Neil Harbisson is the world's first cyborg. With an antenna that stretches out from under his shaggy blonde hair like another limb, he is able to discern parts of our world that he has trouble accessing — things like color. But he doesn't see color, he hears it.
Achromatism has stripped his world of any color, a greyscale vision he describes as "total colorblindness." Harbisson's antenna has a color sensor that processes the color frequencies of his world, sends those frequencies to a chip, and then translates them in sound. "I hear color through bone conduction," he says.
Set in a gorgeous world devoid of color — not unlike Harbisson's own — the video provides an intimate lens into his world and how he's able to educate people about the gains of technology like his in improving the lives of people living with unique needs. He says people sometimes want to know how they sound to him, and he's eager to appease them. Using his antenna as a catalyst for conversation around the fusion of biology and technology, he's hoping to change the perception around cybernetics.
"I am a cyborg," he says, "and cybernetics comes from the union between cybernetics and organism. And that's how I feel."
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Hearing Colors from Greg Brunkalla on Vimeo.
