Cyborg Cadavers

About

“Are we the fallen and in what image will be the re-imaging of our flesh?”

Hallidonto 2019

Hallidonto’ s work explores challenging themes that attempt to answer complex questions that ever-evolving technology poses to humanity. In his latest work, ‘Cyborg Cadavers’ a series of nine pencil works that explore the concept of the body, Hallidonto contests our notions of embodiment; suggesting that if we don’t choose wisely, we won’t be in a position to select the body we need. Or for that matter, the body that is required in our projected futures.

This poses deeper questions of how we view ourselves within our technological world. Is the flesh redundant and shall we proceed with the morphological freedoms embedded within the post-humanist/ trans-humanist discourses where alteration and the evolution of body are intertwined?

In this exhibition Hallidonto, alongside other leading artistic luminaries, explores the rise of the artificially sentient and the ascent of the cyborg. Hallidonto has curated nine speakers to respond to the work and pathos created by the artist. The opening night will have the nine authors perform their respected works, details of which you’ll find in their biographies listed below.

The exhibition will take place at Alexander Tcharney’s Gallery, 297 Lillie Road, Fulham, SW6 7LL from September 28-October 5, www.streettmarburg.co.uk . Alexander Tcharney specialises in early 20th century lighting and furniture mixed with more contemporary objects and works of art.

Kavka vodka ‘vodka how it used to taste’ https://www.kavkavodka.com/ are sponsoring the exhibition with their incredible vodka for the opening evening, light refreshments will also be available.

So, join us on Saturday, September 28, 6-9pm and make it a night to remember that will preserve itself in your memory cells until the moment of singularity and beyond.

Artist and contributors’ biographies

Hallidonto Is a Scottish Artist originally from Dundee, based in London.  Hallidonto has exhibited nationally and internationally, he has presented his manifesto at the Posthuman forum in NYC with Philosopher Dr Francesca Ferrando. He was also invited to Central Saint Martin’s for a panel discussion with comic book writer Warren Ellis and Dr Jamie Brassett. Hallidonto was recently VR Artist in residence with Hobs studios and for Gazeli Art house’s online Arts residency. Hallidonto’ s work relates to his ‘Cyborgia Manifesto’ and his main focus is drawing.

“The essence of the cyborg became my own. The cyborg image has been an integral part of my childhood. The cold war had just ended – the cultural landscape of the '80s was very much rooted in the future, the natural feeling of that time was dystopia from the cartoons/films, I watched as a kid, the advent of console gaming: Nintendo, etc. The image of man was always his metamorphism into the machine, or the machines taking over. I identified with the cyborg image, I wanted to be one. I identified with the concept of such a being, and it has informed my work to date. They are infantile and simplistic in their appearance but not in their construction, being drawn in one continuous line.”

@Hallidonto

Trudy Barber BA (Hons); PhD; FRSA; FHEA.

Dr. Trudy Barber created the UK’s first immersive VR Sex environment during her Fine Art Degree at Central Saint Martins, London in 1992. Previously she has been artist in residence with National Power, The Hampshire Health Authority and the Morphology Dept. at Southampton University. She went on to complete her PhD: ‘Computer Fetishism and Sexual Futurology: exposing the impact of arousal on technologies of cyberspace’ from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2005 and joined the Creative and Cultural Industries Faculty at Portsmouth University in 2006. Trudy lectures and writes on various aspects of Digital Culture, including emergent technology, cybersexualities, VR, robots, deviant leisure, love and attachment, art practice and the digital future. She has published, lectured and broadcast worldwide for over 25 years on her interests, and continues her arts practice in both virtual and offline worlds. Her current monograph: ‘30 years of Cybersex: from pixels to the post-human’ is forthcoming and in progress with Emerald Publishing.

@TrudyBarber

Stephen Oram writes science fiction and is lead curator for near-future fiction at Virtual Futures, a writer for SciFutures and a member of the Clockhouse London Writers. He’s been a hippie-punk, religious-squatter and an anarchist-bureaucrat - he thrives on contradictions – and now enjoys collaborating at the intersection of science, art and technology. He is published in several anthologies, has two published novels, and his collection of sci-fi shorts, ’Eating Robots and Other Stories,’ was described by the Morning Star as one of the top radical works of fiction in 2017. His second collection ‘Biohacked & Begging’ was published in April 2019.

@OramStephen

Dr Jane Norris Associate Professor in Digital & Creative Culture at Richmond, The American International University in London. She is a designer theorist working with posthuman approaches to materiality to better understand our relationship to materials and making. She runs workshops at international design conferences on ‘listening to materials’ and writes design fiction to explore the future.

@Janeviatopia

Daniel Sainty is a copywriter, a poet and an author but not necessarily in that order. He likes to try to live in the present but his mind frequently wanders into the future. This is a bit scary so he heads back to the present which of course has subsequently become the past. So, he looks ahead again because like many of us he secretly likes being scared. He hopes he scares you a bit too.He is a regular contributor to Virtual Futures: Near-Future Fictions and has a story included in their first anthology ‘Virtual Futures: Near-Future Fictions Volume 1’. His debut novel is loitering with intent is awaiting publication.

dansainty@hotmail.com

Becky Lyon is a London-based artist examining how humans are impacting the development of life on earth through the intentional or unintentional blending of biology and technology, in so doing creating what she terms a ‘Technobiocology.’ Her practice combines scientific research, thinking-through-making, fiction and participatory research in order to model potential futures and possibilities through the imagining of a spectrum of new hybrid species, new materiality, new systems and new ways of relating.

Her explorations have seen her invite the public to explore future environments through their noses at ‘Life At The Edges,’ Science Gallery Dublin; contemplate the entanglement of our matter through sculpture and sound via ‘Geologic Bodies,’ discuss ‘Radical Ecologies’ with artists reframing their practice for a sustainable future; and collaborate with scientists in Edinburgh’s Biodesign Lab among other research activities. She also runs ‘Elastic Nature’, an interdisciplinary art research club exploring the future of nature.  Such expanded art-making becomes a means of understanding, communicating and discussing the scale of human impact on future evolution and by extension, the environment. It invites us to fast-forward to scenarios as a means of reflecting on our actions now. It exposes and illustrates the complex entanglement of all matter and what we think of as ‘live’ and ‘lively’ matter in an attempt to foster greater kinship between the human and non-human.


She has recently graduated from Central Saint Martins with a Distinction in MA Art and Science where she was awarded the Tension Gallery Prize for ‘Fieldnotes from a Technobiocology.’

@elastic_fiction

Katt Petersen is a self-proclaimed biohacker and machine ethicist. She is a first year PhD student at the University of Portsmouth, based in the school of Film, Media and Communications. Her main research areas are that of Transhumanism, Posthumanism, existential risk and the human condition in the digital age, with particular interest to the connection between the idea of Morphological Freedom and the conception of the Cyborg. Alongside this, Petersen also has a vested interest in the literary genre of Cyberpunk, and has written a number of poems exploring the poeticism of the human-machine interface.



David McAllister is a UK based writer with a love for stories that challenge our beliefs about the world. He loves to craft fiction that asks questions about where the human race is headed and what waits on the other side. He lives with his wife and four children so quite frankly it’s a miracle he finds time to write at all. His first short story collection 'Parallel Worlds and Possible Futures' is being released later this year.

@DGundersen

Dr David Roden has worked for the Open University as a lecturer and associate lecturer. His published work has addressed the relationship between deconstruction and analytic philosophy, philosophical naturalism, the metaphysics of sound and posthumanism.

He contributed the essay ‘The Disconnection Thesis’ to the Springer Frontiers volume ‘The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment.’ His book ‘Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human’ (Routledge 2014) considers the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical implications of the existence of posthumans: powerful non-human agents produced by human-instigated technological processes.

Other representative publications include: ‘Radical Quotation and Real Repetition’ in ‘Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy’ (2004); ‘Nature's Dark Domain: an argument for a naturalized phenomenology’ in the Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Phenomenology and Naturalism (2013); ‘Sonic Arts and the Nature of Sonic Events’, ‘Review of Philosophy and Psychology’ (2010).

@turingcop