The New Flesh

The room was cast in a dark blue glow, star-lit by glass reflections and other strange colours. Squint and it looks like the ’80s nouveau glass-walled apartment of one Max Renn, but we’ll get back to him later. Sounds are muffled in a sleepy space, with shelves of dangling specimen jars—some empty, others two-thirds full of some fluid—each soaking a PoD.

The Personal On Demand (PoD), a palm-sized, fleshy, 3D-printed pronged critter, looks like a Pokémon spattered with various genitalia. The PoD is a product of BODY/MIND/CHANGE, a beta program for a bio-engineered apparatus, one that seeks to sync your real world with your digital persona in a gnarly, invasive way. The natural evolution of a smartphone, the prison of your virtual self. A strange thing to find in bulk at the Bell Lightbox movie theater at the Toronto International Film Festival, but not when it’s part of a David Cronenberg project—in which case, a phallic arachnid techno-nightmare is totally consistent.