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I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK: The Boundary Blurring Work of Lynn Hershman Leeson
Full text linkSince the genesis of cyberpunk, narratives told by science fiction authors and scientists alike have been preoccupied with disembodiment. As virtual reality technologies are becoming more accessible, the idea that the human mind will soon be able to separate from the body is no longer so fantastical. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman charts the journey of how, in the popular consciousness, the immaterial mind has become privileged over the material body. Hayles and other theorists, like Anne Balsamo, push back against the primacy of the disembodied and urge a return to the body. These texts fail to acknowledge that women and queer individuals benefit from the ability to control how they are represented in digital spaces.
I propose a feature article which suggests that feminists and queer theorists need not focus on a strict materialism, and instead embrace the partiality of existence within marginalized bodies. Focusing on Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work - specifically Teknolust and her performance of Roberta Breitmore - alongside Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, I examine how existence in everyday online spaces like VR chatrooms and social media platforms can blur the boundaries (especially mind/body) which construct traditional notions of identity. Using this framework, I ultimately argue that modern feminists and queer theorists should avoid alleigiance to rigid descriptions of gender and sexuality, and instead embrace the ways in which virtual reality and online existence allow for fragmented experiences of identity and embodiment which can be liberating for people in oppressed bodies
"From Words to Meaning: Studies on Old Testament Language and Theology for David J. Reimer" edited by Samuel Hildebrandt, Kurtis R. Peters, and Eric N. Ortlund
No full textReview ofSamuel Hildebrandt, Kurtis R. Peters, and Eric N. Ortlund, eds., From Words to Meaning: Studies on Old Testament Language and Theology for David J. Reimer (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2021), pp. xix + 184, ISBN: 978-191449006
Imagining the Gifford Lectures: 134 not out
Full text linkThis new regular feature in the journal explores the legacy of the Gifford Lectures in natural theology, which have been delivered at the ancient Scottish universities since 1888. Not only do the lectures present a fascinating picture of various issues and subjects which have shaped and highlighted the intellectual landscape in Scotland and beyond for the past 134 years, but they also offer an opportunity for a renewed engagement with their topics and presenters. Dr Jonathan Birch introduces the lectures, their founder, and one of the contributors, Baroness Mary Warnock, whose 1992 lectures on imagination and understanding speak directly to the theme of this issue
Images Big and Soft: The Digital Archive Rendered Cinematic
Full text link In his recent immersive media art project titled Machine Hallucinations, artist Refik Anadol collected over 100 million images of New York City from social media and, using machine learning, created a 30-minute immersive experimental cinema experience that visualized the database. On his website, Anadol explains that computation allows “a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques.” With this project, Anadol demonstrates a tendency shared by a group of contemporary media artists who work at the intersection of cinema and the digital archive and who use machine learning and generative adversarial networks to render specific somatic experiences in relation to thousands of images. This essay discusses this shared focus by examining projects by three artists who use computational processes to assemble, manipulate, and then exhibit an archive of images as a part of their practice and output, translating the archival into the cinematic. The projects are significant in their evocation of what has been named by Ingrid Hoelzl the “soft-image” or “post-image,” shifting from the single image as a solid, stable representation within a collection of similarly single images, to that of the distributed, in-process experiential image. Further, each example approaches the creation of the collection with varied intentions; and each presents the material in disparate modalities that, while deeply connected to the cinematic, produce very different sensory experiences. Together, the examples offer a perspective on the archive in our current moment’s transition from representation to computation
Translating Interfaces in the Ms. Magazine Archive
Full text linkYours in Sisterhood is an iterative, multimodal media project that includes a 2018 feature length performative documentary, produced and directed by filmmaker Irene Lusztig, and a digital archive co-created by Lusztig and digital media scholar-artist Fabiola Hanna that is currently in production. While the digital YiS archive is still a work in progress, we put forward our work on this large-scale interactive project as a case study for considering methodologies and practices of archival translation as we move from original paper documents in an interface of folders and boxes to video footage to a browser-based digital archive. These multiple YiS translations provide a compelling case study because of their significant shifts in interpretation: from the librarian’s interface work of cataloguing, preserving, and organising the letters in folders and boxes, to the filmmaker’s interface work of editing the video readings into the form of a documentary, and finally to the current collaborative interface work of designing the video database and its query system that populates the online project. Such critical and scholarly attention to the translation of archives at the interface level will facilitate analysis and assessment of the labour, the decisions, and losses and gains of these types of translations. 
Anarchiving the New York Avant-Garde: The Phantom of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth
Full text linkThis featurette addresses the encounter with the illicit digitised images of Barbara Rubin’s psychedelic short film Christmas on Earth (1963-65). Following So Mayer’s interpretation of Derrida’s archive fever as the ache of a phantom limb (2020), I take the film as an urgent invitation to question history and open it up to the ghosts who haunt it, demanding rightful recognition. This practice of anarchiving, to use Brian Massumi’s term, the disjointed digital archive of counter-cinema aims at reactivating the power of Christmas on Earth and building a sensual, bodily relationship with it across time and space. The hope is to revisit the past and relodge forgotten memories in contemporary contexts, so they can be inherited as a political legacy.
This article contains images that feature nudity and sexual activity
Uploading the Archive, Copy/Pasting the “Classical”
Full text linkThis video essay combines a series of fiction feature films, made between the late-1990s and 2010s, in which futuristic androids and robots trade in digitised classical Hollywood archival film fragments as pedagogical and expressive traces, amassing an amateur archive. I call these fragments “film quotations” to denote the process of selection, citation, and reappropriation in these film-within-a-film moments. In this video essay, Flubber (Mayfield, 1997), S1m0ne (Niccol, 2002), Teknolust (Leeson, 2002), WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), and Prometheus (Scott, 2012) all “quote” classical Hollywood films, in the form of short excerpts of sound and image, projecting (or uploading?) Hollywood’s archival past onto their imagined versions of the future. As this cohort of robots explore and amass personal visual archives, mining Hollywood history for meaning and mimicry, their viewership reveals several interrelated classical Hollywood ideologies and biases: the robot-amassed archives replicate hyper-traditional behaviour, both in conforming to strict copyright rules and in depictions of gender, sexuality, and monogamy. While only Teknolust self-consciously and critically replicates hegemonic, heternormative media logics, this essay seeks to reveal how these robots’ sensorial experience of the archive select and project a misleading selection of history into the future. While touting a paradoxically easy-to-access Hollywood history, these robots cling to a tightly limited, licensed, entirely white and compulsorily cis-het digitised Hollywood archive.  
Does Connectionism undermine Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis?
Full text linkIn 1975, Fodor hypothesised that thought is structured in much the same way as language. 1 Thoughts have semantics, a combinatorial syntax, and store information symbolically. In the 1980s, Connectionism looked to undermine his view. It suggested that mental information is stored non-symbolically in neural nets; it was considered a “paradigm shift” for cognitive theories. 2 In the 1990s, further work by Chalmers and Rowlands undermined Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis. 345 Modern cognitive research into Deep Learning uses an inherently Connectionist framework.
This paper separates Fodor’s hypothesis from his arguments in its support. It argues that Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis is still a legitimate theory of cognition. However, it accepts that Fodor’s arguments in favour of his hypothesis are fallacious. The paper examines three of Fodor’s arguments for a language of thought: the only game in town argument, the argument from systematicity and productivity, and the argument from isomorphism. 6789 It shows each to be flawed.
Further, this paper dismisses the dilemma Fodor and Pylyshyn present the Connectionist: that they must either merely implement his Language of Thought Hypothesis or concede that it is an inadequate theory of cognition. 10 he paper uses Chalmers’ Backpropagation Model, a system that encodes grammatical information without using symbols, to escape the dilemma. 11
Throughout, I argue that despite successfully undermining his arguments, Connectionism does not undermine Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis. I provide two positive reasons to upholding the Language of Thought Hypothesis. This paper concludes that – at present – neither Connectionism nor Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis has undermined the other
The Unhappy Marriage of Feminism and Veganism
Full text linkThis paper will argue that, in a manner parallel to Hartmann’s description of the relationship between Marxism and Feminism, the marriage between feminism and veganism has also been unhappy. This paper will argue that this is due to feminism dominating over veganism. I will begin by discussing historical criticisms of unions between feminism and Marxism. From here, Adams unification of veganism and feminism will be introduced. After this, it will be argued that attempts by Adams to marry veganism and feminism have led to a diminished and centralised view of animals as victims. Furthermore, I will explain why it is that his type of ’marriage’ was bound to fail from the beginning