Filmmaker Carey Born’s film Cyborg: A Documentary is going to be screening at the Barn Cinema in Totnes on Friday November 1 followed by a director Q&A on Saturday November 2.
The film is about the world’s first formally-recognised cyborg, Neil Harbisson, who studied Music Composition at Dartington Hall in Totnes.
As the film shows (including footage of Neil’s time in Totnes) it was while he was at Dartington that Neil, who was born completely colour-blind, attended a lecture by a young technological engineer called Adam Montandon that was to change his life.
Adam ignited in Neil’s mind the possibility that he might be able to find another way to perceive colour, something he had yearned for his whole life.
Together they embarked on a ground-breaking project to create a device that would enable Neil to perceive colour as sound.
Today he has an antenna permanently implanted in his head that translates colour waves into sound frequencies and Neil hears these tones through bone conduction.
The film tells this fascinating story and raises all kinds of questions about the advent of transhumanism and where we might be headed as a species.
Neil wants to convince the world that technological enhancement of our senses is a force for good.
In Cyborg: A Documentary, Neil and Moon confront their detractors head on, communicating their controversial ideas about the technological future of humankind.
The number of humans becoming ‘cyborgs’ is growing year on year and our species is on the verge of being able to design and re-design itself at will.