If you remember Michael Jackson – and who truly can forget him? – you might have wondered: what exactly was this amazing comet that once crossed the sky of spectacle? What kind of being was this after so many transformations/modifications and such an artificial death that resulted from the incorrect administration of the chemical cocktail that kept his fragile vital functions operating?
“Our best machines are made of sunlight… Humans have not achieved anything else so close to the fluid, as material and transparent… Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.” There is no more accurate description of Jackson than the one Haraway made speaking about the cyborg.
Neither white nor black; neither child nor adult; neither human nor monstrous; half-born, half-constructed: Michael Jackson was the epitome of boundary transgression and border crossing, exactly as described in the cyborg manifesto. Existing at the threshold between organic and inorganic, between embodied flesh and informational signal, between life and ethereal communication, Michael Jackson became a mutated product of the human that once was.
One thing it did not avoid: death. Perhaps because it’s still too early for cyber immortality…