Page - 9 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Major Kusanagi is an elevated organic form – part human, part machine, as all of us are to some, even if to a lesser extent.1 Another type of machine–person mergings are mechas – big robots in human shapes controlled from inside by a person, usually used for fighting or sometimes for work. In Neon Genesis Evangelion (Anno et al., 1995–1996), there is an extraterrestrial invasion of battling angels coming successively and the only way to fight against them are mechas with teenagers controlling them from the inside. In order to be able to do this, the chosen children have to synchronize with them: they enter the machine and after a while, their movements are directly reflected in the movements of the mechas. Many problems arise precisely from these connections: connections are either too strong – so the mechas are impossible to disconnect – or too weak – so they start to act on their own, etc. In Figure 2, there are two mechas: one of them is going berserk because it is infected by the angels, the other one was deliberately disconnected from a boy's body, after the boy refused to fight the first one because of a child being inside of it. Then this mecha in a ‘dummy mode’, that is controlled by auto-pilot, tore the infected mecha into pieces. You can see that the ‘dying’ mecha actually resembles a living body with all the blood and flesh flying around. Figure 2 My last example of anime with uncanny connections is Paprika (Kon, 2006) in which dream time- space and conventional reality merge through a technical device called DC Mini. It is a device developed for medical uses, which enables to share dreams with other persons. Its prototype has been stolen and misused and consequently a horror-like dream of one of the characters starts leaking into the city. Nevertheless, it is exactly thanks to these semipermeable boundaries and vaguely defined relations between the main character Dr. Chiba and her dream alter ego called Paprika, that it was possible to bring the city back to normal. In Figure 3, Dr. Chiba is seen as split between herself and Paprika, and on the contrary, the two main antagonists are seen as combined in one body and fighting each other. Figure 3 1 This is Donna Haraway's claim in The Cyborg Manifesto and we can easily perceive it around us or feel it in ourselves: all human (and other) bodies are shaped by technology, starting with techniques of food preparation, wearing clothes most of the time, or repairs of body parts, such as teeth, joints etc. 9