Promises of Cyborgs

Promises of Cyborgs: reimagining human-technology relations through artistic practice 

This practice-based research reflects upon generational perceptions of the potentialities and implications of digital technologies in the Western cultural imaginary. I analyse the anticipated dematerialisation of the body through a feminist posthuman lens by examining the poetics of hybridity, image referent relations, techno-nostalgia, mnemonic functions in digital culture, and embodied knowledges. I argue that certain historical figurations of the cyborg and its accompanying discourse no longer adequately encapsulates the complexities and contradictions of contemporary lived experience in the digital age. I then develop and test these constructs and assertions through a series of creative works which explore poetic meaning-making and disruptive processes in digital storage, narrative and cataloguing structures. Using a range of speculative artistic methods to reassemble data through digital animation, scanning, inter-material translation and web-based interactivity, I propose a series of novel confabulated transmission processes designed to explore emergent intimate human-technology relations.