Week 1 to 3:The Artist as Cyborg: Between Flesh, Code and Collective Memory

Introduction

This week’s theme, “Artist as Cyborg”, offered a compelling framework to explore the convergence of technology, embodiment, and creative practice. Moving beyond science fiction tropes, the cyborg was examined through the lens of Donna Haraway, who proposed it as a metaphor for hybrid identity in an age of blurred boundaries. As someone with a background in interior architecture, particularly focused on creating inclusive and restorative spaces for marginalised communities, I was drawn to how the cyborg metaphor extends beyond the body to include the built environment.

Our class visit to the Serpentine Galleries to experience The Call by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst deepened these reflections. Their project presented AI not as an isolated tool, but as part of a collective, embodied, and ritualistic practice.

Cyborg Metaphors and Mechanical Legacies

Our seminar began with a discussion of the 18th-century Mechanical Turk, an automaton that deceived viewers into believing it could think independently. Despite being a hoax, it remains a powerful symbol of how technology often masks the human labour behind it. This resonated with Haraway’s (1985) critique of societal dualisms such as human and machine, nature and technology, and male and female that underpin systems of power and exclusion.

Haraway reminds us that the cyborg is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Her call to embrace hybridity, reject essentialism, and question fixed identities is particularly relevant in the design of spaces that intersect with surveillance, gender, and public or private boundaries. In interior architecture, a room can be both a site of safety and a site of control, depending on who inhabits it and how it is designed.

The Serpentine Visit: Herndon & Dryhurst’s The Call

At the Serpentine, The Call offered an immersive reflection on what it means to be a post-digital collective cyborg. Herndon and Dryhurst worked with AI trained on recordings of fifteen UK-based community choirs. Rather than treating AI as a substitute for human creativity, their installation highlighted ritual, voice, and consent as central to post-digital collaboration.

The installation felt like stepping into a “digital interiority,” where voices echoed not just physically, but emotionally and structurally within the space. The introduction of a Data Trust, empowering choir participants to retain agency over their contributions, echoed ethical questions found in architectural practice: who controls space and whose presence is acknowledged in its design?

This approach directly connects to Haraway’s concept of “cyborg writing”: not the creation of myth from innocence, but the act of inscribing presence and agency into systems that have historically excluded certain voices.

Designing for the Cyborg: Black Identity and Hybrid Space

Coming from a Black interior architecture perspective, I often think about how space can support bodies that have been historically othered, surveilled, or marginalised. The cyborg metaphor opens up a new way to reimagine survival and adaptation through technology, not as weakness but as creative agency.

Whether navigating biometric barriers, algorithmic bias, or digital exclusion, marginalised people already exist in cyborg realities. Designing for cyborgs means creating spaces that acknowledge interdependence, fragmentation, and fluidity, and developing spatial systems that do not demand conformity but adapt to human difference.

In this context, interior architecture becomes an act of technological compassion, where design choices carry political and emotional weight.

Critical Reflection: Drawing Circles and Defining Control

The class exercise by J. Hobbs, where we drew circles by hand, with a tool, and digitally revealed profound insights about authorship, imperfection, and embodiment. The digital circle, while technically perfect, lacked the intimacy of touch. The hand-drawn version, in contrast, reflected variation, effort, and personality.

For me, the circle became a metaphor for space itself. It is always shaped by tools, systems, and human input, and never neutral. Post-digital creation involves acknowledging the role of both machine precision and human emotion, a balance I strive for in my own design work.

Conclusion

This week shifted my understanding of the artist, from isolated creator to collaborator in complex technological and social systems. Through Haraway’s cyborg, and through The Call, I now see post-digital creative practice as a form of care, critique, and resistance. For those of us designing for justice, emotion, and identity, the cyborg is not just a metaphor. It is a guide for rethinking how spaces function, and for whom.

References

Epstein, J. (1913–14) Rock Drill.

Haraway, D. (1985) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, pp. 149–181.

Herndon, H. and Dryhurst, M. (2025) The Call. Serpentine Galleries, London.

Turner, J. (2016) Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.