Cyborg

Definition - "A human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices". http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cyborg

A cyborg is a:

• cybernetic organism
• hybrid of machine and organism
• creature of both fiction and lived social reality 

 http://cyborganthropology.com/Donna_Haraway

From the research that I have done up until this point, I have been able to gather a few different ideas on the direction in which I am going to go in, however I still don't really have anything solid enough to work on yet. I just have a few ideas of things that I could combine from the human body and electronic items - merging them together to create a human cyborg.

The ideas I have at this point are combining a humans chest/torso and adding in a section of an engine from a car by either using the cut and paste technique or merging and blending to make it look like one piece. I also have an idea of taking a person and adding in a television as so much of what we do today evolves around the television.

Stelarc

"This australian artist is interested in the evolutionary architecture of the body and possible ways of redesigning the human augmented by implants and exoskeletons. His previous works include suspending himself with a series of hook in his own skin, and he has performed with a third hand, with a virtual arm and with a virtual body. His works Ping body and Parasite probe notions of engineering external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the internet. recently he had a third, soon-to-be-functional ear implanted, grown from stem cells".
http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=3052&lang=en 

Stelarc explored the extraordinary things that our bodies can do, taking it to the extreme and pushing himself as far as possible - such as when he suspended himself in the air using only hooks that were attached to his skin, something that us, as humans would think impossible as well as something that should just never be done. 

"Stelarc is a performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. He has made three films of the inside of his body. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body." http://stelarc.org/?catID=20239

Peter Kennard

Kennard was born in London in 1949 he began drawing and painting intensely at the age of 13, this is the point in which it became a big thing to him. He used a shed that he had found in the back garden of the flat's where he lives, he used this place to produce his work it was somewhere he could make as much mess as he wanted and needed and enabled him to create pieces.

Kennard's photomontage pieces were based on and reflected his envolvment in the anit-Vietnam War movement. He started off painting but later turned to photomontage as he felt it was a better way for him to express his political views.

"The photojournalist goes out and takes the pictures; I sit in a room with the tools of my trade and try to pummel these pictures into revealing invisible connections, disconnecting them from direct representation into statement and argument. Although, compared to a photojournalist, I’m grounded and stuck at my safe desk or in my darkroom under safelight, I still feel that my subject has to be made up from events from around the world". http://www.peterkennard.com/main/home_set.htm

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler works mostly with images and text, her work mostly covers the social issues we face, she uses the combination of areas such as the kitchen, the streets and the transport system. Within her work she looks at the contrast of two different worlds. like with the two images below there is a women in the foreground layers on top of fighting scenes, they are complete opposites. It's showing the social difference between certain classes and the divide that is within them.

Hannah Hoch

 Hoch had a relationship with Raoul Hausmann during post-war in Berlin, he was one of the main driving forces behind Dada. Together they started learning the different techniques used within photomontage. Later she rejected the approach used by John Heartfield and she developed her own unique style which she went on to use within her photomontage pieces. Hoch's pictured look quite modern as she chose to focus on areas that have stuck and continue to progress through time, meaning her photomontage pieces do not age.
Hoch created photomontage pieces using the cut and paste technique, she would take different body parts and in some cases electronic items and layer them on top of each other creating a collage. The combinations of body parts and electronic items that she used helped to create pieces that were visually interesting and made the viewer think about what exactly it was that Hoch was trying to say through her work.

Raoul Hausmann

Hausmann created photomontage pieces where he combines both electronic and humans. using the cut and paste technique he layers his pieces with a cyborg theme, as he has added electronic items onto the human body forming something new and visually interesting. When he was your Hausmann first received training in painting from his father, his interest was in the goals of the emerging expressionist movement in Germany as well as being a committed staff member of the magazine 'Der Sturm'. As well as being interested in painting he also had an interest in philosophy and literature, he also have a few articles published in cultural magazines.

Hausmann was a founding member of the Berlin Dada he was one of its driving forces. He liked to explore and experiment with new things and techniques, finding different ways of working and producing pieces such as photomontage, painting, being a fashion designer, poetry, publishing work.He was also the partner of Hannah Hoch, every single thing that he did he did with enthusiasm.

 

Fritz Kahn

Khan was born in 1888 and died in 1986, he was a Doctor in Berlin and he was also a world famous popular science writer whom illustrated the form and functions of the human body with spectacular modern man-machine analogies. Khan specialised in illustrating the physical processes of human bodies as though they were machine powered.

The work Khan produced - including his books were not liked by people, they probably seemed offencive to a certain extent, people didn't like the content of them. "In the 1930s, his books were banned and burned by the Nazis, then edited by Kahn’s publisher and reissued as plagiarisms with a superimposed anti-Semitic chapter". http://www.fritz-kahn.com/person.php?site=&lang=en

When Khan lived in Germany he was silenced due to the fact that his work wasn't liked, however today there is a big interest in his work ranging from historians to designers - today people across the world are inspired by Khan's images, therefore the work he produced all them years ago that was strongly dis-liked and banned, has had a big impact of the people of present day.

 

"Fritz Kahn's books and illustrations explored the inner machinery of the human body, using metaphors of modern industrial life. Kahn turned the brain into a complex factory with light projectors, conveyor belts, secretaries and cinema screens; he showed the journeys of blood cells as locomotives encircling the globe; and he compared bones to modern building materials such as reinforced concrete".
http://www.bl.uk/learning/artimages/bodies/kahn/kahnmachines.html