iCyborga: The Film
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Monthly Archives: December 2014
CST week 10
Suzanne: “So here’s the thing. He wants to buy you guys out. He doesn’t want the ride or the town. He just wants- I don’t know- the creativity. The PR win. He wants peace. And the real news is. he’s over the barrel. Freddy’s forcing his hand. If we can make that problem go away, we can ask for anything…” (Doctorow 388)
“I met a man a couple of weeks ago who had dreadlocks down to his knees, shredded jeans, and a leather jacket with amazing etchings all over it. I went over to see what he was working on and discovered another accidental entrepreneur.” (Hatch, 195).
This quote represents the relationship between technology and capitalism and how the two fuel each other. We, this class, are participants in this relationship. An example of this is purely the texts we read each week. One, an entrepreneurs perspective on the makers movement and how it changing small business opportunity and the other, a creative science fiction novel that spans time and character narrative moralities to flush out the tension in the makers movement with capitalism. This quote touches on creativity as currency, and the appearance of power in public sphere, all of which can be seen in modern company models (Makerbot, Apple, etc). As Hatch awkwardly points out, even someone who wears shredded jeans can do it! (?) I found this quote in the Makers Manifesto to represent the underlying voice of condescension mixed with And-You-Can-Too! that Hatch has describing creative innovation in the tech world. In our own microcosm of technology and creativity in Making Meaning Matter we have to navigate artistic landscapes, while attempting to create something purposeful, with innovation in technology and design. This has created quite a transposition between conversation in ‘the real world’ the Evergreen microcosm, and the various personalities of the class.
Interation 5
4th Iteration-figurine
My Blue Rabbit project is like something
out of a twisted feminist sci-fi dream. I wanted to bring self-portraiture and virtual reality/identity together to create a model of myself that in theory was born out of my virtual presence on social media. Imagine the attributes of your facebook, okcupid, etc. coming to life, being born through the 3D printer womb and living as you. Obviously, with out imagination, this project does not work. The reality is a 5 inch figurine that is inanimate, essentially faceless, and perhaps even boring. The use of film to ‘animate’ or bring to life this plastic self image is key to sharing this idea quickly and creatively to an outside audience. I considered many options on how to portray her voice, her personhood. Should I speak using my voice? Should I use a robots voice reading text I wrote? Should I use text, silent and open to interpretation?
My 3D ‘replica’ is 154mm (6 inches) tall, 69mm wide, and 66mm deep. My RL body is 1,676.4mm tall. ‘She’ is made of 33g of plastic filament compared to my 56699g of ‘natural’ filament. It took ‘her’ 6 hours to print, where as my mother was in labor with me for 12.
Designing myself was easy. I stood in front of a scanner. I played with positions of my arms, and my posture, which at that moment seemed so incredibly important. I was constrained in movement and detail. My posture would forever be cast into plastic, representing me in form as slightly more than an amorphous white blob. My arms had to stay fixed at my sides or at least have my hands attaching somewhere. My legs are also fixed, immobile and in Tinkercad became rooted to a cylindrical platform to allow my replica to stand on her own, to have a platform, literally. I chose a white filament to catch lights and show shadow and texture. I considered painting ‘her’ but decided it would take away from the raw machine made feel it had.
After her lead role in Cyborga, my 3D model will most likely retire to a shelf in my house a souvenir of exploring my relationship with my virtual self. Her legacy will live on in my future work exploring the intersection of feminism, identity, and technology through art.
week 8 CST
“Death was used to drawing stares even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different” (Doctorow, 339).
Speaking of cyborgs and stares… I wanted to make my cyborg have movable limps to bring more life to ‘her’ movements. John and I designed a socket attachments that would allow the arms and legs to move. We also found an already proven, similar model on tinkercad. We pulled the arms and legs off of my virtual body which was creepy and fascinating.