Cyborg Utopia

Cyborg Utopia

Cyborg Utopia

Identifying as a woman is deeply connected to a never ending process towards society’s ideals of perfection. If you want to be a woman, then you have to constantly perform as one, look a certain way, as well as most importantly, exerting effort due to being watched by others. In the realm of the digital, we have the opportunity to reapply our digital self to the real world, which can also shape our perspective, to create greater agency for ourselves. This means we can use our digital self to cross the barriers of our limitations of our physical being. Within my projects, this was reflected in the visual language, through the digital form as an extension of the physical. The narrative is visualising the impact of being dependent on the digital identity and female self- expression through the digital self. This film explores the relationship between the merging digital and physical worlds. Stemming from the physical, the digital developed these representations to a new level.
Having the past and the present in mind, I wonder how this will shape our future.

By creating a cyborg that is a digital extension of the physical being, shows how self-representation within the digital developed the idea of identity and representations to a new level. My working methods for this were experimental, I explored the possibilities of both, the physical and the digital self. I started researching 60s - 80s film with a strong focus on colour. I was immediately drawn to Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s Inferno which was an op-art experiment (Inferno, 1964). The lighting & the use of colour in this are amazing. The colour followed the protagonist to make her the focus of the scene, it shaped emo- tion and created depth. It was difficult to not be engaged with it. Jack Smith’s „Normal Love“ was also a key reference (Normal Love, 1963). I liked how he used smoke, or fabric to create dense compositions that made the actors blend into the set design. This helped me to understand my colour scheme and the importance of colour in my work. I created some experiments with the exact colours that were used in those films. I realised how colour can be both, physical and digital. It is a crucial part of both worlds. Colour intensifies the expression of emotions, this is important as emotions can be empowering.

Emotional empowerment allows people to experience a wide range of emotions. This is important to understand where their feelings are coming from, and why they feel this way. Women are often labeled as too emotional or men shouldn‘t show emotions in order not to appear weak. Howe- ver, emotions are powerful and valid feelings. Emotions are self-expression on a spiritual and on a very personal level. To show and create emotions visually, colour is a useful tool. Colour surrounds us physically and psychologically impacting our lives. This often happens without us noticing it. Colour can have a different empowering effect for everyone. This is subject to personal and cultural factors.
If we feel emotionally empowered, then we can express ourselves better. This makes the connection between our digital and physical selves even closer. That is why emotion through colour is important for this project. When we are emotionally empowered in our physical self, then we can transfer this to our digital self or vise versa. The extension of our being through emotion makes this clear.

Because my references were mainly physical, I wanted to incorporate the digital part. I was inspired by my female gaze and Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as well as Russel’s Glitch Feminism Manifesto. I created a digital cyborg that represents an extension of the female physical self. My design decision was to make the cyborg identifying as female (she/her). In Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto the cyborg aims to have no gender to destroy gender boundaries. However, it was not my intention to visually present her manifesto, it was my version of embracing the female identity, the digital self that can be used as a tool to full self-expression. This tool will be created in the digital world through our digital persona, this will then led the physical self to push away the barriers of social constructs and society’s ideas of the „perfect woman“. Technology makes our bodies change, therefore it was important to me to work mainly digital. To understand how crucial it is to use our online self as a tool for a safe space, Glitch Feminsim was a vital part of my work: „...Internet represents....a tool for global feminist organising...an oppor- tunity to be protagonist...in ones own revolution and it is also a safe space.“ (Russell, 2013. p.54).

The cyborgs were created in Cinema 4D inspired by my film colour scheme, as their physical veil, to create emotion and realness. The analogue colour and lighting still function within the digital while both are constantly defining one another. This cyborg represents a digital being that gives the woman the freedom to be herself, maybe not through the visual aspect, but through the possibility to break out of the never-ending aim of perfection, as well of the boundaries of being watched by others and the general looking relations of the male gaze. It seems like a woman could be a cyborg, cons- tructed of organic material with the subconsciousness of voices telling women how to be perfect, how to behave. Everybody is a machine.

Our central communication system relies on performing and information, which is part of the body. We don’t describe ourselves and our existence as a machine simply because we are made of organic material. I am showing if a female body is a machine then they can create their tools to create better dreams and greater agency. Women are in control of their consciousness. Women don’t need to be formed, they can adapt to new advances and not mechanisms that require constant repair from a patriarchal box. Their bodies and identities should be things that they are building not because they are broken, but because we are constantly defining for ourselves what better means. This shows that the digital and the physical can be combined and live together in a comfortable symbiosis. The digital experience „is not a non-existent reality, because we live it, can be changed by it...as we engage with the digital, it encourages us to challenge the world around us, and, change the world as we know it, prompting the creation of entirely new worlds together.“(Russell, 2013, p.69).

The cyborg represents that the real person is not letting society shape them but adapting to one’s true self through digital expression which can then be transformed to the physical. I present this through a digital film with diverse cyborg identities. I hope the viewer will think they are part of a new utopian digital world which makes them think of how to be braver, starting with their digital self to extend their physical self.

The posthuman cyborg seems to be the perfect tool to fight our dystopian present. Within the mainstream culture, Donna Haraway‘s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” shows a society in which the boundaries between hu- mans and technology have melted. Cyborgs, unbothe- red by gender or social constraints, can be used as an extension of ourselves for overcoming reality. The cyborg image creates a safe space to openly criticize the reality of being a woman within a patriarchal society. This cyborg image helps women to campaign for the new status of women in our modern world. This is therefore empowering and liberating. The cyborg‘s posthuman, cyborgized body is necessary to empower women. Therefore, the cyborg owns a natural utopian fluidity which creates new possibilities to rise above dystopia.

The internet, social media are powerful tools to make voices heard. As women are strong physically and intellectually, they are capable of fulfilling their dreams without a man. The cyborg stands for women who are fearless and telling their truth. It is an empowering way to create awareness that this is not part of the male dogma. Through that, women can live without fear, judgments, and doubts which was caused by the feeling of incompatibility and low self-worth because of society‘s voices. Fear creates inequality, therefore the cyborg can be used as a tool for braveness. This creates a new safe space. That is why the cyborg image will empower and liberate my audience. The cyborg and the woman can't be separated. They empower and complete one another.

The digital world has changed the way we can understand our identity and the power of self-expression. By highlighting these I hope that the viewer will understand that we own the tools, we just need to acknowledge them and cross society’s barriers that are holding us back from being ourselves.

Notions of identity and how this digital environment can become
a space of experimenting with identity and the female gaze, which can then be reapplied to the physical world.

To summarize, the values of the female gaze and identity play a role within creative design through shifting perspective of how we perceive the world as well. My artistic practices were shaped through exhibition design, 60s & 70s film, and a vivid colour scheme. This was then combined with digital tools such as Cinema4d and physical tools such as photography and the physical self. I have learned that the physical self and digital self doesn’t exclude the other, they can complement each other. This idea played an important value in my work because I was merging the digital and physical worlds. I created a completely digital cyborg that is something that lives in the digital world,
I then transformed it into the physical. I have learnt that cyborgs can be used to create an online persona that lives on in the digital. As the creator can control it and use it as a tool, it becomes physical and the two worlds are melting together. The body becomes an abstract being with no form. This shows that the body is a concept of cultural, social and political discourses. The body can be therefore read differently based on where it is situated. Once the recognition of the self-defined cyborg happens, we can empower our physical selves. This is evidence of how the physical and digital can live in a comfortable symbiosis together. Cyborgism doesn’t create a divide from reality but embraces the digital and the physical world. This can have a positive impact on how identities can conquer divisions of patriarchy and the breakdown of real and virtual.

Identifying as a woman is deeply connected to a never ending process towards society’s ideals of perfection. If you want to be a woman, then you have to constantly perform as one, look a certain way, as well as most importantly, exerting effort due to being watched by others. In the realm of the digital, we have the opportunity to reapply our digital self to the real world, which can also shape our perspective, to create greater agency for ourselves. This means we can use our digital self to cross the barriers of our limitations of our physical being. Within my projects, this was reflected in the visual language, through the digital form as an extension of the physical. The narrative is visualising the impact of being dependent on the digital identity and female self- expression through the digital self. This film explores the relationship between the merging digital and physical worlds. Stemming from the physical, the digital developed these representations to a new level.
Having the past and the present in mind, I wonder how this will shape our future.

By creating a cyborg that is a digital extension of the physical being, shows how self-representation within the digital developed the idea of identity and representations to a new level. My working methods for this were experimental, I explored the possibilities of both, the physical and the digital self. I started researching 60s - 80s film with a strong focus on colour. I was immediately drawn to Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s Inferno which was an op-art experiment (Inferno, 1964). The lighting & the use of colour in this are amazing. The colour followed the protagonist to make her the focus of the scene, it shaped emo- tion and created depth. It was difficult to not be engaged with it. Jack Smith’s „Normal Love“ was also a key reference (Normal Love, 1963). I liked how he used smoke, or fabric to create dense compositions that made the actors blend into the set design. This helped me to understand my colour scheme and the importance of colour in my work. I created some experiments with the exact colours that were used in those films. I realised how colour can be both, physical and digital. It is a crucial part of both worlds. Colour intensifies the expression of emotions, this is important as emotions can be empowering.

Emotional empowerment allows people to experience a wide range of emotions. This is important to understand where their feelings are coming from, and why they feel this way. Women are often labeled as too emotional or men shouldn‘t show emotions in order not to appear weak. Howe- ver, emotions are powerful and valid feelings. Emotions are self-expression on a spiritual and on a very personal level. To show and create emotions visually, colour is a useful tool. Colour surrounds us physically and psychologically impacting our lives. This often happens without us noticing it. Colour can have a different empowering effect for everyone. This is subject to personal and cultural factors.
If we feel emotionally empowered, then we can express ourselves better. This makes the connection between our digital and physical selves even closer. That is why emotion through colour is important for this project. When we are emotionally empowered in our physical self, then we can transfer this to our digital self or vise versa. The extension of our being through emotion makes this clear.

Because my references were mainly physical, I wanted to incorporate the digital part. I was inspired by my female gaze and Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as well as Russel’s Glitch Feminism Manifesto. I created a digital cyborg that represents an extension of the female physical self. My design decision was to make the cyborg identifying as female (she/her). In Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto the cyborg aims to have no gender to destroy gender boundaries. However, it was not my intention to visually present her manifesto, it was my version of embracing the female identity, the digital self that can be used as a tool to full self-expression. This tool will be created in the digital world through our digital persona, this will then led the physical self to push away the barriers of social constructs and society’s ideas of the „perfect woman“. Technology makes our bodies change, therefore it was important to me to work mainly digital. To understand how crucial it is to use our online self as a tool for a safe space, Glitch Feminsim was a vital part of my work: „...Internet represents....a tool for global feminist organising...an oppor- tunity to be protagonist...in ones own revolution and it is also a safe space.“ (Russell, 2013. p.54).

The cyborgs were created in Cinema 4D inspired by my film colour scheme, as their physical veil, to create emotion and realness. The analogue colour and lighting still function within the digital while both are constantly defining one another. This cyborg represents a digital being that gives the woman the freedom to be herself, maybe not through the visual aspect, but through the possibility to break out of the never-ending aim of perfection, as well of the boundaries of being watched by others and the general looking relations of the male gaze. It seems like a woman could be a cyborg, cons- tructed of organic material with the subconsciousness of voices telling women how to be perfect, how to behave. Everybody is a machine.

Our central communication system relies on performing and information, which is part of the body. We don’t describe ourselves and our existence as a machine simply because we are made of organic material. I am showing if a female body is a machine then they can create their tools to create better dreams and greater agency. Women are in control of their consciousness. Women don’t need to be formed, they can adapt to new advances and not mechanisms that require constant repair from a patriarchal box. Their bodies and identities should be things that they are building not because they are broken, but because we are constantly defining for ourselves what better means. This shows that the digital and the physical can be combined and live together in a comfortable symbiosis. The digital experience „is not a non-existent reality, because we live it, can be changed by it...as we engage with the digital, it encourages us to challenge the world around us, and, change the world as we know it, prompting the creation of entirely new worlds together.“(Russell, 2013, p.69).

The cyborg represents that the real person is not letting society shape them but adapting to one’s true self through digital expression which can then be transformed to the physical. I present this through a digital film with diverse cyborg identities. I hope the viewer will think they are part of a new utopian digital world which makes them think of how to be braver, starting with their digital self to extend their physical self.

The posthuman cyborg seems to be the perfect tool to fight our dystopian present. Within the mainstream culture, Donna Haraway‘s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” shows a society in which the boundaries between hu- mans and technology have melted. Cyborgs, unbothe- red by gender or social constraints, can be used as an extension of ourselves for overcoming reality. The cyborg image creates a safe space to openly criticize the reality of being a woman within a patriarchal society. This cyborg image helps women to campaign for the new status of women in our modern world. This is therefore empowering and liberating. The cyborg‘s posthuman, cyborgized body is necessary to empower women. Therefore, the cyborg owns a natural utopian fluidity which creates new possibilities to rise above dystopia.

The internet, social media are powerful tools to make voices heard. As women are strong physically and intellectually, they are capable of fulfilling their dreams without a man. The cyborg stands for women who are fearless and telling their truth. It is an empowering way to create awareness that this is not part of the male dogma. Through that, women can live without fear, judgments, and doubts which was caused by the feeling of incompatibility and low self-worth because of society‘s voices. Fear creates inequality, therefore the cyborg can be used as a tool for braveness. This creates a new safe space. That is why the cyborg image will empower and liberate my audience. The cyborg and the woman can't be separated. They empower and complete one another.

The digital world has changed the way we can understand our identity and the power of self-expression. By highlighting these I hope that the viewer will understand that we own the tools, we just need to acknowledge them and cross society’s barriers that are holding us back from being ourselves.

Notions of identity and how this digital environment can become
a space of experimenting with identity and the female gaze, which can then be reapplied to the physical world.

To summarize, the values of the female gaze and identity play a role within creative design through shifting perspective of how we perceive the world as well. My artistic practices were shaped through exhibition design, 60s & 70s film, and a vivid colour scheme. This was then combined with digital tools such as Cinema4d and physical tools such as photography and the physical self. I have learned that the physical self and digital self doesn’t exclude the other, they can complement each other. This idea played an important value in my work because I was merging the digital and physical worlds. I created a completely digital cyborg that is something that lives in the digital world,
I then transformed it into the physical. I have learnt that cyborgs can be used to create an online persona that lives on in the digital. As the creator can control it and use it as a tool, it becomes physical and the two worlds are melting together. The body becomes an abstract being with no form. This shows that the body is a concept of cultural, social and political discourses. The body can be therefore read differently based on where it is situated. Once the recognition of the self-defined cyborg happens, we can empower our physical selves. This is evidence of how the physical and digital can live in a comfortable symbiosis together. Cyborgism doesn’t create a divide from reality but embraces the digital and the physical world. This can have a positive impact on how identities can conquer divisions of patriarchy and the breakdown of real and virtual.

My work consists of a digital film. I have created the digital cyborgs in Cinema4D and used found footage from Henri-Georges Clouzot, Inferno, 1964 and Jack Smith’s, Normal Love, 1963. I liked how they used smoke, or fabric to create dense compositions that made the actors blend into the set design. This helped me to understand my colour scheme and the importance of colour in my work. I created some experiments with the exact colours that were used in those films. I realised how colour can be both, physical and digital. It is a crucial part of both worlds. I wanted the focus to be the cyborg, that’s why I made the background look very blurry and liquify the colours. Lights were also important as they can shape and create emotions. I edited the lighting mainly in C4D. Once I had my footage, I edited the film in PremierePro.

For my YouFab submission I also included some of my favourite film stills of my work. You can find more images, as well as images of some physical pieces of this project under the link below:

https://ninaler.com/Cyborg-Utopia

My work consists of a digital film. I have created the digital cyborgs in Cinema4D and used found footage from Henri-Georges Clouzot, Inferno, 1964 and Jack Smith’s, Normal Love, 1963. I liked how they used smoke, or fabric to create dense compositions that made the actors blend into the set design. This helped me to understand my colour scheme and the importance of colour in my work. I created some experiments with the exact colours that were used in those films. I realised how colour can be both, physical and digital. It is a crucial part of both worlds. I wanted the focus to be the cyborg, that’s why I made the background look very blurry and liquify the colours. Lights were also important as they can shape and create emotions. I edited the lighting mainly in C4D. Once I had my footage, I edited the film in PremierePro.

For my YouFab submission I also included some of my favourite film stills of my work. You can find more images, as well as images of some physical pieces of this project under the link below:

https://ninaler.com/Cyborg-Utopia

https://ninaler.com/Cyborg-Utopia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXut8p3WJ_I&t=1s

https://ninaler.com/ & https://www.instagram.com/nina_ler/

First of all, I am inspired by the practice Matsushita called the “waterworks philosophy”. The idea of popularizing and democratizing makes sense, even today. My work relates to the theme of the special prize as my film is based on a democratic experimental activity. I am not only focusing on the physical human, I am trying to connect the physical with the digital as they cyborg represents an extension of our physical self. I am therefore addressing the social issue that identifying as a woman is deeply connected to a never ending process towards society’s ideals of perfection. If you want to be a woman, then you have to constantly perform as one, look a certain way, as well as most importantly, exerting effort due to being watched by others. In the realm of the digital, we have the opportunity to reapply our digital self to the real world, which can also shape our perspective, to create greater agency for ourselves. This means we can use our digital self
to cross the barriers of our limitations of our physical being.

The cyborg represents that the real person is not letting society shape them but adapting to one’s true self through digital expression which can then be transformed to the physical. I present this through a digital film with diverse cyborg identities. This cyborg represents a digital being that gives the woman the freedom to be herself, maybe not through the visual aspect, but through the possibility to break out of the never-ending aim of perfection, as well of the boundaries of being watched by others and the general looking relations of the male gaze

It seems like a woman could be a cyborg, constructed of organic material with the subconsciousness of voices telling women how to be perfect, how to behave. Our central communication system relies on performing and information, which is part of the body. We don’t describe ourselves and our existence as a machine simply because we are made of organic material. I am showing if a female body is a machine then they can create their tools to create better dreams and greater agency. Women are in control of their consciousness. Women don’t need to be formed, they can adapt to new advances and not mechanisms that require constant repair from a patriarchal box. Their bodies and identities should be things that they are building not because they are broken, but because we are constantly defining for ourselves what better means.

The cyborg represents that the real person is not letting society shape them but adapting to one’s true self through digital expression which can then be transformed to the physical. I present this through a digital film with diverse cyborg identities.

The digital world has changed the way we can understand our identity and the power of self-expression. By highlighting these I hope that the viewer will understand that we own the tools, we just need to acknowledge them and cross society’s barriers that are holding us back from being ourselves.