UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
            COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

          "A Cyborg Genealogy: Science, Fiction, and Myth"

                     Dr. Genevieve Liveley
       (Classics and Ancient History, University of Bristol)

                    24 November 2010  (Wednesday)
                       Lecture Theatre A161

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                            1 -2  pm


                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

Mythographers of the cyborg assume that this monstrous hybrid, part human
and part machine, part being and part metaphor, has no significant history
before `being spat out of the womb-brain of its war-besotted parents
in the middle of the last century of the Second Christian Millennium'
(Haraway 1997: 51). For most science writers and theorists, the history
of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism coined by research
scientist Manfred Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan Kline to refer to a
technologically enhanced man or `cybernetic organism' -- a fusion of
organism, machine, and code -- capable of surviving and working in hostile
alien environments. Others might posit the genesis of cybernetics with the
publication of Alan Turing's classic 1950's paper `Computng Machinery and
Intelligence', or perhaps look further back to 1947 and the publication
of a theory of self-regulating or `cybernetic' systems (from the Greek
kybernetes) developed by pioneering research scientist Norbert Wiener.

Historians of science-fiction might push back the imaginative history
of the cyborg to the nineteenth century, locating its genesis with Mary
Shelley's `Frankenstein' or, to give its full title, `Frankenstein;
Or, the Modern Prometheus'. The casual `or' of this alternative title,
however, emphasises both the kinship of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to
Aeschylus and other classical mythmakers, no less than the kinship between
Victor Frankenstein and his Promethean ancestor, inviting us to push back
the imaginative history of the cyborg from the nineteenth century AD to
the ninth century BCE, from Shelley to Homer. Frankenstein's monster
reminds us that the genealogy of the cyborgs of the Second Christian
Millennium may be traced back to the mythical monsters of classical
Greece, and that in the narratives of Homer, Hesiod, Apollodorus,
Apollonius Rhodius, and Pausanias, an alternative and ancient history
for the cyborg may be mapped.



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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq