Performing the cyborg self: explicit and implicit examples of body hacking the distributed self

ABSTRACT Today, as many work and socialize completely online, we are more acutely aware than ever of the cybernetic relationship between the body (in-situ) and the virtually or digitally extended self. However, even before the onset of the current global pandemic (COVID-19), the contemporary ‘body’ had to be understood as extended beyond physical flesh, through global communications systems. How do our practices on these platforms reveal our evolving relationships with a distributed and digitally mutable body? Drawing on my own construction of cyborg theory as a subset of posthuman discourse, this paper links the practices of explicitly cyborg performance, like Stelarc and ORLAN, with the increasingly banal practice of body-hacking as it is realized in the performance of the self (both consciously and unconsciously) on distributed, social media platforms. These discussions touch both on identified trends in contemporary self-representation as well as artists whose work within those spaces acts as a comment, critique, and application of those practices. Through this discussion, I show how these practices can be understood as body hacking and how that body hacking can both reflect an increasing sense of personal empowerment in relation to the body as well as a morally ambiguous algorithmic redefinition of the paradigmatic body.