Borg Again:
reframing cyborg culture

Curatorial Statement

Borg

Cyborg. As in The Borg. Or RoboCop, the Bionic Wo/Man, Terminator 1, 2 and/or 3. It’s a sci-fi thing – a being who is part machine, part biological.

You know.

Or it’s a metaphor. Most of us here in Canada at the squalling birth of the 21st century, are so entwined with technology that we’re virtually part machine.

 

Philip Davis was creating cyborg images long before I asked him to consider it for this show (Elizabeth Shefrin is the "I" in Times font). As someone who doesn't speak, paintings are one of his ways of connecting to the world. His picture of a car from the perspective of the back seat rider positively contradicts any label of "outsider" which might be imposed on him. Depictions of cars are usually from the drivers' eyes, but as the artist does not drive because of his disability, his point of view centres his own experience.

 

Cyborg: as in your sister whose social life is a chat room. Or your cousin who drives his car to the corner store. Or your son who puts (machine planted, fertilized, harvested, processed, packaged, shipped, and priced) breakfast cereal inside his body every morning.

Cyborg as in me, attached by the eyeballs to my laptop as I write these words. I love my machine because my demographic says I should, and because my learning disability made writing a miserable exercise in frustration, until the day I touched my first computer. Because unlike so many people with disabilities (yes, 90% of us are unemployed), I could afford a computer.

You know.

 

“Disabled people have been among the first to embrace new technologies and the benefits which these offer, but they also have greater awareness of the problematic nature of that technology.”
Ju Gosling: My Not-So-Secret Life as a Cyborg

 

Cleo Pawson's exquisitely painted debutante dress highlights the rod permanently embedded in her spine. As surgery was intended to make her more "normal",as a young teenager, so a debutante is presented as the perfect version of womanhood. The needles on the her dress, so elegant and painful, provide a metaphor for the rods in her spine, designed to create a perfect young woman whose invisible pain would not disturb the world. Through "My Backless Dress" Cleo visibilizes her pain. The repeated spinal motifs in her paintings and button blankets fuse her spiritual world to her physical reality.

 

The cyborg is a useful metaphor. It tosses out the old Nature versus Technology conflict. No more nature = good, technology = bad; or nature = female, technology = male; or nature = barbarism, technology = civilization. If we are cyborgs, we don’t have to pledge allegiance to one or the other. They are joined within us. We can acknowledge the military/corporate origins of most technology, without rejecting our technological selves. Cyborgs are not the electric sheep of technocracy.

 

Emma Kivisild's work brings the cyborg concept back down to earth, by using her friends as her assistive devices. She puts herself at the centre, away from the margins, and her able bodied friends become part of her cyborgness. As an able-bodied person I want to say "me too", I also get help from my friends, but the format of the medical posters reminds me that while disability is certainly a spectrum (rather than us and them) the artist's experience is very different from my own.

 

Ok, hold on. For some of us, it’s not sci-fi, and it’s not all that metaphorical either. We have plastic hips, teflon hearts. Or we put on a machine to talk, to walk. Or pharmaceutical technology interfaces with our brain chemistry (with and without our consent). Or implants in our ears make us simultaneously more Normal and more cyborg.

So what's with this Normal thing?

 

"When technology works on the body, our horror always mingles with intense fascination."
Hari Kunzru: You Are Cyborg, Wired Magazine issue 5.02

 

In the above quote, the author seems to assume his audience is able bodied, and that we all regard people for whom technology and biology are combined, with repulsion. Marilyn Cherenko makes her audience consider our own attitudes. As you gaze at Cherenko's drawings of herself in her first communion dress, how does your image of her change from drawing to drawing? (Do you like her better in one rather than another?) Feel free to interact with the piece. As a viewer you get to impose the magnetized vocabulary of cyborg theory on the artist. How often do we label each other in this way?

 

Technology in the lives of people with disabilities is sometimes about our very survival, sometimes about making our day to day lives easier, and sometimes it's all about appearing as normal as possible. Or it's a confusing combination of all three.

In a world where we're stereotyped into monsters (objects of fear) or poor little poster kids (objects of pity), is it any wonder our families, our doctors and we ourselves can be so desperate to make us more Normal.

For people with invisible disabilities, passing for normal can be a proud trickster art form (while simultaneously reflecting cultural shame). For others, passing isn't an option, and tricky talents take other forms.

 

Buz Onezed wants it all: a cure and civil rights too, and he's not waiting around. Buz likes to push at the edges. Confrontational and honest, he dismantles stereotypes or at least puts them on the table. How does it feel to sit in his chair? When you watch the video do you laugh or squirm? What would you or I have done on that escalator? Look at his Bitch page. Why are the letters so big? Those of us who are able bodied have the luxury of being able to keep our bodily functions in a discrete 10 point. Buz's text size insists that his story be told.

 

Borgs are born from corporate capitalism -- we consume and are consumed by its technologies. We live with the contradictions.

Drug technology is no different.
Some dream of smart drugs to sharpen them up, keep them on top of the next next next thing.

For people with psychiatric disabilities, borging our brains is not such a dream. Few are transformed into happily-ever-after-as-shown-on-TV. Many of us struggle every day with side effects, or meds that work for awhile and then stop, or meds that never quite work well enough, or drug cocktails that prove toxic over the years. For some of us, to drug or not to drug is not a question, it's a court order.

 

Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa and Irene Loughlin have created an installation piece that is, from time to time, activated by performance. "Synthetic Happiness" depicts a world in which nothing is quite real. A clear vinyl tent, useless for privacy, warmth or protection, an astroturf campsite, electric blankets without electricity, exercise equipment replacing the Great Outdoors, and anti-depressants sewn into the sides of the tent, provide an environment through which the performers move without awareness. In today's world of psychiatry, more and more emotions that were once seen as part of the spectrum of human experience are now being classified as illnesses. At what point does over-diagnosis and its accompanying drugs create a cyborg quest for perfect human happiness?

 

Cyborg theory talks about the pleasures of technology, but also about our anxiety and dread. We create the cyborg as monster to embody our fears of technology. A flip through pop culture also shows us legions of monsters fabricated from able-bodied fears of disability: the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein’s monster and a thousand cinematic psycho-killers.

Maybe we can turn that around and ask: Are disabled people embracing cybernetics in order to become non-monsters, and/or are we embracing and reclaiming monsterdom on our own terms?

 

Shaira Holman reclains the word "stupid" for herself as a person with a learning disablity. Her "Gender Stupid" challenges and deliberately confuses us . (Who among us has never been called stupid? Who 100% identifies with the cliches of the gender we were born to?) Is the problem us or them? It's hard to tell in a world where "normal" is defined as able-bodied hetrosexual, middle class and white. How could the artist possibly end up confused in the men's room, as her image suggests? On the other hand, how could she possibly not? How much of where the world doesn't make sense is because of our own confusions and how much is rigid social norms?

 

Borg Again revisits the cyborg debates with a point of view that has been present and articulated in the margins, but too often overlooked (and infrequently overheard). Borg Again is a fragment of conversation at the crossroads of flesh and technology, theory and pain, dreams and daily life, banking and gallery hopping, cyborgs and disability.

 

This is the wrap up paragraph, the place where all the straggling ends of ideas -- opened but never quite closed, present but not accounted for, drawn but not quartered, loved and left hanging -- are gathered together and woven into a satisfying conclusion.

Umm.

 

Curators: Elizabeth Shefrin,
Persimmon Blackbridge

Thanks to Geoff McMurchy, Della McCreary, Emma Kivisild