Quantum mechanics, back in the early part of this century, established the wave/particle duality of electrons. During the war nuclear physics focused, of course, upon the splitting of the atom. But after the war Bell Labs applied the new physics to the amplification of electrical signals. They replaced the cumbersome vacuum tube for the first time with a solid device: the transistor. Transistors soon developed into semi-conductors and semi-conductors brought about miniaturisation. Now, more than 10,000 times earth's population of them are made every day. (Interestingly, the having/being/doing conundrum, in a rather physicalist metaphor, can be likened to the concept of wave/particle duality - our identities are the waves, our bodies the particles.) In sum, the application of quantum physics gave us the bomb, the computer, and the era of code; and the most crucial of those codes: the human genome. We stand, today, upon the threshold of the possibility that the wave may begin fundamentally to rewrite the particle - we are, like Oppenheimer, opening up a Pandora's box into an awesome power for radical change. The genetically modified sheep, Dolly The Clone, recently gave birth. The Times announced, "Mutton Dressed as Lamb," when it was revealed that the new born lamb was, genetically, already six years old. Multinational companies like Monsanto sell so-called 'Terminator Seeds' to Africa and India with the marketing ploy that their genetically modified crops, that do not reproduce, are feeding the world. But, of course, we already have enough food to feed the world; 800 million people go hungry every day because Europe and America are eating it all - worse - throwing vast amounts of it away. Now Africa and India will have to buy seeds every year, and, probably, their monarch butterflies will be poisoned by GM pollen, too.

Cynic you may call me, but echoes of the Fredersen Corporation return to mind. The priests of the scientific community, and their funders, multinational corporations, want to apply this technology in as many ways as possible, motivated not by some arch political dogma born in the southern forests of Germany, but by the sheer voraciousness of the guiding principle of the whole of Western Society - the profit motive - and its masters on the Wall Streets of this world. It is, indeed, the march of rationalisation and dehumanisation so starkly heralded in Baudrillard's dark mirror. People reduced to objects reduced to code.

The Zoque people of the Chapas region of Southern Mexico were a pre-Mayan people who first developed the Tzolkin, the calendar and alphabet system of the later Mayan Codices. They tightly bound the heads of some babies with stout wooden boards and cloth, which physically changed the shape of their heads as they grew. Now, a well known Australian performance artist, of course, has taken all this to its rational extreme. One better than the mouse, Stelarc is growing himself an extra human ear, too. Self-mutilation for art's sake, indeed. Like the performative citing of a religious rite that leaves it mark on the body, so common amongst oral-tradition peoples the world over, Stelarc's art-performances physically impinge upon his body.

Through his art and his writings, Stelarc propounds the view that the human body is in fact, obsolete. Perhaps, indeed, as he says, "It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form." Hm. He uses the language of function, malfunction, modularity, and objectifies the body as separate from, detached from, the individual self, which is deemed as inhabiting what is now to be regarded as an outmoded vessel. Some quantum physicists, it must be said, don't actually subscribe to the wave/particle duality of electrons, insisting that the particle concept is quite outmoded, and that electrons are, quite simply, waves. "It might be the height of technological folly to consider the body obsolete in form and function," Stelarc admits, "yet it might be the highest of human realisations." (ibid) For him, the advances in medical technology are such that, "Patched-up people are post-evolutionary experiments."(ibid) With the looming possibilities of genetic engineering we will soon be in a position to make a whole range of such experiments. There is a sense of inevitability in Stelarc's work. He seems quite certain where things are going and equally determined to grasp them by the horns. Now, I am no technological determinist, but as a pragmatic cynic I would place bets on multinational corporations ultimately getting their own way, regardless of populist policy decisions in liberal democracies. But if the first decade of the next century turns out to be much like the 1950s in its wholehearted embrace of new technologies, I wonder what awaits us in the 20-teens.

In Washington DC in March 2000, I attended a conference run by DARPA (The Defense Advanced Rsearch Projects Agency, the central research and development organisation for the US Department of the Defense,) entitled "Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation." The morning sessions were given over to a series of talks from top military personnel from the navy, marines, army and air force, telling us what they wanted, what their requirements were; the afternoon sessions a series of 15 minute presentations by engineers from all over the US telling us what they were up to at present, what bio-mechanical research they could offer to the project. There was one buyer - dr. Garcia of DARPA, with $50m dollars of DoD money in his pocket. Heilein's "Starship Troopers" are now officially in R&D, but no-one is heading Steakley's warning, in his sci-fi novel, "Armor," about the consequences for identity of becoming part of an integrated human-machine system, and the qualitative leap involved in such integration, similar to the distinction between two such disperate human tools as a hammer and a city infrastructure. Interestingly though, though implants are not considered an option, at present. No-one wants to see captured American personnel on enemy vivisection tables.

Eduardo Kac, on the other hand, has already experimented with the phenomenon of human implants. In his Interactive Art, he seeks to step beyond the performer/audience binarism into a genuinely interactive practice, and his project, "Time Capsule" is a pertinent example. Into his akle - the event webcast live - he implanted a radio-wave-activated and powered identification chip developed for pets. He then registered himself on the ID chip database - breed:human, owner:himself. As he told me, just before Christmas 1999, he believes there is much good that can come from the new technologies currently being developed; but we must move forward with awareness, and with caution.

In conversation with Prof. Richard Norman, earlier this week, in Salt Lake City - the man who developed the Utah array which, following invasive brain surgery and implantation, is the basis of a new field of neuro-prosthetics - it is clear that, for now, at least, this technology may be capable of helping the blind to see a little, the deaf to hear a little, the paraplegic to move and direct a wheelchair by wanting to. Anything further is a long way off yet, and non-invasive neuro-mechanical devices, still further. But clearly it is within a decade that people will come to view wheels and various other mechanical devices as part of themselves, as parts of their bodies, to which they sub-attentively send instructions, and from which they sub-attentatively receive bio-feedback, in much the same way as we walk and feel the ground beneath us without needing to be consciously attentive to the control of our legs and the messages sent from our feet.

This is a qualitative shift beyond the conscious direction that, say, Stelarc exercises over his third arm. It is the leap in technology from hammer to city infrastructure, a human-machine relationship even more instinctual than the motorbike between one's thighs. It is, in short, something post-human.