#cyborgs opened in summer 2018 as a multiplatformed exhibition built around Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg as a queer political body. 28 artists across two dozen formats — Vimeo videos, p5.js sketches, GIF animations, a 187KB theoretical PDF, an Instagram residency, a Facebook Live performance, a Weebly-hosted speculative design lab, and a ground floor randomized JS interface that scattered artist names across the page like a deck shuffled on every click.
What's preserved here: the original interface's chaos register (Courier, IKB blue, pink, the repeating "nointernet.gif" tile), the original artist pages running live in iframes (most of these works weren't standalone — they had their own custom HTML, JS, fonts, and pacing, and stripping them to a still misrepresents the work), the curatorial statement, and — remarkably for net work this old — all eight Vimeo embeds and both YouTube embeds are still live. A small miracle, after the ghost-town that glitch turned out to be just two summers prior.
The "thoughts about cyborgs" section near the bottom is a sample of the 40+ artist statements that populated the original cyborgs.html page — short field reports from inside the figure.
One thing the original site never said out loud: #cyborgs also lived in three physical pop-ups in Portland that summer — a rented First Friday storefront (SHOUT HOUSE), a screening of all the films at the Clinton Street Theater, and a free durational live performance by Maggie Hazen at Performance Work Northwest. There was a printed publication too. See the IRL section below for the surviving documentation.
More original pages — click to open in a new tab
- Alex Hovet
- Chloe Patricia ONeill
- HOUSE OF KILLING (Esben Holk)
- fabiola larios
- Fratolish Hiang-Perpeshki
- Iza Koczanowska
- Karl Munstedt
- Kevin A. Perrin
- Maggie Hazen
- Mores McWreath
- Peter Whittenberger
- Tara Youngborg / synaptic gap
- tim tsang
- Daniel Pinheiro — HOMOEXTENDED.pdf
- ↗ all originals (root)
- original list of works
- original "thoughts about cyborgs" page
#cyborgs
(transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities)
we began planning #cyborgs right away when we became familiar with the work of Maggie Hazen. we used her work as a starting point and sent out an open call searching for #cyborg artists to tell us something about what Haraway meant by "transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities".
the work we received resonated around the idea of digital intimacy. artificial intelligence has entered the common tongue, but what of emotional intelligence?
gifs from Peter Whittenberger help us understand how the riders of the tech storm truly feel to each other. a web piece by Emma Dickson shows us what it feels like for #cyborgs to be lonely through data-scraping of craig's list's Missed Connections. <3 u documents the process of using performance scores as a pathway to creating digital intimacy. tim tsang's desktop performances are intimate acts of performative viewing, merging and blending the work of other #cyborg artists.
when thinking about #cyborgs, we can't ignore the goo.
...or the way that #cyborgs are fundamentally queer — neither nor both and any of the above answer unclear try again later.
SUPERCHAMBERS asks you to enter into a 'becoming neuroqueer' by viewing the intimate spaces of the #cyborgian mind. Fratolish Hiang-Perpeshki is a hologram, a #cyborg identity that performs a xenoqueer fantasy of incestous alien love. Karl Munstedt's game world imagines a chemical queering of the population through mutation of the reproductive system. my body is a (virtual)-/wonderland queers the narratives of class and gender by re-imagining the real estate of the gentry as a HOUSE OF KILLING.
can #cyborgs be born?
Tara Youngborg considers the possibility in a series of interactive web pieces.
some holographic performances by #cyborgs:
Alex Hovet builds a persona off a data-hoarder's Internet Archive page as part of an Instagram Residency. Seeker_of_True-files: an emergent entity of an evolving noetic field that quests, imagines and is steadily weaving cyborg futures. Documentation of over a decade of network performances by Garrett Lynch. RIVAL: an AI created by Noah Travis Phillips, used to paint a collective portrait of how #cyborgs see water. William Wolfgang Wunderbar: a multiplicitious social media shared identity producing "mixed feelings" — digital images that collide the iconography of emotions into mutant hybrids.
as the production of interfaces intensifies, #cyborgs touch everything, taking many shapes.
Surface Tension examines the intersection of flesh and device from the point of view of the device. Manion Kuhn's facebook residency explored the intersection of water, privelege, and infrastructure. SEICA Human Interaction Labs takes a speculative approach to (re)searching human interaction in relation to networked consumer electronic devices. Daniel Pinheiro writes about the Internet as a living medium devoid of content.
— Jah Justice, summer 2018
- we are all cyborgs, and have always been, although each generation of cyborg has differed in many ways, defined by which form of technology that the "pure natural human" is understood as intersecting with at that time. — anonymous contributor
- as a queer artist/performer, i have been thinking more and more about the donna haraway quote "i would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" through the lens of drag, wherein the natural response to such a statement is "i'd rather just be both". to me cyborgs and drag queens share an inherent link in that both are a rejection of what is deemed "natural", and a celebration of what haraway has described as a "fraying of identities". — anonymous contributor
- The cyborg is a specter, an interference, a fetish. It is body and image, screen and flesh, desire and algorithm, presence and absence, fractured yet whole. — anonymous contributor
- a[sigh]bor[g]tive lift:: remove br.ace[likelihood]:: push N pull muscula[tor]ture:: [metallic ar[m].cs N arches binding flesh packz// mirror shades [r]evoke perception, ba.lance[N barbed]// pacing strides 2 the podium, glands ac.tiff.vated] — anonymous contributor
- Cyborgs are dangerous because they pose the question, "who's really in charge, humanity or machine?" and then refuse to answer. — anonymous contributor
- "Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction" — Haraway. As a lesbian married to another cis woman, I am both forced into and eagerly taking on the role of a cyborg-woman. Whenever I talk about the possibility of having children with my wife, straight people immediately ask us about our conception, or if we will adopt. Our reproduction and families are immediately placed under scrutiny... I would take the DNA only from our two bodies to create a daughter if I could. — anonymous contributor
- I worship the "monstrous sisterhood" of the cyborg and goddess (Nina Lykke), whose figural ontology absorbs and composites the excesses of its techno-ecologies. A goddess-like-cyborg activates the accumulation of desire to merge with the world, touchscreen et. al. — anonymous contributor
- Intelligence analysts are all cyborgs, but not all cyborgs are intelligence analysts. — anonymous contributor
- they exist!!! — anonymous contributor