Considered one of the earliest modern prosthetists, Swiss physician Jean-André Venel (1740–1791) developed a corset for people with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. The idea was to treat a malformation or disability. Technically, the corset is an orthotic device, which compensates for an absent or deficient function, as opposed to a prosthesis, which replaces a function. Orthotics are the forerunners of the exoskeleton, the development of which is accelerating for civilian and military uses.

This exoskeleton can be used for therapeutic purposes or to augment the wearer’s motor skills. Many companies sell such products, in general as support for a strenuous activity or to treat physical handicaps. But DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is working on the most spectacular exoskeleton prototype, capable of turning a soldier into a nearly inexhaustible war machine.

Marie-Claude Baillif has suffered from myopathy since adolescence. Without her respirator, she would have died thirty years ago. Her website features eloquent articles about her special relationship to technology: "My survival depends on microprocessors and electronic cards"; "Electricity is a matter of life or death for me"; "I love my phlegm aspirator"; "A little battery is magical; it transforms my life." Technological devices keep her alive.

Classic orthodontic treatment using braces to align the patient's teeth. Originally therapeutic, it aimed to prevent jaw or dentition problems. Today it is also used for aesthetic purposes, establishing perfect teeth as a new norm of smile du sourire. The shift from correcting a physiological anomaly to improving appearance participates in manufacturing a relationship to the body as a malleable, correctible object. Implicitly, the body can be incomplete.

Inheriting the incubator means growing up in an immensely fragile environment that offers no guarantee outside those provided by the unsettling actions of knowledge, treatments, tubes, food, temperatures, and monitors. Instead of technically supporting desires for power turned towards the future, the incubator prompts the telling of another story, actively concentrating on a fragile present, a story woven from countless vital and uncertain relationships. Inheriting the incubator means insisting on remembering that technology and biology are committed to continuously building eminently precarious relationships.

Gabriel Dorthe in "Héritier de la couveuse," A contrario, no. 22, bsnPRESS, 2016.

This anti-aging light therapy mask supposedly makes whoever wears it every day for five minutes look younger. The sales pitch borrows from medical discourse, even though it is a beauty product like anti-aging cream. What makes the device symptomatic is its participation in the already dominant ideology of the perfect body while adding the cult of technology as a way to save it from decrepitude. It is a geeky, cheap, non-invasive version of plastic surgery.

The quantified self movement advocates measuring physiological data in order to be healthier. It is part of the trend towards predictive medicine and increasing life expectancy. Quantified self uses tools connected to applications. They are usually external, but many companies are working on integrating them inside the body. For example, heart rate, activity during sleep, the blood oxygen rate, or physical activity can be measured. Quantified self allows individuals to create their own connected space and, in a way, become a medium, in other words an information system.

Transhumanists often say that even apparently healthy bodies are sick and imperfect and that technology, like chemical prosthetics or dietary supplements, are a means to achieve physical perfection.

"Nootropics (from noos, "mind," and tropos, "bend"), also known as smart drugs and cognitive enhancers, are drugs, supplements, and other substances that improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals. Generally recognized as safe at low doses, nootropics are promoted in transhumanism as a means to improve living conditions or achieve specific goals, such as increasing motivation."

Wikipedia: "Nootropics" article

Dietary supplements can limit diseases and consequently increase life expectancy. They are only a stopgap until gene therapies to inhibit aging are developed. At least that is the message on transhumanist websites. They are a form of doping applied to everyday life. Ideologically, this apparently harmless practice is paving the way for the cyborg because it allies man with embodied technology.

The dietary supplement Elysium contains nicotinamide riboside, which has been shown to have positive effects on cell regeneration in mice. Although the findings of a 2016 study on humans look promising, the company's methods are controversial. Six Nobel Laureates are among its scientific advisers, but the power of this kind of supplement seems limited: aging is a multifactor process, and acting on one factor alone cannot slow it down.

These "total" foods are not dietary supplements but food substitutes. Water is added to powder that contains everything the body needs but nothing more. This practice is symptomatic of abandoning the body as a locus of pleasure and how much it is increasingly considered a vehicle, the functioning of which must be preserved. During my discussions, especially with the Russian transhumanist Danila Medvedev, I heard that, "thanks to this type of diet, we are gradually moving away from solid food while saving time and protecting our health." When I asked him about physical pleasure, he replied that on the scale of eternity—his horizon—that type of pleasure becomes trivial. The sales arguments put forward by companies that sell this powder are nutritional perfection, the quality of the products, respect for animals (veganism), and the saving of time.

Born in 1918, centenarian Jeanne-Marie Dudan enjoys drinking strong espresso, the only nootropic substance, along with tea, she has ever consumed.

“There are those who recommend, sometimes with ridiculous exaggeration, this liqueur’s beneficial properties, while others consider any amount harmful. To the latter we can quote Fontenelle’s reply to a doctor who told him that coffee is a slow-acting poison. ‘It is slow,” he said. ‘I’ve been drinking it every day for the past 80 years.’ That, I believe, is called irrefutable proof.”

Dr. Hyppolite-Alexandre Trifet, Histoire et physiologie du café. De son action sur l'homme, à l'état de santé et à l'état de maladie, Paris, Moquet Libraire-Editeur, 1846.

The pacemaker is a device implanted in the body that sends electric pulses to stimulate the heart muscle, accelerating, for example, the heartbeat when it is too slow. It is made up of a battery (photo) and electrodes connected to the patient's heart. Some are also automatic defibrillators. The same type of device can also be used to relieve certain kinds of chronic pain: the electric pulses act directly on the spinal cord. One of the first invasive electric devices, it is in that sense emblematic of the mechanization of the human body.

The boundary between repairing a damaged or dysfunctional body—here, my father's knee prosthesis, which is strictly therapeutic—and enhancing a healthy body may seem obvious, but it is very hard to define. When does a prosthesis leave the medical realm in the traditional sense of healing and become a means to enhance an individual? To answer that question, it is necessary to try to understand or define what health is. The World Health Organization's (WHO) definition is clear: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." The wording, which has not changed since 1946, implies that health has a shifting, fluctuating, subjective character. This definition makes it easier to understand why many transhumanists consider their healthy bodies an incomplete vehicle that must be "fixed" and "fulfilled."

For years, Defymed has been working on this prototype of an artificial pancreas, Mailpan, which could revolutionize the lives of diabetics. Mailpan is an implant filled with stem cells that can secrete insulin. The technological challenge is twofold: manufacturing a membrane capable of releasing oxygen and insulin while remaining impervious to the immune system when it attacks the stem cells; and finding cells that will manufacture insulin in an optimal way. When a syringe is inserted every three to six months, two ports placed under the skin allow the stem cells that have become inactive to be removed and replaced by new ones.

Dr. Blaise Rutschmann, head of the anesthesia, antalgia, and neuromodulation department, implanting a neurostimulator, a medical device used to treat chronic pain of neurological origin. Neurostimulation, a machine-generated electric pulse, causes paresthesia (numbness), which alters the patient's perception of pain. It is implanted in the spinal cord during a percutaneous procedure. Then a battery is implanted in the abdomen or upper thigh and a wire (photo) connects the box to the generator. As with a pacemaker, but in a more spectacular way, the patient is wired, making his or her body hybrid.

Morges Medical Center, December 2, 2016

The intra-uterine device (IUD) is a contraceptive invented in 1928 by Ernst Gräfenberg. It is a small object inserted into the uterus to prevent fecundation and, secondarily, implantation. The copper IUD locally releases copper ions and causes a reaction in the uterus due to the foreign body, which prevents the egg from being fertilized and/or implanted. It can remain in the uterus for several years. After its removal, its effects quickly regress, increasing the chances of pregnancy. The IUD is more than a prosthesis because it locally changes the woman's physiology.

In the framework of Project reWalk, headed by Professor Grégoire Courtine of EPFL, electrodes have been implanted into this rat's injured spinal cord. The goal is for the rat to partially learn to walk again through electrical neurostimulation, accompanied by physical therapy and the use of stimulating drugs. If the spinal cord is not restored to its original condition, stimulation and physical therapy will allow a partial reconstruction of the tissues. This experiment paves the way for treating people with incapacitating spinal cord injuries.

Geneva, Biotech campus, March 22, 2017

STIMO (Epidural Electrical Simulation with Robot-assisted Rehabilitation in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury) is a clinical study aiming to improve the motor skills of people with injured or diseased spinal cords, who have major difficulties controlling their lower limbs. It is the extension of the reWalk experiment. The study required the participation of neuroscientists, engineers, robot scientists, physicians, and physical therapists. The first human patients received this type of implant in 2017.

Laboratories (this one was recently designed by French architect Dominique Perrault on the campus of EPFL) are temples of modernity. Of course, they are not religious in the strict sense of the word, but rituals do take place there. That is where their magic lies. That magic, an unconscious attribute of transhumanist ideology, is what—it seems to me—gives them their quasi-religious character. The world of science becomes a place of power and establishes itself as a new cult that is free of spiritual traditions and manufactures a new God.

Considered a transhumanism guru, Google head engineer Ray Kurzweil has written many books on the future of humanity. In The Singularity is Near, he predicts that, by 2030, it will be possible to transfer or download the human mind into a machine. The implicit message is that consciousness is merely the result of physical, chemical, and organic processes, the final outcome of a particular information system. The transhumanist community often criticizes the messianic dimension of his comments. At first, Kurzweil agreed to pose for me, but he changed his mind after noticing that Google is mentioned in the presentation document I submitted to him. He apparently refused on contractual grounds.

In 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, which drastically increased our dependency on machines. Smartphones are now considered memory prostheses.

Yann Minh, born 1957, is a protean artist specializing in cyberculture and persistent worlds. Here he is seen in his "Nooscaphe." He often describes himself as a "nooconteur" (a cyberspace raconteur) or a cyberpunk exploring cyberspace and the noosphere (the sphere of human reflection and, by extension, the Internet, which connects humanity through artworks, thought, etc.). He has won several awards for his creations in the areas of contemporary art and cyberculture. His futuristic, transhumanistic world mixes eroticism and science fiction.

Paris, June 16, 2016

Douglas Coupland, Microserfs, New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Virtual reality (VR) allows us to slip into a real but non-physical new space. Its applications are not limited to entertainment: The technology makes it possible to understand the brain better and improve cognitive skills. It the future, it will be used to treat neurological disorders. "Virtual reality is merely popularizing the idea of offering a product deprived of its substance, real core and material resistance... [It] is a reality that really isn't one. When the end of the virtualisation process is reached, we will start perceiving that 'real reality' is itself a virtual entity." (Slavoj Zizek, La Subjectivité à venir, Essais critiques, trans. François Théron, Paris: Flammarion, Libres Champs, 2006, p. 18)

Cognitive neuroscience laboratory, Geneva, Biotech campus, March 22, 2017

Excerpt from the body hacktivism manifesto written by Lukas Zpira: 'In opposition to the modern primitives whose work is based on tribal anthropology, body hactivists practice, theorize and invent avant-garde, futuristic body modifications influenced by mangas, comics and science fiction. Made possible by constant curiosity about technological-medical breakthroughs, those experimental practices are defined as body hacking, a term expressing the goal of these artists, researchers and thinkers, which is to break down biological borders. The terms body hacktivist and body hacktivism imply the need for action and taking control of our destinies by perpetually reinventing the self."

Julien Deceroi self-implanted a magnet into his middle finger. He says it works like a new sense, allowing him to feel magnetic fields, including their amplitude or modulations. He also wears microchips. He is the only grinder I met in Switzerland. (Grinders are biohackers who demand total freedom for their bodies, which they enhance by operating on them themselves, often in extreme conditions.)

The size of a grain of rice, the NFC/RFID (Near Field Communication/Radio Frequency Identification) microchip can be implanted under the skin. In general, tattoo artists perform the operation. NFC/RFID is a way to store and retrieve remote data. The latest implantable microchips combine both technologies, leaving their uses up to their hosts. They can be used to store medical data, passwords, and small bits of information or to interface with other electronic devices, such as smartphones. Highly regarded by biohackers, they symbolize the transformation into cyborgs.

Neil Harbisson considers himself a cyborg. Afflicted with achromatopsy, a rare form of color blindness, he has had a prosthesis called Eyeborg implanted into his skull that converts colors into sound waves. Mr. Harbisson advocates creative enhancement of the human and sometimes distances himself from transhumanism, which, he thinks, is stuck in stereotyped or commercial depictions. His view is more that of an artist than a disciple of technoscience. He takes pride in being the first human to appear with a prosthesis in a passport photo.

Munich, July 15, 2015

Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Coventry, United Kingdom, is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, earning him the nickname Captain Cyborg. He has had electrodes directly linked to his nervous system grafted into his arm. Connected to a computer, he has remote-controlled a wheelchair and a computer with no other interface than his implant. A trailblazer in the field of man-machine interaction, he considers himself one of the first cyborgs. The British scientist almost systematically appears in the media and general-public articles about transhumanism. His position is unique, for he straddles two areas that in theory are disconnected: institutional scientific research and biohacking.

Prague, January 6, 2017

Businessman Igor Trapeznikov, a member of Russia's transhumanist movement, wears several handmade experimental implants, including a device that turns sights into sounds, which could prove useful for blind or vision-impaired people. His also has various handmade microchip implants that replace his credit card and house keys, for example.

Moscow, June 21, 2017

Electronic tattoo

Hannes Sjoblad, activist and co-founder of the Swedish biohacking organization BioNyfiken, is a leading promoter of transhumanism in Europe. In Paris in 2016, he held the first Implant Party, where candidates received their microchip implants in public. He earns his living by giving companies strategic advice about technology and lecturing on the "enhanced human."

Paris, Futur en Seine, June 30, 2017

Some people wear necklaces that blink to the rhythm of their heartbeat. Others have had devices implanted allowing them to "feel" the North. In either case, these are demonstrative gadgets that prefigure objects with more potential. External appendages, they are outward signs of participating in a project: Their function is therefore quite superficial. They are symbols, futuristic substitutes for crosses or religious medals.

Pregnant women can have prenatal exams to tell whether an embryo or fetus is normal. These tests lead to in utero therapeutic treatments or abortions, raising many ethical questions. Will they eventually bring about a kind of eugenics, even though few dispute the usefulness of prenatal treatment? Transhumanists argue that these practices must be viewed as statistically improving longevity and human health.

A host of home laboratory kits are available for purchase online. They can include everything a DIY biologist needs, from instruments to plasmids and the substances to cultivate them in Petri dishes, from genetically modified cells and bacteria to bioluminescent cuttlefish or fireflies.

For years, Google has been a leading sponsor of transhumanism, especially by massively funding companies working on NBICs. In 2013, it launched Calico (California Life Company) at the secret Google X Lab complex. The company's goal is to combat aging and its related maladies and eventually kill death. So far, Calico has not marketed any products.

Bioluminescence in the Aequorea victoria jellyfish has allowed scientists to make advances using transgenesis, the transfer of a gene from a cell of one species to a cell of another. Mice that have received the gene responsible for bioluminescence in the Aequorea victoria jellyfish glow when exposed to UV rays. Researchers use this property as a marker allowing them to analyze the growth of tissues, organs, tumors, etc.

Freiburg, March 30, 2017

American professor Robert Wilson Chester Ettinger, a transhumanist trailblazer, wrote The Prospect of Immortality, the bible of believers in immortality and a sort of cryogenics guidebook. He thinks “natural man” is deficient: Cryonics is the key to unlocking and making the most of his full potential.

Igor Trapeznikov, Alexey Samykin, Valerija Pride, Danila Medvedev, Sergey Evfratov, and Ivan Stepin are members of Russia's transhumanist movement. In the absence of any restrictive legal framework, they founded Kriorus, one of the world's three cryonics companies. They believe in immortality.

Moscow, June 21, 2017

Kriorus not only deep-freezes corpses but also trains cryogenization devotees in how to prepare them. The body fluids are drained; otherwise, deep-freezing would break the tissues' cells, making a future reawakening less likely. Lost in the distant countryside of Moscow, the depot is the hub of their activities.

Built in Moscow in 1964, the Monument to the Conquerors of Space is an emblem of Soviet ideology and Russian space travel. At the dawn of the twentieth century, this movement's followers thought technology could help man achieve immortality or awaken the dead. They considered the conquest of space as the road to the transcendence and salvation of humanity. The association between transhumanism and the conquest of space occurs frequently: Only an enhanced man would be capable of facing the harsh conditions allowing an extraterrestrial colony to be established.

Kriorus's brand new facility. The vats contain cryogenized brains and whole bodies awaiting the day when science can wake them up.