Dale Wallain's Preface
Before being posed with the project of "making" a cyborg with my classmates, I had been thinking about doing a research project on the different ways in which recording technologies (camera, video, home movies, journals, etc.) have brought on a psychological (or otherwise) shift in our conception of human aging. When posed with the cyborg project, I became concerned with how I could apply the ease of recording technologies to the idea that such an entity must possess ease of recording. My project further evolved as I became increasingly more interested in self-hood and the actual application of "self" to the cyborg. If the cyborg can record itself then I can create an archive, and like us, use that body of stored information to re-create itself in new and evolving ways.
All of this is complicated by our discussions and the final text we have posed (the (Fe)Man/ual), which has called into question even our cyborg's ability or need to have a self. In a way I have problematically presumed the cyborg to be a Western subject in order to explore and expand our own understanding of self-making through collections and archives, both material and mental. |
