From the Cyborg to the Rendered Body: Conceptualising Redistributions in Composite Agency Through Hito Steyerl’s Citational Figures
Lucy Bollington
From Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture (2025), pp. 155-186, doi:10.59860/vc.c69b713
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| Part of the book: Citational Media Edited by Annie Ring and Lucy Bollington Legenda Abstract. In 1985, Donna Haraway instated the cyborg as a provocative conceptual figure expressing the entangled dynamics of power, control, and protest in the information age. This theory was pathbreaking in part because of the challenge it posed to the prevailing tendency within feminism to seek ‘alliance with nature and against technology’. Even today, almost forty years on, the cyborg arguably remains the most prominent figure for conceptualising entangled relationships between humans and technology. Yet, despite this enduring influence, already in 2006 N. Katherine Hayles suggested that the cyborg was beginning to look out of date. Hayles proposed replacing the cyborg, not with another figure, but with a concept: ‘the cognisphere’, a term drawn from the work of Thomas Whalen. Bollington now proposes that we supplement the cyborg with a new conceptual figure for the sociotechnical present: the digitally-animated figure, or ‘rendered body’, that appears with striking frequency across films by some of today’s most prominent artists. Bollington discusses in particular the acclaimed German-Japanese artist Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), which stages a transition from the cyborg to the rendered body, a transition propelled by Steyerl’s understanding of the importance of machine-machine ecologies in shaping the terms and operations of contemporary power, capitalism, and protest today. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
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