The term "cyborg," short for cybernetic organism, was created by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to refer to the enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments. Their concept was the outcome of thinking about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine as the new frontier of space exploration was beginning to take place. A designer of physiological instrumentation and electronic data-processing systems, Clynes was the chief research scientist in the Dynamic Simulation Laboratory at Rockland State Hospital in New York. Director of research at Rockland State, Kline was a clinical psychiatrist. In their paper, given at the Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight Symposium sponsored by the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, they write that "altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an earthly environment for him in space.... Artifact-organism systems which would extend man's unconscious, self-regulatory controls are one possibility."

Clynes and Kline conceived of their cyborg as a practical matter concerned with human exploration of outer space. The concept of the cyborg in popular consciousness, as depicted in films, is very different. For the most part, the cyborg is presented as a slave for humans, ranging from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973) to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) to Andy and Larry Wachowski's The Matrix (1999). Philosophical debates in these films tend to surround the degree to which cyborgs should eventually be given the same rights as human beings. It is a debate that mirrors the discussions that surround slavery and immigration.

Perhaps what is more interesting is how the cyborg, representing the pinnacle of a technology-driven society, has become less and less corporeal. As a piece of technology, it has evolved from being a very separate and distinct entity from the human being to being more of an energy force that surrounds us. It has progressed from Lang's full-metal body or the circuit board innards of Crichton's gunslinger gone amok to the Wachowski's conception of a world in which what appears three-dimensional is really just digital information.

For Cyborg Manifesto, or The Joy of Artifice, the word "cyborg" is used more as a metaphor, in order to suggest a state of mind by which to navigate the trials and tribulations of our society. This was the approach that Donna Haraway took in her seminal essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Her definition shares a kinship with a kind of conceptual artmaking in which the most basic objective is to remind people of the multiple layers of meaning that exist behind an object that was once viewed as having a single definition. In other words, it is about using objects to inject a mental state of ambiguity into a viewer's consciousness.

This is the line of thinking that Donna Haraway took with women in relationship to high-technology. From her point of view, women have a particular fear of technology because they are left out of the decision making process behind its production. In other words, it is a man's world. Haraway recognizes that we live a technology driven society, so in order for women to succeed they must engage with it. She suggests that the idea of merging with the tools of our own making--to theoretically become something else that we are not--is a way of thinking by which to expand on our identities as human beings, or as women, specifically. The cyborg, when utilized as a metaphor, is meant to be a tool for helping women think outside of the usual definitions that have been projected upon them. Like any political manifesto, it is a call to action for changing the status quo. If there really could be a cyborg, if there really could be something that is not exactly a human, and not exactly a machine, but a combination of the two, then how would pre-existing, still pure humans look upon such a creature? Haraway suggests that if we can wrestle with such a dilemma within our minds then perhaps it will help us re-examine our existing relationships between men and women, between humans and other animals, or between culture and nature.

 

The process of redefining one's entire world becomes necessary once one begins questioning the definition of personhood. Doug Buis' Suburban Legend is a room-size installation that can be viewed from two different points. At one end, the viewer can look through a one by two foot opening in a wall and see a miniature setting of a bar created with train set and doll house furniture. Tables are knocked over, dishes are left on the table--it is apparent that the scene has been interrupted, yet there are no people. If you look through the sliding glass doors at the back of the bar, one will see in the distance a tree swaying in the wind. The fact that you are actually looking through a window into another world creates an uncanny sense. This is a work that is connected to what Buis defines as "hand crafted virtual reality." When viewing his work, there is an unresolved flip-flop occurring in the mind: you know that you are looking at an artist-constructed scene, yet for a few moments it seems very real. Its artifice becomes more apparent when one steps around to the other vantage point and sees that the swaying tree is actually made up of different tree parts, like Frankenstein's monster. It is spring loaded, which although indoors, accounts for its realistic sway. The wind effect is generated by a wire and cam system that pulls at the branches.

The title of Jody Zellen's photo-based installation, Mechanics of Nature, further literalizes the relationship between a technology-driven society and nature. In a humorous reference to her own title, she mounts her trademark photo-based images that are a clash between dystopic phrases from the newspaper and cityscape scenes, onto little propellers that are mounted on the wall and can be spun. The construction of our concrete environment is turned into a game, as if it does not matter where the spinner stops because it is all a matter of artifice anyway.

Carlee Fernandez's video installation, Peter, exemplifies the internalization of such a value system. Peter is a taxidermic rabbit mounted on the wall with a viewing lens inserted into his forehead. Peer into the lens and one sees a short video of a woman leaving her suburban house from the point of view of Peter, the rabbit. She sees Peter and approaches him, but she is carrying a chainsaw. She kills him, though all we see is the blood splattering on her clothes. It is very much a garden animal's version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If one peers through the lens with both eyes open, the video can be viewed with one eye, while the other eye meets the stare of Peter's glassy, dead eye--all this while his whiskers brush against your cheeks. Using humor, the work points to an internalization of certain horrors around us, whether we are the victim or the victimizer. It is about the process of how we turn other living things into objects, e.g. food, that we then bring into our bodies by eating. It is a more subtle and expanded definition of the cyborg regarding the merger of a subject and an object.

If Fernandez's work is about the internalization of horror, then Clare Cornell's photo series, Association: CA, Pacific Palisades, Will Rogers Beach, north end, is an exploration of how we deal with a horrible situation. In his work, Cornell suggests that "association" is not only a mental process but also a physical locale. It is a place where meaning is found in the between spaces. He literally presents such a space by mirroring the bodies of men, photographed at a beach, so that the center space forms a dark orifice, one that dominates a new kind of body, now having multiple arms and legs--monstrous but still desirable. For Cornell, it is a site of longing and desire for a man's body, a way of mourning the loss of his longtime lover to AIDS.

The boundaries between private and public space may dissolve more as physical and electronic spaces overlap. Such a universe will become more artificial, as it is inherently more constructed, either by man or machine or a combination of both, and thus there is more opportunity to exert direct control over such a universe, for good and bad purposes. Susan Hornbeak-Ortiz's wall sculpture, Wisdom, is constructed of a lamp shade that juts out from the wall like a megaphone, and at its center is a mechanical blinking eye. She has anthropomorphized domestic furniture into an all-seeing eye of knowledge but also one of surveillance within a private, domestic space. Tony Oursler's Come to Me is a floor sculpture in which a video image of a man saying "Come to me" is projected onto a misshapen, abstract form mounted on a pole. Oursler's character is a man who projects himself through high-tech media in order to make himself feel more substantial. He announces himself to the world, yet instead of broadcasting himself through the internet or on a billboard, he has projected himself in less than human scale. The attempt is meaningful and intimate but pathetic.

 

As if making fun of the idea of our highly mediated and constructed environment, Ed Giardina creates work that is about the weekend odd jobber in his garage, perhaps someone living down the street from the creator of Alan Rath's work. However, instead of constructing a table for the living room, to accompany Hornbeak-Ortiz's "lampshade," Giardina creates sculptures that are tools for teaching us the rudiments of perception. It is as if we have forgotten that we do indeed still live in a physical space amidst the vectors and matrices of cyberspace capturing our imagination. Back in Black is a sculpture that is made up of a wooden platform with handrails, though it leans to one side because of a fulcrum underneath at the center. In a series of photographs, Giardina shows two people, wearing safety helmets, facing each other, rocking back and forth. Their task is to use this simple machine/sculpture in such a way as to remind them that they have bodies which move through space and interact with other objects, whether that be a sculpture or another human body.

Evan Holloway is also interested in reminding us that our body is in the same space as his sculptures. He often makes work that forces a viewer to interact with the work in a very simple manner, such as being required to step in closer to look at a detail. Double Projector satirizes a high-tech object like the video projector, a ubiquitous object in the art world at present, by making his own version out of solid wood. Now it is the viewers who are the projectors, thus contemplating their own meaning. The title therefore refers not only to the two projectors, literally, but also to the subject/object relationship. Holloway's emphasis on the physicality of his work could be viewed as a reaction to present-day digital hype that by nature emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the image on the screen.

On the other end of the spectrum, Mark Bennett's fantasy blueprints of classic TV homes attempt to capture the details of television families from the 1950s to the 1970s. He is fully engaged with a two-dimensional, fictional world. After substantial sketching and research, that is, watching TV, Bennett draws the complete house of the TV family, one that never existed since it was always only an indoor TV set, such as Home of Fred & Wilma Flintstone (The Flintstones). It is as if Bennett is attempting to capture the details of these fictional families in order to create a utopian neighborhood for himself. It is a project that speaks to how many people's identities are very much tied up with the machine that sits in many living rooms, the television. Bennett's work is a commentary on and a celebration of this condition. Chris Wilder's A Copy of My TV Remote Control acts in concert with Mark Bennett's blueprints. Instead of the TV families, the tool by which one is allowed to remain on the couch and surf is fetishized. As a nonfunctional, solid resin molded copy it has been made into a kind of permanent, intimate, domestic monument to this happy merger with fiction.

Jon Haddock's Screenshots is a series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game, another perspective from the electronic media-scape that now seems very familiar. The subject of each drawing is an image of a well-known historical event, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel. It is about combining two familiar ways of looking. On one hand there are the iconic historical images such as General Loan executing a suspect from the Vietnam war, and on the other hand there is the familiar bird's-eye, isometric point of view of video games. The combination of the two points of view creates a third image, though one that is still familiar. The work comments on the influence of electronic gaming technology on our imagination and consciousness.

Like Haddock, Chris Finley is interested in the layered and nested aspects of video games, the World Wide Web, or Windows operating systems with its files-within-files capability. Undoubtedly, twenty years worth of interaction with such layering is bound to affect our perception of the world. Recognizing this condition, Finley has made a set of sculptures, such as Ganoid Ganache x 3, composed of small toys, plastic containers, whittled down pencils, and other assorted household products from Target and Toys R Us. He piles these objects one upon another and makes them interactive--you lift up one plastic bowl to discover a treasure-house of other arranged products, and you keep going deeper, just as you do in any video game or set of computer files. This series of work precedes his next body of work, Level One, which is part of a planned series of eight levels that are sometimes elaborate installations and other times paintings. All of them require the work of making one's way through its various levels and assumes that the player/viewer has prior experience from their deep relationship with their laptop or desktop.

Ken Gonzales-Day's series of untitled color photographs depicts a jigsaw puzzle of body parts and skin surfaces. Through fragmentation and pattern-making, he has made parts of the body, such as wrinkles and fingernails (many photographed from cadavers) that are usually considered ugly, into images of beauty. The grid structure suggests the activity of collecting and categorizing specimens. It also raises the modernist notion of flattening out the picture plane and its effects on our perception of the world. The gridded mix and matching of body parts also suggests the influence of digital technology on how we view the world.

Using one of the oldest forms of painting Paul Paiement, like Gonzales-Day, also examines how it is we perceive the world and the assumptions that we make based on these perceptions. Hybrids is a series of egg-tempera paintings. In each work the central image appears to be an insect, presented in the manner of a specimen on display or a scientific illustration. In reality each image is half insect body and half everyday object, similar in shape to the chosen insect, such as Hybrids B-Tettigia Screwni, half fly and half screw. Due to the preciseness of the painting, rendered nearly photographically, it is hard to discern between the two halves at a distance, or even close-up. After a few moments, one recognizes the disparate collision of organic and inorganic parts. Paiement has chosen one of the oldest painting media, egg-tempera, as a way to rival the precision of the computer, that is, we are used to seeing this kind of precision only with the aid of computer programs. He is using a traditional medium to examine a digital-media influenced world. The paintings are less about the images and more about the act of perception. Like Holloway, who returns to the rudiments of the sculptural experience, and applies them to a new a high-tech world, Paiement's work is also a response to the influence of computers and imaging technology on our perception of the world.

Tyler Stallings