Friday, July 29, 2011

cyborg teacher 1




I was curious about whether there have been film representations of cyborgs as teachers, so I decided to google cyborg teacher. Of course, what I got was a wild array! The first link I clicked was for a real stinker of a movie, Class of 1999, in which cyborg teachers have been placed in "out of control" schools, to whip the attitudinal teens back into shape. Stacy Keach has, like, no eyes. Malcolm McDowell is uber scary. One of my favorite scenes is when the new "teachers" scan the students, and the audience views the readouts on how many gang members are in the crowd in front of the school. 


It's an interesting dilemma: the school really does have a gang problem; the cyborgs make it better at first, and then...the school has a cyborg problem. There is sadly a second movie, Class of 1999 2: The Substitute. One of the cyborg teachers from the first film comes back...and once again, substitutes get a really really bad rap. 


So the first version of cyborg teachers is aimed at the classic issue of classroom discipline, and imports the basic RoboCop logic. Society, and the soft nonaugmented humans who make it up, has failed; kids are in gangs and anarchy is loosed upon the blackboard jungle world. There is no pretense of learning; it is simply a struggle to see which war lord will control the mostly terrified students. 








Of course novels and films about the problems schools face with violent students is an old story (see Blackboard Jungle among many takes). And of course there is the classic 1980s Reagan era solution to all problems like this: terrorists? Columbine? Just get a cyborg superhero, or a truly heroic American on steroids, to take on these shitheads and beat sense into them (or the life out of them). 


But I'm struck by the 1990ness of these images. Cities, public schools, the world has somehow all been taken over; the people who used to run things are now victims, and the erstwhile victims are now aggressors. But the people who used to run things (read: white middle class filmgoers and voters) have a (literal) new weapon: technology. Technology can help them regain control, and control, it turns out, is what it (school, urban life, geopolitics) is all about. 


Today, as the U.S. government teeters on debt failure, a crisis completely designed and constructed by ideologues intent on making good all those rabid right wing radio ideas...I consider how to teach, what to teach, to my students in the fall. In a way, I want them to be competent cyborgs in a world where media representations outnumber actual representations. 


Here is another site dedicated to cyborg teacher:

The classroom is itself a technology that I would argue is a virtual space, designed, organized, enclosed, no different than a space comprised of bytes; the classroom is a part of a larger education system whose parts are cooected to every aspect of American culture: home to road. The teacher and the student walk “into” the classroom from some other place and erect the theater of the system as they go about their business. The teacher stands at the front of the room, the student sits, listens, and writes notes. If a student leaves the room, he or she will walk down the hall and look into other “rooms” in which others are pretty much doing the same.
This illustration of the cyborg is mearly a test, a hypothesis, a means of seeing, not meant to be factual. It’s meant to be pleasant, perhaps a distraction; it’s meant to invite a game into the picture: to create learning spaces just as virtual as the classroom. What is this learning space: Interactive Fiction, of course.
http://www.steveersinghaus.com/archives/294
That is, the face to face classroom according to Steve Ersinghaus might be fruitfully reimagined as a place where people are partly somewhere else (as in my online course) but also synchronically linked (that is, in that virtual place at the same time). 

The cyborg teacher as cyborg enforcer looks at students from the point of view of enemies, of uncontrollable violence animals with a patina of humanity. The cyborg teacher as teacher of cyborgs imagines that the students are always already partly elsewhere, with different goals and priorities, and that a good deal of what modern teachers teach is how to think through things over time with some degree of time commitment and focus. 


Sometimes I think that given our media saturated and information-centrifugal world, everyone in the US is ADD. Learning to attend - not attend as be in your seat, but to attend to what is being offered as learning, to attend to one's own priorities and skills - turns out to be a massively cyborgian task.


About one month to go on this sabbatical, and I'm getting ready to dive back in to this task. I can imagine a prompt that asks students to "read" classrooms, and teachers, and what combinations are best for learning. I want my students to use social media to connect with other people, students and otherwise, to produce real knowledge, to join forces and collaborate on real problems. 
First cyborg stop: teaching the frack out of Fracking in Monterey County.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Reading The Dada Cyborg



I am loving this book to pieces, partly because it deals so well with Hannah Hoch, a terrific Dada artist. It is giving me good ideas about how to negotiate between the early cyborg meanings in Norbert Wiener's style of cybernetics, and later more "pomo" meanings in the work of Donna Haraway and others. I'm also interested in ways the cyborg can allow artists and activists to begin intervening to challenge reactionary and militarist political trends. Weimar feels so often like a too-contradictory republic/Statist cyborg, one that "resolved" into fascism. And the United States post Reagan feels that way as well.

For now I want to simply post Matthew Biro's answer to the question, "In a nutshell, what is the Dada cyborg?"

The Dada cyborg is a motif or image type that I kept identifying in Dada art and, in particular, the work of the Berlin Dada artists. As I investigated Dada cyborgs and, simultaneously, the concept of the cyborg as it was developed in cybernetics and cultural theory after World War II, I came to the conclusion that the cyborg frequently appeared in Berlin Dada art because it could represent a new conception of hybrid or “networked” identity. By analyzing various appearances of the Dada cyborg between 1919 and the early 1930s, my book thus traces an emerging pattern of cultural activity that links Dada art with the rise of mass media as well as the (roughly) contemporaneous cultural theory of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Jünger, and others. It is a concept of identity that appears across multiple media and shows us the roots of our own media- and conflict-saturated consciousnesses today.

http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/01/dada-cyborg.html


Hannah Hoch's photomontages are amazing. Here is one form 1919-20 that Biro discussed in great detail, analyzing (among other things) the human/machine hybrids of the Kaiser and of her lover, the Dada artist Raoul Haussman. It is called "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany."



Monday, July 11, 2011

The golden header



1.
I first found out on my way to watch the last minutes of a depressing game.

My bro called me "Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you?"

I could only think...no. We scored? The US women scored? But...isn't the game more or less over?

It was so awesome getting all that from one sentence repeated in a frenzy.

Telephones are pretty awesome for getting good news fast.

2.
The Women's World Cup of Soccer is front and center on my Summer Sports agenda. I watched France-England and a bunch of Sweden-US (we lost 2-1 on a freak carom off of our wall) and US - North Korea.

When we scored in the 76th...SECOND!!!!! I was both delighted and...well, and had that slightly doomed feeling you get when things come quickly and easily. When we missed a close off the bar header I felt proud of our attack.

Then came the penalty on Rachel Buehler. The amazing, insane stop by our goalie Hope Solo. Then the heartbreaking calling back of the play, giving Brazil a second chance. (At the time there was no apparent explanation; later we learned that one of the US players crossed the line and encroached, but...this is NEVER called this tightly, as far as I can tell). Then Marta scoring the penalty kick to tie it.

AND the red card sending Buehler off for the rest of the entire frickin' game (awful call upon awful call). Then...


well this is one of those moments when it seemed the US really woke up as a team. They played on fire. Even with Marta putting in a marvelous goal to go ahead. Even with a player (why do they keep saying "man?) down? But effort after effort was repelled by the back on its heels Brazilian defence.

And then the Play.


3.
I've seen The Catch: Montana throw to Dwight Clark for the winning score in the 1982 NFC title game against Dallas. I've seen Viniateri kick that insane field goal in 2002 after the Tuck Rule saved the Patriots' season in the snow against Oakland.

But I think The Play is...well, I can't get it out of my head. I've seen it maybe thirty times on YouTube and ESPN. Rapinoe cruising up the left side, hauling, then putting her head down and hitting an absolutely perfect, probably religion-founding, cross, just out of the reach of the Brazilian goalkeeper, curving just enough toward the US striker.

And then Abby went up (afterwards it almost looked like a dolphin just about to break the surface of the ocean after a dive). And never ever blinked.

I am in love, seriously. I went to bed and closed my eyes and saw Abby hit it again, some kind of halo around her head, like a soccer saint. Ball. Goal. Tie. Hope.

Honestly. The best.