“Rad Hourani breathes new life into the concept of unisex: his clothes don’t make men look feminine, nor is he trying to make boys out of women. He designs for people, not a specific gender. In his own words, a Rad Hourani person is someone who, like him, “doesn’t seem themself as a man or a woman, and looks beyond all demographic categories.”
— BON, Issue #18
Abstract:
The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades (I borrow the term ‘mindware’ from Clark, 2001) extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade. What cultural history adds to our understanding of embedded cognition is not only a recognition of our cyborg past but a historicized understanding of human reality.
Our cyborg past: Medieval artificial memory as mindware upgrade
(via Adam Greenfield)
See also: My interview with cyborg anthropologist Amber Case
From http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/07/27/medieval-cyborgs-artificial-memory-as-mindware-upgrade/