WEEK 7

Jaime Smith-Windsor- The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary

&

Steve Dixon- Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About

The Cyborg Mother, was the first time in this class that I had that moment of "Wow, technology supports everything that we do and live with every day." Jamie Smith-Windsor's writing is inspire and insightful. She delicately writes about how the machine helping her child grow has now become its mother. Her child is a cyborg, living from a machine rather than a human, and how her child will always be part human, part machine.  Her child, like many children, would have died without the help of an incubator.  

"26 February 2003-… I look to the machines and they tell me how my daughter is doing today. How easy it is to look at the monitor that tells me… what Quinn cannot yet tell me… Quinn is having a 'terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day."

"The cyborg does not die because it is unplugged. The cyborg continues to exist beyond all locations of space and time, the consciousness irreversibly fused with technology." 

Steve Dixon, writes about the "the humanization of machines and the dehumanization of humans," and the artists that maker this happen, in a "camp" or deliberately exaggerated and theatrical in style, typically for humorous effect way.  

Stelarc Exoskeleton

(machine controls the body and the body controls the machine)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM2wbdh4eTU 

Laura Kikauka and Norman White Them Fuckin Robots

(a very camp way of showing the attempted reproduction of robots)