An Engineered Reality
"I see colour"- a sense ahead of evolution or an engeneered reality?
By: Chanté Petersen
“I find it completely normal to hear colour all the time,” says Neil Harbisson, who perhaps while not considering his creation also did not realise that none of what he has just said can be described as ‘normal’.
Through an electronic eye attached to a chip at the back of his head, Harbisson artificially demonstrates and evokes the cross-sensory condition of synaesthesia, a perceptual condition of mixed sensations.
Through transforming light waves into sound waves, the electronic eye or ‘eyeborg’ allows him to experience voice, music and various environmental sounds in colour, a form of ‘sound-to-colour’ synaesthesia.
Harbisson’s life has since changed dramatically as he learns that colour is almost everywhere. Born with achromatopsia, a condition leaving him colour-blind, Harbisson can only experience colour via sound. “I’ve never seen colour and I don’t know what colour looks like because I come from a grey-scale world. To me, the sky is always grey, flowers are always grey and television is still in black and white.”
Developing the ‘secondary effect’, the inversion whereby common sounds start to become colour, Harbisson not only experiences colour-to-sound but also sound-to-colour. “I heard a telephone tone and it felt green because it sounded just like the colour green. The BBC beeps sounds turquoise. Listening to Mozart became a yellow experience.”
“Also the way I perceive beauty has changed. When I look at someone, I hear their face.” As an artist and colourologist, Harbisson creates sound-portraits. Instead of drawing someone’s face, he points at them with the eyeborg and writes down the notes he hears.
“I think that we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive.” It is for this reason Harbisson created the Cyborg Foundation, a non-profit organisation encouraging others to experience artificial forms of synaesthesia. “We should all think that knowledge comes from the senses, so if we extend our senses we will consequently extend our knowledge.”
After memorising a name and note for each colour, Harbisson is able to differentiate between all 360 degrees of colour just like anyone else but he feels that human vision is ‘not good enough’. “After some time, all this information became a perception. I didn’t have to think about the notes and after some time this perception became a feeling. I started to have favourite colours and I started to dream in colour.”
With the combining of organic and artificial parts, the eyeborg became part of Harbisson’s official image, thus making him the world’s first cyborg. “When I started to dream in colour, when I felt that the software and my brain had united… that’s when I started to feel like a cyborg.”
“I think life will be much more exciting if we stop creating applications for mobile devices and we start creating applications for our own body.”
