{"id":3648,"date":"2010-09-12T13:10:38","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T18:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=3648"},"modified":"2010-09-12T14:40:01","modified_gmt":"2010-09-12T19:40:01","slug":"fifty-posts-about-cyborgs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2010\/09\/fifty-posts-about-cyborgs\/","title":{"rendered":"fifty posts about cyborgs"},"content":{"rendered":"

To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon<\/a> is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts<\/a> on the subject.<\/p>\n

The first question that might occur to an architect, I suppose (assuming that this imaginary architect is not a regular reader of Quiet Babylon<\/em> — though he should be), is what, exactly, architecture and cyborgs have to do with one another.<\/p>\n

The answer is quite a lot — but realizing this depends on understanding what a cyborg is. \u00a0Though, as Tim explains<\/a>, the word has come to refer (particularly in pop culture) primarily to extreme biological-technological hybrids like\u00a0Schwarzenegger’s\u00a0Terminator or Star Trek’s Borg, it originally (and perhaps more usefully) refers to a much larger class of bodily augmentations, which Tim describes as “non-hereditary adaptation[s]”, or “technological interventions that change the course of biological existence”.<\/p>\n

Because, again using Tim’s words, “visions of cyborgs are all about the relationship of technology to the body”, it turns out that, as Geoff Manaugh points out<\/a>, the cyborg can be read as a negation of architecture:<\/p>\n

The cyborg [under Clynes and Kline’s original definition and] in this specific sense, then, \u00a0is an organism that does away with the need for architecture\u2014it brings its environment along with it, in the form of artificially created internal feedback systems that adapt, on their own, to often radically changing environmental conditions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1<\/strong> For a longer explanation of why this is the case than I’m about to provide, see Tim’s somewhat earlier Quiet Babylon<\/em> series on the topic, “Cyborgs & Architecture”: Adaptation<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Astronauts and Super Villains<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Nomads and Homesteaders<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Mobile Structures<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0The Invisible Infrastructure of Cyborgs<\/em><\/a>, and\u00a06 Points on a Continuum<\/em><\/a>.<\/div>\n

I think Geoff is careful to provide that qualification in this specific sense<\/em>, though, because when we accept Tim’s broad thesis — that the best image of a contemporary cyborg might not be Robocop, but a woman wearing glasses and holding a cellphone — we soon realize that the line between the architectural and the cyborg can be quite blurry1<\/sup>.<\/p>\n