Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, 2000.

Pietro Celo interpreting in LIS a quote from Paul B. Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto.

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Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, Socialist Review (US), 1985

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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Artist Christine Sun Kim Rewrites Closed Captions

Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim thinks about closed captions a lot. And she let us in on a not-so-well-kept secret: they suck. Christine shows us what closed captions could be, in a new story featuring original footage she captured and captioned herself.

Video description and transcript are available.

Further information and full credits are in the description of the original post, published by Pop-Up Magazine on their YouTube channel.

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Activating Captions

Curated by artist Christine Sun Kim and ARGOS director Niels Van Tomme, “Activating Captions” is an online platform that critically engages with captioning as a singular artistic form of expression. The process of converting audio and visual material into text through a display system is essential – the curators note – ‘for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing, as well as numerous others, such as people who are learning a new language’. There is an online magazine featuring texts from art writers, scholars, and poets that reflect on captioning from personal perspectives and experiences.

A gem that may go unnoticed on the online platform is the Accessibility Resources index. Among the links, there is “Alt-Text As Poetry Workbooks” by Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat – I will do those exercises again!

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Infinite Ear: A Reader

On the occasion of the exhibition WITHIN / Infinite Ear, Bergen Assembly, 2016 Emma McCormick-Goodhart in collaboration with Grégory Castéra selected a series of texts and published a reader that follows these categories:

GESTURE/ASSEMBLY

MECHANISM/APPARATUS

UNSOUND/(IM)PERCEPTION

PROSTHESIS/DEVICE

INTERARTICULATION

ARCHITECTURE/ACOUSTICS

MIND’S EAR

MATTER/NOISE

TACTILITY

PARA-HEARING/IMAGINARY

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