<nettime> CURRENT SCREENSAVER: Tereza Vinklárková, Vojta Dubcová, Michal Durda /Monster Manifesto/

[XLterrestrials via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Nettimers + Screensaver artists,

Hadn't realized that it's the 40th anniversary of Haraway's text...
And of course it makes sense to commemorate and/or revisit that with an exhibition.

We are curious to see what the exhibition entails, especially now , given the rapid manifestation of all the patriarchal + authoritarian + industrial-global-scale + and technologically-manufactured monstrosities.   

One might now consider, it's time for a deeper critical analysis that question whether Haraway's 'warnings' ( and gambits ) were and/or remain very inadequate theoretical positions that provided way too little real resistance or even a proper lens to fully grasp the corporate-krapitalist tsunami of the very commodified and widely-distributed fetishization of ... becoming "Cyborgs" ... 

The Nature / Culture thing that she and Latour pushed seems - in hindsight - like a very flimsy kulisse now, which allows a very ecocidal ( and primarily white ) culture to wildly expand the Guineapigdom Inc. + a wide-variety of techno-fascist trajectories w/ zero guard rails , zero global consensus and fewer and fewer alternative routes, much less emergency exits.

It is readily obvious to any environmental thinker worth their salt that our hyoer-industrialized cultures are and were ( in the 80s )  way out of balance ! And we continue to act like our technospheres are some supreme and/or more cvilized intelligence.  It's obvious barbarity currently reigns like a heaping portion of agent orange turds !  

During the rise of the "Haraway school", there were other fascinating and productive resistances that got far less traction and limelight in academic circles and art-scene festivals.  And are still extremely marginalized by the culture industries and installed academic hierarchies !

One example that always comes to our mind when thinking about Haraway's controversial and softer ( non-activist? ) tact, is the story of Ignacio Chapela, the prof at UC Berkeley, who was a serious whistleblower who decried the toxic corporate influences like Novartis + Monsanto ( predatory biotech ) in University structures, essentially contaminating all higher-education on the very subjects essential for steering societies towards any kind of autonomy and sustainability and independence from the industrial-powers, and their profit-feeding frenzies.

We have numerous other anecdotes in this vein, and it would be a good time to start to look at at the academic + state-funded art scenes that are still clinging to Haraway's muddy - and possibly contaminated - approach to environmental orientations and/or the arts + tech resistances. 

Perhaps we'd do better with our feet more firmly on all the contested territories !  

the XLterrestrial 2 cents,

podinski

 






> On 29/07/2025 12:00 CEST nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. CURRENT SCREENSAVER: Tereza Vinkl?rkov?, Vojta Dubcov?,
>       Michal Durda /Monster Manifesto/ (metazoa.org)
> 
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2025 09:49:53 +0200
> From: "metazoa.org" <info@metazoa.org>
> To: nettime-l@lists.nettime.org
> Subject: <nettime> CURRENT SCREENSAVER: Tereza Vinkl?rkov?, Vojta
> 	Dubcov?, Michal Durda /Monster Manifesto/
> Message-ID: <26342782-775F-41EF-BFD1-1CB57E5E4205@metazoa.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset=utf-8
> 
> In her influential text A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Donna Haraway proposes a radical transgression of binary oppositions such as nature and technology, male and female, organic and synthetic. The cyborg thus becomes a metaphor of resistance against essentialist notions of identity and rigid power structures. In academic and artistic circles?especially within queer, posthumanist, and transfeminist studies?the cyborg is a symbol of a liberating alternative for those who transcend normative frameworks of body, gender, nature, and culture.
> 
> For many who experience exclusion, identification with the non-human (monstrous, synthetic, animalistic) can be a form of relief: robots, monsters, dolls, or mythical creatures also do not belong to the ?normal? human world?yet they are more stably grasped within it, unlike tabooed bodies. Identification with these Others can serve as both a survival strategy and an act of defiance. The problem is that society often views those who identify with the non-human (monstrous, synthetic, cybernetic, or animalistic) as bizarre, cool, or frightening rather than listening to what they have to say. Haraway herself warns against embracing the cyborg as a fetish. The aestheticization of monstrosity may represent a comforting way for society to cope with the discomfort of encountering what truly exceeds norms. Therefore, identification with the non-human is not automatically liberating; it can become emancipatory only when it is recognized not merely as an aesthetic but also as a testimony?with
  a
>   right to political and existential dimensions
> 
> More at https://screensaver.gallery/tereza-vinklarkova-vojta-dubcova-michal-durda-monster-manifesto
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