{"id":86162,"date":"2018-12-28T03:42:24","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T11:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/what-makes-you-so-special"},"modified":"2018-12-28T03:42:24","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T11:42:24","slug":"what-makes-you-so-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/what-makes-you-so-special","title":{"rendered":"What Makes You So Special"},"content":{"rendered":"

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https:\/\/paper.li\/e-1437691924#\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed \u201ccyborg,\u201d walked into a caf\u00e9 in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. \u201cMay I do a sound portrait of you? It will just take one minute. For nine years, I\u2019ve been listening to colors,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

Byrne eyed his questioner from under raised eyebrows. On a slight frame, the 30-year-old Harbisson wore a white T-shirt, deep-pink jeans and black-and-white showman\u2019s brogues. His face was angular, with an aquiline nose and a chin smudged with grown-out stubble. A small plastic oval floated in front of his forehead, attached to the end of a flexible stem that reached around from the back of his head and over a sandy pageboy mop, like the light on the head of an angler fish<\/a>. This \u201ceyeborg,\u201d as Harbisson calls it, converts light into audible sound, with a pitch that varies according to the color of the light.<\/p>\n

With a good-natured shrug, Byrne relented. Harbisson darted down next to his quarry, intent, but with a boyish smile that betrayed his excitement. He pointed the eyeborg first at Byrne\u2019s ear, then his lips, then his left eye, then the bridge of his nose, and finally his salt-and-pepper hair, scribbling down musical notes on the back of a cardboard coffee-holder. Byrne gave him his agent\u2019s email. When Harbisson got back to a computer, he would make a sound file that combined the notes from each bit of Byrne\u2019s anatomy, and send it back to the actor. Harbisson\u2019s collection already included Prince Charles, Nicole Kidman, and Al Gore.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/paper.li\/e-1437691924#\/ On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed \u201ccyborg,\u201d walked into a caf\u00e9 in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. \u201cMay I do a sound portrait of you? It will [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":464,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1499],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cyborgs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/464"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}