This is a collection of stories reflecting hybrid relationships among science, machines, animals, politics, nature and people. This series of work is built at the TechShop, a place where engineers, designers, makers and artists come together and where experiments run rampant; people build machines to build machines; and science fiction icons are etched into glass. The TechShop icon, a simple gear, is a constant reminder of our place as both machine and human. Post People Possibilities is part Maker, part machine, part nature and part TechShop.

 

What we have been building in the 21st century sets the foundation for how we will survive in the future. Post People Possibilities is a response to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and is Siembieda’s vision of the future as a battle between cyborg identity, hybrid species and politics.

 

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction,” wrote Donna Haraway in her 1991 Cyborg Manifesto.

 

We fabricate our future by selecting nodes of technology. Our choices of social configurations, biomimicry, genomic modification and political apathy will eventually determine our state of nature. If we see ourselves as superior above all species, we will soon regret our lack of attention. The method of cyborg development is political in design and we can only imagine the breakdown of the true effects technology will have on a global scale. By allowing ourselves to have a superior identity, we will soon be replaced with humility. If we as a species have become or are becoming cyborgs, will we continue to identify ourselves as homo sapiens or as something else?