Exogenesis: Mind Children and Cultured Images in Battlestar Galactica. By Alanna Thain.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” W.J.T. Mitchell claims that we live in an era where biocybernetic technologies such as cloning, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence have actually made possible the uncanny fantasy of “the double” come to life.1 At the same time, we are dominated by another form of reproductive technology: visual media and the mass reproduction of images. The convergence of these two strands of reproductive technologies is ghosted by that seminal text of popular imagination, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The monster of that novel, so often conflated with its creator, initiates a series of fantasies that cross breed with scientific facts around the phenomena of ectogenesis: reproduction outside of the human body. Ectogenesis ranges from the existing technology of invitro (literally “in glass”) fertilization (and, interestingly, the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978, the same year that the original Battlestar Galactica debuted), to as yet science fictional fantasies of gestation, often of mass produced copies, such as the current Battlestar Galactica’s Cylon reproduction, by which dead Cylons resurrect after downloading into new, fully grown bodies in vast vats of goo. From Shelley’s novel onwards, fantasies of ectogenesis have been accompanied by the drive to make visible what has remained hidden: to render the body, and thus knowledge, transparent (or invisible, in the erasure of the mother’s body from the spectacle of reproduction). As relatively routine examples, we see this in the promise of genetic testing to reveal a child’s future or through visual representations of fetal life such as ultrasounds. As a more fantastic televisual example, in season three of Battlestar Galactica, we see the Cylon Three’s serial suicides, motivated by the hope that, if she can just keep her eyes open long enough while being reborn, she will gain a prophetic and complete knowledge of the faces of the “final five.” Her ecstatic knowledge, though, results less in clarity than obscurity: punished for her epistemophilia, her model is now “boxed” and out of view. more... http://flowtv.org/?p=1029 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
