i would rather be a cyborg than a god
“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short,
we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” — Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto
An A4 size zine with riso-printed cover conceptualized, researched, and designed for the workshop on Artificial Intellgience run by Patrick Thomas as part of the Masters in Editorial Design 2021 at Elisava. i would rather be a cyborg than a god uses Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as a starting point to look into the empancipatory potential of the figure of the cyborg in disability theory and justice movements. It then ventures into an exploration on the ways in which AI and social media algortithms can both help mutual aid and inhibit it, particularly in the case of diabetics, and how censorship invisibilizes disabled and chornically ill bodyminds. It ends with a proposal to embrace the figure of the cyborg and create solidarity between disabled communities and artifical intelligence programmers and creators.
Special thanks to Patrick Thomas for running this workshop.