I’m not fully sure what I want to say about this yet - but I couldnt help but be struck by the parallel’s in these images… Joseph DeLappe’s use of his legs to move his SL avatar via a threadmill and the weaver weaving on a pitt loom (image from south India) and the use of his legs in the practice of weaving.

These connections visually open up something for me as I examine notions of the “weaver as technology” the “loom as technology” and the “cyborg weaver” (see Mamidipudi and Gajjala 1998 and Radhika Gajjala, Seemanthani Niranjana and P. Shyama inprogress [to be presented at ICA 2008 next week}).

I know it links somehow to Lucy Suchman’s question of when the categories of human and machine become relevant…” how relations of sameness or difference between them are enacted on particular occasions, and with what discursive and material consequences”… it also re-plants the notion of cyborg back “outside” of “modernity” - refusing to accept that the cyborg is necessarily a “a creature in a post-gender world” … instead posing a question of how a re-gendering occurs at each interface and context.

Who do we name a cyborg and when? and so I go back to a re-reading of the Hobbes and Boyle story in Latour’s “We have never been modern”…

Indeed neither have ever been “virtual”…

contrast those with the now famous image below:

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