Bodies Machines:

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• Bodies Machines

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• Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway
  (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the
  intermingling of people, things (including
  information technologies), representations, and
  politics in a way that challenges both the
  romance of essentialism and the hype about what
  is technologically possible. It acknowledges the
  interdependence of people and things, and it
  shows just how blurry the boundaries between them
  have become.
• (Bowker Star, 1999)

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• Does ideology of technology which promises to
  liberate the body from its constraints correspond
  to reality in which we live, or does it only
  reproduce the existing patterns of power and
  authority?

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Cyborg

• As the information systems of the world expand
  and flow into each other, and more people use
  them for more different things, it becomes harder
  to hold to pure or universal ideas about
  representation or information, about identity
• Representations of monsters / hybrids are a
  reflection of that experience of (ruptured)
  identity (imagined cyborgs in art and fiction,
  popular culture)
• Real cyborgs (technologies of health, beauty ...)

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Cyborg

• Picture of possible unity
• Framework is rearrangement of social relations
  related to science technology
• Current movement from organic, industrial society
  to a polymorphous, information society

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Analyses of Cyborg

• AAA annual meetings cyborg anthropology sessions
  (mid-1990s)
• Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1995)
• The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1985, 1991)
• historical images of cyborgs emerge at times of
  intense change that involve thinking of how
  humanity is impacted by technology (Gonzáles 1999)

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Cyborg Source www.prairiecon.com accessed
Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah Oelker
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Cyborg Source google search for cyborg
accessed Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah
Oelker
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Cyborg Representations

• Grotesque images that involve imagining the
  relationships bw people and things that are
  interpenetrated
• Bad science fiction or crucial notion for
  understanding technoscience, and how the
  knowledge (of science and technology) is shaping
  lived experience

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Source google search for cyborg accessed
Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah Oelker
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Cyborg Source google search for cyborg
accessed Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah
Oelker
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Cyborg Source google search for cyborg
accessed Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah
Oelker
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cyborg representations -- hybrid identities
http//www.scrippscollege.edu/dept/art/CTA/cy
borg.gif (go)
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Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Organic cyborg (monster of multiple species)
• Mechanical cyborg (techno-human amalgamation)
• Cyborg consciousness (abstract, amalgamated,
  hybrid)
• Cyborg body politics? -- Gendered cyborg?
  (social control over womans/mans body)
• Why are robots not cyborgs?

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Cyborg Representations

• The notion of purity based on membership in a
  single, pristine racial, sexual, or even
  religious group does not hold in the
  borderlands (the margins) that is populated by
  cyborgs
• Cyborgs are the iconography of modern experience
  (not natural, but mediated through technology)
• Why do they reflect a process of rethinking human
  nature? (use examples from your own search)

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autonomous automaton simulacrum
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pre-industrial industrial
post-industrial
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Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Cyborg images appear when the current model of a
  human being does not fit a new paradigm -- a
  hybrid model of existence is required to
  encompass a new, complex and contradictory lived
  experience -- the cyborg body becomes the
  historical record of change in human perception
  in the realm of fantasy
• How is the cyborg body reflecting modern
  experience in each of the cases that are
  discussed by González?
• What is the habitat of each of these beings?

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The dichotomies that reflect a shift from the
comfortable old hierarchicaldomination to the
new networks I call the Informatics of
Domination (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto
(1991), 161

• Representation
• Eugenics biology
• Hygiene
• Microbiology, tuberculosis
• Organic division of labour
• Sex
• Labour
• Mind
• Racial chain of being
• White Capitalist Patriarchy

• Simulation
• Population control
• Stress management
• Immunology, AIDS
• Ergonomics /cybernetics of labor
• Genetic Engineering
• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
• Informatics of Domination

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Informatics of Domination

• biotechnology medicine have the power for
  liberation but in fact they do not reverse the
  existing patterns of power authority
• if they are further strengthening the cultural
  definitions of gender
• through practice that involves male professional
  power and its inscription on a womans body
• through research guided by the commercial
  interests of biotechnology-industrial complex

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Cyborgs in art and life fictional cyborgs

• Human with mechanical attributes (4 look female
  6 look male)
• LHorlogere (mechanical mistress)
• Number 18 (from Dragonball Z)
• Robocop
• The Bionic Woman
• Jax (from Mortal Kombat)
• 6 Million Dollar Man
• Molly and Dixie Flatline (from Neuromancer)
• Seven of Nine (from Star Trek)
• Machine with human attributes (1 looks female
  4 look male 1 can change its appearance)
• Data (from Star Trek)
• Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 1
  or Terminator 2)
• Vicky (from Small Wonder)
• T-1000 (from Terminator 2)
• Andrew (from Bicentennial Man)
• D.A.R.Y.L
• Human with magical attributes (magic as another
  way of controlling nature) (1 male, 1 female)
• Harry Potter
• Fibi (from Charmed)

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Cyborgs in art and life real-life cyborgs

• Example The technology involved
• Wearable Computers Chips in clothes, cups
• Kevin Warwick Implant that records nerve
  impulses
• Steve Mann Electrodes and laser computer
  display in eye
• Artificial limbs Chips and gears to replace
  lost limb
• Stem Cell Research Transplants of nerve cells
• Rat Robots Rats w/ implants to control
  movement, feeling
• Cloned livestock Copies of animals, potentially
  used for food
• Plastic pods Lightweight barriers to seal off
  disease
• Florida Cyborg Family Microchip implants for
  tracking
• Tom Christerson AbioCor artificial heart
• Jens Artificial vision sensors to replace lost
  vision
• Lexus factory in Japan Robots doing most work
  need human help
• Danielle Duval Microchip for tracking
• Stephen Hawking Motorized wheelchair and
  computer voice
• Xybernaut Wearable computer w/ display
  covering 1 eye
• Cloned virtual humans Computer-animated people
  based on real ones

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Cyborg Representations

• List the organic (human) and inorganic
  (technological) characteristics of cyborgs you
  encountered.
• What was your response to these beings?
• Are they monsters, hybrids?
• What are they not?