Studio
Electromagnetic
Still from the Cyborg Nation action and exhibit at the Center for Performance Research.
What if technology was designed to enhance your vulnerability and compassion? "Join me in the soft underbelly. What do you have to lose?" Go here for the full Cyborg Nation statement.
Cyborg Nation is a Culture Push project co-conceived by Clarinda Mac Low and Walter Polkosnik.
Why Cyborg Nation? What are we doing?
- Creating our own science fiction/cyberpunk character with the kinds of powers that you rarely see in the genre--a utopian ideal of cooperative and tender humanity. And what better way to use art than to live out the utopian ideals that can spell disaster if they’re applied to actual systems too hastily?
- Questioning the uses of technology and, indirectly, what we value. Why only physical power, mental agility? Why power at all? What about a horizontal use of interconnectedness? Not an advantage in the conventional use of the word, but an advantage of the ineffable. A triumph of empathy.
- Living simply through technology. Using technology to simplify rather than complicate life. To have something so small and perfect and close to the skin that you can let go of all the other elaborate edifices of civilization, everything made of concrete and metal melting away in the face of this miniature marriage of machine and flesh. Keeping the components separate but small—little objects for little needs, learning to live with each other as resources for entertainment, interaction, happiness, not relying entirely on speed and drive and hard surfaces and clicking shoes and the bubble of invincible privacy that we can weave but not being too interpenetrating either. The ability to be alone together, to breathe together without interfering. Quiet understanding without alienation from nature and from each other. Waving away insects and trying to survive large predators and running all the time. That’s one way. Then partner that with subtle cues and interferences that preserve our lives without entirely eliminating all other forms, that give us the monkey comfort we seem to crave so much but not at the expense of physical integrity. Can the rats stop pushing the lever that keeps feeding them something delicious but ultimately destructive?
Summary:
Cyborg Nation is built around a wearable, self-contained performance environment (or SCoPE) to create performance installations in any venue. This piece is fed by an interest in how technology both extends and limits our senses and how intimacy manifests in a world of remote communication, taking concrete form as a performance experiment where one-to-one conversation becomes a public display--intimacy becomes spectacle and strangers connect fleetingly and find depth in momentary contact. In Cyborg Nation, miniature technologies (camera, microphone, amplifier, projector, etc.) are built into a costume that acts as a portable media environment that can function on its own or connected toother available resources. The costume will be adaptable to any user, and can even connect several users at once. The content of the piece will include conversations with audience, images sent by the audience through live feed cameras on site and from anywhere via the web, text sent by audience, improvised monologues, and the costume alone as a liveinstallation with live feed 
Cyborg(s) take a rest (Athens, Georgia)visual and sound elements woven into the mix. The Cyborg Nation events are tailored to fit the venue, and an installation is set up using materials that fit the atmosphere of the situation. The SCoPE examines methods of minimizing energy consumption to create a model of sustainable (art) production that doesn’t sacrifice the spectacular. The performer(s) wearing the SCoPE becomes an opinionated conduit for ideas, images, words and thoughts. Eventually the SCoPE will be an open source prototype that can be built by anybody to create a spontaneous performance moment anytime, anywhere. The components of the Cyborg costume are battery-powered and flexible enough to adapt to any site. The conversation with the audience is always mediated by cell phone, and interlocutors are both those physically present and people far away. Eventually there will be several web streams from the performance, but no overall picture, so the only way to experience the performance fully will be to be there.
History
We are currently deep in the research process, testing prototypes of the SCoPE (see below) and building a framework for conversation-starting. We tested a rough and ready, very primitive version of the SCoPE, and some conversation-starters, at AUNTS performance party in November 2008. We found that the intimacy of cell phone conversation inspired deep, amusing and weird conversations with strangers and friends (see a glimpse of it, on video, here.). The next Cyborg Nation episode took place on May 1, 2009 at the lovely home of Lydia Bell (video here). Our latest chapters were as part of Fritz Haeg's Dome Colony at X Initiative in September and October of 2009, and at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, as a guest of the Department of Theater and Film Studies and the ICE program of the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
Go to our events page for details on upcoming showings and events.
We're always looking for intriguing venues (of any kind! Homes, studios, galleries, street corners..). Contact us at cyborg@culturepush.org if you would like to host a Cyborg party at your home or venue. We will tell you more about what hosting would mean, and how we would work together. We are also interested in conducting open studios which give the public a view of the process of creating—a potent conversation-starter at anytime. This “open studio” approach has been effective in the past in projects like Salvage/Salvation. If you have any Cyborg ideas, practical or philosophical, contact us at cyborg@culturepush.org. For a glimpse of our current technical ideas in process, go here.
Cyborg Nation at AUNTS Performance Party, 11/21/08. Photos by Lydia Bell
Studio showing--photos by Mike Taylor
Motivation:
Cyborg Nation started from urgent curiosity about US soldiers returning from Iraq missing body parts, and what is being done to meet their needs, fed by an interest in how many kinds of technology become a replacement of spiritual and actual missing limbs. Added to this is a desire to shift what we think we need to survive.
Soldiers and other amputees are (often unwilling) pioneers in symbiosis with technology, and their need for extra parts is urgent and practical. We all engage extra-sensory aids, though--we are all cyborgs (cf. Donna Haraway, 1980s). Electronics are part of how we love, communicate, and interact. What is the relationship between our fleshly and technological selves? We live in an era of depleted resources and looming climatic disaster. There are thinkers that advocate living as though on a boat; miniaturizing and cutting down—nomad values in rapidly changing terrain. Technology has become smaller and more self-contained, but more ubiquitous. Can we turn this to our advantage without further destroying the integrity of our overstressed environment? I want to create a performance that serves as a template for a way of life that embraces adaptability and conservation of physical and emotional resources.
This piece is also an investigation of conversation as a forum for examining culture and as a mode of influence. The more regulated our lives become, the more I see a need for spontaneous, unscripted interaction. I see this piece as addressing a need for deep contact in a culture increasingly dominated by surfaces, and I have found that informal discussion can act as an agent of change and illumination. I see the vulnerability of being open to the moment and engaged with an unpredictable audience as a small revolutionary act. Also, I believe that deep philosophical investigation begins in discussion, and Cyborg Nation aims to be a 21st century version of a Socratic dialogue. At some point conversations from Cyborg Nation will be compiled into an installation and serve as a jumping-off point for other types of public discussion.