying yourself, so it will become another form of diversity.”
