Cyborgs

This paper examines a variety of cyborg figures in science fiction and art, and investigates how these posthuman subject’s perceptual capacities are altered through their “cyborging,” how this might lead to greater intersubjective understanding and empathy, and advocates an embodied phenomenology for these figures. The cyborg and the posthuman are not necessarily synonymous but share similar political and ethical goals in theory: to radically redefine the human and the humanities, in order to see a way to better intersubjective and interspecies relations.
Ghost in The Shell, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Harbisson.

English abstract: This article deals with recent developments in the discourse on Cochlear Implants (CI) and the appropriation of the implant as an enhancing cyborg device. The article will first consider developments in medicinal, technological and cultural histories of the CI: While medical experts originally designed the CI to “cure” deafness, some members of Deaf communities do not agree. In their perspective, deafness is not a “disability,” but a certain cultural lifestyle. Hence, forcing people to “hear” with a CI needed to be considered a threat to the culture of sign language. Apart from these discussions, self-appointed “cyborgs” such as German Enno Park consider the CI not only a way of becoming “normal,” but instead claim that the CI bears the potential of raising the human body and its sensory capacities to a posthuman level.

This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in transition, particularly in relation to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness.

ABSTRACT In the article, we make an attempt at discussing what it means that our reality is commodified, what the consequences of this are, how we commodify our bodies and what role in this process is played by cyborgization, as well as what the relation between commodification and disembodiment is. These issues seem to be significant, because when the consumptionist and neoliberal discourse is reconstructed, the aspect of commodification of a human through cyborgization is omitted or marginalized. And such a context of commodification seems to be especially important, as it constitutes the idea of radical questioning of a biological body as a commodity of high market value. Thus, it constitutes the paradox of the commodification of body, i.e. a situation when the most attractive (from the consumer’s point view) body is a body that is disembodied to the maximum.

This presentation shall have an essay type form, and I will talk about my painting-work and the circumstances that influenced it to look the way it does. Therefore, many of the ideas I am going to write about, came from theorists and artists who meant a great deal to me, who helped me understand why I do this kind of painting, but those ideas were interpreted and contextualized through my experience. Therefore, I shall not list them in footnotes and literature. First of all, I would like to thank theorists such as

This Foreword, about robots, written in both poetry as well as prose, introduces the edited collection _Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society_, edited by Steven J. Thompson (IGI Global, 2018). The link on the thumbnail cover at
https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222 will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access. The attached PDF, sent directly to me from IGI-Global to use here, is presented with written permission of the publisher.

The primary objective of the paper is to construe the post-humanist electronic age and its ramifications in terms of religious, biological, social and economic aspects of human society. These effects eventually affect the cultural core of any human society. The rapid rate of transit brought forth by the technological revolutions would leave the world entangled in its electronic chords and the humans disentangled from their emotional selves. The cybernetic organisms-'cyborgs' will infest the world resulting in racial extinction. Technology is intended to enhance human lives in spheres. Gadgets from being facilitators have metamorphosed into cyborgs marking the end of mankind. Growing needs of sedentary lifestyle coupled with contrived innovations of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) scientists like robots and gadgets which could work beyond any human can imagine has resulted in a 'Power Shift'. The humans have started to play second fiddle to robots. Sherry Turkle's Alone Together has documented the effect of technological advancements on human of all section and age group.

Currently the prospect of technological development regarding robotics looks in two directions. On one hand there is a development of creating humanoid robots, which ultimately will house the capacity for human-level sentience, consciousness, and intelligence. On the other hand there is a development of mechanizing the human being, resulting in a cyborg, which refers to the belief that the human being can evolve beyond the current physical and mental limitations through the use of technology. Now, the cyborg is found to be philosophically identical to the Homo Sapiens regarding their status as human being. However, in ontology, they are regarded to not be equivalent, as the Homo Sapiens has an ontological status of As(x) and the UC and ontological status of C(x,y). The automata, on the other hand, is regarded not to be identical to the Homo Sapiens, but equivalent to the UC, wherein both entities hold the ontological predicate of C(x,y). Discourse has led to the discussion of a shif...

David J. Gunkel was a keynote speaker for “Identity, Agency, and the Digital Nexus”, April 2013, SSHRC funded  international symposium hosted by Athabasca University. His talk challenged the audience to reframe and rethink the “human-machine” binary in 21st century understandings of ethics and agency. Later that year Gunkel talked with Paul Kellogg over Skype to discuss some of the points raised in the presentation, and other key ideas embedded in Gunkel's 2012 publication, "The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics." Gunkel is the Presidential Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University. The symposium was funded by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and organized by Dr. Raphael Foshay, MA-IS Program Director at Athabasca University.

Cette communication pose la question du rapport entre le jeu vidéo et la quête de soi dans l’étude de cas de l’œuvre « Expérimentale mise en jeu » réalisée par l’artiste ORLAN en 2015. Cette dernière détourne les codes des jeux vidéo lors d’une exposition itinérante qui a eu lieu en France et à l’étranger entre 2015 et 2016. Développée sur la durée, son œuvre se complexifie à chaque nouvelle étape de l’exposition et plonge le visiteur dans un espace virtuel, dans lequel il peut incarner un avatar cyborg à l’image de l’artiste dont l’objectif est de rebâtir le monde qui s’y trouve en ruine. En plus de reconstruire la culture et l’humanité, l’avatar cherche à reconstituer une œuvre qui est en fait son propre corps : celui-ci se métamorphose alors à chaque morceau trouvé. Cela fait écho à la pratique artistique d’ORLAN qui, au début des années 1990, réalise une série de neuf opérations chirurgicales, utilisant son corps comme médium afin d’ajouter « de la figure sur son visage » et de créer de la différence par rapport aux standards de beauté. Cette quête de l’identité va donc de pair avec le caractère autoréflexif de ce jeu vidéo, puisque l’artiste y insère plusieurs de ses œuvres qui s’élaborent sur le mode de l’autoportrait. Le jeu vidéo d’ORLAN présente ainsi un récit fictionnel qui s’articule d’un medium à un autre.

En el presente trabajo será mi propósito ofrecer un panorama de las diversas áreas de reflexión ética en torno al deporte que se han desarrollado durante estas últimas décadas, siendo consciente de que tal acercamiento no es exhaustivo (no analizaré las relaciones entre deporte y animales, el deporte y los discapacitados o las cuestiones de carácter metaético) y de que trata de ofrecer una foto fija de un fenómeno cambiante. Así pues el objetivo será ofrecer una visión sintética de los principales temas éticos que plantea el deporte: los valores (el fair play), el dopaje, el deporte y la violencia, el deporte y las cuestiones de sexo, y el deporte y el nacionalismo. En último lugar presentaré los principales retos morales que planteará en el deporte los últimos desarrollos tecnológicos aplicados al deporte: el dopaje genético, los cyborgs y la posibilidad de crear deportistas transgénicos (híbridos y quimeras). Pero antes de analizar esas cuestiones son necesarias algunas precisiones conceptuales sobre el fenómeno deportivo, pues una parte importante de la discusión filosófica acerca del deporte ha girado precisamente, alrededor de su definición, esto es, de los rasgos que lo caracterizan frente a otras actividades similares: 1) la distinción entre juego y deporte; 2) el papel de las reglas y los valores en el sistema normativo deportivo; 3) el carácter competitivo y lúdico del deporte.

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

In this book, my aim is to offer an overview of the diverse areas of ethical reflection regarding sport that have developed over the course of recent decades. I am aware that this approach is not exhaustive (for example, I will not analyse the relation between sport and animals, sport and disabilities or matters of meta-ethical character), nor do I intend to offer a static picture of a changing phenomenon. Thus, the objective will be to offer a synthesis of the main ethics-related topics that are found in sport: values (fair play), doping, sport and violence, sport and matters of sex, and sport and nationalism. Lastly, I will present the main moral challenges that arise in sport through the latest technological developments: gene doping, cyborgs and the possibility of creating transgenic athletes (hybrids and chimeras). But before analysing these matters, some conceptual notes are necessary about the phenomenon of sport. This is needed due to the fact that a large part of the philosophical discussion concerning sport has specifically revolved around definitions. In other words, it is important to note the features that distinguish sport from other similar activities: 1) the distinction between play and sport; 2) the role of rules and values in the rule system of sport; and 3) the competitive and recreational nature of sport.

To understand what digital democracy is, this article suggests looking at the individual level of democratic subjectivity. Who is the democratic subject and how is it constituted in digital democracy? It revisits the poststructuralist-inspired debate about cyberdemocracy in the 1990s, which conceptualized the democratic subject as disembodied discursive self, reifying through textuality in cyberspace. In contrast, current debates on new materialism offer novel perspectives with attention to the materiality of bodies and things. New materialist thought has been fruitfully incorporated for social interaction online, but they have yet to be applied to political participation. By discussing three examples of political online participation in which users materialize their classed, raced, and gendered bodies, this essay contributes to a novel understanding of embodied democratic subjectivity in the digital age.

In this paper I will offer an analysis of cyber technology, cyberspace and cyborg from its appearance in fiction to its contemporary realizations, in order to show symbolic place of cyborg has changed, in the light of contemporary power relations. I will focus on the cyborg figure in literature and film, mainly the cyberpunk genre characteristic for fictionalization of the relations between individual, society and technology.

My book, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art, was published by Continuum International Publishers (named the top academic press in Britain this year) in 2012. It starts from the premise that the new changes in copyright law are functioning as a new Prohibition, that is to say as something that it so unpopular, so untenable and so unenforceable that it is only a matter of time before public backlash destroys the current corporate monopoly on creativity. This is the first book to discuss the global politics of creative work and emergent models of authorship in a digital age. The book examines the creation of new media forms by artists and groups who use technology to challenge established models of creation. It starts from the premise that creativity is no longer a useful concept in an age of data glut and perfect copies; instead we must now think of creative practice as a kind of creative critique that repurposes existing materials in order to explore the nature of media and how they affect us. It does this through three different aesthetic approaches: interruption (stoppage and repetition), disturbance (critique and event), and capture/leakage (performance and documentation). The book is wide-ranging in its definition of authorship, exploring methods as diverse as sampling, mashups, hacktivism, machinima, social media, tactical media, productive mistranslation, and digital anthropophagy. It includes extensive research in Asia (Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and especially China and Pakistan) to see how and what creative practices flourish when they are not fettered by copyright regulations.

"This book is an interrogation of humanity's new potentials and threats brought by technology when the question of social change is becoming more crucial than ever.

The selected essays in this anthology confront questions from a wide-ranging perspective that evoke the postmodern idea of the cyborg to illuminate recent phenomena from global warming, Wikileaks, to the Occupy movements. Multiple disciplines from music to psychoanalysis to journalism to anthropology collaborate to examine the way we shape the world from behind our ubiquitous screens to taking to the streets in mass protests.

What does the increasing omnipotence of networked machines ultimately mean? What do social networks do to our sense of self, others and society? Does P2P technology foster new ethics and spiritualities? What potentials does posthumanity have to bring about social change?

Featuring essays from Robert Barry, Siri Driessen & Roos van Haaften, Bonni Rambatan, Dustin Cohen, Jacob Johanssen, Michel Bauwens, Aliki Tzatha, Zakary Paget, Stefen Baack, Alessandro Zagato, Peter Nikolaus Funke, Glenn Muschert, and Jung-Hua Liu."

"My inquiry will focus on an attempt to locate an ethos of music education. Because I acknowledge that the ethos of a society must logically precede a study of ethics (Ryan, 1972, p. 291, Miller, 1974, p. 309), and given the dramatic changes over the past 30 years in the ways that we create, record, store, access, and perform music, much of my exploration will be positioned in an examination of music and new digital media in the 21st century and how it is used by countless adolescents. Thus, in the development of my line of rhetoric I will (1) begin with basic Aristotelian (1984, 1999) notions of art making, artistic activity, and ethos, (2) discuss the relationship between téchne and technology, and (3) téchne and logo, (4) briefly describe the phenomenon of music making in the digitally enriched 21st century, (5) attempt to discover an ethos of music and music education in the 21st century, and (6) based on the possible discovery of an ethos, determine the ethical outcomes regarding curriculum and pedagogy in music education.

I argue that that the profession has not been responsible in the ways that we have constructed an ethos—any notion of ethos—over the past 80 years, in music education textbooks, music curricula, research, and position documents, and in the ways that we (re)present reasons for why music belongs in the schools. Our profession seems to be grasping at straws in our advocacy for ‘justification’ and ‘academic positioning,’ while we may merely need to identify the individuals and communities of people whose lives have been changed by their experiences with music and enlist them to help us (re)define and refine our role not only in education but in society. At best, we may have an ethos that is antiquated and not related to 21st century youth, and most catastrophically, no sensibility regarding the music identity of the majority of youth in digitally enabled nations. It seems that we possess no center, no unified voice, no sense of music of the 21st century, and no sense of “knowing our market” (see Rideout et al, 2010). We need to (re)elaborate what is perceived as ‘music activity,’ in and out of schools and in structured and unstructured learning situations (Gouzouasis & Bakan, 2011). Moreover, we are not speaking to the very people who can understand the need for music education in the schools—the youth of today, who will become the creators and consumers of music and policy makers of tomorrow. Thus, this paper questions how we can create an ethos of music education for our profession without including the individuals who are being ‘educated’ by our notions of music education—our youth themselves.
"

When we think of cyborgs, we might conjure up the collective hive-mind of The Borg from ‘Star Trek’, or science fiction writer Alastair Reynold’s chimeric starship residents, half their bodies taken up by prosthetic limbs and organs. Cyborgs are futuristic meldings of the biological and the artificial; something created rather than evolved. Or are they?

"The cyberPRINT is a fully immersive, interactive virtual environment that is being generated in real-time based on physiological data readings of a human body. In other words, the cyberPRINT is based on creating interfaces between physical and digital spaces and between biology and information technologies. The cyberPRINT is also an event, wherein a performer is connected to the cyberPRINT generator to create a self-sustaining feedback mechanism. Although using the body to electronically drive music and media events is not new, most of these works have paid little or no attention to the potential of interactive 3D virtual environments. Nor have they been so technologically advanced, interdisciplinary intensive (involving architecture, choreography, modern dance, music, bioengineering, medicine and computer science), or architecturally focused as the cyberPRINT.

This project covers a wide and fertile territory that goes from the very technical and design oriented to the very theoretical and interdisciplinary. This paper is intended to (1) expand what has been already published about this project and (2) establish potential areas for discussion before and after the performance"

Die Cyborgisierung des Menschen erzwingt eine „innere“ Disziplinierung, die ganz direkt auf der Ebene des Nervensystems wirkt. Die Institution, welche die Körperdisziplinierung trägt, setzt nicht mehr an der leiblichen Oberfläche an – sie ist keine gesellschaftliche Institution im klassischen Sinne mehr. Diese Institution ist nunmehr der Leib selbst.
Denkbar sind eine ganze Reihe verschiedener technisch-organischer Hybridmenschen. Der Essay schlüsselt das Feld des Techno-Körpers auf und versucht in kritischer Absicht den inneren Motiven nachzuspüren, die vielen Phantasmen der Technisierung des Leibes zu Grunde liegen.

This work deals with the use of self-player pianos - Class of automatic musical instruments - and their technical evolution and the acquis in perforated rolls of paper that containings the digital records for the instrument. Also evaluates the dimension of its use by composers and performers at the beginning of modernity and points to the musical preferences of pianists interpreters who can be seen from the cataloging of rolls for these instruments. Reinforces the conviction of relational intimacy between music and technology. [Text in Portuguese]

When we move past the hype surrounding fourth generation industrial technology (4gIT) and attend to its nature, we should expect 4gIT to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, conditions that tend to ensnare us in dukkha. Here I probe the nature of 4gIT with brief case studies about the Eyeborg, the DIY pancreas system, Google's Pixel Buds, and their role in exacerbating experiences of inherent separation from others. I examine how cravings for self-continuity (bhavana) and self-discontinuity (vibhana) connect experiences of separation from others with dukkha. I also contrast my techno-pessimism with David Loy's Buddhism-inspired value-neutrality, and with an increasingly popular pessimism grounded upon observations about the so-called attention economy.

(Comments much appreciated by October 22 2017. Thank you!)

Las nuevas tecnologías en desarrollo estan permitendo avances importantes en el ambito de conectar los cerebros de las personas a las máquinas. Interesantes experiencias han conseguido efectivas logros en este campo.

Las proyeccione es que los seres humanso lograremos, en unos pocos años. conectarnos a través de una resd social telepática.

En est artículo se aborda el destino final de esta línea de investigación que es subir la mente humana a un ordenador.

I love technology; it promises so much. Then, when it doesn't work, I find it infuriating and frustrating. Transhumanists (short for “transitional humans”) have a reputation for embracing technology with unbridled passion. Conservative social theorist Francis Fukuyama claims that transhumanism is the “world's most dangerous idea.” Some conservative groups have described transhumanists as extreme militant libertarians, who advocate anarchy and pure capitalism.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

When designing target architectures for organizations, the discipline of enterprise architecture has historically relied a set of assumptions regarding the physical, cognitive, and social capacities of the human beings serving as organizational members. In this text we explore the fact that for those organizations that intentionally deploy posthumanizing neuroprosthetic technologies among their personnel, such traditional assumptions no longer hold true: the use of advanced neuroprostheses intensifies the ongoing structural, systemic, and procedural fusion of human personnel and electronic information systems in a way that provides workers with new capacities and limitations and transforms the roles available to them.

Such use of neuroprostheses has the potential to affect an organization’s workers in three main areas. First, the use of neuroprostheses may affect workers’ physical form, as reflected in the physical components of their bodies, the role of design in their physical form, their length of tenure as workers, the developmental cycles that they experience, their spatial extension and locality, the permanence of their physical substrates, and the nature of their personal identity. Second, neuroprostheses may affect the information processing and cognition of neurocybernetically augmented workers, as manifested in their degree of sapience, autonomy, and volitionality; their forms of knowledge acquisition; their locus of information processing and data storage; their emotionality and cognitive biases; and their fidelity of data storage, predictability of behavior, and information security vulnerabilities. Third, the deployment of neuroprostheses can affect workers’ social engagement, as reflected in their degree of sociality; relationship to organizational culture; economic relationship with their employers; and rights, responsibilities, and legal status.

While ethical, legal, economic, and functional factors will prevent most organizations from deploying advanced neuroprostheses among their personnel for the foreseeable future, a select number of specialized organizations (such as military departments) are already working to develop such technologies and implement them among their personnel. The enterprise architectures of such organizations will be forced to evolve to accommodate the new realities of human-computer integration brought about by the posthumanizing neuroprosthetic technologies described in this text.

Il 21° secolo ha inaugurato una ridefinizione del corpo attraverso gli sviluppi cibernetici e biotecnologici. Come vedremo in questo articolo, il concetto di “umano” è stato ampiamente contestato, mentre “postumano” e “transumano” sono diventati termini di ricerca filosofica e scientifica. Tali cambi stanno inducendo un cambio paradigmatico nella percezione ontologica ed epistemologica del corpo umano. Questo articolo presenta una riflessione originale sulla tematica della corporeità nell'era postumana, ponendo domande quali: gli esseri postumani avranno bisogno di qualche forma di corporalità? Per rispondere, analizzeremo concetti chiave come “umano”, “corpo” e “sé incarnato”, e poi presenteremo le risposte che danno il postumanesimo e il transumanesimo a tali quesiti, in modo critico e generativo.

Questo testo è la traduzione di Francesca Ferrando, The Body, in R. Ranish, S. Lorenz (eds.), Post-and Transhumanism: An Introduction , Peter Lang Publisher, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 213-226.

Abstract (in English)

The 21st century has ushered in a redefinition of the body by cybernetic and biotechnological developments. the concept of "human" has been broadly challenged, while "posthu-man" and "transhuman" have become terms of philosophical and scientific enquiry. These scenarios are inducing a paradigm shift in the ontological and epistemological perception of the human body. this article presents an original reflection on the topic of embodiment in the posthuman era, by asking questions such as: will posthumans need any embodiment at all? Posthumanism and transhumanism offer different answers to these questions. before presenting them, we will analyze key concepts such as "human", "body" and "embodied self", in critical and generative ways.