October 2010
0 posts
50. This is How it Ends/Begins
“Cyborg” is a child of the space age that almost immediately fled the nest. It found a home in the popular and critical imagination, where it’s flourished for the past 50 years. Hybrid creatures of technology, biology, and culture, cyborgs find purchase in our fantasies, our nightmares, and our purchase orders.
To those who have just discovered our project, greetings to you in...
“Whatever I can tell you about the extraordinariness of the cyborg might be a bit...”
– 48. Quinn Norton, who once gave herself a sixth sense, offers a wide-gazing analysis of the place of cyborgs in a very, very weird half-century.
It seems like the discussion of cyborgs in the time since 1960, echoing the discussion of robotics, bounced between news of DARPA and DARPA-like Sci-fi...
September 2010
50 posts
“If you want a society more frank about its integral reliance on technology,...”
– 47. Stephen Becker normally writes about architecture, but today he’s interested in cyborg fashion. If we’re all already cyborgs, why do some of us insist on dressing up like them?
fake cyborgs – mammoth // building nothing out of something
“For the next sixth months, visitors to the gloriously named Maison d’Ailleurs in...”
– 45. Nicola Twilley examines an art installation that plays with the feedback mechanisms of our enteric system, the body’s “second brain”.
Gut Control | Edible Geography
“No atmosphere in space? One solution: Don’t breathe!”
– 43. We’ve argued many times before in this series that the cyborg of Clynes and Kline was about much more than humans with robot bodyparts. Today, we offer a catalogue of the enhancements they envisioned.
The Clynes and Kline Enhancement Package | Quiet Babylon
“We don’t know what a cyborg is because there is no such thing as a cyborg.”
– 41. Johnnie Wilcox considers the nature of cyborgs across a range of classic pieces of fiction.
mistersquid: a digital fiction: Notes About a Network
“Most of the time, my followers and my phone and my networks feel like a sense.”
– 40. Simon Bostock discusses one of my favourite aspects of cyborgs - when cultural identity mixes with technical capability. Watch especially for the part about deaf culture and how the logic of those arguments gets applied elsewhere.
Managing Cyborgs- Cyborg Management 101
“Sure, sure, cyborgs don’t have to be libertarian wankers, but it isn’t until the...”
– 38. Justin Pickard is a master’s student at Goldsmiths and a crazy person. His post is about memory palaces, real and virtual.
Cyborg Memories: Why Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum (plus visitors) is a Cyborg « Justin Pickard
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point,...”
– 36. A young cyborg encounters Merleau-Ponty and Karl Marx in this piece of science fiction by Adam Rothstein. Did you know that reading about someone else reading dead philosophers could be gripping? Now you do.
P.O.S.Z.U. » Marx and the Cyborg
“It makes sense that the vector of this breakdown is a broadcast signal.”
– 35. Will Wiles returns, with a look at the broadcast body horror of Videodrome, Ballard, and Walter Pichler. This part isn’t strictly cyborgian, but boy does it give me chills:
Nothing but torture and snuff, filmed in a studio with walls of wet clay. Wet clay - absorbs sound, and it can be...
34. Weekend Reading: The Return Of The...
In 2008 Alexander Trevi looked at cutting-edge exoskeleton tech and could only imagine one thing: what if they were gardening?
The CEO of Caterpillar, an unavowed fan of Cinquecento garden design, wants to create for his palatial mansion located just outside the company’s world headquarters in Peoria, Illinois, a replica of the Villa D’Este gardens, an exact copy, in fact, except...
“Throughout his life and work, there is an effort to make sense of the human...”
– 32. Havi Hoffman, writing for the Yahoo! Developer Network, takes a deeper look at Manfred Clynes, surviving father of ‘cyborg’. I particularly enjoy the bit about musical Turing tests and sincere computers.
Manfred Clynes, Cyborgology, and the Real-Real Time of Our Lives (Yahoo!...
“What would the implications be for our culture, Shaviro wonders, if prosthetic...”
– 30. Jim Rossignol, of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and author of This Gaming Life recasts videogames as cybernetic enhancements for the mind.
The Prosthetic Imagination | > jim rossignol
“We routinely fetishize & sexualize cool, flashy tech. In doing so we impart...”
– 29. Chris Arkenberg considers the ways we are becoming more like machines and how machines are becoming more like us.
URBEINGRECORDED » Blog Archive » The Cybernetic Self
“Great day for an etymological celebration, I reckon.”
– 28. Do you like science fiction mixed in with your tech history? Because if you do, Paul Graham Raven’s got you covered, in this piece leaked backwards 50 years, offered exclusively as part of our little project.
Who is Paul Graham Raven? I can offer no better bio than the one the man offers...
“The idea that an electronically augmented revelation could restore the...”
– 26. Steve Silberman looks at the life and fiction of Paul Linebarger, a man who wrote about cyborgs before we knew that’s what they were called.
Tripping Cyborgs and Organ Farms: The Fictions of Cordwainer Smith | NeuroTribes
“It is often said of actor Peter Sellers that he was so skilled at his craft...”
– 24. Navneet Alang considers the web as social prosthetic. A refuge for the shy, for shells seeking an outlet.
The Soul/Made Cyborg « Scrawled in Wax
“Pop culture influence aside, the cyborg has always represented the best and...”
– 22. Eleanor Saitta’s far-reaching essay considers the identity question from romantic self-sustaining hero to decision-outsourcing cloud network pseudo entity.
What Are We? | Structure Light Design Research Collective
21. Weekend Reading: The Accidental Cyborg
Jamais Cascio is a futurist who found himself thrust into the role of cyborg as his hearing degraded to the point that he now relies on programmable audio-processors (hearing aids).
The demographics of the disabled are changing, as is the power of assistive technologies. And these changes have serious implications both for the role and visibility of the disabled in Western society and the...
20. Weekend Reading: The Entomomechanophilic Army
Forget China, there is a new Insecta Superpower lurking on the horizon.
Picking up on yesterday’s non-human cyborg mini-theme (gods and plants), this 2006 post from Brian Finoki charts the rise of mechanised, militarised insects. Which means it picks up on the Terminator/our-creations-will-destroy-us theme too.
The end of the world could see, not a Noah’s Ark of surviving...
“The Bible is full of cyborgs.”
– 18. Matthew Battles helps us find them, as part of a whistlestop tour of cyborg spirituality. Like a good fundamentalist, he begins with the founding documents before things get truly wild.
Cyborg Theology | HiLobrow
“Once we can abstract from the medium, information does not need to be a letter,...”
–
14. Bookfuturist, Snarkmarketeer, and general man-about-town Tim Carmody turns in what is probably going to be the strangest contribution to our little project. Read the post twice. You’ll be glad you did.
Paterson, or History of the Cyborg as City « Snarkmarket
“Is the flesh for the Terminator just clothing, just camouflage? And if so, does...”
– 12. In another Quiet Babylon guest post, Jonah Campbell of still crapulent argues that The Terminator is not a cyborg at all.
Some Major Terminator Fan Is Totally Going to Nail My Ass to the Wall for This | Quiet Babylon
11. Weekend Reading: Disabled Puppetry
Published in August 2001, The Next Brainiacs is one of my all time favourite Wired articles. It has a healthy dose of the most gleeful techno-optimism combined with a deliciously counter-intuitive argument — that disabled people are ahead of the curve.
When you think disability, think zeitgeist. I’m serious. We live at a time when the disabled are on the leading edge of a broader societal...
“In spite of their superficial simplicity, even these problems have a background...”
– 10. Dovetailing nicely with yesterday’s post on cognitive load, Molly Wright Steenson returns to discuss early attempts to use cybernetic systems as tools to aid in design and architecture.
Misfits and architecture machines | girlwonder
“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at...”
– 9. The quotation is from Gregory Bateson.
After a week or so of arguments along the lines of “we have all always been cyborgs” it’s worth taking a moment to consider what cyborg augmentation isn’t. Today’s post does that.
Cognitive Load | Quiet Babylon
“But our trip to the nursery with a flamethrower can also be educational.”
– 8. Will Wiles revisits one of the all-time great pieces of cyborg fiction, Genesis of the Daleks.
Children of the Bunker.
“No wonder cybernetics proved so very attractive to so many fields: it described...”
– 7. To get to cyborgs, you need cybernetics. Molly Wright Steenson looks at some of that history.
A network of constant interactions and communications.
“Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this...”
– 6. A guest post by Kevin Kelly on the evolutionary history of humans as cyborgs.
Domesticated Cyborgs – Kevin Kelly | Quiet Babylon
5. Weekend Reading: The Juicer
The image of cyborgs in fiction has most prevalently been of the “bionic prosthetics” variety. Ghost in the Shell, Terminator, Robocop, Neuromancer, on and on, we see chromed enhancements. Cyberpunk games such as Shadowrun or GURPS Cyberpunk make heavy use of the trop as a means to enhance your characters.
But the spirit of Clynes & Kline’s cyborg is to be found most...
4. Weekend Reading: Walking Architecture
Though much of 50 Posts About Cyborgs is new material, we also want to highlight great posts that have come before.
This one is recent. It’s taken from a presentation by Matt Jones of BERG. It’s a nice counterpoint to the argument touched upon briefly in Friday’s Post which contrasted the architectural impulse with the cybernetic.
Enjoy.
People Are Walking Architecture, or...
2. The Project
In May 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline attended the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine to participate in the Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight Symposium. They presented a paper called “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics”. The proceedings of the symposium were published in 1961 but before that, an excerpt of Clynes & Kline’s paper appeared in the September...
“For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated...”
– 1. This is where it starts.
Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline Cyborgs and Space [PDF] (ASTRONAUTICS, Issue 13 September, 1960)