Diane Ludin talks with Prema Murthy about Mythic Hybrid,
her latest project for Turbulence

by Diane Ludin
from thing.review:
01/14/2003
http://bbs.thing.net [login][reviews]

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed "women's experience," as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility."

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century"

Diane Ludin: The title of your latest work, Mythic Hybrid, can be considered a resonant term to summarize the promise of technology as relates to the internet. Does this title refer to the technology that you are using to broadcast your content or is it focused on the subject matter alone?

Prema Murthy: I'm interested in exploring concepts through various technological "lenses" or "filters," so the medium for me is not separated from the subject matter. It becomes part of the content as it also gives it its form. I am as interested in examining the formal boundaries of digital media as I am in exploring various social or cultural contexts out of which specific media are constructed. For this project, I wanted to reinvoke the words "mythic hybrid," a term coined by Donna Haraway over ten years ago, to call to mind a second reading of some of the ideas proposed in her "Cyborg Manifesto." My project, as the term implies, is meant to examine collective narrative as fiction as well as complicate the word "hybrid," which by now has become a cliché when talking about the products of human/machine couplings.

Q: When we look at this piece, are we looking at real-time returns from the internet, framed within your filtering structure, or rather at a select record of search results?

A: The entire project has been constructed of pieces I collected while on a search to find out about the lives of a group of women working in micro-electronics factories in India who were reported to have had collective hallucinations. The project mimics the form of a search engine. It is not meant to present one "truthful" viewpoint in any way, but rather multiple perspectives brought together to form a story.

Q: What do you think of the notion that the internet is a medium for tracing the social unconscious, as implied by the Google "Zeitgeist?"

A: The Internet has an emptiness about it in the way I think the unconscious does. It is like a shell in which information is stored, deleted, retrieved, transfigured -- like memories, obsessions, dreams, fears. It is also the product of a racist, male-dominated, military-entertainment-industrial complex, which has undoubtedly left its mark on the medium as well.

Q: You've been drawing on concepts from Donna Haraway's work for some time now. How has your approach to her work evolved over time? Could you summarize some of your favorite themes from her work? Has creating this work changed your understanding of Haraway's concept of the mythic hybrid?

A: When I first read "The Cyborg Manifesto," I was excited by the way it challenged dualistic modes of categorization and called for an integration of mind and body, nature and culture, organism and machine, imagination and material reality. It urged women to embrace new technologies to disrupt the established order and acknowledged the role of third world women as integral to (cyber)feminism and the global economy. It seemed quite radical at the time, as a starting point. Since then, it seems some of its initial radicality has been forgotten and it has become absorbed more into the mainstream of fashion and proto-hippy culture. In retrospect, the concept of the mythic hybrid seems to lack a realistic consideration of the difficulties involved with hybridization and takes a very "optimistic" approach to contestation through creativity and the imagination.

Q: What were some of the hopes you initially had for cyberfeminism that haven't been realized?

A: The cyberfeminist movement seems to have carried over a lack of concern for issues of race, for which the second wave of US American feminism was critiqued. There are online forums for discussion, like the Undercurrents listserv that has been explicit in its mission to discuss these issues, but outside of that I find that it is a fragmented movement. It has made me rethink the importance of resistance and transformation on many levels, through political movements and organization, as well as through micropolitics, pockets of disruption specific to certain regions, invisible warfare,
empathy.

Q: What relationships do you now draw between the labor that builds computers -- which we rarely consider -- and the hallucinatory experiences that originally interested you in the factory realities of the workers we watch in the Quicktime movies?

A: The myth of a group of factory workers driven mad by their working conditions, social environments and an over-sensitivity to all things supernatural was shattered upon meeting women who were struggling, yes, but in quite sane, rational, strong-minded, yet still creative ways.

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