My thesis aims to map the art historical, religious and cultural influences in Chiho Aoshima’s work, particularly in her 2015 solo show Rebirth of the World at Seattle Asian Art Museum. I will start with an outline of the artist’s overall oeuvre, focusing specifically on her aesthetic development. This will set up an introduction of the main elements I see in her work (Shinto beliefs, yōkai/ukiyo-e aesthetic references, and references to A Cyborg Manifesto). The thesis will essentially be a case study of Rebirth of the World, using specific mediums as evidence for the presence of these influences in her work. My thesis is essentially Chiho Aoshima’s work is a seamless blend of the history and culture of Japan, while still grounding her practice in critical, contemporary theories of subversion. Her work is a gripping nod to the past but it is very much contemporary and critical, and it is easy to overlook all the threads woven into the fabric of her oeuvre.

This project addresses problems for theorists of writing and composition that arose in the 1990s when capital privatizes the production of internetworked writing and starts operating in the manner of a practicing compositionist. I begin by noting that capital in the 1990s converted internetworked writing machines into fixed capital and started composing its version of the cultural form of the "social" we call the Internet. Thereafter, I argue that composition theorists can best understand the Internet, internetworked writing, and internetworked subjectivities if they regard capital as a formidable compositionist, one capable of making the machinofactured internetworked composition into a privately owned means for organizing the direct production of internetworked social writing and internetworked social being. I engage with this problem by pointing out that capital's private production of the internetworked social subsumes both the interindividual site of sociolinguistic p roduction and the individual internetworked writer. I go on to establish that capital uses its control of end-user license agreements to transform the writer subsumed by capital into a privately controlled intellectual property. I argue that capital subjects internetworked writers to a form of accelerated decrepitude because the internetworked writer's cycle of life gets tied in to cycles of software and hardware upgrade, overwrite, and erasure. And, finally, I demonstrate that capital converts the internetworked population of commodified writers, along with their commodified writing and commodified formal compositions, into allegorical symbols insofar as "every commodity is a symbol, since, in so far as it is value, it is only the material envelope of the human labour spent upon it" (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chapter 2). On the strength of these positions, I argue that composition theorists should develop a theory of internetworked writing and composition that makes the following assumpt ions: capital has become a compositionist; internetworked compositionists and compositions have become commodities; and internetworked compositions, compositionists, and composition theorists -- for having become commodities -- have entered into an age of allegory -- that is, an age wherein internetworked compositions necessarily make other, allegorical reference to relations of production and exchange that support capital's ongoing production of the composed, commodified, and festishized internetworked "social."

Le cyborg est un avatar de ce que permet la science-fiction lorsqu’elle s’offre comme terrain où développer une heuristique des identités genrées. Donna Haraway, dans le Manifeste cyborg, a relevé le potentiel de liberté discursive que promettait cette figure romanesque. Il m’apparaît que, depuis sa fictionnalisation puis sa théorisation dans les années 1980 et 1990, le cyborg a muté au sein de l’entreprise science-fictionnelle littéraire. Le Silence de la Cité d’Élisabeth Vonarburg et Le Goût de l’immortalité de Catherine Dufour présentent des personnages dont la cyborgitude problématise les questions identitaires du genre humain, à travers une écriture spécifique, affectée par les technologies. Mon analyse des procédés scripturaux s’effectue de pair avec une analyse gender, ce qui me permet de mieux saisir la fictionnalisation toujours changeante des cyborgs dans les oeuvres de Vonarburg et de Dufour. Ces cyborgs déconstruisent les frontières des systèmes binaires traditionnels, en explorant les possibilités trans-genres et trans-espèces que permettent les métamorphoses de leurs corps excentriques. En tant que représentations fantasmées de désirs autrement inavouables, les cyborgs science-fictionnels témoignent du malaise inhérent de couples comme homme/femme, humain/animal ou organique/artificiel. / The cyborg is an avatar of what science fiction can produce as a territory where heuristics of gender identities are developed. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway reveals the potential of discursive liberty provided by the cyborg’s narrative figure. It appears to me that since its fictionalization as well as its theorization throughout the 1980’s and the 1990’s, the cyborg has evolved within science fiction. Élisabeth Vonarburg’s Le Silence de la Cité and Catherine Dufour’s Le Goût de l’immortalité present characters whose cyborg nature explores questions of humankind’s identities through a certain writing affected by technology. My study of these writing processes is conducted through the analysis of gender. This allows me to better understand the ever-changing fictionalization of the cyborgs found within Vonarburg’s and Dufour’s work. These cyborgs deconstruct the borders of traditional binarist systems by experimenting the trans-genders and trans-species possibilities their excentric bodies enable. As fantasized representations of desires otherwise unmentionable, the science fictional cyborgs attest the inherent uneasiness of couples such as man/woman, human/animal or organic/artificial.

Univ., Magisterarbeit, 2002--Frankfurt (Main)

This research examines how reading and writing on digital platforms establishes public and private spheres in Tokyo, Japan. Based upon findings from a group of students at an international University, I develop new modes of thinking about people and their use of Internet capable devices by exploring the paradoxes present in contemporary literacies. Contextualizing reading and writing within the speech patterns and exchange rituals (aisatsu) which mark public spheres in Japan, writing practices are found to reflect multiple nuanced identity performances in which the varied use of the cultural principles uchi/soto (inside/outside) and ura/omote (back/front) create parallel publics. Constructed by authors and recognized by readers, these parallel publics are the result of student agency as well as the materiality of platform programing and device capabilities. Contemporary literacies have developed conventions which account for the message recipient carrying an ever-present Internet capable device, leading authors to utilize message practices which align the proximity of a platform to levels of intimacy in a relationship. Authors also compose messages which are less likely to require the receiver to excuse themselves from any given social situation. The ubiquity of human-device pairs has also impacted memory practices, with youths prioritizing recognition skills over memorization.

The text is concerned with informational privacy in infosphere. Infosphere according to Luciano Floridi presents a new type of techno-scientific ecology in which western societies organize themselves and operate. Privacy is conceptualized as a labor of division in the infosphere, where every (quasi)subject is mobilizing various actors in order to protect her outer boundaries and resist objectification. The labor of division in infosphere is then compared with similar types of labor in different ecologies and societies (i.e. Amazonia and Mongolia) in sake of identification of crucial agents carrying out this labor of division based on negotiations of categories such as human/non-human or self/non-self. The text distinguishes three types of actors of division according to three interconnected intruders; traders, overseers and criminals. The argument then is that through mobilization of various dividing actors depending on the type of intruder, different (quasi)subjects emerge, thus subjectivity in the infosphere is a political project co- constructed by non/human dividing actors. The last chapter than proposes general ethical directions which might be helpful in the future, when considering the problems of lack of privacy.

This master thesis deals with the topic of the relationship between man and technology, which is represented by cyborg characters in visual culture. The aim is to create a stereotype of individual cyborg characters from selected cyber-punk works, on the basis of which I can reflect the vision and ideas of the relationship between the organic and technical in the future world. This work is divided into four chapters - the first chapter focuses on cyber-punk as a sub-genre of sci-fi, in the second I define the cyborg character and the postmodern theoretical background, which are related to the cyborg, in the third chapter I present the theoretical basis for the analysis of characters and specify methodological procedures, in the final chapter I analyze the individual works.

The thesis deals with representation of cyborgs in advertising on mobile phones from Apple and Samsung. The aim is to show how this theoretical concept - a cyborg as human in intimate relationship with technology - is depicted in advertising. The concept of the work deals with the origin of the term cyborg, its development and its display in art, literature, movies and in works in field of humanities. When examining cyborgs, we use notes from philosophers and science historians, D. Haraway, K. Hayles, A. Clark, W. Mitchell. Their concept of the cyborg is more about mental rather than physical connection to the machine. Here, the mobile phone is used as an extension of people's skills, mental and physical, even without having the device implanted into their body. It corresponds to the idea of human as a cyborg, because the phone as a technology and its user creates a single being, which is now part human part machine. For theoretical base, papers on visual communication, advertising and semiotics were used. This thesis intends to defend the idea of humans as cyborgs and to show how advertisements display relationship between humans and technology, and how new positions of power are created in this ideological environment.

This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies–so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future–as mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control operative at the level of the biomolecular.

This Thesis is pertinent to the negotiations of sex, gender, and sexuality in the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and the narratives the gamer traverses while on the game, and aimed to add to the literature regarding the entanglements of gender and technology within the virtual world of the video games.This Thesis focused on investigating the potential of technocultural assemblages to undo gender (and racial) interpellations, and more specifically in regard to the assemblages that are formed between (post)human and avatar in first-person video games that allow the user to create their character with a great deal of freedom. In other words, this study deploying the method of Autoethnography set out to research the materialities and normativities in (post)human-technology relations and the potential of these relations to operate as a means of resistance.