Right, time to think of new work, been fascinated by surealist robotic drawings , the idea of a FEMBOT and have now come across the term Gynoid..........
"Greco has made use of hypertext technology to create a cyborg text... Its hybrid form is so completely interwoven with the electronic prostheses through which we encounter it that the cyborg body is the text, and the text is the cyborg body. Which, I take it, is precisely Greco's point." -- N. Katherine Hayles, American Book Review "Diane Greco'sCyborg is a singular, extraordinarily adept foray into contemporary metaphysics as it has been inflected by technological change. At once both a subtle work of art and a deeply intuitive philosophical treatise, it not only asks our most troubling questions about what it means to be human, but answers them through informed appropriations of current theorizing in feminism, deconstruction, and virtualism. The work embodies (all puns denied!) the aspirations of Derrida's trace andjouissance, as well as Gibson's, Haraway's, and Stone's decategorizations of gender and organicism, within a hypertextual reading that recalls yet other recent theorizing by Bolter, Hayles, Moulthrop and others. Still, it is Greco's own voice that prevails in this tour de force meditation on the intersections of the fictional and the real, the artificial and the originary. " -- Burt Kimmelman, New Jersey Institute of Technology Much of the allure of science fiction is that it provides us with "the fantasy of knowing the unknowable through objectification" (Cawelti, 1978, p. 49). Science fiction writers produce models of worlds which, in some cases, differ only slightly from ours; the magic of science fiction is that it speculates on the results of such changes with little risk to us. In his review of definitions of science fiction, John Walchak (1993) concludes that "science fiction is the literary [or textual] investigation of the relationship between humanity and technology, and (thus) of the myriad kinds of change produced by science and technology." If the investigation of our relationship to science and technology is the definitive feature of science fiction, then the exploration of human couplings with a particular type of technology constitutes a broad categorization of cyberpunk fiction. Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction which emerged in the 1980s, is particularly concerned with exploring the effects of "cyborg technologies" on late twentieth-century culture. Cyberpunk is differentiated from the more mainstream science fiction literature by three central themes which illuminate the role of technology in society: futurology, techno-paradigms, and the cyborg presence. The first prominent theme of cyberpunk fiction is its pseudo-scientific and -sociological extrapolation. In contrast to the apocalyptic and American-centered themes of early science fiction, cyberpunk presents a nonapocalyptic view of the future, a globalist perspective, and the futuristic extrapolation of current social and economic trends. Prior to cyberpunk, Cold-War-era science fiction described the future in terms of pre- or post-apocalyptic nuclear imagery. The worlds represented in cyberpunk fictions, on the other hand, rather resemble our own present state magnified to a more extreme condition. Bruce Sterling notes of William Gibson's stories that in them we see a future that is recognizably and painstakingly drawn from the modem condition. It is multifaceted, sophisticated, global in its view. It derives from a new set of starting points: not from the shopworn formula of robots, spaceships, and the modem miracle of atomic energy, but from cybernetics, biotech, and the communications web -- to name a few (1986, pp. x-xi). Reflecting the Population Crisis Committee's prediction that by the year 2010, half the world's population will live in urban areas (Hift, 1990), cyberpunk authors create settings, such as Gibson's New York-to-Atlanta "Sprawl" city, which depict a colossal mutation of today's increasingly rapid urbanization. The late twentieth-century expansion of Japanese corporations as a dominant presence in the global market and the importation of Japanese pop-culture items such as Hello Kitty, manga and anime are magnified into idioms of both dominant and popular culture in such cyberpunk films as Ridley Scott's (1982) Blade Runner. In Mixon's Glass Houses, today's environmental degradation has progressed to the point where the rich wear air-conditioned clothing while the poor rely upon sunscreen and gauze wraps. Indeed, some aspects of Gibson's early work, such as the global computer network of cyberspace, have even been realized, in this case, as the World Wide Web. Thus, the significance of cyberpunk is that, as a genre, it is not only about the near future -- it is about our own time. The second central theme of cyberpunk is its conflation of categories; as a genre, it melds disparate elements of cultural dichotomies. The very term "cyberpunk" fuses disparate concepts of cybernetics -- advanced communications technology -- with the defiantly low-tech do-it-yourself aesthetics of punk. In cyberpunk fiction, computers are also artists, people are also machines, and nature is also technology; Gibson opens Neuromancer with the sentence: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (1984, p. 1). This jarring, yet familiar, image shows how cyberpunk fiction redefines natural attributes by using imagery drawn from technology. In the "technoculture" predicted by the advent of cyborgs, waldoes, communications nets and global politics, the dichotomies of nature/science, body/mind and female/male become obsolete. Cyberpunk uses technology as a totalizing idiom to create new space, and to destabilize these existing constructs of power. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in the third prevailing theme of cyberpunk, the ubiquity of corporeally invasive technology. Computers, cyberspace, and cybernetic organisms which meld flesh and machine are omnipresent in these fictions. The products of our technology have already become progressively invasive, with prostheses available not only for our limbs, but now for our internal organs as well. Cyberpunk's focus on corporeally- and mentally-invasive technology, in the form of prosthetic enhancements and direct brain-computer interfaces, is but an extension of an existing theme in our current experiences with the products of our technological innovation. This human-machine hybrid -- the cyborg -- becomes a central figure in cyberpunk fiction. The cyborg is not only a physical amalgam of human and machine, but represents a radical shift in subjectivity; the cyborg combines a humanly incorporated personal consciousness" with a technologically incorporated "machine consciousness" (Csicsery-Ronay, 1991, p. 191). It is this breakdown of categories through the use of technology which is at the root of cyberpunk authors' rethinking of gender. In these fictions, gender dichotomies are overcome through the prevalence and use of technology; as "post-human" subjects, cyborgs create new social and cultural contexts, redefining gender along with the most basic of human attributes. The fictional cyborg, however, does not necessarily escape gender categories. Fictional cyborgs are often depicted as behaving in gendered ways; in cyberpunk film, coercive sexuality is a ubiquitous characteristic of male cyborgs (Pilaro, 1994). Unlike film, however, literary cyberpunk fictions are dominated by female cyborg characters. In the remainder of this paper, I explore the two ways in which cyberpunk writers create cyborg characters which transform gender. Writers such as Gibson and Cadigan present female-gendered cyborgs undertaking a role-reversal into masculinity; in many senses, these are transgendered representations, rather than radical revisions of gender. Mixon's work, however, presents us with a cyborg character which employs technological interface to offer a radical change of subjectivity, of embodiment, and of gender.
If cyborgs know about anything, they know about parts. Spare parts, parts and wholes, prostheses, replacements, enhancements. How do you make sense of all these pieces? After the disaster, when things fall apart, cyborgs know how to stitch themselves back together.
Sense: The exoskeleton incorporates force sensors at six points of contact with the user's body. Data from these sensors are sent to the exoskeleton's control system between 100 to 1,000 times per second.
Plan: The control system's goal is to keep the forces applied by the user's body on the exoskeleton in equilibrium. Since all of the user's movements push or pull on the exoskeleton, to return to equilibrium the exoskeleton must move in the same direction as the push or pull.
Act: The result is that the exoskeleton shadows the user's movements. If the user pulls down on a weight bar, the exoskeleton's arm follows the user's downwards to eliminate the pull of the user's hand on the handgrip. When the user walks, the exoskeletons's foot follows the user's upwards to maintain the force on the exoskeleton's boot, and then downards when the user steps down on the exoskeleton.
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