Bollington, Lucy;
(2025)
From the Cyborg to the Rendered Body: Conceptualising Redistributions in Composite Agency through Hito Steyerl’s Citational Figures.
In: Ring, Annie and Bollington, Lucy, (eds.)
Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture.
(pp. 155-186).
MHRA/Legenda: Oxford.
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Abstract
In 1985, Donna Haraway instated the cyborg as a provocative conceptual figure expressing the entangled dynamics of power, control, and protest in the information age. This theory was pathbreaking in part because of the challenge it posed to the prevailing tendency within feminism to seek ‘alliance with nature and against technology’. Even today, almost forty years on, the cyborg arguably remains the most prominent figure for conceptualising entangled relationships between humans and technology. Yet, despite this enduring influence, already in 2006 N. Katherine Hayles suggested that the cyborg was beginning to look out of date. Hayles proposed replacing the cyborg, not with another figure, but with a concept: ‘the cognisphere’, a term drawn from the work of Thomas Whalen. Bollington now proposes that we supplement the cyborg with a new conceptual figure for the sociotechnical present: the digitally-animated figure, or ‘rendered body’, that appears with striking frequency across films by some of today’s most prominent artists. Bollington discusses in particular the acclaimed German-Japanese artist Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), which stages a transition from the cyborg to the rendered body, a transition propelled by Steyerl’s understanding of the importance of machine-machine ecologies in shaping the terms and operations of contemporary power, capitalism, and protest today.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | From the Cyborg to the Rendered Body: Conceptualising Redistributions in Composite Agency through Hito Steyerl’s Citational Figures |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1-839542-02-2 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.59860/vc.c69b713 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.59860/vc.c69b713 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215596 |
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