The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.
Rationale
All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of
cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few
questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and
practical design around Internet and Society:
- How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?
- How
do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How
do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?
- What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?
We , the Cyborgs, is a first of its kind research inquiry that
locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the
challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her
seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as
a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary
creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of
human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation.
In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in
practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of
questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are
we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have
produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places
them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in
her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of
Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to
technology’.
Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated
from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those
moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is
suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the
technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How
does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the
axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies
in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in
designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where
there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg
citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we
need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the
regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.
Methodology
Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg
in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how
bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different
processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming
cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care,
Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the
body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like
post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In
the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks,
ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology.
We, The Cyborgs, aims to bring together a wide range of
researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations
including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning,
Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies,
Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate
around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their
fields.
