The Fantastic Adventures of No-body: Mechanisms of cyborg disembodiment in five texts by women authors

Science fiction is a genre in which anything is possible. It therefore comprises the perfect litmus test of any given culture’s prevailing hopes and fears about the future. One such source of anxiety that has been particularly conspicuous in works of fiction since the Industrial Revolution is the development of automata and other machines – specifically, whether they might eventually become strong or intelligent enough to overthrow their creators. As elucidated in this essay, fears about some sort of robot uprising fit into a more general worry among dominant groups about a reversal of fates between them and an oppressed group. The cyborg character, however, complicates this formula because it is a hybrid of human and machine, a boundary figure. This is a clear, perhaps uncomfortable reminder that the Other is also the Same. This thesis will examine five key examples from the last five decades of literature about cyborgs, namely: The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey; ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ by James Tiptree Jr.; Proxies by Laura J Mixon; ‘Silently and Very Fast’ by Catherynne M Valente; and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. These texts will be combed through for examples of the ways in which cyborgs might disrupt binary understandings of identity and thereby challenge real-life social hierarchies. Most important to this investigation is the potential of cyborg disembodiment – that is, any kind of cybernetic separation of the consciousness from an organic body – to confuse how identities are perceived and constructed

New Kids on the Net. Deutschsprachige Philosophie elektronisch\ud

Mailing lists tend to be shaped by core groups of dedicated participants, developing their interests and opinions in front of a predominantly receptive audience of subscribers. A new kind of communicative praxis is established on top of some guidelines on how computers should exchange data: participation in quasi-instantaneous, globally distributed, non-hierarchical discursive interchange. Computer networks, as is well known, are not confined by any historical or geographical borders. As a consequence, the cultural impact of the technical devices seems to affect arbitrary collections of users availing themselves of the necessary equipment and know-how. One of the most dazzling experiences of communication on the net, it has correctly been pointed\ud out, is its global egalitarianism. While it is true that large parts of the planet are still excluded and the predominance of the English language imposes important\ud constraints on the participants, it is difficult to avoid an initial euphoria, a cosmopolitan state of mind, as one becomes familiar with a machinery that can support spatially unlimited cooperation between equals with a minimum of\ud administrative overhead

Identity, otherness and the virtual double

Interactive media arts offer us new approaches to the role of theatrical representation. Nowadays, digital technology allows us to explore self-representation in systems that cross over between installation art, theatre and performance. By confronting the subject with his or her own image, these devices question the mechanisms of identification and denegation. Both the theatrical creations and the interactive forms that are examined here invite the spectator to explore the relationship between identification and denegation. All the artistic productions that are studied in this article call for a virtual double that the immersant meets: Liquid Views (1992) and Rigid Waves ([1993] 2008) by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Telematic Dreaming ([1992] 2007) by Paul Sermon and Eux (2008) by the Crew company and Sensorama (2009) by the Andwhatbeside(s)death company. In all of these artworks, the participant is encouraged to give less importance to his or her cognitive senses in order to allow his or her sensations to create a representation of himself or herself. The overlap between identity and otherness is therefore to be found at the very heart of the sensitive body.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Muddy rules for cyberspace: Musings of a she-blogger

‘Muddy rules for cyberspace’: Musings of a she-blogger. Yvonne Downs Although referring specifically to intellectual property rights, the above quotation from Burk (1998) gives a sense of the complex, emergent, often ambiguous terms on which we enter new digital spaces. In this paper I give an auto/biographical account of my experience of writing a blog for a number of months while doing research for my PhD. My account is located in the broader context of a consideration of ‘cyberspace’ and animates the contention that ‘(t)he new opportunities and constraints online interaction creates are double-edged, leading to results that can amplify both beneficial and noxious social processes’ (Kollock and Smith 1999, p.4). Whilst acknowledging that ‘cyberspace represents an exciting new medium which allows us to communicate, teach, learn and understand in ways never before imagined’ (Bryant 2001) I also ask whether the multiplicity, mystification and mythologizing of cyberspace (Mosco 2005) has diverted our attention away from the question of ‘what happens to gender when it goes through the hardware?’ (Arpiz 1999). Although I touch on the relationship of cyberspace and physical spaces, relating my specific and limited experience of blogging as a PhD student clearly cannot provide definitive answers or adequately theorise the complexity of cyberspace. My aim is rather to instantiate a method of ‘seeing with both eyes’ (materially and discursively) relations of power within new digital spaces. References Arpiz, L. 1999. Preface. In: Harcourt, W. (ed). Women@internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace. London: Zed Books, pp. xii - xvi Bryant, R. 2001. What kind of space is cyberspace? Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy Vol. 5,. pp. 138 - 155. [Online]. Available at http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/cyberspace.pdf . [Accessed 8th November 2010]. Burk, D. 1998. Muddy rules for cyberspace. In: J. Mackie-Mason and D. Waterman (eds). Telephony, the internet and the media: selected papers from the 1997 telecommunications policy research conference, pp.197-214. Kollock, P. and Smith, M. 1999. Communities in Cyberspace. In: P Kollock and M Smith (eds) Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge pp 3-25 Mosco, V. 2005 The digital sublime. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

What can and cannot be felt: the paradox of affectivity in post-internet art

Focusing on the paradox of embodiment/ disembodiment in virtual space, and on the recent history of Net Art, this article proposes to go back to Roy Ascott’s metaphor of the ‘telematic embrace’ in order to examine different artistic and theoretical approaches to online affectivity. While the first generation of artists who founded the net.art movement was openly fascinated by the novelty of cyberspace as a medium, currently artists are adopting online tools to produce also offline works, revealing the presence of Internet culture in contemporary society instead of focusing on the nature of the medium in itself. In this scenario, marked by the current Post-Internet discourse, real and virtual worlds overlap, and hybrid artistic forms emerge. But are Net artists still reinterpreting the idea of virtual embrace? Or have they moved away from a romantic stance, highlighting the perils of the digital revolution in the so-called Post-Digital age? Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this essay aims to address these questions, exploring the paradox of affectivity in contemporary networked cultures through the analysis of emblematic artworks

Techno-Utopia/ Techno-Dystopia: Writing the Future of Cyber-Technology

Will cyberspace ever become truly inhabitable, and if so, what kind of political climate will be present there? By investigating emergent discourses surrounding the future of cyber-technology, I reveal how online users are actively engaged in the preemptive literary construction and interpretation of a not yet realized cosmopolitics of virtual spaces. Additionally, I argue that futurism online constitutes the emergence of a novel form of real-time genre fiction intertextually linked to more conventional forms of science fiction that interpenetrate both public and academic discourses and interpret cyberspace as a potential source of either boundless freedom or dystopia

The Desire for Immortality: The Posthuman Bodies in Ken Liu’s _The Waves_

In the industrial era, advanced science and technology make immortality-obsessed human beings constantly develop, modify, and reshape their bodies and consciousness, to overcome the fragility and transience of their bodies and approach the dream of immortality. The transformation of the body, in turn, drives society to confront the co-existence of cyborg, transhuman, information subject, nomadic posthuman and other life forms. Focusing on Chinese-American writer Ken Liu’s science fiction the Future Trilogy, Arc, and The Waves, this paper attempts to explore the metamorphosis of the body and the ethical choices in the tension between death and immortality, embodiment and disembodiment. Immortality is not a Utopian paradise but causes many ethical problems and loss of continuity of time, space, history, and identity. Liu’s works suggest that the solution to the problem of posthuman disembodiment involves embracing embodiment and recognizing the importance of memory and social interaction in the formation of one’s identity, affirming that memory and the interaction with others are necessary conditions for the formation of the subject’s identity. Blending genesis myths and technological immortality, Liu explores the possibility of creating new life different from human beings. The posthumans depicted are always in the status of becoming, eager to discover the new world, and indicate the author’s expectations for the bright new future