“Rather than going for the new object of study, the new product to consume, one should work on new ways of seeing, of being, or of living in the world.” – Trihn T. Minh-Ha from D-Passage: The Digital Way

“Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” – Donna Haraway from A Cyborg Manifesto

Following Donna Haraway’s epochal work A Cyborg Manifesto in which she imagines the cyborg condition as a site of liberation and decolonized subjectivity, this panel considers diverse approaches of artists, historians, theoretician-practitioners, and media activists that encode strategies of decolonization in their work and practice. Through a critical engagement of code as a (rhetorical) tool to re-inscribe historically marginalized bodies, this panel looks at a broad array of efforts, tactics, and projects that consider the ethos of a cyborg condition imagined by Haraway’s writing. As part of this conversation, we may begin to ask: through what means and technologies are these situations deployed? What are the strategies that allow for decolonized processes that are situated within feminist, queer, and anti-colonial subjectivities? And how do these methods enable, embody, and construct new realities of being?

Recognizing new media’s ability to rupture obsolete systems in the efforts to reconstruct other idealized ontologies, this panel extends the cyborg condition through theoretical approaches and practice in an effort to re-imagine human relation. In particular, this panel seeks to address how new media practice and theory can reconfigure our understandings of marginality as well as offer strategies that enable the repositioning of subjects so as to decolonize their subjectivity.

Panel presentations by Oli Rodriguez, Dan Paz, Mailee Hung, and Alejandro T. Acierto