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The Prosthetic Aesthetic: An Art Of Anxious Extensions, Tiffany Funk

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

The difficulty in ascertaining how the “prosthetic” functions across disciplines derives from the sometimes parallel, and often antithetical definitions given for what it constitutes. Many art historians use the prosthetic to illustrate psychoanalytical methodologies, largely ignoring physical technological devices, cybernetic body augmentation and its social effects – subjects expounded upon by many influential media and cybernetic theorists such as Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Prosthetics are not merely psychic trauma nor virtual signifier, but material artifacts marking autonomy, ability and disability, amputation and extension. A re-evaluation of prosthetics in contemporary aesthetics brings us closer to …