Post-Humanization as a Process: Cyborg Art, Sensory Reconfiguration, and Networked Mediation

Abstract

This article conceptualizes post-humanization as an ongoing process through which human–technology relations reconfigure bodily experience, cultural meaning, and everyday practices. Drawing on posthumanist theory and accelerated technological transformation, it proposes a four-stage model—preference, possibility, dissemination, and inevitability—to analytically trace how technological innovations move from elective experimentation toward socially dominant or practically required forms. Within this framework, new sensory modalities and cyborg art practices are examined as concentrated manifestations of the preference and possibility stages. The works of Neil Harbisson, Moon Ribas, Manel De Aguas, and Stelarc demonstrate how perception can be technologically reconfigured as a selective and embodied practice rather than as a universal trajectory. These cases reveal that new senses emerge not as inevitable outcomes of technological progress but as situated, context-specific rearticulations of embodied experience. The study further argues that cyborg art operates through a dual structure: while sensory transformation originates in embodied perception, its public intelligibility is shaped within networked digital environments. In some instances, the internet forms part of the sensory infrastructure itself; in others, digital platforms function as mediating infrastructures through which embodied transformation becomes culturally legible and publicly circulated. By situating cyborg art within a staged process model of post-humanization, the article offers a differentiated account of how sensory reconfiguration becomes visible, negotiable, and socially meaningful in contemporary networked digital environments.