CYBORG SUBJECTS

• Alice Strete
• Evelyn Schalk
• KairUs
• Manuel Beltrán
• Mario Klingemann
• Max Höfler
• Nayantara Ranganathan
• Patrícia J. Reis
• Peter Brandlmayr

The term ‘cyborg’, short for Cybernetic Organism, first appeared in 1960 as part of a NASA project whose goal was the “conquest” of space. In 1985 Donna Haraway took up this militaristic, techno-humanistic figure in order to formulate a socialist feminist manifesto in which she particularly emphasises the ambiguous nature of the cyborg and a necessary overcoming of dualisms such as human/machine, female/male, etc., which in her view form the foundation of power relations. In the movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system, knowledge, technical processes and also humans and other organisms are being disassembled into information units that are subject to a theory of language and control. Everything is rendered codable, everything becomes predictable. What, as Frieder Nake asks, has happened to our right to be unpredictable?