Topic 2: ‘The machine/ organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary’ writes Haraway (p.36, Manifesto). In what ways have our relations to machines been theorized?
1. Gandy, Matthew (2005) ‘Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00568.x/full
It is about the replicant who named Rachel in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). In the acticle, the writer explores the possibility that human identities might be artificially created in order to produce advanced androids whose intelligence and sensitivity is comparable with that of their human creators. The figure of the cyborg, as represented in science fiction cinema, is not an automaton or robot but a sophisticated creation that seems to simultaneously extend but also threaten our understanding of what it means to be human. If we were to locate the cyborg as an idea, we could say that it is clearly linked to fantastical combinations of bodies and machines but is nonetheless a way of thinking about the world. It is, in other words, an ontological strategy for extending the limits to human knowledge as well as an apposite means of describing those phenomena that appear to reside outside conventional frameworks of understanding. If a cyborgian sensibility is explored within the context of the contemporary city, we find that it has developed out of several interconnecting strands of thought as a trope of critical reflection which uncovers a series of anomalies, fractures and tensions lurking within dominant modes of urban and architectural thinking.
2. Bell, David and Kennedy, Barbara (2000) ‘The Cybercultures Reader’
The Cybercultures Reader brings together articles covering the whole spectrum of cyberspace and related new technologies to explore the ways in which these technologies are reshaping cultural forms and practices at the turn of the century. The reader is divided into thematic sections focussing on key issues such as subcultures in cyberspace, posthumanism and cyberbodies and pop-cultural depictions of human-machine interaction. It explains that cyborg is one which is not defined within the parameters of a fixed subjectivity or identity. This cyborg consciousness has arisen out of the literal ideas of boundary crossing found in cuborg mythologies. Also, cyborg has no origins, it is completely without positionality. As such it functions metaphorically, to disturb enlightenment epistemologies which have foregrounged origins. Indeed, the cyborg skips the stip of original unity, or identification with nature in the Western sense.
3. Mitchell, William (2003) ‘M++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City’ http://www.google.com/books?hl=zh-TW&lr=&id=wcBo7pq3X1AC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=cyborg&ots=Xp9YRguPgp&sig=HWJikg6IEvVTuP-i9VGTxE4-W0I#v=onepage&q&f=false
The writer stated the transformation of wireless technology in the hundred years since Marconi in this book. The transmission and reception is scaling up the networks. He thinks immobile machine is just replaced human’s organs. The hand-held devices is one of the example. This transformation has, in turn, changed our relationship with our surroundings and with each other. The cellphone calls from the collapsing World Trade Center towers and the hijacked jets on September 11 were testimony to the intensity of this new state of continuous electronic engagement. In the book, the writer also stated that the elementary unit of information and matter - the "trial separation" of bits and atoms is over. In cyberspace, the events are reflected by the events in physical space by the increased frequency. The movement of an aircraft or a robot arm is controlled by the digital information. The writer also explains the effects of wireless linkage, global interconnection, miniaturization and portability on our bodies, our clothing, our architecture, our cities and our uses of space and time. The new urban condition including the computer viruses, cascading power outages, terrorist infiltration of transportation networks, and cellphone conversations in the streets. They lead network interconnectivity.
4. Mirowski, Philip (2002) ‘Machine dreams: economics becomes a cyborg science’
In this book, the writer stated the “history of technology” with history of economic ideas. By using the Cold War history and the history of the postwar to analysis the technology history is kind of building the relation of the economic and technology. In the book, cyborg science is defined as the existence of the computer as a paradigm object for everything from metaphors to assistance in research activities to embodiment of research products. With the advent of the cyborg sciences after cyborg sciences after World War II, something distinctly different begins to happen. A cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans and machines, the living and the dead, the active and the inert, meaning and symbol and intention and teleology.
5. Balsamo, Anne (1999) ‘Technologies of the gendered body: reading cyborg women’ http://www.google.com/books?hl=zh-TW&lr=&id=lkr11mXPYKEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=cyborg&ots=U7N3hvzz2g&sig=K2ocT_txsHWlnwpDGM5ky_RcKx0#v=onepage&q&f=false
This book is about the reading of body. It takes this concept into the fields at the forefront of culture and the vast spaces mapped by science and technology to show that the body in high-tech is as gendered as ever. The writer used female body building, cosmetic surgery, reproductive medicine for example to talk about the status of the female body in a postmodern world. Also, the writer also described how gender considerations and other beliefs about race, physical abilities and economic and legal status to shape the certain biotechnologies.
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