Paper short abstract:

This talk uses the example of my robotic surgery to describe the transformation of the body through the hospital system, and to describe the relationship between the surgeon's body, the da Vinci robot's body, and my body, as information, action and sensory experience traverses their interfaces.

Paper long abstract:

This talk uses the example of my 2016 robotic surgery to describe an experience of the transformation of my body through the hospital system, and in particular, to describe the relation between the surgeon's body, the da Vinci robot's body, and my body, during surgery. It will be argued that as information, action and sensory experience traverses the interfaces between these three bodies (surgeon, robot and me), new ontologies and new actors emerge.

Throughout the whole process, my corporeal, biological body is a focus of concern for all, for it is this body that will live or die, and will bear the marks of the clinical successes and failures of the surgery. However, in the performance of the surgery this biological body is displaced by the body as a data-source for the construction of numerical, auditory and graphical representations for the anaesthetists, and as a data source for the high-definition 3D representations generated by, and for, the hybrid robot- surgeon. Having been transformed to a data source, my corporeal body is then physically transformed through the sight and touch of the surgeon-robot: the human surgeon neither sees my corporeal body, nor touches my corporeal body. These abstracted, constructed representations of the body are thus the key vectors for the interactions of the human, non-human and hybrid actors participating in the surgery, and are the key vectors for the relations of these constructed representations to one another.