Searching for cyborg:
Pictures of half dressed robot girls, and some half-dressed robot boys. Ad for the Fifty Shades of Grey film (sponsored by Maybelline cosmetic company). (In a second search, the ad was for the Strictly Ballroom musical).

Searching for Cybernetics:
Pictures of half dressed robot girls. Ad for the Fifty Shades of Grey film. (Second search, Kia ‘Game On’ app to win a car with a tennis tie-in).

Searching for android:
Mostly the operating system, some robot stuff. Ad for McDonalds fast food.

Searching for robot:
Mix of half dressed robot girls, real robots, transformer fan art. Ad for McDonalds fast food.

Searching for Cognisphere:
2 quotes from Hayles (2006) from Anzbau, another MScED participant.

Searching for AI:
lots of Ashton Irwin fan love. Ad for Woolworths supermarket hot cross bun trifle.

Searching for Artificial Intelligence:
Serious articles about science and technology. Ad for MLC financial advisors.

Searching for mecha:
mostly transformer fan art. Ad for MLC financial advisors.

Correlation doesn’t equal correlation, of course, but my search on Thursday night suggests that, for posters and for ad algorithms, cyborgs are coded as more female that robots.

I went back to find some images and found that I would probably code the feeds very slightly differently–so clearly the above is a snapshot, not a definitive statement. 

by Shorra after Bouguereau

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Mourning; http://www.shorra.com/p217174063/h4e700222#h4e700222

The original depicts the moment when Adam and Eve mourn the murder of their son Abel (by their other son, Cain). What does it do to the picture to have the first humans mourn a cyborg? The cyborg’s body is much more mutilated than the human body in the original–partly to show that he isn’t actually a human, but perhaps suggesting more.

I’m a fan of steampunk novels, and the grafting of flesh and mechanical elements is a major part of that. But in a way I’ve been grafted onto my watch for so long I reflexively twist my wrist to look at the time, and the skin beneath it is permanently lighter than the skin on the rest of my arm. I’m short-sighted, so my glasses are essential for me to function, I put them on first thing in the morning, and take them off last thing at night. I wear a ring on that finger too–I’ve been married a long time, though I often switch up my wedding band with a fun bit of costume jewellery. My finger indents under the ring, the white flesh moulded so that it looks strange if I don’t wear a ring.

Shoes, jackets, hair clips, piercings. Useful, medical and ornamental bits of metal and glass technology. We have always been cyborgs.

***

And yes this was the image I tried to share as an Instagram post.

When we were watching the films, I was most struck by the consistently melancholy tone, each of them reflected on some gulf or gap between actual life (remembered or experienced) and the virtual memories or experiences they were able to attain. Each of the films had, at it’s core, some kind of loss or lack.

Having woken up a bit more, I thought about the ‘wrongness’ in each of the films, the awkward or slightly ‘off’, as portrayed by the false-memory Sophie in Memory 2.0, or the almost inhuman replicant Roy as acted by Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. This was prompted by a comment made by one of the other students about Address is Approximate, about the ‘uncanny valley‘. (I wanted to go back and attribute it correctly, but the Temporary Room in TogetherTube doesn’t keep the discussion, which I’ll have to remember for next time).

But as I was making dinner that night, my academic training kicked in, and I started thinking about money.

I couldn’t shake the line from Memory 2.0 where Steve, the lab tech, races after Henry to find out what happened.  ‘I’ve got my uncle screaming at me, claims they’re asking for their money back‘ he says. (All film clips are designed to start at the relevant line… you shouldn’t have to watch the whole clip for each quote).

• Who is paying for Henry’s memories of Sophie? Why is this worth something for them?

It’s clear that ‘they’ pay the lab enough for the lab to pay Henry, as we see earlier.

This made me think again about the desk in Address is Approximate. 

• How does the fact that this is a workspace make it different from toys-coming-to-life stories like The Velveeteen Rabit or Toy Story?

And of course this is the backbone of Bladerunner. Replicants are made by a corportation, and destroyed by the state.

• What financial or market forces led to the creation of really believable androids? Who benefits (cui bono) from their destruction?

Therefore, is the crucified Roy, with a nail in his hand, a Christ-figure dying to redeem the world; or a follower of Spartacus, the slave revolutionary?

And thinking about slavery took me back to Caliban in Address is Approximate.

The cute little white mono-brow robot gets to live out his dream, a version of the American dream, by riding his mini-fig convertible along the Pacific Coast.

Screenshot from Address is Approximate: http://vimeo.com/32397612

Screenshot from Address is Approximate http://vimeo.com/32397612

But who is driving the engine of the machine?

A small, monsterous- or native-looking black robot Caliban with pointy teeth.

The fact that I can’t work out if the robot is supposed to be a monster, a monkey, an indigenous person, or an Afro-Carribean person basically says it all about the representational Othering going on here.

Screenshot from ‘Address is Approximate’ by The Theory: http://vimeo.com/32397612

(For more on this, see Edward Said.)

The comments beneath the video, and the responses of the class (and my own) were overwhelmingly positive: ‘cute’, ’emotional’, ‘heartwarming’. Yet, clearly, all of this white affective labour is being made possible by the invisible others in the engine room.

Historical technology, knowledge and machinery are often coded as ‘transparent, self-invisible’, and implicitly white and male, Haraway reminds us (p.29). A focus on the virtual mind enables physical difference to be erased, making ‘most men and all women… simply invisible’ (p.29). Making difference invisible, she suggests, does not liberate those whose difference is written on their bodies, but rather continues to force those differences away from the public sphere, even as the different continue to sustain the public sphere from the background. (Embodying Learners in New Media Literacies: Cyborgs, Androids and the Dance Apocalyptic I)

From Star, Susan Leigh. “Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions.” The Sociological Review 38.S1 (1990): 26-56.

As a recent post from danah boyd demonstrated, the tech industry ‘whitewashes’ what teens do on social media, for example “critiques of youth use of Twitter are often seen in a negative light because of the heavy use by low-status black and brown youth”. The significance of ‘Black Twitter‘ to Twitter is not to be overlooked.

There are responses to this problem that take us further, that give us ideas of how to not just notice the problem, but perhaps deal with it. Ta Nehsi Coates in “The Case for Reparations”, notes that (especially if, as Picketty has argued, inherited capital is a major force for income inequality) a long history of dispossessing black people of the fruits of their labour, means they continue to be disadvantaged.

Another route is Janelle Monáe’s Electric Ladies cyborgs. For a more academic survey of how Monáe embodies the theoretical positions of Philip K Dick, Octavia Butler, and Donna Haraway, see The Dance Apocalyptic II. But for now, watch how she combines product placement, black middle-class life (with cupcakes, sororities, majorettes and her own convertible), and the life of an escaped revolutionary cyborg.

Now, when I take notes for academic writing, I use the Cornell Method–which is analogue (handwritten on paper), atemporal (designed to be used again and again across a writing or research project, and its multiple revisions) and strictly analytic (that is, the thoughts, comments and notes I include fit squarely into the tradition of academic writing and logics). It is also, interestingly, less linear, more map-like, with its multiple panes for meta-analysis and reflection.

Live-blogging is is rather a stream-of-consciousness (or rather, I suspect, a form of “free indirect discourse“), rag-bag of links, thoughts, quotes and responses to the reading. This makes it messier than my neat notes, but it makes it more linear chronologically. It therefore lays out clearly my route (rather than my map), my growth and way of getting there. If this sounds fragmentary, repetitious, and kind of modernist, it is. Eliot wrote: “And all is always now“, and texts are always present to the person reading them, and yes, I was thinking about Mrs Dalloway (and Ulysses) when writing this paragraph.

I think that makes it less interesting for anyone else to read, but useful to keep track of my progress–in the same way the ‘Lifestream’ does.

***

So, on with the reading.

In which we nod at the Post-human, the Cyborg, and Homo faber

I’ve already engaged with some of these ideas in a 3-part ‘web essay‘ for IDEL, ‘Embodying Learners in New Media Literacies: Cyborgs, Androids and the Dance Apocalyptic’, which makes extensive use of two of the secondary readings:

Haraway, Donna (2007) A cyborg manifesto from Bell, David; Kennedy, Barbara M (eds),  The cybercultures reader pp.34-65, London: Routledge.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine,  How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

The web essay also makes some use of Clarke (2002). I would like to read more on this, starting with Shilling (see list below). Latour’s later Reassembling the Social is on my summer reading list  already.

In which we get to the bit where mobile phones change everything

I’m always sceptical about these claims, what I have called before the “things are all different now, because interwebs” claim. (Yes, this is another blog-post for IDEL that I reblogged for a wider audience).  I always read these claims about, say, the mobile phone, and wonder… ‘yes, but what about the letter, the telegram? what about film, about portraits, about dageurrotypes? what about short-wave radio, and the telephone?’

For example, how might be understand Van den Berg’s (2009) claims about GPS compared to other traditional methods of navigation?

Miller (2011) p 221

Okay, this is clearly different from, say, an (imaginary) wild tracker who looks at how the moss grows and the direction of the sun and navigates that way.

But I wonder how much this might be like the sailor with his sextant navigating via star charts? Or a cross-country runner using a compass and an ordinance survey map (as in orienteering) ? Or a driver on a motorway, chosing one of a score of identical-looking  exits because of the road signs? All of these modes of navigation also use a “God’s eye” view, a typical aspect of maps since… well, here is an example from 500BC, so we’re looking at 2,500 years.

“Baylonianmaps“. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the fascinating discussion that emerged from my earlier rant post, I said:

I agree that the internet has made major differences to degree, speed and scale of reading and writing.

And I continue to agree that the ways in which we might be present or not present through mobile phones are made easier, quicker and more portable than ever before. No longer do I need to take an image in a professional studio with a camera the size of a small suitcase, holding my pose for some minutes. The image does not need a complex, multi-stage development and fixing process. Without wrapping it carefully, franking it, and walking it down to a postbox, I can share it with those who are emotionally connected to me but physically distant. Moreover, my recipient needn’t wait for weeks for the steamship to cross the oceans.

Miller (2011) p 221

But anyone who thinks that people in the past were mentally and emotionally ‘with’ the people around them, or ‘in’ the spaces they inhabit, has clearly never read a novel. Not read The Catcher in the Rye, or The Scarlet and the Black, or Northanger Abbey, or seen The Cherry Orchard or The Three Sisters.

Or

Source: http://www.observatoriofucatel.cl/la-necesidad-de-un-diario-publico/

Rant over.

***

To Read:

Shilling, Chris. The body and social theory. Sage, 2012.

Licoppe, Christian. “Connected presence: the emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape.” Environment and Planning D 22.1 (2004): 135-156.

***

Review: Since this was a live-blog, I didn’t go back and edit  what I wrote (except to correct typos etc). However, it’s interesting that I was thinking about literature and maps in my reflection about this as a way of taking notes, long before I got to the bit where I was having qualms about mobiles changing human relationships.  I’d quite forgotten about that, though clearly it was still in my mind.