Escape Velocity (42 page)

Eddie Deutsche, who works at San Francisco's Tattoo City, credits Kulz with pioneering the genre in the early to mid-eighties. "Greg started doing biomechanical stuff in a cartoony style, using solid black-and-white graphics," says Deutsche. "His forte was putting biomechanical imagery inside rippers. The next step after the ripped skin was the Borneo-style tribal shapes that I did, filled in not with solid black but with biomechanical imagery. You get the overall shape of a tribal tattoo, the curves and spikes and all that, and then when you get close up, it's got all the little biomechanical textures-the transistors-and-wires thing or the bony motifs from Giger's Necronomicon books."

Kulz, who tattoos at Erno's in San Francisco, is every inch the modern primitive, with his close-cropped hair and traffic-stopping techno-tribal tattoos: His backbone is overlaid with stylized black shapes somewhere between vertebrae and machine parts; an X-ray rendering of a pistol lies flat on his belly, its muzzle disappearing into his jeans; distilling tubes and pipettes jostle for arm space alongside a cogwheel and a circuit board.

"As a kid, I really loved The Six Million Dollar Man,'' he says, recalling the early seventies TV series about a severely injured astronaut who leaves the operating table a "Bionic Man"-a cyborg able to see through walls with his X-ray eye, run at eye-blurring speed on his prosthetic legs, and lift trucks with his artificial arm. "There was one episode where he tore his arm open

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and there were circuit boards in there; that really lit a fire under me," remembers Kulz. "Then I got Giger's Necronomicon 1, which had pictures of a woman in a body suit that Giger had painted on her. That was so inspiring!

"Around 'eighty-three, before anyone I knew had a biomechanical tattoo, I got tattooed by [the tattoo legend] Ed Hardy, who did a section on my arm. It's not really of anything, just tailpipes and circuit boards and distilling tubes and components picked out of Necronomicon 1. I wanted my arm to look all machine; I didn't want any hint of meat. Ed had previously done a Giger tattoo on Jonathan Shaw, but at the time I had no idea that anyone had ever gotten one.

"For years, I really pushed the biomechanical style. A big inspiration was industrial music-Throbbing Gristle, SPK-and the performance artists who shared that aesthetic, such as Mark Pauline, Chico MacMurtrie, and Barry Schwartz. I tried to take the same aesthetic and bring it into tattooing."

Kulz's tattoos are less illustrations than animated cartoons; he exploits his knowledge of human anatomy to create images that conform to the body's topography, coming to life when a muscle is flexed or a limb is rotated. According to Marcus Pacheco, biomechanical tattoos are becoming increasingly dynamic. "These days, a lot of the biomechanical work incorporates muscle and bone structure to create the illusion of the body being made out of mechanical components as well as organic materials that look metallic or rubberized," he says. "The biomechanical effect involves making body parts look metallic so that they look like 'organic equipment,' neither mechanical nor biological, but both."

Biomechanical tattoos speak volumes about the human condition in cyberculture. Putting an off-center spin on the tattoo's function as a marker of "outsider" status, they signal the alienation of the body they embellish: in cyberculture's maze of dualisms, the meat is the mind's Other. Moreover, they inflect one of the essential meanings of a tattoo-"to express what is happening on the inside," according to Pat Sinatra-with strange, new resonances; someone who represents his inner self as a riot of wires, light-emitting diodes, and BX cable glimpsed through a trompe I'oeil gash in his flesh possesses a self-image unique to the late twentieth century. Like the metal fetishist in Tetsuo, he may be acting out cyborg fantasies; contrarily, he may be saying, "Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me-a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but essentially

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mechanical." Alternately, biomechanicals may function as a sort of homeopathic medicine, symbolically inoculating the body against invading technologies. Or they may simply attest to the fact that the mysterious inner workings of information machines have attained totemic status in cybernetic subcultures. In tangled cables whose involutions conjure Celtic "knot-work" or Borneo-style abstractions filigreed with microcircuitry, we see the artifacts of a technological society endowed with magical associations.

To Shaw, the biomechanical style must be understood within the context of modern primitivism, which harks back to an essential humanism anchored in the physical body. "Primitive cultures evolved along certain lines for very strong reasons," he says, "and with the advent of technology a lot of these tribal cultural patterns have been swept away. I don't think mankind is ready, spiritually or mentally, for the transformations it's undergoing in the technological era; tattooing is a mute plea for a return to human values." Biomechanicals, he suggests, give vent to deep-seated anxieties over the body's uncertain future. "The world is becoming mechanically oriented and the human race is mutating," he observes. "I think biomechanicals appeal to the collective unconscious."

Conversely, the very "biomechanoid" mutations (to use Giger's term) that unsettle Shaw are the stuff of Cliff Cadaver's postevolutionary whimsies. In his Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue article, "How to Make a Monster: Modifications for the Millennium," the Hollywood-based piercer pays lip service to "modern occultists" who "reflect their inner spiritual growth . . . through a continually evolving physical body" and excoriates technological modernity ("our standardized society," "the made-for-TV existence") even as he abandons himself to cyberpunk fantasies about designer hair transplants that create a "marathon mohawk that extends from pate to tailbone"; dental implants in the form of "custom fangs of steel, gold or porcelain"; and "multiple piercings . . . around the circumference of the head ... to [create] a metal crown of thorns fit for the most outspoken heretic."'^^ Amusingly, Cadaver's posthuman being shares DNA with Haraway's "promising and dangerous monsters" as well as the Hell's Angels: He is a Utopian aberration, a self-made "monster God" who "disregard[s] all pseudo-restrictions of race, gender, sexuality, religion, or morality to focus upon [his or her] individual essence" and whose sign-off, after such high-toned ruminations, is the biker expletive "ftw" ("fuck the world"). '^'^

For the present, Cadaver's postmodern monster is pure metaphor, stippled on skin or trapped between the covers of cyberpunk novels; in some archaic future, however, such fictions may become palpable. " Tor, you see,' said the Illustrated Man, 'These Illustrations predict the future.' "*1

70

Joseph M. Rosen, M.D.: Of Human Wings and Wireheads

"We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and without a smile we declare that wings are asleep in the flesh of man."

-F. T. Marinetti^^^

Joseph M. Rosen may have a hand in that future. A reconstructive plastic surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and a professor at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering, Rosen is glowingly described in the video documentary Cyberpunk as a "cyberpunk hero" whose work with the disabled and far-flung speculations have captured the imaginations of those on cyberculture's fringes.'^^

Although he would wince at such a label, Rosen makes no secret of his research interests: bionics, human-machine interfaces, artificial nerve grafts, the simulation of operations in virtual environments, and the transplantation of limbs through immunosuppression. He is an acquaintance of Mark Pauline's (he performed surgical "revisions" on the artist's reconstructed hand); keeps abreast of advances in robotics (Anita Flynn from MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab has spoken as a guest lecturer in one of his classes); and tracks developments in virtual reality (as a research associate at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, from 1987 to 1989, he worked on surgical simulation with Scott Fisher). He teaches a course called "Artificial People-From Clay to Computers" and the titles of the presentations he delivers at technical seminars sound like one-sentence summaries of cyberpunk novels: "Nerve Chip-The Bionic Switchboard," "The Development of a Man-Machine Interface for Control of a Bioprosthesis."

An avid Gibson reader, Rosen is familiar with the surgically modified modern primitives who play walk-on parts in Gibson's narratives: Dog, the Lo Tek gang member whose scarred features are "a mask of

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total bestiality," his speech garbled by a "thick length of grayish tongue" and canine "tooth-bud transplants" courtesy of a Doberman pinscher; the Panther Modern gang member in Neuromancer whose face is "a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous."'^^

"There was nothing in Neuromancer that with enough funding and enough people I couldn't do in one of my laboratories," insists Rosen, adding the all-important caveat, "i/^ people weren't very critical and they just gave me the money and said, 'Do it, don't worry about whether it's far-fetched or not.' We're growing skin on collagen right now, so these things are in Scientific American articles and we're going to overrun Neuromancer soon."

He sees himself as a strange attractor, a transition point between embedded and evolving modes of thought. "I'm trying to get people to shift their paradigms," he affirms. "That's the role I see myself playing." He foresees a shift in emphasis, in reconstructive surgery and bionics, from the restoration of normal function or appearance to posthuman enhancement. "Presently, when we reconstruct somebody, we're repairing some injury," says Rosen. "In plastic surgery, the surgical field I'm in, we . , . repair defects of nature or acquired defects. In cosmetic or aesthetic surgery, we change the way [a normal patient] looks. To go the next step and implant . . , devices in normal people so that they can improve their skills is something we [wouldn't] do right now, but I wouldn't rule out something like that for the future.'"^^

He talks, with unnerving matter-of-factness, about the possibility of reconstructing human legs into limbs capable of kangaroo leaps by "taking a certain muscle and forming it into a band, almost like a rubber band"; augmenting human arms with robotic parts whose sensors and superhuman speed would obviate workplace accidents; and, borrowing an idea from the plastic surgeon Burt Brent, fitting mortals for angel wings-or, more accurately, flying squirrel membranes.'^^

In "Thoracobrachial Pterygoplasty Powered by Muscle Transposition Flaps," a somewhat tongue-in-cheek essay on the surgical construction of human wings, Brent takes his fellow plastic surgeons on a flight of fancy in the hope of provoking them to "extend [their] creativity.'" ^^ His imagination sparked by Leonardo da Vinci's speculations on human-powered flight,

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Brent brings "contemporary tissue transfer and plastic surgery principles" to bear on the problem.'^^ Flaps of skin shifted from the chest, expanded with saline-injected implants, and stiffened with transplanted ribs could be used to create a patagium (the thin membrane stretched between the fore and hind limbs of bats and flying squirrels). The powerful pectoral muscles of birds could be emulated by transposing the latissimus muscles and anchoring them to a "keel-like" extension of the sternum fashioned from bone grafts, similar to the jutting breastbone of a bird.

Rosen notes that a winged human wouldn't actually be able to fly "because he wouldn't match the rules in terms of the amount of weight compared to the amount of wing surface, although if you brought in hybrid materials, you could potentially build wings that would allow [a patient] to glide, like a flying squirrel."'^^

But it is the Gibsonian implications of Rosen's theoretical musings on implantable computer chips that have earned the surgeon an unlikely following among would-be cyborgs, or "wireheads."'^^ His technical speculations about interfacing peripheral nerve axons and integrated circuits hold forth the possibility of linking individual nervous systems to "mankind's extended electric nervous system"-a dream that is alive and well in the elusive subculture of "neurohackers," or "do-it-yourself brain tinkerers," uncovered by Branwyn.'^^ In his Wired feature, "The Desire to Be Wired," Branwyn quotes a correspondent on a BBS:

I am interested in becoming a guinea pig, if you will, for any cyberpunkish experiment from a true medicine/military/ cyber/neuro place. New limbs, sight/hearing improvements, bio-monitors, etc. Or even things as simple as under-the-skin timepieces.'^'

Cyberpunk fantasies such as these were catalyzed by Gibson's tantalizingly vague references to the "dermatrodes," or " 'trodes," with which Case jacks into cyberspace; evocations of simstim, a one-way brain link to another, wired body that enables a passive "rider" to share another human's sensorium as a "passenger behind [the] eyes"; and mentions of carbon sockets nestled behind ears, receptacles for silicon shards called "microsofts" that enable the user to instantly boot up any information stored on a chip.'^^

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So ubiquitous is the cranial jack in cyberpunk fiction that it has become semiotic shorthand for the genre in the same way that Frankenstein's neck bolts came to symbolize gothic SF. "Boreholes to the limbic system! Manipulation of the parietal lobes! Taproots to the visual and auditory cortices! Coining soon to a brain near you,'' gibes the Nation's John Leonard, in his auto-da-fe of cyberpunk novels and cybercul-tural criticism.'^^

But bionic dreams die hard. Cyberpunk enthusiasm for the ultimate interface between mind and machine-the brain socket-remains undiminished, sustained by pop science articles on neural prosthetics such as the Omni story that describes an experimental visual implant in which tiny electrodes were inserted into the visual cortex in a volunteer's brain; wires ran from the electrodes, through the patient's scalp, and into a computer. Signals sent from the computer stimulated the visual cortex, enabling the totally blind volunteer to perceive patterns of light made up of phosphenes, the "stars" produced by a blow to the head or by rubbing the eyes. "By the end of the decade," writes David P. Snyder in Omni, "the research team hopes to have constructed a device utilizing a [miniature] television camera that would interface with 250 or more implanted electrodes and a signal-processing computer to stimulate the occipital lobe.'"^"* The world of a blind person equipped with such a device would be rendered in pointillistic pinpricks of light, "something like a stadium scoreboard."*^^ William H. Dobelle, a researcher whose pioneering experiments in this area were conducted at the University of Utah, envisions a miniature television camera housed in an artificial eye fitted into the user's eye socket and attached to his or her eye muscles; a pair of glasses concealing a battery-powered microprocessor would translate the televisual images into phosphenes and transmit them to the electrodes implanted in the visual cortex.