hybrid environments

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hybrid environments

• 10.05.06

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conceptual identity

• Keith Obadikes blackness
• item 1176601036 on ebay
• tactical repurposing reappropriation of ebay
• rearticulation of race in relation to the body
• plays off the separation of signfiers about the
  body from the body (ala the Turing test)
• also de-essentializing race while pointing out
  its strong material connection to the body
• and also its cultural circulation as a commodity

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conceptual identity

• Ron Eglash, Race, Sex, and Nerds
• tactical, critical intervention into the
  naturalized attributes of ethnic/racial
  identity African American and Asian American
• a form of compositing
• construction of identities in relation to high
  technology (not just in high-tech)
• the nerd as important an imaginary figure as
  the bot or the cyborg

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conceptual identity

• composites and morphing
• a different way of using digital technology to
  both de-essentialize individual features
• while generating essential types
• below Nancy Bursons Beauty composites

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conceptual identity

• composites and morphing
• a different way of using digital technology to
  both de-essentialize individual features
• while generating essential types
• video Composite News Composites (1982)

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conceptual identity

• Nancy Burson Three Major Races (1982)

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composite photographs

• 19th century composite photographs of
  racial/ethnic types by Francis Galton (founder of
  modern eugenics)
• composite photography was also used in the 19th
  century to determine standardized characteristics
  of criminals

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cyborgs

• from a technological means for compositing -- or
  commodifying -- embodied identity. . .
• . . .to a way of compositing technology and the
  body

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cyborgs

• cybernetic organism integrated human machine
  system
• For the exogenously extended organizational
  complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic
  system unconsciously, we propose the term
  Cyborg. The Cyborg deliberately incorporates
  exogenous components extending the
  self-regulatory control function of the organism
  in order to adapt it to new environments. ie, a
  spacesuit
• Manfred Clynes Nathan Kline (Cyborgs Space,
  Astronautics Sept. 1960)

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cyborgs

• critical theories of cyborgs cyborgology
• Grey, Mentor, Figueroa-Sarriera
• knowledge about cyborgs
• cyborg knowledge cyborg subjectivity
• cyborg society range of organic/machine
  interactions
• highlights the ways in which bodies are
  re/constructed in cultural/technological networks

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cyborg society

• machines are intimately interfaced with humans
  on almost every level of existence
• an environment of human/machine relations
• full range of intimate organic-machinic
  relations
• facilitation of communication
• not just means of communications but an
  environment of interaction

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cyborgs Haraway

• cyborg manifesto or manifesto for cyborgs,
  1985
• ironic blasphemous
• figure of resistance
• using cyborg against its dominant meaning and
  against dominating (military, scientific,
  capitalist) culture
• a figure of social reality and fiction (and the
  interrelations between them)
• cyborg is our ontology it gives us our politics

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cyborgs Haraway

• creature of (post)industrial and globalized
  economics
• tradition of time/labor management automation
• informatics of domination
• international cultural division of labor
• women of color in the integrated circuit (of
  high-tech production, feminized cheap labor)

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cyborgs Haraway

• cyborg can work against the system that produced
  it
• leaky boundaries
• fractured identities
• transgression
• cyborg not a goddess
• counter to essentialist feminism

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Miko no Inori The Shaman-girls Prayer (1996) a
  video that plays off of fantasies of Japan as a
  place of both futuristic technology and
  traditional spiritualism cyborg goddess

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Miko no Inori The Shaman-girls Prayer (1996) a
  video that plays off of fantasies of Japan as a
  place of both futuristic technology and
  traditional spiritualism cyborg goddess

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Birth of a Star (1995)
• an example of what Thyrza Nichols Goodeve calls
  cyborg surrealism
• uses digital photography to create a personality
  that is a hyper-glossy comment on the global
  commodification of Japanese femininity

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Birth of a Star (1995)
• an example of what Thyrza Nichols Goodeve calls
  cyborg surrealism
• uses digital photography to create a personality
  that is a hyper-glossy comment on the global
  commodification of Japanese femininity

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Kyoko Date (1996)

• virtual idol CG idol idoru
• DK-96 (Digital Kids) HoriPro Inc.
• 1996 single Love Connection
• not that successful

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Play with Me (1994) photograph of Mori as a
  post-human cyber girl . . . creating an
  irritation about the future that questions
  Japanese fantasies about cyborgs and gender roles
  (Yvonne Volkart)

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Tea Ceremony III (1995)

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Mariko Mori (b. 1967)

• Wave UFO (2002)
• inside capsule, visitors watch video generated
  through electrodes that read brain activity.

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Karl Sims, artificial creatures

• Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994)
• Darwinian evolution of block creatures, which can
  connect articulate
• several hundred created with supercomputer each
  tested for specific task (swimming, hopping,
  competing)
• most successful survive their virtual genes
  (instructions for growth) are copied, combined,
  and mutated
• new offspring again tested

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Karl Sims, artificial creatures

• Galápagos 1997 interactive evolution of virtual
  organisms 12 computers simulate display growth
  behaviors of abstract animated forms viewers
  select which one they find most aesthetically
  interesting, which can then mate, reproduce,
  mutate, and take over the screens of those not
  selected.

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Karl Sims, artificial creatures

• Galápagos 1997 interactive evolution of virtual
  organisms 12 computers simulate display growth
  behaviors of abstract animated forms viewers
  select which one they find most aesthetically
  interesting, which can then mate, reproduce,
  mutate, and take over the screens of those not
  selected.

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Stellarc