Class Scribe - 11/17

Today, we continued with presentations and discussions concerning the cyborg. There is a general consensus that a cyborg is made up of constituent parts of several different beings, whether they be man, machine, or animal. As such, a cyborg tends to be a merger of ideals intrinsic to its components. The over-arching question was how a cyborg overcomes these perhaps clashing binary ideals and dualisms. Such ideals include technological/human, male/female, human/animal, living/nonliving, self/other, etc. We determined that it was difficult to actually imagine a realistic cyborg, since we depend so much on these binary oppositions. For example, we like to think about life, not death. We categorize ourselves as either male or female, good or bad.

The idea of a human/technology merger may not seem so far-fetched, however, since we already coexist with technology in today's society. Overcoming gender binary oppositions seemed to be much more difficult, and almost impossible to eliminate the distinction between male and female.

We also touched upon the notion of alienation as the "other" or unknown. Alienation serves as the foundation of inequality.

The class ended with us viewing some works and images by performance artists such as Orlan and stelarc.