writing a final paper for my senior seminar in new media theory at ucsc. i would like some comments, questions, feedback, etc….thank you.

Eugene Thacker states in his book Biomedia, “what we find with biomedia is a constant, consistent, and methodical inquiry into this technical-philosophical question of ‘what a body can do’” (Thacker 6). Thacker questions the importance of our programmable flesh, where it is today and where it will take us in the future. Body as medium becomes an important issue throughout chapter one of Biomedia as well as in Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation as the human body has the capability of transforming data from the mind through physical appearance. Through analysis of Thacker, Bolter and Grusin’s text we are able to find reason as to why humans use their body as a medium. We are constantly questioning what our bodies can do, finding ways in which we are able to test the strength of our flesh and its ability to disrupt formal ways of thinking.
Thacker begins chapter one of Biomedia with the tile "What is Biomedia?" The question is broad allowing him to bring elements of several different new media theorists, collecting information from a number of different areas. He states, “Contemporary media theorists have carried this notion further, suggesting that in its more extreme forms, technology fully absorbs the body (e.g. in posthumanist visions of “uploading”), that technology ambivalently collides with the body (e.g., Arthur Kroker’s study of “panic bodies”), or technological development configures new boundary arrangements in relations to the body (e.g., Donna Haraway’s reappropriation of the militaristic trope of the “cyborg”) (7). In order to understand the topic of biomedia to the best ability, it is important to see more extreme forms of technology’s ability to absorb the body. (I need help with this part, where should I go without falling way off topic?)
I want to talk about posthumanism (flesh-eating 90s(Kroker)/Gibson’s Neuromancer/) and skip over cyborg/military trope because I do not know much about it but I feel like this could lead into a whole new topic, yet without it, the paper will feel in complete (at least to me). The idea that our bodies are programmable relates with using our bodies as a medium in a sense that we are programming ourselves into something else. We are taking data from our minds, programming it, and then displaying it as a vision. Hayles talks about being able to separate our bodies from our minds, like Brown’s study of humanism and anorexia. Anorexia is technically a way of using the body as a medium.
I think that what I am getting at is that as humans; we use our bodies as a medium to display the dictatorship that our mind has over our body. Using Stelarc and Orlan as examples show the human ability to allow the mind to dictate the body into transforming into what data the brain has collected. Stelarc and Orlan are extreme examples but they show how large of ability the mind has to dictate the body into really questioning, “what a body can do?”
“In its character as a medium, the body both remediates and it remediated. The contemporary, technologically constructed body recalls and rivals earlier cultural versions of the body as a medium. The body as enhanced or distorted by medical and cosmetic technologies remediates the ostensibly less mediated bodies of earlier periods of Western culture” (9). Thacker makes note of this from Bolter and Grusin’s text, in relation to pop art figures such as Stelarc and Orlan, is it possible that they are using new media technologies (i.e. cosmetic surgery, attachment of prosthetics, tattooing) to reflect ideas of what Western culture used to be. What is the connection between new technology and its ability to reflect ideas of the past?
“To mediate the body is to reify it twice, first through medicine, second through technical practices, both of which are at offs with out sense of individual subjecthood” (11). How do people use both medicine and technical practices to mediate their bodies? How do we differentiate medicine from technology and where are we able to draw the line between the two? In what ways are new media technologies and traditional Western cultural traditions related? How is new media a representation of the past?