At the close of the second millennium, our species has started to evolve a new, electronic skin. This skin is the sum of the devices which now mediate and interpret reality for us, and I find a very appealing name for it to be the BIOAPPARATUS. This name was coined for a "Virtual Seminar" at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1992, where artists, technologists and humanists from around the world were invited to think about, discuss and experiment with, "the technological apparatus in its intimacy with the body".

In my own work from the mid 1970s, I have been involved with this notion of machine/human interfacing. At that time, I began creating jewelry objects which put electronic technology into very intimate proximity with the wearer, even to the extent of sometimes making the wearer's body an integral part of the circuit. An example of this is the Biocrown from 1975, which measures skin resistance via electrodes in the headband and uses that value to control one of the LCD eyes. In the 1980s I began to utilize programmable computers in my jewelry objects, thereby increasing the complexity and capabilities of the BIOAPPARATUS I was evolving. The driving paradigm for my work during this period was the CYBORG- the symbiotic human/machine combination which I saw as a logical pathway for development of cybernetic jewelry.

In the late 1980s I began to think about putting people into computers, as opposed to putting computers onto people, and this proved to be an even more fertile avenue for exploration. This was the time of the initial efflorescence of the Virtual Reality movement, which I quickly discovered. It took me rather a long time of shifting gears and learning before I was really ready to pursue serious work in this field, but I am now creating virtual worlds which I believe instantiate the BIOAPPARATUS on a viscerally real level. An example of this is LegionWorld, a VRML 3D world which make functionally explicit the notion of Multiple Personality.

I hope to continue to evolve my versions of the BIOAPPARATUS, perhaps eventually combining the hardware-based cybernetic objects with the digitally created virtual worlds to create a hybrid experiences of altered reality.