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Cyborgs

Time & Interactivity DiscussionCeri Myers

April 7, 2008

Is it a cyborg…?

For the following 10 images, please indicate with a simple “yes” or “no” whether what you’re seeing is a cyborg

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Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator

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Blade Runner replicants

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Astronaut in space suit

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Sony QRIO robot

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Immunized people

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French performance artist Orlan

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Everyone!

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Donna Haraway

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Gaia—the earth

“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.” (Clynes & Kline, 31).

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A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen‘high-technological’ guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communication systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses (Haraway, 1).

“…dynamic, self-regulating, homeostatic system; the earth, with all its interwoven layers and articulated parts, from the planet’s pulsating skin through its fulminating gaseous envelopes, was itself alive….Lovelock’s earth—itself a cyborg, a complex auto-poietic system that terminally blurred the boundaries among the geological, the oganic, and the technological—was the natural habitat, and the launching pad, of other cyborgs.” (Haraway, xiii)