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“People who say they are black are not actually black and people who say they are white are not actually white,” says Neil Harbisson, the world’s first legally recognised cyborg.
Harbisson, a 33-year-old colour-blind artist and transpecies activist, has had an antenna implanted in his skull that allows him to hear colours.
Harbisson’s antenna, which he regards as an extension of his body that also features in his passport photo, works by sensing the frequencies of colour in front of it, then translates these into vibrations through his skull, which he hears as an inner sound.
He then matches these sound waves to the colours they represent.
Harbisson can also sense infrared and ultraviolet, and says the antenna has opened a “new reality” for him.
“I [can sense] many more colours than [there are on] the visible spectrum, and many of these colours have no names,” he said, smirking. “There are many I’ve had to name myself.”
The flexible antenna, which he designed and which was “installed” in 2004, protrudes from the back of his head and hovers just above his forehead.
A hospital’s bioethics committee refused to allow one of its doctors to implant the antenna because it was not a pre-existing human body part and sensed more than a pre-existing human part could.
Harbisson then found a doctor willing to do it anonymously.
“I identify as being technology. I feel no difference between the software and my brain any more, that’s why I identify myself as a cyborg,” Harbisson said during his keynote speech last week at the Road to AI conference of data management company SAS.
He told the audience: “When I look at your faces, I can hear the sound of your faces. Instead of drawing someone’s face, I get close to someone’s face and I write down the sound of the eyes, the lips, the skin, the hair and I send them an MP3 of their face so they can listen to it.”
Harbisson says Woody Allen’s face sounds like an old painting, Robert De Niro has a melody on his lips because of its different shades of red, and Prince Albert of Monaco’s “face” is saved as his ringtone.
But that’s not all his “eyeborg” can do.
Harbisson can listen to a Picasso painting (and even hear the scream of the man in Munch’s painting The Scream), create visual representations of speeches (Martin Luther King’s speeches “look” pink and blue, while Adolf Hitler’s have no dominant colour), he can listen to food and explore space by connecting to the International Space Station while his feet are firmly planted on Earth.
“When I do this, my sense of colour is no longer on Earth, it’s outside this planet, and this allows me to explore space and the colours of space without having to go there. I call this becoming a ‘sensetranaut’,” he said, to roars of laughter and gasps of shock.
“Technology is allowing me to reveal a reality that already exists. If we merge with technology, we can reveal realities that are not normally visible to humans.”
Harbisson, who was born in Northern Ireland, is now in talks with the Swedish government to have him declared a citizen because that’s where the materials used in his eyeborg are from.
So how does he charge his body part? Initially, he had to “plug myself to a socket”, but now he just sleeps. “I’ve created a charging cushion so I charge myself when I sleep.”
His eyeborg is also waterproof, so swimming isn’t a problem.
Harbisson has an internet connection in his antenna that allows five people in the world to send him colours from a supermarket in New York or a sunset in Australia.
Although exciting, this does pose a risk.
“I was hacked once. Someone without permission sent colours to my head,” he said. “But I liked it.”
There are no regulations governing people who choose to add, or become, technology and, as co-founder of the Transpecies Society, Harbisson actively fights for the rights of cyborgs.
“We have been a species that have been designing and changing the planet to survive and I think this is wrong. We should be designing ourselves and modifying ourselves to survive,” he said.
His society has more than 400 people with technological implants. Some can detect the speed of moving objects through their ears, others feel earthquakes in their feet and are able to predict the weather within their body.
Harbisson believes humans should have “the right and freedom to design ourselves”.
His next project, though, seems a little over the top.
“The aim is to take Albert Einstein’s theory of time relativity into practice and see whether or not we can modify our perception of time,” he said.
So if we are not black or white in colour, what are we?
“People who say they are black are actually very, very dark orange and people who say they are white are actually very, very light orange. We are all different shades of orange,” said Harbisson, who still sees the world in black and white.
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