For my final project I would like to focus on extending a topic similar to my midterm project. In my midterm I focused on the cyborg's purpose in matters of the world going towards a Utopia or Dystopia. My final project will explore how this could actually happen from the cyborg's view point. I want to show the cyborg as a being that's a little too human to be a robot and a little too robotic to be human. This gives an objective viewpoint being "stuck" between two worlds.
I'm going to combine this into a type of text based game/choose your own adventure. The game will allow the player to live as a cyborg, that has been made simply to live, observe, and develop its own mission and purpose. Depending upon the user's actions and choices, the cyborg will either assimilate more into human society, be completely disgusted with humanity or anywhere in between. I'll be focusing more upon the texts from earlier in the semester (Haraway, Shelley, Lyotard, Dick) and will also try to pull subtley from topics discussed in class.
1 comment:
First, tentative question - is it a good thing, a bad thing, both or neither to be stuck between two worlds? For Haraway, of course, it's ultimately a good thing, and if I remember right that's the one thing I struggled with re: your midterm project - I thought you had interesting things to say, but that you were overly unsure about what you wanted, or where you were going with it. I'd like to see a little more direction in that area this time around.
I like the adventure you're proposing in the second paragraph. One idea I have for a vaguely similar CYOA (of course, I've never even started it) would include choices to dictate whether the character wants to be, e.g., male or female, gay or straight, etc - and then certain aspects of the narrative are determined by the chosen identity. For Haraway, of course (and, I think, for you) cyborgs are fluid and ambiguous in their identity.
Let me put that another way - I think maybe this is a CYOA where you're having the reader choose not so much what to do as who to be. Or something like that. I like the idea - and yet, I need to note that I'm still very uncertain about what you think. Is this a desirable or undesirable fluidity? Will the story be such that we can emerge with a range of feelings about, not only the particular path taken, but the (un)desirability of a cyborg identity itself?
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