Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto.

"We are all cyborgs now."

" Meet Donna Haraway and you get a sense of disconnection. She certainly doesn't look like a cyborg. Soft-spoken, fiftyish, with an infectious laugh and a house full of cats and dogs, she's more like a favorite aunt than a billion-dollar product of the US military-industrial complex. Beneath the surface she says she has the same internal organs as everyone else - though it's not exactly the sort of thing you can ask her to prove in an interview. Yet Donna Haraway has proclaimed herself a cyborg, a quintessential technological body."

                                         (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html)




Harraway argues that we are all cyborgs today as we incorporate so much technology into out lives" 




(http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html)






Through reading some of Harraway's essay online i have realised the true extent to which we depend upon technologies and machines simply to function and live our lives. From the watches on our wrists, the mobile phone which we rely upon for communication, the camera which becomes an extension of the self when we place it to our eye, the headphones in out ears, the television we watch, the oven that cooks our food and the dish washer which cleans up afterwards. The transport we depend on daily, the internet are just a few examples of technologies which have shaped today's society. Without such devices the human race would probably fail to function successfully, thus we are all cyborgs to some extent.


For quite sometime i have been intrigued by the whole idea of the body as an organic machine, i even have tattoo's of cogs and clockwork as it is something i have often thought about.
This project is the perfect opportunity to further explore such concepts and extend my own knowledge.

"There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices." 

(http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html)

Donna Haraway uses the cyborg as a metaphor to analyse the links between science, technology, and "socialist-feminism". She argues that our modern, dependant hi-tech culture diminished  elements of Western thinking such as the "mind/body split, Self/Other, male/female, reality/appearance, and truth/illusion."

Haraway believes that humans are longer able to consider themselves in the above terms, or even,biologically at all. She argues her theory that we have all become cyborgs, a combination of biological and technological/machinery, where the two are have such a strong relationship that they cannot be separated or even defined separately. 

I have learnt of many living cyborgs - 

 Wafaa Bilal. 

"An NYU professor triggered a debate about campus privacy in November when he decided to implant a camera in the back of his head for a year-long art project."

(http://eselinger.org/blog/)

Trevor Prideaux.

"Trevor Prideaux, who was born without his left arm, used to have to balance the smartphone on his prosthetic arm or put it on a flat surface to use it. But now Mr. Prideaux, 50, can call and text his loved ones without moving the mobile, which is embedded into his fiberglass and laminate limb."

(http://www.disinfo.com/tag/cyborg/)

"Talk about being "handy." Plastic surgeons have installed a USB memory stick in the false finger of a 29-year-old computer whiz.
Surgeons developed the gadget after Jerry Javala lost his digit in a motorcycle accident."

 (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,509528,00.html#ixzz1lHXXNDPs)

"A filmmaker named Rob Spence has successfully become a cyborg by replacing an eye he lost through a childhood accident with a wireless camera that transmits everything he sees to a computer. Spence believes that technology may soon reach the point where are be tempted to swap out their body parts for superior prosthetics. No word on when he’ll be able to apply Instagram filters to his eye camera photos."

               
(http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2011/09/10-best-fictional-cyborgs.html)

From reading the article on the daily mail website.

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2030420/Meet-eyeborg-Film-maker-turns-prosthetic-eye-miniature-video-camera.html?ito=feeds-newsxml)






Neil Harbisson: The worlds first recognised cyborg! His technological device that allows him to hear colours due to eyesight problems has become so much of his identity that it is even on his passport photograph.

Below - a video of a lady named Amber Case, she argues similarly to Donna Harraway, that we are all cyborgs now as we integrate so much technology into our lives.