Carolin Wiedemann, Soenke Zehle, Depletion Design A Glossary of Network Ecologies

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DEPLETION DESIGN

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The cyborg today has changed its function, role, and appearance. Everybody might be one, some are excluded, others seem to be part of the club of C. The cyborg, born 25 years ago, played with her technical part, played with her body as interface. The hybrid species of today is entangled in social networks, globalized food & drug streams, biochemical data-exchange. Whereas the Cyborg-girl was meant to address the new humannonhuman relationship, today humans have already become another species among others, an affective organism which has more in common with apes, rats, and dolphins. The question is no longer who is human, machine or animal, the question is rather who or which is able to do things in a word of electronic communication. Sadie Plant, one of the co-writers oft he Cyberfeminist Manifesto (together with VNS Matrix, 1994) wrote in the mid-90s (ten years after Haraway’s Manifesto) that women were the first cyborgs, they were never included in human history, never a subject of language, of rights and politics. She, the woman-cyborg, is perfectly adapted to move along the waves of 0 :1. If the male human has been the only human, the female cyborg is the only cyborg. Women have always been in-between, they sent the messages fom A to B, they counted the numbers (of their husbands), gave birth to their children. But the arrival of the universal code dissolves the distinction between message and messenger, between container and content, between materiality and immateriality, with radical consequences, as Sadie Plant puts it: Complex interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance nights and bacterial exchanges emerge. She, the cyborg, who didn’t want to become a Woman, today stands for the necessity of being multiple, de-centered, affected, single alone together, … articulating patterns of communication and exchange, building images of surfaces and connecting dots. Recommended Readings Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Tausend Plateaus, Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie, Berlin: Merve, 1992. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Random House, 1968. Dick, Philip K. Blade Runner, München: Heyne Verlag, 2002. Galloway, Alexander R. and Thacker, Eugene. The Exploit. A Theory of Networks, Minneapolis, London: Minneapolis University Press, 2007. Grey, Chris Hables (ed). The Cyborg Handbook, New York, London: Routledge 1995. Haraway, Donna. ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in: Linda J. Nicholsen (ed), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, London: Routledge 1990, pp. 190-233. __. The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Others, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.


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