1st Edition
Modified: Living as a Cyborg
Building off the highly successful The Cyborg Handbook, this new collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces brings together a set of compelling personal accounts about what it means to live as a cyborg in the twenty-first century.
Human integration with complex technologies goes back to clothes, cooking, and language, but has accelerated incredibly in the last few centuries, with interest spreading among scientists, coders, people with sophisticated implants, theorists, and artists. This collection includes some of the most articulate of these voices from over 25 countries, including Donna Haraway, Stelarc, Natasha Vita-More, Steve Mann, Amber Case, Michael Chorost, Moon Ribas, Kevin Warwick, Sandy Stone, Dion Farquhar, Angeliki Malakasioti, Elif Ayiter, Heesang Lee, Angel Gordo, and others. Addressing topics including race, gender, sexuality, class, conflict, capitalism, climate change, disability and beyond, this collection also explores the differences between robots, androids, cyborgs, hybrids, post-, trans-, and techno-humans, offering readers a critical vocabulary for understanding and discussing the cyborgification of culture and everyday life.
Compelling, interdisciplinary, and international, the book is a perfect primer for students, researchers, and teachers of cyberculture, media and cultural theory, and science fiction studies, as well as anyone interested in the intersections between human and machine.
Introduction
"You Are a Cyborg; Deal With It!" The Overdetermination of Modification
Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, Steven Mentor
Part 1: Being a Cyborg Is My Job
1 Modifeyed: Why Privellance Is More Important to Our Cyborg Future Than Privacy
Steve Mann
2 The Avatars of alpha.tribe
Elif Ayiter
3 Tanks, the Shield of Achilles, and Social Cyborgs
Anonymous
4 Experiments with Cyborg Technology
Kevin Warwick
5 The Body Vehicle: An Argument for Transhuman Bodies
Natasha Vita More
6 When I First Met Jesus, He Was Cyborg
Gill Haddow
Part 2: Being a Cyborg for My Health
7 Pers. ex.
Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone
8 Infusions/Infusiones: Itinerant Portraits in My Cancer Treatment
Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera
9 To See With Eyes Unshielded: Perceiving Life as a Partible Cyborg
Miranda Loughry
10 "Don’t Mess With My Heart Device, I'll Do It Myself." In Which Karen and Marie Interview Each Other
Marie Moe and Karen Sandler
11 Becoming an Accidental Cyborg Feminist Socialist
Michael Chorost
12 Ghost in the Biome
Steve Guile
13 "Cyborg" "Mom"
Dion Farquhar
Part 3: Imagining Myself Cyborg
14 Cyborgian Episteme as Queer Art-science
Clarissa Ai Ling Lee
15 Computer Kid
Amber Case
16 Seven Ghosts: Critical Confessions of a Psyborg Mind
Angeliki Malakasioti
17 A Mundane Cyborg: My Smartphone, My Body, and My City
Heesang Lee
18 To Be Transhumanist, Or Not To Be
Nikola Danaylov
19 On Cultural Cyborgs
Audrey Bennett and Ron Eglash
Part 4: Performing my cyborgness
20 Waiting for Earthquakes
Moon Ribas
21 My Cyborg Performance as a Techno-Cerebral Subject
Melike Şahinol
22 A Song for the Universe in the Dialect of Terran Cyborg Companions
Lissette Olivaries
23 Modulating
Lucian O’Connor
24 Zombies, Cyborgs & Chimeras: Alternative Anatomical Architectures
Stelarc
Part 5: Thinking myself a cyborg
25 I, Cyborgologist
Chris Hables Gray and Bob Thawley
26 Cyborg Empathy for the Age of (In)difference
Sandra P. González Santos
27 Being a Cyborg in a Connected World Increasingly Mediated by Algorithms: From the Perspective of Two Brazilian Journalists
Silvia DalBen and Amanda Chevtchouk Jurno
28 Social Challenges: The Serious Game of Digitalization
Angel Gordo
29 Disc/erning the Crisis: A Mundane Cyborg Throws Hope to the Wind
Steven Mentor
30 The Best Possible Now
Donna Haraway, with Nada Miljkovic
Artist’s Comment
Julia C R Gray
Biography
Chris Hables Gray is the author of Postmodern War, Cyborg Citizen and Peace, War and Computers. He is a Continuing Lecturer and Fellow at Crown College, University of California at Santa Cruz.
Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera is a community social psychologist and professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Her research area is focused on digital technology and the transformations of everyday life, subjectivity, and embodiment.
Steven Mentor is a Professor of Critical Thinking, English and American Literature, and writing at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, California. His current research includes cyborgs and climate justice, climate fiction, and new models of online and hybrid learning.
