Over the years, I've been met with all kinds of hostile attitudes to my presence. Even today, I meet people who seem to instantly dislike me based on how I look and what they think I represent. So many preconceptions and prejudices swirl around my work and my person, I have often felt like an exile from the places and institutions I was meant to be part of. Much of this had to do with the fact that my work is me - I am the embodiment of the invention, and, in many ways, I am my own solitary institution. Thus, intensely personal reactions were to be expected, as my literal presence is an assertion of complex forces in the world. My appearance twenty years ago forced confrontation, unveiled hidden biases, and asked questions that could not easily answered. Though today the WearComp I wear is all but undetectable, I have spent never sought to turn away from the question of how the cyborg should or could function in society. I have spent a significant amount of time exploring the different ways the cyborg is understood in society, assuming roles as a cyborg photographer, cyborg performance artist, and cyborg sculptor. The results of my social and cultural experiments, far from being secondary to my work as an engineer and teacher, have instead enhanced my perception of the way the cyborg in particular and personal technologies in general have come to be feared, or at least not always welcomed.

So I have sought to be not just an inventor, but also an explorer surveying the complicated terrain of a society at once in the throes of, and horrified by, its own technological contrivances. This is, at times, an awkward marriage. A textbook I wrote on intelligent signal processing was accepted for publication only on the grounds that I remove my philosophical musings, evidently not appropriate for graduate-level engineering and computer science students. Yet when I teach, I end up teaching not only the principles of engineering that involve the building of computers, but also the underpinnings of my philosophical stance, which sometimes calls into question the corporate-controlled invisible technological society we currently live in. The crossroad society faces is not just a hypothetical idea, but one I feel every day when my work as an engineer competes and even interferes with my commitment to exploring the moral ramifications of cyborg technologies as something more than just a new wave of product with which we can play.

In truth, many of us would rather not be confronted by a entity that makes the invisible hardware of day-to-day life a personal reality. Such confrontations, after all, are the stuff of myths and legends - Frankenstein, the Golem of Prague, and later the Terminator - all incarnations of our fear that we will one day transcend and endanger our humanity through technology. As Donna Haraway writes, "A cyborg is simultaneously a myth and a tool, a representation and an instrument, a frozen moment and a motor of social and imaginative reality." I know all too well the way one can stand in flux between horror and fascination, desire and disgust, one's very existence reduced to either "myth" or "tool." And yet, neither state is particularly desirable for the autonomous human being. My presence as a functioning cyborg forces me to confront and attempt to understand -- and alter -- the hostility I encounter wherever I go. Neither myth nor tool, the challenge is to make it clear what I am and what I intend to continue to be: a human being seeking to reclaim the essential attributes of the individual through greater control over and integration with wearable technologies.

I have come to realize that hostile reactions have less to do with who I am and much more to do with what I am perceived to be: an embodiment of corporate and bureaucratic control over a frightening, changing world; a kind of walking, talking technological slave -- the invisible chains binding us to machinery made suddenly apparent to all. Or perhaps, I have reasoned, hostility stems from what Joseph Dumit has termed "cyborg envy," described as "existing alongside stressful fears of the human species being outpaced by the world." In "cyborg envy" Dumit theorizes that individuals "dream of...technological redemption" even as they come to think of their bodies "as somewhat deficient cyborgs." In other words, it is not just those who fear becoming cyborgs that react with antagonism to my presence, it is also those who resent the fact they are not yet full-fledged cyborgs.

Cyborg envy and cyborg fear stem from society's overall failure to implement and explain technology as that which human beings develop and control. As a cyborg, I have sought to confront not just the random outbursts that reflect the understandable insecurities of a society navigating extreme change, but also the systemic apparatuses that perpetuate our widespread anxiety over technology. Which is to say that my everyday, unplanned encounters with the hidden technologies that modulate and direct human life constantly remind me that, for many of us, the cyborg persona is a horrifying one simply because we lack control over so much of the technology that determines important aspects of our lives. We are used and controlled by our technologies at least as much as we use and control these same technologies. As a result, our social consensus seems to be that technology is mysterious, inherently dangerous, a creature to be controlled only by the specialists and the experts. Someone who purports to walk around in everyday life wearing a computer is breaking the rules, challenging sacrosanct assumptions.

Of course, most people do nothing overt to indicate their disapproval or discomfort with the way I defiantly mix the hidden trappings of a technological society with the mundane activities of every day. But then, the vast majority don't have to say anything; they know that in our "free" society they can count on the agents of corporate control to raise countless objections to my existence. Rote responses from managers, security guards, customs officials, airline employees, and various governmental functionaries have served to demonstrate why the cyborg is so very suspect in a society that outwardly seems only too comfortable with technology. The truth, as evidenced by countless encounters with agents of authority, serves to illustrate a bias that I have long suspected: technological innovation is welcome only in so far as it can be controlled and regulated in ways that subjugate the power of the individual to corporate purposes.

Let's take flying to another country as an example. When traveling by air, I am almost invariably informed by a customs agent or security representative or airline steward that I must remove my wearable gear (which does not affect the functioning of the airplane in any way). I have become increasingly unwilling to accede to such demands, as there is no real reason for me to remove the apparatus - no statute or law - and no prohibition of bringing WearComp across a border. Arguments that I could be, for instance, a walking bomb are patently ridiculous -- a hijacker does not show up at check-in with a stick of dynamite taped to his forehead. It may seem reasonable to the reader that those charged with protecting the plane from terrorism would be wary of my gear. At the same time, the often unprecedented levels of belligerence I encounter suggest an institutionalized cyborg hostility; the airline representative's hostility is the same hostility I've encountered in the department store, in the subways of big cities, and even in universities I've attended such as MIT and Hamilton, Ontario's McMaster. If I am not accosted or shunned, people will often want to know who is doing the experiment on me, as if to suggest that I am merely the product of a large corporate vision. The proverbial tip of the iceberg, this hostility is just a small manifestation of the hostility toward anyone who attempts to use technology for purposes that fall outside the parameters of our system: You can't do/wear that. Why? Because you can't.

Unlike Obi-wan Kenobi, the Force is not yet at my disposal -- in response to such situations there is no gizmo I can use to change the minds of those hired to maintain the unstated social norms that govern technological use. Thus I have relied on extreme reactions to safeguard my right to wear and operate technology that is unimposing on those around me and allows me to go about my work while on a long flight (after all, WearComp at its simplest is just another version of the portable computer: I may edit a piece of writing, I may answer e-mail, I may read an article).

In the 1980s I responded to continual demands to remove my WearComp system by growing my hair through fine mesh in a skull cap and then "locking" it on the other side (hair-locking may be accelerated by teasing in beeswax to cause the hair to tangle together permanently). I had already been using conductive/metallic hair dyes to help make my hair form part of a ground-plane for a transmitter, so my hair was sufficiently "damaged" to allow it to lock quite easily. The skull cap formed a substrate upon which other devices could be mounted. In this manner, I could not reasonably be asked to remove the apparatus, because that would require cutting it off my hair. This necessary subversion of the body provided a reasonable barrier to the constant requests by others that the apparatus be removed.

A more recent variant of this same approach depended on modifying the brain rather than the body. Since WearComp allows me to computationally augment, diminish or otherwise alter the perception of reality for the purposes of attaining a heightened sense of awareness, including compensating for visual/spatial/mental deficiencies that cannot be corrected with ordinary prescription eyeglasses, I could argue that I had medical requirements that necessitated wearing the system. Removal of the apparatus could result in my inability to see properly, as well as in sensations of nausea, dizziness, and disorientation. Since WearComp involves deliberate modification of the visual system -- the development of alternate neural pathways through the process of certain kinds of very long-term visual adaptation -- I would explain that I have attained a permanent or semi-permanent bonding with the apparatus, in the sense that others cannot reasonably ask that it be removed.

Coupled with this argument, I might also make the kind of legal argument that almost always frightens authority's representatives: using the rules and regulations of hierarchical responsibility against itself, I would point out that because requiring me to remove my device amounts to a violation of my physical space -- my body -- the agent must be prepared to accept legal responsibility for any brain damage or onset of flashbacks that might result from a sudden re-instantiation of the old (temporarily or semi-permanently weakened) neural paths. Thus, when asked to remove the apparatus - if in fact it even could be removed (if it were not permanent or semi-permanent) - I might present the representative with a form to sign declaring that they (the agent and the entity on whose behalf the agent acts) accept all responsibility for any damage their demands could do to me.

In such public situations, I have confronted cyborg hostility with my own attempts to show this hostility is really hostility directed against the hidden prognostications of technologies that seem to rule our lives through prophecy and mystery. Increasingly, technology seems to hide behind the walls of the corporate logo - it works that way because head office says it has to work that way. Similarly, I am denied my right to challenge the way technology works or even to wear my own technology as I see fit because, again, according to the "powerless" clerk confronting me, that's the way "management" or "head office" says it has to be. Experiences of cyborg hostility -- essentially the result of an anxiety-ridden populace subjugated to the misguided use of invisible technologies -- have informed my development of a different social agenda and inspired the "performance" interventions into society that I will shortly describe to you. Over the years, such a philosophical stance has alleviated the solitude I have experienced and the hostility I have encountered -- from people who know nothing about me and my work -- wherever I have gone.