Here’s Part I of a great discussion of the ways prosthetics—in their ever more sophisticated forms—are raising ethical questions about bodily augmentation and mechanical advantage. The image is of Oscar Pistorius, an athlete and bilateral amputee who’s been able to seriously compete against both able-legged runners and at the Paralympics. Continue reading »

From Mitchell Whitelaw’s Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life: “New media art self-consciously reworks technology into culture, and rereads technology as culture. What’s more, it does so in a concrete, applied way; it manipulates the technology itself, with a nonindustrial latitude that admits misapplication and adaptation, rewiring and hacking, pseudofunctionality and accident. New media art also … Continue reading »