A Cryptanalysis of the Foreign Body Language (2017) is a performative piece in which audience members are invited to wear a head restraint incorporating a tongue circuit board that enables them to feel the artist’s physiological or emotional changes as electrical stimulation patterns on the tongue. As with learning a new language, the brain could be trained to recognize these patterns as meaningful information, such as pain, arousal or excitement.

Technology is inherently erotic, as it is grounded in the restless vicissitudes of human desire. Techno-fetishism criticizes this uncanniness, but it also exactly demonstrates the intimacy of body-machine unions. It is time to come to terms with the notion of the human being as an assemblage and to strap on our auxiliary organs, create space for new kinds of intimacy, and find out what it could mean to be human.

A Cryptanalysis of the Foreign Body Language questions and explores the degree of agency that technologies allow their users, as well as the intimacy and vulnerability of the union between human and technology. Where is the boundary between the person and the prosthesis? Where does one end and the other begin? How do we understand our place and placement in a multiplicity of approaches to ever-changing conditions of borders and bordering?