Cyberman

Steve Mann, the world’s first real cyborg, has been walking around for more than 20 years with a computer he developed and put together himself as an extension to his own senses. He interprets and manipulates reality through a camera he has fitted to his spectacles and that is connected to the computer and Internet, so that ‘people cannot just see me, but also be me’. Peter Lynch made a portrait of this brilliant scientist, inventor and artist, whose progressive ideas evoke both boundless admiration as undisguised disgust.Mann does not just investigate technological boundaries, but also ethical ones. In this way he confronts store managers with the ban on filming in their shops, while they constantly record their customers, often with hidden cameras. Lynch makes grateful and inventive use of the recordings made by Mann and his cyber-wife Betty – who has also been fitted with a technological prosthesis for the last 15 years. He edited their digital film and photo material with his own 16 mm shots, video and black-and-white photography and in this way he put Mann’s theories about manipulation into practice: sometimes it is not in the least bit clear through whose eyes we see reality.Cyberman sketches a fascinating picture of an obsessed genius who uses technology as a weapon against the manipulation of global companies and mass media. ‘If technology is a monster gone wild, then this is the way to tame the monster.’