Device Art: A New Form of Media Art from a Japanese perspective I am not sure which category I will be using for my project yet, so I have chosen two readings from categories I think I will end up using: design a device and cyborg. Machicko Kushara’s essay Device Art: A New Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective envisions different formats the relationship between art and technology could embody in the future. One idea she considers is if artists were able to make their artwork available on a joint platform, an form of online software that essentially made everything available to everyone. But the everlasting question remains: would this still be considered art? When it takes the form of pure fulfillment of digital content, produced and available on such a wide scale – does it lose the very authenticity behind the creator’s purpose? Could artist’s adapt to art forms created intended to be viewed in that context – among thousands of others? It is a consistent struggle of mine not to view technology’s effects on the modern world as over-archingly “bad.” But in terms of the art world, I see both the beauty and despair it has caused. We are bombarded with thousands of images everyday. Everywhere. All the time. Anything we want to see—spanning centuries, is available at the literal touch of our fingertips. So much inspiration available, the flow of ideas and human interaction weaving a billion webs of interconnectivity spanning time and space. A chance to understand the corners of the world we will never reach, to understand we as a race, as planet, are One and are now facing global problems. A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century Donna Haraway’s essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” points out the relevance of cyborgs in our contemporary culture. In modern science fiction, there are often creatures who are both animal and machine, having arisen from the world naturally. She comments on how cyborgs populate the world in modern medicine, in the sense that technology and the human form work together. She discusses the idea of cyborg “sex” in that the very concept of a cyborg bypasses and concept of gender, and strides into the unknown territories of gender fluidity. There are no divisions between Us and Them. Compassion, inspiration, knowledge. But the constant stimulation, the hypnotization by those lights, those pixels, a thousand images in a line, all the artists at once, all right there. Nothing stands alone and why would you look at one when you could see a hundred in a minute.