Illustration Notes:
The Cyborg is a hybrid creature, a wish image of humanities’ future with a long history of deferrals, tangled roots, and misunderstandings.
Its latest instantiation can be traced back to Manfred E. Clynes’ and Nathan S.Kline’s seminal 1960’s essay Cyborgs and Space. In it, the two researchers raised the specter of an enhanced human being that can survive extraterrestrial environments. They argued that it is more logical to transform human biology than to create an environment to support human life in space.
Faced with today’s “energy and climate crisis” the cyborg myth is being revisited once more.
Do we change ourselves or the environment?
What are the limits of technology to support life?
Who and what will make decisions surrounding our collective future?
What are the new politics of this decision making?
These questions raise older specters of backdoor negotiations, colonialism, and war. Subjects depicted in earlier graphic works like James Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in danger, or, State Epicures taking un Petit Souper or a cartoon of the 1884 Berlin Conference in which European and U. S. leaders debated the division of African resources at a frightening cost to African peoples. Both these graphic works adopt the seemingly innocent conventions of a dinner table to explore their far from innocent subjects. They remind us of violent legacies that still haunt collective visions of energy and resources today.
“Cyborg Energy Conference” depicts a negotiating table from a bygone era. Around it, part human, part machine creatures calculate energy futures. Their results are uncertain- part programmed, part free to evolve.
-T.S Halpern
