43

The Cyborg Subject Position:

Exploring a reconfigured sense of body and
ianguage when mailing art in the cyborg reaim
Tracey Bowen
University of Toronto at Mississauga

Abstract

As cultural practices are Increasingly mediated by

computerization more artists are exploring ways to integrate
computer based procedures into the material world of art
making. This has prompted a new sense of self and body image
manifested as the cyborg subject position which heightens
their awareness of their physical bodies with the electronic
circuitry of the computer and a reconstituted touch space. This
new subjectivity has impiicatlons for educators as generations
of students come to class already knowing the world through
computer mediation.

Dans la foui6e de la m6diatisation grandissante des productions

cuiturelies due k I'informatisation, de plus en plus d'artistes
explorent diff6rents fagons d'int6grer des 6i6ments g6r6s
par ordinateur dans ie processus mdme de creation. Cela a
g6n6r6 un nouveau sentiment de i'individuaiit6 et une nouvelle
image corporelle, ie cyborg constltuant I'exemple ultime de
sensibiiisation accrue au corps physique grSce k des circuits
^iectroniques et k des capteurs tactiies. Cette subjectivity
autre n'est pas sans consequences pour les 6ducateurs
puisque nombre d'6l6ves arrivent k I'^cole en ayant d6j& une
connaissance du monde m§diatis§e par I'ordinateur

Introduction

Over the last fifteen years, personal computers have increasingly

been integrated into the daily routines, working patterns, and
creative processes of many visual artists. As a result, the modernist
 The Cyborg Subject Position
44
modei of autonomous artist/creator is problematized by new media
technologies and is no longer easily compatible with digital systems
of production (Gonz^les, 2000). Hybrid configurations of the artist
are emerging to address experiences and contexts that can be
"complex and contradictory" in relation to traditional forms of art
making (Gonz^les, 2000). These new experiences are inspired by
"joint kinships" (Haraway, 1991) and "couplings" of human and
machinic perspectives (Miller, 1993) where the artist and computer
become collaborators for the purpose of making art. The handwork
of the artist is translated by the pulsing of the quasi-prosthesis of
the computer mouse invoking a union between themseives and
"intelligent machines" (Hayles, 1999). These unions create "new
spatial relationships" between the artists, their bodies, and their
tools for making art (Castelis, 1996). The artist using computer
technologies undergoes a restructuring of consciousness and
assumes a subject position that is a hybrid form of creator modeied
on Donna Haraway's (1991) cyborg. This new model is based on the
cyborg subject position, a metaphoric way of being that incorporates
new technologies with an organic body image.

While the much popularized "cyborg" has developed in pubiic

imaginations as an idealized, seamless melding of computer and
human technology unencumbered by the fleshy meat of the body
(Morse, 1995), the cyborg subject position, requires artists to rethink
the ways in which their bodies are connected to machines and how
these connections invoke a "deeper restructuring" of meaning and
their own consciousness (Chaplin, 2000, p.265) while continuing to
acknowledge the image of their physicai bodies (Stone, 2000). It is
a way of thinking about computer-based experiences through the
body.

The terms on which visual artists are working through a metaphorical

cyborg subject position as a way of redefining collaborative
activity between themselves and their computers warrants closer
examination, in particular, how is "the cyborg" reconstituted as
a metaphoricai subject position that enacts a redefined sense of
body, language and space relative to the ways in which visual artists
are forming "joint kinships" with computer-based technologies for
making art? The purpose of this paper is to define and examine the
cyborg subject position in relation to how it provides the vehicle
Tracey Bowen
45
for artists to psychically invest their "self" with "the machine" as a
collaborative coupling for making art. Furthermore, how does this
union where the machinic elements as Grosz (1994, p.8O) describes,
become "libidinally cathected parts of the body image," pluralize
the artists' sense of seif and ways of working? The machine, that
being a computer is becoming an integral part of the artist's body
whiie making art. Moreover, the cyborg subject position inspires new
ways of imagining relationships between artists' bodies, their working
processes, and the terms on which they construct meaning. The data
collected from six visuai artists who recently participated in a study
that explored the ways in which they are integrating computers into
their mostiy hand-based art making practices provides the context for
further exploring the cyborg subject position. This paper is predicated
on developing a theoretical framework that defines human/computer
engagements as embodied experiences and revisiting data from an
original study in order to identify the cyborg subject position within
artists' descriptions of making art and imagery using digital processes.
The intention here is to map the ways in which the cyborg subject
position appears within the data as the artists redefine their sense
of body and ianguage through their computer mediated experiences
and to further understand spatiai reconfigurations, both physical
and virtuai, that occur. The cyborg subject position dwells within
the interwoven texts that describe the artists' computer-based art
making as experienced through their bodies. These texts illuminate
subjectivities that both Hayles and Haraway describe as "a network
of human and non-human agencies" (Dalton, 2003, p.145). The
cyborg subject position has important implications for teaching and
iearning as new generations of students bring their own ways of "being
digitai"with them into the ciassroom (Negroponte, 1995).

The original study: Probiemizing the physicality of art malting

For some visuai artists, computerization has provoked a degree of

anxiety and discomfort. As visuai artists increasingly integrate digitai
procedures into their art making processes, they are confronted
with the need to transform oider practices, often working through
chaiienging phases of transiation. The original study that has provided
the data to be re-viewed for this paper and a context for exploring
the cyborg subject position invoived interviews with six visual artists
whose practices are based primariiy on hand making methods. During
 The Cyborg Subject Position
46
the interview conversations the artists described how they were in
a process of exchanging and in some instances replacing, hands-
on engagement using traditional materials with digital manipuiatlon
programs using a computer mouse. The study focused on the ways
in which the artists were beginning to work in the cyborg realm
combining both manuaily and digitally based procedures for creating
art. The artists' stories toid through the research described how they
are now becoming hybrid cyborg art makers as they reconstitute
their hand made art processes based in the physical world to digital
manipulations within virtual spaces. This reconstitution enacts a
multi layer process involving the transiation and integration of famiiiar
procedures into foreign systems that, in turn, prompt the artists to
rethink what it means to be a maker of art images and objects in a
digital cuiture. The artists' stories were toid in the moment, through
a number of different theoretical lenses. Their stories of "becoming
digitai" (Negroponte, 1995) impiicated social, technologicai and
autobiographical contexts, all of which are inextricably linked, and
highiighted a number of possible perspectives relative to the different
aspects of making.

Three key themes focusing on researching the electronic iibrary,

computerized image production and the physicality of art making
emerged from the artists' interviews. These themes in conjunction
with theoretical discourses addressing issues of space and place,
cyborgology and art education, illuminate the terms of resistance,
incorporation and innovation that characterize the interchanges
between hand and computer procedures for producing images.
However, the artists' texts extend beyond these themes as their
working processes are further complicated when they make art
concurrently across both physicai and virtual environments. Their
experiences of art making are probiematized by new historical ways
of thinking, acting and being that reconstitute their sense of "art",
being an "artist" and their ways of producing art across different
spatial locations, in particular, haptic spaces.

The process of problematization Foucauit says, occurs when a diverse

range of variabies are imposed on a particular "domain of action"
which in turn, spawns multiple complexities. Each set of compiexities
can inspire several different responses (Rabinow, 1984, p.388).
Foucauit maintains that the process of problemization "develops
Tracey Bowen
47
the conditions in which possible responses can be given" and links
diverse ideas and concepts togetlier in ways that seel< possibie
solutions to unsettling shifts (p.389). Probiemization also disturbs the
artists' thinking about older forms of art making and stimuiates them
to rethink what it means to be an artist in a digitai culture combining
machine production with hand-making. Their working procedures
are redefined through a new body/machine intimacy that spawns a
new spatiai location.

Problematizing the ways these artists were jointly making images by

hand and computer required them to reconsider the haptic space that
exists between their bodies and the computer screen. Historically, the
haptic space that formed between the artist's body and their work was
mediated by tools such as brushes, penciis and media such as paint,
graphite; tactile matter. Rethinking the haptic space between the
artist and the screen invoives a reconsideration of "touch" and bodiiy
sensations experienced through digital images. Haptical space is a
touch space that implies a close material tactiiity that is experienced
through the body. Hapticity is most apparent when artists are
physically handling materials and privileging their bodies as sensory
mediators when making art. iHaptic space becomes problematized
however when artists use a computer mouse, an experience wherein
tactiiity can be perceived as disappearing behind the computer screen
or is limited to minimal mouse gestures. Furthermore, "being digital"
provokes a change in human sense perception so that the physicaiity
of touch-space is translated into a "shock-like" effect similar to the
effect of being bombarded by moving images that Waiter Benjamin
described as cinematic hapticity (Lant, 1995, p.68 see also Benjamin,
1968, p.223). The effect is "glowing images" on a computer screen
that are experienced in a physicai way through the body.

A new understanding of haptic space has evoived from the physicai

experience of image multiplicity and "the glow" of the computer
screen. This hapticity is a reconfiguration of the familiar touch-
based experiences inherent in most hand-making procedures, and
is translated into a radically redefined sense of space affecting the
artists' physical sensations. Complementary to the deveiopment of
the reconfigured haptic space is the kinship between the artists and
their computers identified as a new kind of coupling. Coupiing defines
the aliiances created when working within a newiy recognized cyborg
 The Cyborg Subject Position

realm. These alliances lead to double vision, a combination of human

and machinic perspectives used to create images and produce art
works and rendering the artist as a form of hybrid cyborg art maker.
Doubie vision enabies the artist to move to a perspective beyond
their singular viewpoint, a position that affords an electronic Other
to collaborate. However, this new location may be uncomfortable to
some because of its inherent contradictions.

As technological contexts shift, hybrid-cyborg art makers require a

new vernacular to describe their terms of integration and translation
when working concurrently by hand and computer. The initial findings
of the study I have described here spawned the development of a
vocabulary that names hybrid couplings; and the identification of
important opportunities for artists and art educators to experience
a fresh range of potentialities and pedagogies in the cyborg realm.
The study also opened up new questions about our awareness of
the body while engaged in computer-based forms of working and
creating. Technology then, foregrounds the body in ways that require
a new form of consciousness that is affected by working within the
cyborg realm. Weaver (2005) maintains that we must "shift away from
asking what technology is doing to limit our autonomy and towards
asking how humans are using technology to enhance their abiiity
to interact in the world and create a world that is more artistic in its
capabilities?"(p.84)

The original study focused on the terms of resistance, incorporation

and innovation that characterize artists' interchanges between
hand and computer procedures for producing images, it did not
substantively explore how assuming a metaphoric cyborg subject
position redefines the artists' sense of body image. Examining the
cyborg subject position inspires a more in-depth conversation about
morphing bodies with computer activity in ways that disrupt traditional
ways of thinking and reconfigure our imaginations to re-view the
body/machine union which is redefining the cultural producers who
are offering new ways of visualizing the world we live in.

Problematizing the body/machine relationship

Weaver (2005) uses Timothy Lenoir's work to suggest that new forms
of technology have created "new inscription practices" ranging from
new media, science, video games, advertising, robotics and art to
Tracey Bowen ,.
49
name a few. These new inscription practices are experienced through
digital images and "it is through our eyes that the digitai image is
being seared into our minds and (en) actions" (p.79). The digitai image
permeates every aspect of our iives, entering "into the very materiality
of our bodies and the realm of our thinking and consciousness" (p.79).
Furthermore, Weaver uses the work of Mark Hansen to describe how
digital images "latch on to the body" demanding creative and physicai
interaction (p.81). instead of technoiogy provoking the demise of the
fieshy body, Hansen, Weaver and Wills (1995) also cited by Weaver,
see the new digital age as a "return of the human morphed with the
technological" (p.81). All three authors maintain that it is through this
morphing; a process similar to Haraway's ideas about joint kinships,
that the body affectively has the capacity to experience that which is
beyond itseif and use "sensorimotor power" to create images which
are innovative, often unpredictabie, and previously unimagined. This
is evidenced in the shift away from seeing technoiogical prostheses
as alien appendages to the body, but rather as supplements of the
body enabling us to feel, see and experience the world differently
(Weaver, 2005, p.81).

Reviewing data collected for the originai study provides opportunities

to identify those moments where the participating visuai artists
described their activity in terms of a change of consciousness. A
senior artist I will call Claire, describes how she began thinking through
the computer to the extent that she piaced herself "in the computer"
while doing this thinking. The computer has become a prosthetic
device for her mind mediating her thinking activity, at the same time
she is embodied by this way of thinking by placing herself within the
centre of this activity located with/n the computer machine. Claire
describes this space as absorbing her in such a way that the haptic
space disappears and she is drawn into a space "intellectuaiiy created
by someone eise." The tension she feeis during these experiences is
a "kind of push and pull about being taken over."

Peter on the other hand, another senior artist iike Ciaire, described
the computer as a complex prosthesis that enables him to perform
at a level of competency (through his drawing and drafting skills)
that "improved his ability to present ideas." For Peter, the computer
provides
 The Cyborg Subject Position
DU
an excitement about being able to create something
. . . i'm able to controi the way I put something down
on a piece of paper and more so than I can do with
my hand . . . it's how I want to get the idea out that
really stimulates me.

When working on the computer, Peter describes a trance-like state

where he is "mesmerized" by the "glow" of the screen. His physical
interaction with his own ideas occurs at the level of the "radiating
energy" he receives back from the giow, an energy that is disrupted
once he changes consciousness again due to a strong need for
something more tactile feeling - "getting your hands on the thing,"
skin against matter. However this tension "seduces" Peter back to
the computer whenever he needs to extend his own hand rendering
abilities. Working between these two states of consciousness has
"heightened [his] sensitivity to the physicality of art making." It has
also provided him with

living proof of the iack of permanence which is

something that is very difficult in Western cultures
to distance yourself from.

He says that we are very much "immersed in the concrete or what

we perceive are the concrete aspects of iife" and computerization and
digitization disrupts this sense of materiality and "opens you up to the
fact that there is a definite lack of permanence in everything."

The fragility of this permanence lies in our potential to access

digitized and computerized images in the future. This particular
perspective comes from a consciousness that is dependant on
the tactiie materiality not one that works within the fiux and fiow of
impermanence and tension that exists between the two states of
consciousness.

Jin, one of the younger artists, describes his relationship to working

physicaliy on a piece of art as very spiritual. He experiences the
work through the movements and touch of his hand on the skin of
the paper he is marking, yet it is through his mind and soui that the
work is conceived. His work is a form of inscribing the experiences
of his mind/soul on a skin like surface of paper or the MYLAR that
he uses. Jin emphasizes the importance of the skin of his body,
Tracey Bowen

which is "sensitive and irritable and delicate" mediating the ideas

of the "body of work" he is developing. He says that the drawn line
becomes a collaboration of body and soul. Similarly, Jin sees the
computer as part of himself. He describes this experience of "being
digital" as "I always go into it" as if he is entering a different state of
consciousness. However unlike Peter or Olaire, Jin's shift from the
tactile consciousness to the cyborg subject position appears to be
seamless - without disruption: "I don't even think about it anymore
because it's part of me already."

An important part of "being digital" for Jin is understanding that he

can think through the computer but the marks on the paper must be
mediated by the touch of his own hand. He lives and works across
multiple subjectivities, one of which is the cyborg subject position
that enables him to develop ideas through digital pattern making that
are then manifested through hand markings created through a tactile
sensitive artist subjectivity. He maintains that he is fascinated by the
triangulation of vision, hand and technology.

Like Peter, Jin sees his ability to shift between being an artist who works
from a tactile sensitivity to one that embraces the collaborative possibilities
of working digitally as a process that needs to be developed over time. Both
artists are svire that working from this different location that I have named the
cyborg subject position, is inevitable. They also understand that it is complex
and everchanging in ways they are not able to predict at this point in time.

Cyborg subject positions: Viewing the world from a new

location

Artists using new media technologies assume a hybrid form of creator

modeled on Donna Haraway's (1991) cyborg. This new model is based
on a cyborg subject position, a metaphoric way of imagining forms of
creating that incorporate computer technology with the movements
of the artist's own organic body. Using Haraway's "Oyborg Manifesto"
(1991), GonzSles delineates three types of cyborg:

the organic cyborg [that] can be defined as a

monster of multiple species . . . a mechanical
cyborg can be considered a techno-human
amalgamation" and a "cyborg consciousness"
 The Cyborg Subject Position

which she suggests is presented through a cyborg

subject position (Gonzdies, 2000, p.54O).

The cyborg subject position materlaiizes in artists' descriptions of

their practices and art production. Many artists are redefining their
sense of physical body and subjective language as they invest
particular aspects of themselves when constructing meaning from
their computer-based workings. Their reconstituted consciousness is
enacted through a double vision of machinic perspectives intertwined
with their human ways of seeing. The terms on which artists are
re-imagining their bodies and the bodies of others through their
computer interactions and experiences when making art emerges
through the theoretical iens that involves the cyborg subject position
combined with a new cyborg vocabulary that names the artist/
computer interaction and addresses how their new sense of body
image is impiicated in reconfigured patterns of working and iearning
in a digital age.

Grosz (1994) maintains that the body is a cultural product that 'registers
and organizes information received through the senses" in regards
to its relationship to space, piace, other bodies and objects" (p.66).
She suggests that the body image is also a function of its subjects'
social, cultural and historical context as it is about anatomy; 'the
limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined
by the anatomical "container of the skin" (p.79). Understanding the
body image to include objects and interactions beyond the skin as
part of the body enables the cyborg subject position to emerge as a
way of being that is experienced through computer technology and
the quasi-prosthesis of the computer mouse. However, part of the
chailenge that Grosz highiights is that it is not just a matter of learning
how to use the technological instruments, but rather, how these
technoiogies become "psychically invested" or part of the subject's
way of thinking about and iiving in the world (p.8O).

The computer becomes part of the artist's body image as they work
through a cyborg subject position that requires a deeper restructuring
of consciousness and body awareness. The changes in cultural
consciousness brought about by a new "psychotopography" of
human/computer relationships (Seitzer cited in Lupton 2000:478)
is evident within the artists' stories of experiencing technologies
Tracey Bowen
53
through their bodies. Psychotopography is a form of geographical
crossing between organic and technicai/machinic terrains. At issue
here are the terms on which these relationships are reconstituting
consciousness relative to the body and the ways in which patterns of
art production are "remediated" and re-named (Bolter & Grusin 2000).
Deconstructing the ways in which the artists' texts are "framed by
specific histories of use and meaning, and are products of particular
ideological struggles" (Wilbur 2000:46) is crucial to looking at the
cyborg subject position within a historical continuum that often places
the artist as an autonomous creator. This autonomy is disrupted
when working within the cyborg realm where control over material
and technique is not the sole custody of the artist. Three particular
questions emerge as a result of this shift in control. First, how do
visual artists understand their bodily relationship to the computers
they use, particularly the changes in tactility, in haptic space and
in the reconfigured concept of body image? Second, how do they
understand their computers as a prosthesis of their bodies and their
minds together? Third, do they identify the change in consciousness
that occurs when they move from making art from an autonomous
creator subjectivity to the cyborg subject position which is predicated
on a joint kinship with their computers?

Rediscovering the body through technoiogy

Our engagements with computers are experienced through our

bodies. Argyle and Shields (1996) maintain that "technology mediates
presence" and that we are fully aware of our unchanging bodily
presence even as we loose ourselves in the digital and cyber realm
(p.58). What happens during these mediated experiences is "a
change in consciousness" (p.58). In the cyborg realm however, our
engagements become part of a system that is beyond our body and
possibly within the presence of others who are also experiencing
changes in consciousness. Katie Argyle asks if we might leave bits
of ourselves on that system in order to communicate with others
(p.62). She queries whether our separations from the machine are
myth and "Could this electronic network hold the physical and the
intellectual elements of human beings at the same time?" (Argyle
& Shields, p.62). Furthermore, our computer-based engagements,
marks and utterances involve many voices, including a physical voice
that renders these experiences of voice to be heteroglossic, made up
 The Cyborg Subject Position
54
of intersecting voices both digital (cyborg-based) and physical. These
voices and multiple openings for computer based dialogue afford
"multiple layers of being, a way to be in the body at all times" yet,
interact with the computer voices in the act of creating (p.68). These
are the voices that inform double vision, part of the cyborg vocabulary
that emerged from the findings of the original study described earlier
in this paper, and they are enacted through a change in consciousness
to the cyborg subject position and a mediated presence.

Double vision is a way of disrupting fixed patterns of imagining

and practicing being an artist. It contests the artists' autonomy and
any monocular perspectives they may have used in the past for
representing the world. Hayles (1999) describes these disruptions
as an intrusion of randomness into the set patterns of our bodies.
These patterns are not easily changed or rewritten. Computer based
works however, are easily changed, and reconfigured, "embracing
randomness as a form of dynamic interaction with content, rewriting its
encoding and meaning" (Bowen, 2004, p. 206). The interface between
humans and computers is complicated by randomness that contests
the fixed ness of patterns and renders them constantly rewritable.
Randomness and rewritability have the contingency for disrupting
the artists' perceptions of how they make images (Bowen, 2005).
Double vision inherently combines the voice of the computer with the
voice of the artist in a dialogic fashion where meaning and imagery
are co-constructed as well as grounded in both human and machinic
bodies. When describing their experiences of using computers, the
artists speak from a different self, aware of the compromise in their
autonomy and physical touch experience, yet still conscious of their
bodies even when they "lose" themselves in the processes of making
art. This other self requires a different way of being an artist, a change
in consciousness and experience of their bodies.

What then, happens to the physical presence of touch during this

change in consciousness? Touch can be experienced in two particular
ways. First, touch is experienced through physical contact of the skin
on an object or tactile surface and, second, through the physical
sensation of "nearness" or an intimate proximity to something outside
the self (Springgay 2005). How then is touch experienced through a
cyborg consciousness? How does a sense of nearness interpreted
through intimate proximity to a screen that emanates a glow, enable a
Tracey Bowen __

different way of knowing about the worid through the cyborg subject
position? The act of touching makes us aware of our own "bodily
state" as well as the state of the objects we are touching (Springgay,
2005, p.39).

This new sense of touch has also been related to "synaesthesia"

which blurs the boundaries between senses (Springgay, 2005;
Tuan, 2001). The concept of synaesthesis opens up the possibility
of producing new schemas of the body provoking a fresh awareness
about the body in relation to the machine. The cyborg consciousness
awakens the imagination to the computer as a "touching machine"
that is experienced through the fusion of senses due to hypermedia
representations (Piant, 2000; Springgay, 2005). The reconfigured
schema of body-machine patterns of interaction are realized by
prolonged contact (Lupton, 2000) with a computer appendage
and intimate proximity to the glow of the screen. The boundaries
between inside and outside touch are blurred and a new hapticai
space is created through the interactivity occurring within the newly
configured touch space, a space that is affected by randomness.
Double vision occurs within this space of interactivity and the artist
sees the world through a cyborg subject position that relies on
contact and connection between various interacting entities that are
electricaily charged.

The touch-space related to physical objects also becomes dispersed

across personal investments in the computer screen images that
are dependent on an optical objectivism (Lant, 1995). The personai
investments induce a physical experience within the individual
through particular meanings invoked by an image and the "shock"
of its presentation. For example, the "glow" of the image proiiferates
via dynamic media such as the web or complex computer graphics
programs in contrast to the static presence of a painting (Bowen
2004). The combination of meanings projected by the individual and
their experience of the image "glowing" back at them has the potential
to prompt a sensation that is perceived as physical, albeit sometimes
contradictory to fixed ideas about tactility.

Looking for a cyborg consciousness within the artists' stories enabled

further understanding of how the computerized mediation of our
worldview requires a reconstituted awareness of embodied practices
 The Cyborg Subject Position
56
that not only muitipiy our existing subjectivities, but aiso re-generate
in ways that may seem to contradict each other. These contradictions
and contestations of different ways oi being create a tension that, as
Haraway suggests, has become part of our new ontology. As a resuit
of these new ontologies, artists may no ionger be certain about the
common denominators that underscore their tools of expression.

New questions: Implications for further research

Artists may no longer consider the computer as a tool that is separate

from the body-something that is metaphoricaily "picked up" and "put
down" when needed (Hayles, 1999). The computer becomes a conduit
for co-constructing images and meaning requiring a subjectivity that
is different from the autonomous artist subject position. The shift
between autonomous creator and hybrid cyborg subject position
has impiications for studio based teaching in a digital age. Educators
must consider new forms of visual literacy that reconsider how
visuai ness is constructed and reproduced through new coupiings of
human and machine efforts. This involves opening up the possibility
of digital epistemologies that pose new ways of knowing about
the world through the interplay between atoms and bits. Artists
are reconstructing the ways in which they sense the worid through
manipuiating objects, by incorporating new inscriptions of pixeis,
codes, resolutions and flickers (Negroponte, 1995; Lankshear, 2002).
The new inscription practices have emerged from the information
economy which is based on much different categorizations and
concepts than the material world of art making. These shifts are not
just epistemological but also ontological, changing "the stuff" we use
to make sense of the world (Lankshear, 2002).

Students have come to know their worids through websites, video

games, DVDs CD ROMS, and the muititude of screens we ail
encounter through everyday practices such as banking, pumping
gas, taiking on a ceil phone and taking notes in a lecture. We have
all come to know these practices through a coupling of atoms and
bits. Moreover, with such a broad range of stories that describe how
individuals are becoming digital, which Negroponte (1995) claims is
generationaily based,it is crucial to consider how educators' own
media experiences and pleasures affect how they guide their students
within the ciassroom (Morgan, 1998). Not ail artists for instance, are
Tracey Bowen
Of
completely comfortable with integrating computer-based procedures
into their mostly hand-based art making practices. The hand work and
computer work are often segregated or ghettoized. This segregation
couid carry over into the teaching studio and art ciassroom where
kinships, the organic/machinic intertwinings between students and
computers, are not openly recognized or celebrated. Educators are
responsibie for giving students "access to different discourses to
new and hopefuiiy productive ways of making sense of their own
experiences with the media" (Buckingham, 1990, p.216). Furthermore,
through a cyborg subject position, randomization and double vision
enables the "recoding [of] what [students] see and do" in ways that
prompt "new modes of organization with the new products that have
been formed by these recodings" (p.221)

Meaning making for students will happen at the level of the art
classroom, and through a digital epistemoiogy that is developed within
other contexts such as the visual ness of video gaming, personal web
site development and other subject areas that require some sort of
digital presentation ofthe students' work. Educators need to consider
the Doubie vision students have aiready acquired before they enter
the classroom or the teaching studio.

Garoian and Gaudelius (2001) propose the idea of cyborg pedagogies

that "chaiienge the assumptions of information technoiogies as
shaped by

the dominant cuiture [and] explores the varied

means that artists, educators, and cultural theorists
use to expose, critique, and intervene in the ways
that technology is conceived (p.346).

To this end, cyborg pedagogies offer the opportunity for more informed
discussions about shifting subjectivities and critically position artists
and educators so they may re-imagine art making based on human/
machine couplings. Cyborg pedagogies position teachers so they
may encourage students to question the technoiogies they are using
and to interrogate what they are actuaiiy doing in the name of making
art across different contexts. The cyborg subject position requires
both teachers and students to re-imagine their body and its intimate
proximity to the computer through the newiy configured touch spaces
where atoms and bits are coupled together.
 The Cyborg Subject Position
58

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