When I was given the subject of this virtual world artefact, I associated it with my favourite genre of literature and film, cyberpunk. For example, the film Blade Runner series, the anime Ghost In The Shell series, and the game Cyberpunk 2077, so I chose to set my virtual world setting in a cyberpunk world.
Prostheses are an important element of the cyberpunk world, as they have been used since their inception as a tool to repair people’s disabilities. The first facial prostheses were used to help disfigured soldiers to repair their faces after World War I. Modern prosthesis technology is also used in the medical field, such as artificial hearts. In the future of the cyber world, people will choose to wear cyberwares for a variety of reasons: rigid needs, self-enhancement, entertainment, or fashion. Cyberwares are as much a part of modern culture as tattoos and mobile phones are in our time, but they are also a means of cultural expression, a symbol of fashion, and an efficient and convenient tool, such as the mantis blade in Cyberpunk 2077. At the same time, the cyberpunk world is an era in which the world is connected by a vast information network, so some people have modified parts of their bodies, people have kept only their brains and mechanised their entire bodies, and people who have turned themselves into a cyborg. Almost all human beings have been modified to varying degrees, and have a body with a port for connection to the network (at the back of the neck); for them, the body is simply a computer terminal, a container for the soul. I think it is highly likely that this will happen in our current world, where Elon Musk is working on his brain-computer interface, and I believe that this technology will be used in the near future.
In the Ghost In The Shell, the heroine, Suiko Kusanagi, is a full-blown cyborg, with a human appearance but a cold prosthetic body all over, even her brain is a machine that holds human souls and memories (similar to the concept of the relic chip set up in Cyberpunk 2077). So the question arises, is the cyberized me still ‘me’? As the name of the anime Ghost In The Shell suggests, which is the main body of me, GHOST or SHELL? And how can I prove the existence of ‘I’? So with this question in mind I created this AR avatar, when I use it, my facial skin will flip open like the geisha robot in the Ghost In The Shell, revealing the machine structure inside. I wanted to find the definition of the human through this process of transforming from a human exterior to a mechanical interior.
