This class focuses on the role of the interface in shaping human life; the creating of the cyborg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8K90hX4PrE
![Cyborg a painting by Lynn Randolph. The painting is the cover of Donna Haraway’s book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Randolph describes her piece: “[Donna] Haraway’s description of Asian women with nimble fingers, working in enterprise zones for very little remuneration stuck in my head. I had recently met a young Chinese woman, Grace Li, who was one of my late husband’s sociology students at the University of Houston… I asked Grace if she would pose for me and she agreed.”](https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/12d22480-3d3f-4b17-a96d-3cab0ad62090/b3ebfde6-bf7c-4808-9516-1c4c1e27b24b/Untitled.jpeg)
Cyborg a painting by Lynn Randolph. The painting is the cover of Donna Haraway’s book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Randolph describes her piece: “[Donna] Haraway’s description of Asian women with nimble fingers, working in enterprise zones for very little remuneration stuck in my head. I had recently met a young Chinese woman, Grace Li, who was one of my late husband’s sociology students at the University of Houston… I asked Grace if she would pose for me and she agreed.”
Technology tends to become mythic. I use this word in the sense in which it was used by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes. He used the word "myth" to refer to a common tendency to think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things. I have on occasion asked my students if they know when the alphabet was invented. The question astonishes them. It is as if I asked them when clouds and trees were invented. The alphabet, they believe, was not something that was invented. It just is. It is this way with many products of human culture but with none more consistently than technology. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers--they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.
Bring the below materials to class everyday.
Required Devices:
Required materials: You have until the second class day to bring the below materials.
