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• 1 2022-12-10T17:15:15-08:00 The Digital Body 1 plain 2022-12-10T17:15:15-08:00

  When bodies are morphed, it becomes difficult to tell between one person and another, the boundaries between them are no longer there. This is a trick that is used by marketing people to show the similarities between different races and the blending of the races. The use of this technology has gone so far as to be used in movies, for example Fast and Furious 7. Paul Walker had died during the filming of the movie so the solution to this was to use the morphing technology to put Paul Walker’s face onto his brother’s face using CGI. . Another famous example of this technology was in Michael Jackson’s music video for his song Black or White. “Galton reported that officials stationed in India had complained that “[t]he uniformity in the colour of hair, eyes, and complexion of the Indian races renders identification far from easy, and the difficulty of recording the description of an individual, so that he may be afterwards recognised, is very great.” But this problem was not confined to India” (Cole). Sir Francis Galton had hopes to eliminate the racial types that were thought of as characteristically diseased in a way, in the name of eugenic science. Eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve their goal of improving the genetic composition of the human race.

      The Time magazine “New Face of America” image was intended to portray the beauty of a mix of different ethnicities as a way to remove the barriers of race. It gave a hint of a possible future with new races of people that came about through the process of selective breeding or cloning. Several people fell in love with the created woman on the magazine and the most important thing was that the love would be given and not returned because only then is it true or maybe it just was not possible because Eve was a virtual person.

      An artist Nancy Burson was one of the main people involved in developing computer software that allowed a person to look into someone’s future. Not literally, but the software made portraits age, as in, being able to see what a person would look like in the future. This technology is even used in present day and a large number of the population can benefit from it, whether it is to locate a missing person who may have aged significantly or just to have a laugh using it as a snapchat filter or something related to it. Burson made a series of advertisements that made a statement about facial features that belong to different races of people. She called it Craniofacial and it comprised of portraits of people with features that deviated from “normal” features.

      Techniques such as morphing and the relationship between the body and technology incite concepts that sound futuristic. When thinking about the relationship between a body and technology, cyborgs come to mind. “the peculiar “relationship” of a cyborg refers exclusively to: “Entities that became historically possible around World War II and just after.” (Frykenberg). Cybernetics was founded by Norbert Weiner and it combined communications theory and control theory. In cybernetics, control and communication is the key to the human body, mind, and automated machines and systems. “Cybernetics was also important to a developing perception of the United States as an "information society," in which information, rather than matter or energy, was the key element of economic and social life.” (Kline). Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the term “cyborg” which referred to “self-regulating man-machine systems” which they were researching relating to the difficulties of space travel.