Universal Plastic Surgery: The Right of Man?

The trees here are all twenty paces apart. I know - I measured with my own feet. The city is owned wholly by the Irvine Company, leased to beautiful people and approved companies. Every morning at sunrise an army of dark-skinned people invade to prune the bushes, sweep the streets and sidewalks, trim the trees, and rearrange the flower beds with season-appropriate colours; most of these folks are gone by lunch time. I'm reminded of a little robot Isaac Asimov once envisioned: a quaint, bug-like, bot that would, unbeknownst to us, live in our hair - trimming it, keeping it presentable.

J.J. King reviews Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness, Critical Art Ensemble (Autonomedia $8)

Jerrel is about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. It's the special she's been waiting for all her young life - the day on which she joins the Hive, in body as much as in spirit. This is more than your average holy communion for young Jerrel - a surgically facilitated rite of passage from which there's no turning back. A short story by David McKee

Jerrel could not shake the paranoia. Walking from her building to the metro she felt eyes on her, peeling back layer after layer of skin and flesh and probing her, investigating her intent. The air seemed unusually warm for March. Sweat trickled down her back and soaked her armpits. She imagined she was caught in a warm ocean current, drifting along an immaterial stream through cold waters. Strange, predatory fish floated casually alongside her, eyeing her with hungry fascination and trying to guess how far she planned to drift. Trying to guess her destination.

In 1985, Donna Haraway unveiled ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, thrilling cultural studies bods, new agers, feminists, and cyberpunks alike with its mix of military, political, laboratory and hippy flavours. Consigning the boundaries between the born and the built to the rubbish dump of history, Haraway’s politics of the information age made waves. But ten years on, has the radical promise of her manifesto been borne out by history? Maria Fernandez and Suhail Malik think not – for completely opposing reasons.

>> Merlin Carpenter, A Colloquium of Traktors, 2000, ink on paper, 35x50cm, [http://www.merlincarpenter.com]

THE CYBORG - SWEET SIXTEEN (AND NEVER BEEN CLONED)

It’s about time net-culture got its own coffee-table catalogue and Net_Condition: Art and Global Media is as close as it gets. Edited by Peter Weibel and Timothy Druckery, the 400 page fully illustrated glossy publication documents an exhibition lasting two years which took place across global media networks as well as physical exhibition spaces in Barcelona, Graz, Karlsruhe, and Tokyo.

Sadie Plant's writings have been instrumental in defining many of cyberfeminism's foundational concepts. Here, Caroline Bassett takes one of her recent essays, On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, as the point of departure for a critical look at feminism's most recent progeny while Josephine Berry reports from the conference Wired Women where some of cyberfeminism's more popular figurations were placed under the microscope.

Just like one of its most notorious representatives, the cyborg, cyberfeminism is many things to many people. Arguing its coherence as a movement would do it little justice as it is by nature and intent diverse, mutable and eternally incomplete. Its most defining characteristic is a willingness to unthink traditional dualisms; between man and woman, nature and culture, and technology and the human so as to try and formulate a radically new ontology for both humans and nonhumans. Since they both exacerbate and challenge oppressive systems, accelerating technological, economic and biological changes are both its friend and foe.