CYBORG SUBJECTS

esc medien kunst labor Graz, Austria Opening:

• 14h 27.05.2020 — 24.07.2020 Opening hours:

Core times: Tuesday - Friday, 2 p.m. - 5 p.m. and by appointment. Closed on public holidays. Registration by phone: + 43-316-836 000; Registration by email: esc_at_mur.at

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” [Donna Haraway, „A Cyborg Manifesto“, 1985]

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?