critical reflection

This week we covered computing. For this assignment, re-read Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto from earlier in the quarter. Remember: the subtitle of the manifesto is: “A Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit.” Computing figures in a big way! Look at the cover of the book in which it was published, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991). The cover art is artist Lynn Randolph’s Cyborg, a 1989 painting in which, writes Donna Haraway (in “the Promise of Monsters”), “the boundaries of a fatally transgressive world, ruled by the subject and the object, give way to the borderlands, inhabited by human and unhuman collectives. These borderlands suggest a rich topography of combinatorial possibility. That possibility is called the earth, here, now, this elsewhere, where real, outer, inner, and virtual space implode. The painting maps the articulations among cosmos, animal, human, machine, and landscape in their recursive sidereal, bony, electronic, and geological skeletons.“ Notice that the figure in the painting has a circuit board in their chest, hands on a keyboard, and a screen behind them. It is 1989, so, no, they are not on social media. In the manifesto, Haraway explains that this figure is ironic (and ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, materialism) — the cyborg is a critical figure as well as a futuristic one. If you drew or wrote about yourself as a cyborg before revisit that vision. Get real about Haraway’s essay being much more and far different from a celebration of a future when technology will make us all beautiful, happier, and more successful.

Address computing in a speculative fiction or speculative drawing that embodies not only your personal wishes and dreams, but also the realities you have to grapple with and through in the world. There has to be a computing element to yourself in this speculative image you draw or story you write: identify and feature it. Notice that in the Week 7 slide about Haraway with the COVID-19 patient, there is computing at work. Notice how the “technology” that makes the medical staff superhuman in the slide before that is mere trash bags. Technology comes in all forms — plastic bags break the viral circuit. Make your cyborg self humble, real, hopeful, and, as Haraway would say, a modest witness to the new millennium. Show your weakness and make it your strength through computing components of the new system that will be you. What are you fighting for and against (to stay alive maybe? to eat?)? What are you fearing the most and what do you need to survive, for real? Refer explicitly to the Haraway text and one of the readings from Week 7 as well. Even if it is a drawing, we need to be able to see these references. Find a way to make it clear. Think outside the box (see the slides on boxes in Week 7, not all boxes are “black boxes”).