Cyberemnants
May 2025
If you remember visiting natural history museums in childhood, you will recognize certain suspended from the ceiling structures as dinosaur skeletons — remains of the once living and breathing organic body, preserved in the soil from the self-induced decay for thousands of years. These findings help us navigate in our collective past and project into our future as a species on this Earth. I wonder how the posterity of modern people will treat their remains — remnants of post-human bodies induced with technologies created to transgress the human condition.
Cyborg is both a myth of science fiction and a product of social reality, as Donna Haraway argues in her “Cyborg Manifesto”. She presents cyborg as a concept able to permeate the binary on multiple levels: human/animal, organism/machine, subject/non-subject, and provides a critique on essentialist feminist theories through the body of a cyborg.
When I think of a cyborg, I imagine the body of multitude — a body that represents everyone but belongs to no one. Bioplastic presents itself as a material able to replicate plant tissue, animal flesh, human body — an abstract organic matter that proclamates unity through visceral similarity. When you think of the world under a specific angle, you can see that we’re all build almost identically inside — we replicate each other’s rhizomatic structures: the nervous system under my thin skin mirrors mycelium underground body, which in its turn looks like any root or branch system of species of higher plants. We’ve been constructed from the same matter under the same conditions, yet it holds a pluralistic nature, disparity within itself.
The claim of a cyborg is unity through affinity, rather than identity — something that contemporary feminism should strive for in the age of political polarization and domination of colonial technology. Technology itself can be used to transcend imposed binaries, patriarchal visions, to transit to newfound power in dreams of impossible bodies, reimagined gender, reclaimed power. The problem lies within power structures curating it, not the instrument itself.
The myth of a cyborg helps us recognize new instruments of liberation, and I dream of the day when it will be a symbol of past overcomings, hanging from the ceiling as a once mighty dinosaur, (remaining light and almost unreal as Eva Hesse’s transparent structures) exposing its tangible fleshy guts in glory, only soon to be decomposed.