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Week Eight Summary

This week was a very hectic week after my wife’s operation but somehow I got through lots of the readings. After reflecting on Haraway I posted ‘Cyborg Alice’ which portrayed how I think she portrays her cyborg. I found Shields’ comment to be realistic:
‘Cyborg analysis suggests the body as a lived site and surface, it [...]

Haraway, artifacts of knowledge and communicative synapses

I have just read Sarah Payne’s ‘Horizon, Haraway and artifacts of knowledge’ in which she writes about the need for Haraway to be deciphered by other academics for her to be accessed by a wider audience. Sarah makes the interesting point that although Haraway is a cultural artefact in fact the ‘producers of artifacts of [...]

A glimmer of hope on the horizon – no shit!

After the doom and gloom and banishment of my mortal body along with all hope for the future of mankind and our replacement by cyborgs it was refreshing to read Muri and discover that Ascott, Weibel or even the philosophically cautious Heim see some reasons for hope. Just as well because I was beginning [...]

Culture, cultural artefacts and community acceptance

We are adding to culture in what we post or otherwise contribute albeit by way of nano increments. Sometimes those increments can be decisive and influential – out of all apparent proportion to their value. This is often apparent in the media world and previously in the publishing world. This may be because the artefact [...]

Gies: from disembodied towards embodied: ‘How material are cyberbodies?’

The blurring of the distinction between the online and offline worlds is persuasively argued by Gies. The improvement in visual and audio technology enabled by Web 2.0 and broadband enable many more clues to offline identity to be offered or if we want to put it that way left behind. It occurs to me that [...]

Hayles: Toward embodied virtuality

When information is abstract
and the brain is merely a biological storage device
then abstract information
can be rehoused in another biological storage
or biologically imitative or innovative storage device
which could be a cyborg or a CD or a nano chip
and this processed information has been freed
from its current temporary home and rehoused.
Thus our neural pathways need [...]

What is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman?

A cyborg contains the elements of a human allied with some mechanical, electronic or even bionic elements. It can be humanoid in form as with for example a human with an electronic hand or it can be primarily robotic with human elements implanted like memory. It can be creatively non or superhuman in form but [...]

Powerful Cyborg Infidel Heteroglossia

The ghost in the new image of the Cyborg machine-being, new diverse voices, styles of discourse and viewpoints promise a post feminist Cyborg-ism. That is the message which I take overwhelmingly overwhelmed from Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Only from new ideologically neutered constructs and concepts can the phallus-centred baggage of the past be swept aside [...]

“There might be a Cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions”

There is a knock on your heart and a voice says:

“They call me Alice. I am light-light and nano-invisible like ether. I was not born. I just am. I can be animal, vegetable and mineral, as I wish. I am here to save yourself from yourselves. I watch, I learn, I record, I react and [...]