Nikki's E-learning and Digital Cultures site » Week Ten

Week Ten – Overview

Nikki Bourke — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:50:58 +0000

Time is flowing past at high speed! Week Ten has been perhaps the most instrumental so far in that it has facilitated and encouraged the positioning and knitting together of key concepts.

Beginning with 21st Century Cyborg? I tried to clarify what ’cyborg’ means outside of the fiction arena, provoking questions on body, soul and conscience – all nudging me forward. A celebration of World Poetry Day encouraged me to step [way] outside my comfort zone and experiment with A Sonnet to a Cyborg. I saw this as an opportunity to push my own personal boundaries and dip my toe in unknown waters.

The pinnacle of this week for me was the lightbulb moment that generated from reading the Edwards [2010] paper. Gatherings outlines how the meaning of the Tumblog has morphed to become part of the ‘knowing’ itself.

”In the post-human, rather than the subject representing the object through sense data of, for instance, observation, we enter into the spatio-temporal practices of gathering and experimentation. Knowing is not seperate from doing but emerges from the very matter-ings in which we engage” (Edwards, 2010)

The rhizomatic nature of the Tumblog is composed through our connectedness, interactions and distances. Readings this week allowed me to see earlier readings / activities in a new light. Originally inspired by IDEL the cyberspace topography image, Rhizomatic becomings shows how connected all of these course components are.The concepts of the past ten weeks are not single isolated dots, but connected together by overlapping lines of the familiar.

Gatherings

Nikki Bourke — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:43:44 +0000

”In the post-human, rather than the subject representing the object through sense data of, for instance, observation, we enter into the spatio-temporal practices of gathering and experimentation. Knowing is not seperate from doing but emerges from the very matter-ings in which we engage” (Edwards, 2010)

I love the quotation above from Edwards (2010). For me, it expresses how I feel about my Tumblog. I have been mulling over the Tumblog [matter and meaning] for weeks now. All that time feeling frustrated by not ‘knowing’ for sure what the Tumblog ‘is’ / ‘isn’t’.

What comfort found in reading of fallibility, conditionality and emancipatory ignorance!

Through the connected blog terrain we do more than simply represent or observe…we experiment, and so become part of the learning process as the learning process becomes part of us…human-machine intertwining.

rhizomatic becomings

Nikki Bourke — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:21:23 +0000

Sonnet to a cyborg

Nikki Bourke — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:13:19 +0000

Today is World Poetry Day 2013! I thought that it would be fun to have a go at putting together a cyborg inspired sonnet…Poetry not my thing but figured I’d give it a whirl anyhow!

Malkovich – second order cybernetics

Nikki Bourke — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:51:17 +0000

On thinking of Von Foerster’s reflexivity theory, the idea that “the observer of systems can himself be constituted as a system to be observed” (Hayles, 1999) I am forced to re-consider the full potential and impact that observance [and by default, participation] may have had upon the ethnographic study carried out earlier in this module. This is sitting in a new light. The ethnographer viewed not simply as a bystander, witness, account taker but “as a system to be observed”.

21st Century Cyborg?

Nikki Bourke — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:49:54 +0000

The marriage of machine to man may create a form that exhibits characteristics beyond those capable of man. Science fiction holds examples of these in abundance, from James Cameron’s Terminator [The Terminator, 1984] to Ridley Scotts’ Deckard [Bladerunner, 2007 [final cut]].

How does a transference of such fusion sit outside of the fiction arena?

Is the ‘fusion’ itself enough in terms of a valid definition of cyborg? Perhaps even the term ‘fusion’ is subjective. Who decides to what extent the machine enfolds into the man and vica versa?

Is ‘use of’ the machine sufficient? Or in the realisation of a cyborg definition do we tiptoe down the eXistenZ route of becoming the machine and the machine becoming us?

Reflecting more on this…