Lectures

Project

Cyborgs and Us

Robocop

People with pacemakers?

Terminator and Robocop?

Liger

Universal Robots

Metropolis

Six Million Dollar Man

Borg

Dick

Adaptations

Original ending

Scott explains the second cut

Voight-Kampff

Baty and Tyrell

Humanity?

The Cyborg Manifesto

Wired Article about cyborgs and Haraway by Hari Kunzru.

Excerpt:
In a way, modems are at the center of cyborg politics. Being a cyborg isn't just about the freedom to construct yourself. It's about networks. Ever since Descartes announced, "I think, therefore I am," the Western world has had an unhealthy obsession with selfhood. From the individual consumer to the misunderstood loner, modern citizens are taught to think of themselves as beings who exist inside their heads and only secondarily come into contact with everything else. Draw a circle. Inside: me. Outside: the world. Philosophers agonize about whether the reality outside that circle even exists. They have a technical term for their neuroses - skepticism - and perform intellectual acrobatics to make it go away. In a world of doubt, getting across that boundary, let alone to other people, becomes a real problem.
Unless, that is, you're a collection of networks, constantly feeding information back and forth across the line to the millions of networks that make up your "world." A cyborg perspective seems rather sensible, compared with the weirdness of the doubting Cartesian world. As Haraway puts it, "Human beings are always already immersed in the world, in producing what it means to be human in relationships with each other and with objects." Human beings in the '90s show a surprising willingness to understand themselves as creatures networked together. "If you start talking to people about how they cook their dinner or what kind of language they use to describe trouble in a marriage, you're very likely to get notions of tape loops, communication breakdown, noise and signal - amazing stuff." Even while we mistake ourselves for humans, the way we talk shows that we know we're really cyborgs.

Warwick

"Passing" in Cyberspace: Race, Class and Gender

"Passing" in Real Life is Hard

Mr. White

Mulan

Snell

Six Degrees

Six Degrees

Epistemic Privilege (Not really)

Cultural drag

Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance

Black Like Me

Playfulness?

Obligatory Woody Allen reference

"Passing" in Virtual Life...

...Is Easy

Race

Class?

Able-ism?

“Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I'm not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I'm not sure what I'm calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn't happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass."

Months later, the woman – starsinger - would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere fiction.

Dibbell says: Dibbell says: Since rape can occur without any physical pain or damage, I found myself reasoning, then it must be classed as a crime against the mind -- more intimately and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross burnings, wolf whistles, and virtual rape, but undeniably located on the same conceptual continuum. I did not, however, conclude as a result that rapists were protected in any fashion by the First Amendment. Quite the opposite, in fact: the more seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real that underlies the very notion of freedom of speech.

For whatever else these thoughts were telling me, I have come to hear in them an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact.

Alphaville

Jesse James

Piece of Cakey

Janna St. James

Lectures

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Project

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Cyborgs and Us

Monday, May 04, 2009

"Passing" in Cyberspace: Race, Class and Gender

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Smart Mobs and Flash Mobs

Saturday, April 04, 2009

A Fistful of Dollars (and For a Few Dollars More)

Monday, March 23, 2009

Copyright in the Digital Age

Monday, November 03, 2008

Art and Technology

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