IThe subject of Carey’s film Born is funny, engaging, and somewhat absurd. It’s about talented artist and musician Neil Harbisson, who is colorblind and has an antenna installed in the back of his skull (invented by cyborg technology specialist Adam Montandon) that sits on top of his head and swings in front of his face at about eye level, converting color into sounds so that he can “hear” these colors inside his head.
Born’s film takes his claim to be a “cyborg” at the forefront of a new transhuman era quite seriously, even though most of the people who appear to interview him end up wearing the same facial expressions: intrigued, amused, politely skeptical. The only person who appears to actually test him is Richard Madeley, in A 2004 episode of The Richard and Judy ShowMadeley presents him with an apple painted blue and asks him to guess what colour it is by holding his microphone up to the object and listening to the resulting note. Harbisson passes with flying colours, although a more interesting and rigorous test would surely require him to do it blindfolded, to prove that he is not simply a person with normal colour vision playing a prank on us.
Later, we discover that Harbisson is marketing several objects that supposedly allow people to expand their sensory perceptions and engage in the radical new cyborgism. One of them is “North Sense,” a device worn on the skin that vibrates when you face north. (Hey, why is this better than a compass app on your smartphone, or even an actual, analog, real-world compass?) Harbisson’s public persona is entertaining, perhaps best appreciated as conceptual performance art.
