Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
ShareThis
Javascript must be enabled to continue!

The Fastskin Revolution: From Human Fish to Swimming Androids

View through CrossRef
The story of fastskin swimsuits reflects some of the challenges facing the impact of technology in postmodern culture. Introduced in 1999 and ratified for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, fastskin swimsuits were touted as revolutionising competitive swimming. Ten years later, they were banned by the world’s swimming regulatory body FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation), with the ban taking effect from January 2010 (Shipley 2009). The reason was the controversy caused by the large number of world records that were broken by competitors wearing polyurethane swimsuits, the next generation of the original fast skin suits. These suits were deemed to be providing an artificial advantage by increasing buoyancy and reducing drag. This had been an issue ever since they were introduced, yet FINA had approved the suits and, thereby, unleashed an unstoppable technological revolution of the sport of competitive swimming. Underlying this was the issue about its implications of the transformation of a sport based on the movement of the human body through water without the aid of artificial devices or apparatus. This article argues that the advent of the fastskin has not only transformed the art of swimming but has created a new image of the swimmer as a virtual android rather than a human fish. In turn, the image of the sport of swimming has been re-mapped as a technical artefact and sci-fi spectacle based on a radically transformed concept of the swimming body as a material object that has implications for the ideal of the fashionable body.
Linkoping University Electronic Press
Title: The Fastskin Revolution: From Human Fish to Swimming Androids
Description:
The story of fastskin swimsuits reflects some of the challenges facing the impact of technology in postmodern culture.
Introduced in 1999 and ratified for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, fastskin swimsuits were touted as revolutionising competitive swimming.
Ten years later, they were banned by the world’s swimming regulatory body FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation), with the ban taking effect from January 2010 (Shipley 2009).
The reason was the controversy caused by the large number of world records that were broken by competitors wearing polyurethane swimsuits, the next generation of the original fast skin suits.
These suits were deemed to be providing an artificial advantage by increasing buoyancy and reducing drag.
This had been an issue ever since they were introduced, yet FINA had approved the suits and, thereby, unleashed an unstoppable technological revolution of the sport of competitive swimming.
Underlying this was the issue about its implications of the transformation of a sport based on the movement of the human body through water without the aid of artificial devices or apparatus.
This article argues that the advent of the fastskin has not only transformed the art of swimming but has created a new image of the swimmer as a virtual android rather than a human fish.
In turn, the image of the sport of swimming has been re-mapped as a technical artefact and sci-fi spectacle based on a radically transformed concept of the swimming body as a material object that has implications for the ideal of the fashionable body.

Related Results

Ankle joint flexibility affects undulatory underwater swimming speed
Ankle joint flexibility affects undulatory underwater swimming speed
The movement of undulatory underwater swimming (UUS), a swimming technique adapted from whales, is mainly limited by human anatomy. A greater ankle joint flexibility could improve ...
A Comparison of Fat Utilization during Exercise: Walking and Swimming
A Comparison of Fat Utilization during Exercise: Walking and Swimming
Women, considering swimming as a form of exercise to lose weight, have been discouraged from doing so, since researchers suggest that swimming does not burn fat as efficiently as l...
Robustness of Connectionist Swimming Controllers Against Random Variation in Neural Connections
Robustness of Connectionist Swimming Controllers Against Random Variation in Neural Connections
The ability to achieve high swimming speed and efficiency is very important to both the real lamprey and its robotic implementation. In previous studies, we used evolutionary algor...
Wild Swimming Methodologies for Decolonial Feminist Justice-to-Come Scholarship
Wild Swimming Methodologies for Decolonial Feminist Justice-to-Come Scholarship
This article thinks with oceans and swimming, in dialogue with decolonial feminist materialist approaches and other current novel methodologies which foreground embodiment and rela...
Fish bioacoustics: Navigating underwater sound
Fish bioacoustics: Navigating underwater sound
Fish bioacoustics is about the sounds produced by fish, how fish hear, and what they hear. The focus of this article is on the hypothesis that some late pelagic stage reef fish lar...
John Lennon, “Revolution,” and the Politics of Musical Reception
John Lennon, “Revolution,” and the Politics of Musical Reception
ABSTRACT The Beatles recorded two starkly different musical settings of John Lennon's controversial 1968 song “Revolution”: One was released as a single, the other a...
“We All Hoisted the American Flag:” National identity among American Prisoners in Britain during the American Revolution
“We All Hoisted the American Flag:” National identity among American Prisoners in Britain during the American Revolution
“What is an American?” asked the French émigré Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in 1782. In so doing, Crèvecoeur posed one of the fundamental questions of the revolutionary era. Whe...
Violating Failures: Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin Anti-manifestation
Violating Failures: Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin Anti-manifestation
Some of the greatest Marxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are the accounts of great failures. One needs only mention the German Peasants' War, the Jacobins in the Fr...

Back to Top