cyborg

Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.

Have you seen a cyborg today? Would you know it if you had? A creature of science fiction novels, electronic engineering, and postmodern theory, the cyborg is like the white heron of Sarah Orne Jewett’s story: often discussed but seldom glimpsed. The ambiguity of what one means by a cyborg rumbles through Diane Greco’s electronic hypertext Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric as she plays a series of electronic riffs on Donna Haraway’s now famous essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” giving it, to my Los Angeles ear, an unsettling quality not unlike the queasiness I feel when I go through the mountain tunnel of the Universal Studios tour.

(Source: ebr)

Netianas are heirs of cyborg, of the nomadic subject and other political feminist fictions, they are also a myth, new factitious, desirable and productive creatures, ironic cyberfeminist figures that warn of the new risks of the Internet for an emancipator production of the contemporary subject “woman”. But netianas go further than the artistic ideal of a chimera, the invention produces the same territory of the discourse that tries to change (Translated by Maya Zalbidea) (Source: remedioszafra.net).

Cyberfeminism started in the 90s, a period in which the main feminist issues were globalization, gender violence and the influence of the new technologies and the Internet in our personal relationships, social networks and in our (cyber) bodies. Nowadays, what has remained from cyberfeminism of the 90s? What is the use of cyberfeminist activism?

Our thesis aims at exploring, through the cyborg metaphor, the part of the contemporary literature which produces texts that are the fruit of a hybridization between books and hypermedia. The cyborg enables us to draw a parallel between the connections that exist today between books and hypermedia, and the relationships made up of fears and fantasies, that people have with the technologies they create. Cyborg literature does not propose works within which books and hypermedia are opposed, but works born from the reunion of two material supports, thus offering a media hybridization of the literary text. New media have to be appreciated as a motor of evolution rather than as a threat. Indeed, contemporary literary and books have to take up the challenge imposed by new media. The book is at the core of our problematic. We have to consider it as a medium for text, a mediumthat is not neutral and that holds its own characteristics and potential. New media offer an opportunity to reevaluate the book in its material dimension which is no longer the only medium for text: our daily reading practices, between books and screens, prove it.Studying books along hypermedia enables us to reconsider the technical nature of the literary text. We will analyze how materiality is highlighted by the modifications implied bymedia hybridization. Hybrid literary works are at a crossroads between two imaginative worlds: that of the book and that of the cyberculture. Through the study of the corpus, we will define a poetic of mediation, whose stakes will have to be discussed. We will elaborate a typology of the different connections that exist between printed texts and hypermedia andidentify three kinds of relationships: adaptation, transmediation and representation. Our corpus of cyborg literature offers new combinations of different media which have an impacton textuality. We will study how technology, in its practical (media related) and imaginary dimensions, has an influence on poetic aspects. Our cyborg corpus belongs to a time when literature is going through a shift in media paradigm: from a culture centered on books to onecentered on screens.

Cyborg Tactics and Perilous Hermeneutics in Lexia to Perplexia Shifts in materiality across space¬—from monitor to cell phone screen, from private bedroom to public bus—alter experience and sway meaning. But time also entails an expectation of change that sometimes never comes: works of electronic literature often go without the steady updates to security, appearance, and functionality that corporate software enjoys, turning into strange ruins that, if not broken, carry that possibility. Eight years after the publication of Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, my paper returns to one of the book’s case studies, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, with the goal of investigating the effects of the passing years on the hermeneutics instilled in the user by the text. Focusing on the instability that time and software evolutions have sown, I argue that in this uncertain environment, the recourse of the user is a heightened emphasis on investigation, experimentation, and attempted recovery. With these motivations in mind, I turn to various palimpsests in the text, features of Lexia that straddle the divide between the literary technique and the glitch. Palimpsests are marks of the broken Web, a layering generally born not from experimental poetics but coding errors, and in puzzling over their status and possible meanings, the user explores the tactics required/allowed/prohibited in their interpretation. Full engagement with the text requires that the user turn to capabilities of the computer beyond the browser—copying and pasting, modifying human memory, extending human sight: becoming a good cyborg. The interactive text is read by doing, and in Lexia doing entails experimentation and brings with it the possibility of danger. As the text’s content foregrounds human-machine intersections, the enactment of these tactics brings the text’s meaning closer to the body of the user—in painting a potentially perilous picture of human-machine interactions, the old and possibly broken text may be more effective than its original, new and shiny, manifestation(Source: Author).

An early non-fiction hypertext exploring "the significance of the cyborg in 20th century writing. from Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson to Haraway and Derrida." This book-length work was published as a stand-alone Storyspace hypertext on a disk/CD-ROM.

This work was published under Diane Greco Josefowicz' earlier name, Diane Greco.

This article uses Donna Haraway’s work in “A Cyborg Manifesto” to examine how new reproductive technologies and politics meet and converge with fictional representations of the posthuman subject in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext, Patchwork Girl. It argues that Jackson’s text offers a cyborgian reading of reproduction that challenges the dominant discourse surrounding new reproductive technologies. Ultimately, it argues that Jackson’s text represents assisted conceptions, cyborgian births, and monstrous progenesis in ways that explore the possibilities and limitations of the cyborg, and it addresses current preoccupations with the potential benefits and horrors of new reproductive technologies. (Source: Author's abstract)