Readings for Thurs. April 3 / Tues. April 8
- Paul, 165-174
- Wardrip-Fruin, #35, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”
- On Stelarc: CTheory articles by Stelarc and Julie Clarke at: http://www.ctheory.net/home.aspxSee under the date 10/19/2005
7 Responses to “Readings for Thurs. April 3 / Tues. April 8”
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Wrote some stuff on my blog
http://scanci.wordpress.com
This particular set of readings was all about the marriage of organic and technological, the fusion of creature and machine, the cyborg.
The selection from the Paul text, presented some very interesting in-depth explorations of the theme of “cyborg”. Of the artists covered in the reading, Stelarc is the one who really stands out. His works are extremely extensive toward the modification of the human body with prosthetic extensions. His Exoskeleton (1999) performance was one to really stir up the mixed emotions from the viewer. The coupled horrific spider-like legs below the platform on which he stood, paired with the intriguing arm extensions (all controlled by Internet activity) were very disturbing and inspiring at the same time. This really was the primal makings of a cyborg in the science-fiction-turned-reality sense!
I’ll be perfectly frank about Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”. I understood very little of this reading. She seemed to be caught up in the use of extremely long words to try and show her extensive vocabulary and baffle the reader into believing that she had great knowledge of the topic. I do understand that she was pairing feminist themes with the cyborg’s uni-sexual (or even non-sexual) capabilities. She seemed to be glorifying the fact that in a dystopian future, a cyborg-ruled community will be unbiased in regards to sexual influence over society’s many working elements. She talks about with the increase of time, the boundaries between animal and man, man and machine, and physical and non-physical have become thinner, blurred, and constantly breached. She foreshadows that essentially the boundaries of such things will eventually lead to the fused reality of the cyborg and the social dynamic of such a society to go along with it.
The third reading further explored the studies of Stelarc. One of his more current projects investigated the possibilities of a prosthetic head rather than his earlier prosthetic bodies. Granted, it was only a virtual prosthetic head, not a concrete one - it showed that without a consciousness behind the face, there could still be all the functions, however it lacked the inner pathos of imagination, creativity, and emotion.
These readings make me wonder, how far off are we from an actual society where cyborgs (like the ones formerly dreamed up in science fiction) are a part of every day life… It’s quite disturbing, to say the least…
Wrote some stuff in my blog too!
http://benmadethis.wordpress.com
The prosthetic head is more scientific than artistic. There are artistic aspects: the forming of the face, realism of movement. But these aspects can also be seen as scientific. Science is needed to allow the head to interact with the interrogator. Science is also needed to allow the movements to be graceful and truly look lifelike. I believe this piece is less beneficial to the art field and more beneficial for other areas. As with interviews, for jobs or schools, this piece can assist the boss/professor with narrowing down the prospects. This prosthetic head can also be used for teaching or tutoring purposes. It could be used to train employees for a job or tutor someone in a foreign language.
However, if one considers videogames to be part of the art world, I would place this piece in that genre. It can help with creating accurate figures who, can possibly one day, interact with the person playing the game. I am sure this day will come soon enough, to all you videogame lovers.
bserp1: (1) how do you know what is art and what isn’t? why is that not a question we have been asking lately in class?
(2) Videogame artworks have alerady existed for a while as we will see next week!
SER
check out my comments on the reading at my blog: http://marykate.wordpress.com/
Haraway presents the idea that we are all cyborgs and we have become this way through mutations in media, technology and social organizations. Her definition of a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of a machine and organism; a creature of social reality and fiction. A quote that I found eerily interesting is: “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.”To claim that we are all cyborgs in a “post gender” world is scary and reminds me of science fiction movies, as it seems to be a popular theme. She says we are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. Again, I find this to be frightening if its at all true. What makes this “manifesto” feminist is that unlike the dualist socialist-feminism, a cyborg feminist is only interested in looking forward. Cyber-feminism is seen as more progressive than its predecessor who looked back to Marxism for answers.
Haraway breaks down traditional boundaries into three divisions, the first being human and animal. Here she refers to the animal rights movements as a prime example for “a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.”Then she moves on to the human/animal and machine relationship. I agree with Haraway’s observation that the technologies of our time have given us a frame of mind that never existed before, a part of us that recognizes the difference between natural and artificial. The last distinction that she makes is between the physical and non physical. She suggests that because we cannot fully rid our minds of these differences and boundaries, feminists in particular should give up the utopian dream of some return to nature and purity. The answer to all of this is the cyborg. She says that if we are all cyborgs, then we can experience a whole new set of social and political practices and we can decide what is appropriate instead of relying on the rigid set of standards that have existed thus far.
Technology and informatics have become so advanced that societal norms are becoming obsolete and the roles that people played are changing. We are attempting to find some common ground through a universal language and cybernetics is the system through which some sort of control is being attempted. We are now going beyond dualism to a point that is blurring the boundary between human and non human.
In order for me to really absorb the point Haraway was trying to get across, I reread several sections of the manifesto. The ideas represented here are so foreign to me, which I suppose was to be the idea, but I find the whole thing to be terrifying. To think of society in the comfortable way I understand it to be and then to know that it is changing beneath our feet into something that is so unnatural and artificial-it is a little uncomfortable. I do feel challenged however, to pay attention to my surroundings and really observe the roles that I play. At first, I thought the writer was a little crazy and maybe had read too many science fiction novels, but the more I tried to wrap my brain around her ideas, the more they made sense to me. I wonder what she thinks about how far we have come since 1985…