cybernetic organisms
by Marlies Wirth
The cyborg, a much-cited being composed of organic and mechanic material is a fascinating creature of literature, theater and film. It makes us relate to our own frailty and incompleteness, looking back at us from the abyss of our own technological creations. Through the influential text A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway (1985) the cyborg thus became the symbol of a generation: a paradigm of “the other”, the woman, the colonial, the outcast. The cybernetic organism is a myth and yet a graspable goal enabled by digital and medical advancements of the recent past and present. With the rise of robots, artificial intelligence and human enhancement through technology the body has once more become the center of attention. The human form as a shape, the body as an iconic signifier of what we call “humanness”.
In an attempt to end the dichotomy of man and woman, human and machine, nature and culture, physical and metaphysical being, the idea of the cyborg as defined by Haraway has brought feminist movements to the forefront. Humans of all genders are claiming the right to take their bodies back from oppression, exploitation, rejection and exhaustion. The body is a temple, a battlefield, a temporal shell, something to show and to hide at the same time. Its naked display is as polarizing as its visual veil, both claiming to limit the freedom of its bearer. The human form is defining the way we design the world around us to suit our physical needs, to define and extend it by means of sports, fashion, media and tools, to shelter, feed and deform it. The body denominates a whole era designed by and mostly for humans.
Concealing the human form with abstract, enigmatic shapes and silhouettes, Tina Lechner reveals her own take on the Anthropocene and the role of the female form, creating cyborgs by her own means. The fascination with the human form, its alteration, distortion or optimization is a wide phenomenon in various cultural contexts and epochs. In the current discourse, the technological promise of the augmentation and expansion of mind and body by means of prosthesis and implants create a new image of the human. Formally and aesthetically close to the styles of 1920s photography and fashion and with a technoid touch reminiscent of early science fiction – like Fritz Lang’s epic Metropolis – , Tina Lechner’s gelatin silver prints create an abstraction of the human form that visually renders reality to black and white. Applications of geometric, rounded, folded and creased shapes made meticulously by hand from a wide selection of material of various color, texture and structure obstruct and enhance the bearers, all of which are women, to a strange and enticing new organism. Skin tones and “prostheses” all monochromatic, a black and white scaled landscape of organic and inorganic parts, revealing its humanness only by glimpses of the body, a hand, an arm, a backbone bearing a shape, a face obstructed by futuristic contours.
13945/8. Pigment print, 2022
The costume is a means by which one can become what one is not, a pretense, a proclamation of a persona that reaches far beyond the self–a creation as such, a figure portraying invisible skills, the simulacrum of a body, beyond the flesh. In a slow, almost contemplative process, Tina Lechner develops her props, often made from textiles, carried by wittily engineered constructions to slip naturally onto the bodies of her models. Extensions of reality, non-functional, but still heavy, a weight to carry for the model during the photo shoot, but invisible to the viewer. A lightness, timelessness that makes Tina Lechner’s creatures seem natural, the protagonists not forced to the stage but born within the process of their creation.
The fascination–and suspicion–of the machine, which is potentially superior to humans characterizes our primal fear of “superhuman” technology and cyborgs. What is it that makes us human? The question of identity seems evident in Tina Lechner’s process of constructing her characters and their prostheses. Carrying their extended appendages, ranging from hat and helmet-like headpieces to structures and applications that are fitted onto limbs like adapters or full bodysuits, protective gear, encapsulating the body like spacesuits or armors, the models become intermediate beings, unable to move, frozen in time, stuck between realities.
The boundary between animate and inanimate matter seems ever more implausible, as in the difference between “real” people and their media incarnations, between “original” objects and dummies. The work we do on ourselves, forcing our minds and bodies to perform and outperform our own technological creations brings the non-natural structure of the human to light–we have made ourselves into what we are.
“I have always preferred reflection of life to life itself”, said François Truffaut. The photographic image of matter has claimed for centuries its irreversible bond with what we call reality.
Tina Lechner’s stylized black and white portrayals of characters never communicate information about the historical period, geographic location and time of their creation. The visual codification of the human figure of our own likeness renders it a stranger that is turning its gaze away from its onlookers. The works’ titles do not reveal what lies behind the mirror, only occasionally denominating a character by a common name or note referring to mythology, fashion, or a story that remains untold. The line between live and inanimate is never effectively drawn, the stillness of time embedded into the monochrome surface of the flat image that does not allow touching and revealing the warmth of the body against the coldness of the inanimate matter attached to it. In the photographic image, both become one.
What seems like the alienation of the human form throughout the process of Tina Lechner’s photographic enactment by obstructing and deforming it brings the human even closer. The cybernetic organism refuses to integrate in common categories of belonging and when stripped bare of its inherent features it ultimately leads to the conclusion of the unsolved enigma that we call the human condition.
AF 1138/3. Gelatine silver print, 2021