May I please ask your readers to review current work on view at the MIT
Museum- Robots and Beyond: Exploring Artificial Intelligence at MIT.
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/robots.html
The collaborative research at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab may be of
interest and relevant to the current discussions on Ethnic Cyborgs.
Joseph Ingoldsby
Landscape Mosaics
On 7/12/09 9:37 AM, "roger malina" <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> ETHNIC CYBORG= CYBORGs IN BURKAs=AVATARS AS BURKAS
>
> I want to venture with a little trepidation in territory that has difficult
> Cultural and political connotations today, to argue that Cyborgs should be
> able to wear Burkas in Public.
>
> I was talking to Annick Bureaud and she made the comment that its strange that
> With the Burka, we mask everything except the eyes , but that on
> television you often
> See shots with peoples eyes blocked out to avoid being able to
> recognize the person.
>
> This gets into the general area of how we use non verbal communication
> in general
> To assess the credibility and intent of people when they are in
> dialogue with you. And
> the importance of eyes. ( Semir Zeki at his Plaisir neuroaesthetics
> conference in Berkeley
> a couple of years ago, dealt with how neurobiology now informs how
> facial recognition works
> and interpretation mechanisms and the plasticily of those circuits in the
> brain)
>
> Yasmin moderator Soussi Houssine is doing a PhD on the use of photojournalism
> in
> The arab press in north africa, and necessarily one gets into the
> whole discussion of how the body ,
> naked or not, is situated in different cultural and religious
> contexts. And the large issue of How
> clothing is also part of the non verbal communication interpretation.
> My father grew up in an age where wearing a hat in public was
> obligatory for certain
> Social classes.
>
> In western culture the age of a body is very difficult territory.
> Artist Orlan who has
> Used her body as her territory for art making, forces us to address
> such issues. (no
> Comment re Michael Jackson)
>
> One of the liberating effects of on line culture has been to create spaces
> that
> Break many of the cultural norms of interpersonal dialogue. In second life
> Everyone is wearing a burka. But the second life user has total
> liberty to use/not
> Use anonymity and to design their appearance. This is not the case in
> patriarchal
> Societies that enforce secondary roles for women ( with our without
> burkas) and don¹t
> Let you design your own or decide when to wear it.
>
> Maybe there are several basic rights that a Cyborg should have:
>
> a) A right to privacy. Knowing however that the right to privacy has
> evolved radically
> over the last few thousand years. In village life there is little personal
> Privacy but at least you know who is watching you and you can watch them
> back.
>
> b) A right to dignity and equality with non cyborgs, something even we humans
> have failed to minimum dignity a social reality. ( and by creating a
> class of Œwe
> Humans versus ³you cyborgs: I have fallen into the trap that the body
> determines
> Your identity ( need to unpack Varela¹s nice statement that ³all knowledge is
> Conditioned by the structure of the knower; cyborgs can know things
> we cant know and
> vice versa )
>
> Two rights are perhaps becoming particularly important:
>
> c) A right to anonymity. The surveillance society is rapidly
> eliminating our ability to mask
> our identity ( except during Carnaval). There will eventually be more
> web cams than people soon.
> There are hacker communities now becoming expert at how you can
> remain anonymous
> ( many countries try to block aliases in computer
> Accounts= facebook too. Last night Lambert and Carlos Santiago took me
> to the Plaza Garibaldi
> in Mexico City where the mariachi players entertain revelers behaving
> with implicit public anonymity.
>
> d) A right to all the data available about themselves. We live in the
> terabyte era with
> massive data being accumulated about each one of us ( yes google) and
> this is probably irreversible.
> You should have a right to all the data being taken about yourself.
>
> Artists projects that explore issues of privacy, human dignity,
> anonymity and data ownership I
> think are relevant to this Ethnic Cyborg discussion. We have been having
> Trouble this month opening up this discussion, maybe some of the
> artists on the list
> Doing work in these areas would like to tell us about their work. Any
> artists working on "eyes" ?
>
> Roger
>
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