On Cyborgs | Studio Notes
05. New Moon - March 2025
Pondering what the raw, embodied Feminine means for Techno sapiens…
Let’s start here, with questions. Who do you think you are? Who are you when you are not thinking yourself into existence? Do planetary bodies find expression in your body? Are you embodied? What is a body?
From the perspective of body, you move and have your being in the cosmos, the body of God—or however you conceptualize it. From the perspective of consciousness, the cosmos has its being inside you, inside your body. As within. So without. Are you body? Are you flesh? Are you stardust?
Are you cyborg? What is a cyborg?
I am blood and ovaries. Womb and breasts. My body ever gestating new life, grounding the incomprehensible current that runs and pulses between earth and sky, Eros and Psyche, spirit and body, this side and the other. I am the primordial syzygy, interpenetrating opposites giving rise to one another. Two poles: Yin and Yang. Does this ring true to you? Truth has a ring to it. You can feel it curling up your spine.
Last week, I finished my megalithic cyborg painting and titled it “Who do you think you are?” in a spirit of inquiry. While I’ve been playing with the tension between nature and digital in my art for some time, I see this new work as the first in a series that deepens my exploration of technology and the body, the Feminine pole of existence. The cyborg is where technology and body meet, a symbol for the co-evolution of our technologies and ourselves, as we become a new species of Techno-sapiens.
Our ancestors worshiped the fertile, abundant, life-giving body of woman and the Earth, the Feminine, and deified the principle as Mother Goddess. She is nurturing, loving, and wise. She bleeds and swells with the moon. Like the moon, she has a dark side. She is impenetrable, unruly, and chaotic. She is Devouring Mother, overbearing and oppressive. Progress is freeing ourselves from her shackles. Progress is the ascent from the status of enslaved animals to that of liberated human gods. Progress is the conquest and subjugation of this imperfect, inconvenient mortal body that suffers, ages, and dies. Progress deifies technology as Liberating Agent.
Is your body sin? Is your body meat? Is your body sacred?
I was twelve years old when I first bled. I don’t know why I only felt dread and shame, but I did. I didn’t tell anyone but my grandmother, who proudly told my mother, who tried bringing it up at the dinner table one night, but I squirmed my way out of it. I was barely fourteen when the doctor proclaimed me Woman. I walked out of her office transformed, holding a pack of contraceptive pills. My only question to her was “Will I gain weight?” which she dismissed right away, assuring me that being in control of my sexuality was far more important. This is a cyborg rite of passage.
Where does technology end and the body begin? Is your body a machine?
Mary Harrington says, “nearly every adult woman in the developed world has implicitly accepted the belief that full adult female personhood is structurally reliant on technologies that interrupt normal female fertility.” She identifies the Pill as the first transhumanist technology, setting out to fix and overcome the embodied limitation of normal human physiology and radically transforming society in the process. We think it’s the Tech Bros that typically champion the transhumanist ideology, but women were the first cyborgs.
Who do you think you are? What is a human being? Do humans even matter?
I’ll continue exploring these questions in my art. I’ll keep painting weird little androgynous beings, eyes full of riddles. The answers don’t really matter, but keeping the questions alive does. Keep returning to them, over and over.
Leave a comment if you feel like it. I’d love to hear from you <3
A fascinating point which I have never thought of before: does the pill empower a woman to take control of her body? Or is it a form of control for men to have sex without consequences? And is this a change in evolution for women? I believe we are entering a new age where the sexes are blurred and the individual consciousness is more important than biology. This is not a matter of science but a natural progression of humanity. It may take the world a while to catch up with your paintings!