Remote Experience: Donna Haraway

Sam Scaife

Concept

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs”

Donna J. Haraway

We are increasingly using digital technologies to enhance our lives and experiences, communicating with friends through social networks and consuming content. These interactions exists within the parallel reality of the Internet. Rarely do they allow you to directly influence the real world. This view of technology has been visible in Science fiction, with its utopian and dsytopian visions of the future. Sci-fi tends to have themes of replacing real world experiences with those of a technological nature. Networks allow distance and other variables of real life to be surmounted, computers can become and extension of the body both physically and mentally. Are we now approaching a reality where the dreams and fiction of the 20 century are being realised?

What I will produce

I will explore the potential of digital technologies ,from a Science fiction perspective, to create a real world experience controlled through digital technologies, which comments on the future implications of technology. This will be in the form of an object or installation which is controlled remotely though networked technologies. It will target a digitally aware audience with interests in the artistic uses of digital media.

Reading List

O’Mahony, M (2002) Cyborg: The man-machine by Marie

Gibbson, W (1988) Burning Chrome

Dick, P (1968) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Nusselder, A (2009) Interface fantasy: a Lacanian cyborg ontology

Zylinska, J (2002) The cyborg experiments: the extensions of the body in the media age

Haraway, D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Nicholas Negroponte, N (1995) Bits and Atoms available at: http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED3-01.html

Notes

___________________________________________________________________________

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/01/memory/

“whereas gaming is connected to rules and strategy, playing enacts a meta-narrative that reconciles paradoxical communication (Bateson 1972), thus blurring the boundaries between the real and the virtual; it is this liminal state of being in between that supports the illusion.” (Diaz & Ekman, 2011)

Tangible Computing

“Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organization. Their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as a system. hence, they not only are self-organizing but also are autopoietic or self-making... In a sense, autopoiesis turns the cybernetic paradigm inside out. It’s central premise - that systems are infomationally closed- radically alters the idea of information feedback loop, for the loop no longer functions to connect a system to its environment. in the autopoietic view, no information crosses the boundary separating the system from its environment. We do not see a world “out there” that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organizations allows us to see that environment merely triggers changes determined by the system’s own structural properties. Thus the center of interest for autopoiesis shifts from the cybernetics of the observed system to the cybernetics of the observer. Autopoiesis also changes the explanation of what circulates through the system to make it work as a system. The emphasis now is on the mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system rather than on message, signals or information.”

Katherine Hayles cited in Bioethics in the age of new media

in the words of Maturana and Varela, “everything said is said by someone,” which means that when the observer - herself a smaller discrete system within a larger system - makes statements about reality, these statements are always produced from within the system. in other words, reality comes into existence from us “only through interactive processes determined solely by the organism’s own organization.” Cognition and articulation are at the same time acts of bringing forth a world.” (Zylinska 2009 p.40)