This is a short ongoing anthology that helped me understand my cyborg’s nature. There are many texts where I found guidance, and in some cases I left them behind because my identity and subjective awareness feels everything but static, given values. I like to begin with “The Cyborg Manifesto,” first published in 1985, the year I was born. I will slowly add here more recent wordings that suggested me new understandings and shaped my thinking.

Lynn Randolph made this painting in collaboration with Donna Haraway: "So I placed my human-computer/artist/writer/shamans/scientist in the center and on the horizon line of a new canvas. I put the DIPswitches of the computer board on her chest as if it were a part of her dress. A giant keyboard sits in front of her and her hands are poised to play with the cosmos, words, games, images, and unlimited interactions and activities. She can do anything. The computer screen in the night sky offers examples. There are three images that graphically display different aspects of the same galaxy, using new high-technological imaging devices. Another panel exhibits a diagram of a gravity well. The central panel offers mathematical formulas, one from Einstein and the other a calculation found in chaos theory. In the same panel a game of tic-tac-toe has been played using the symbols for male and female and the woman has won. The foreground is a historical desert plain replete with pyramids, implying that the cyborg can roam across histories and civilizations and incorporate them into her life and work. Finally I placed the shamanic headdress of a white tigress spirit on her head and arms. The paws and limbs of the tigress reveal its skeleton. They both look directly at the viewer. The underlying intent was to create a figure that could visually do what Haraway was describing as the potential for re-figuring our consciousness."
Lynn Randolph’s “Cyborg” painting, that became the cover of her new book “Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.”

The image’s alt-text, is an excerpt form Lynn Randolph’s “Modest Witnesses: A Painter’s Collaboration with Donna Haraway” in which the authors describe the composition of this painting and unpack its iconography. It feels great to find an artist creating another way to access their work, beyond vision.

Link to a digital copy of the essay, available on Internet Archive.

Audiobook version of “A cyborg manifesto.”

Donna Haraway, From Cyborgs to Companion Species: Dogs, People, and Technoculture, September 16, 2003.

Donna Haraway presented her lecture as the 2003-2004 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Haraway is a prominent theorist of the relationships between people and machines, and her work has incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

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