Janelle Monae’s song “Oh, Maker” and its accompanying video are examples of cultural reproduction of cyborgs. The song is the ninth track of her ArchAndroid album released on May 18, 2010 in the U.S. She includes a backstory for her music on the album which involves an illicit love connection between a female droid/cyborg named Cindy Mayweather and a man named Anthony Greendown who frees her from government captivity. The video features Monae’s Cindy Mayweather character, her lover, and the cyborg government official attempting to recapture Mayweather and kill Greendown. The government hopes to return her to the laboratory in hopes of harvesting the ghost-in-the-machine soul produced in Mayweather’s programming. In the video, the audience can see the love in her eyes and also the fear of being captured and effectively killed, indicating human emotion in technology. Looking at the video, the audience can see that Mayweather and the government official are not just human, but a combination of both human and machine. The computerized melodies of the song and the robotic rewind of the video further reproduce a cyborg aesthetic and romanticize love between a machine-human (Mayweather) and a true human (Greendown).
Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, winner of the 2013 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, is an unusual modern portrayal of cyborgs as it reverses the process of body/machine interaction. In the film, the audience discovers the lead character Theodore Twombly has fallen in love with an OS named Samantha, who over the course of the film gains human emotion to fit her programmed human intelligence. Samantha’s ghost-in-the-machine programming indicates a new strain of reversed cyborg thought, that posits development of humanity in hyper-realistic human programming (another recent example is The Matrix from 1999). Her blurs the line between artificial intelligence, cyborg, and human as Samantha seeks out various ways to give herself the feeling, or the reality, of a body. Her desperation to be human in body as well as mind and emotion forms the central plotline and eventually destroys her relationship with Theodore. As humanity becomes further intertwined with online cyborg personas of social media, blogs, and the possibilities of the Internet, it is no surprise that interest in the cyborg-like humanity of artificially intelligent programming will become more popular as a subject for artistic discourse. Importantly, Theodore’s love for Samantha shows a secondary strain of cyborg imagery in culture, as another example of an artistic portrayal of the subject in which the human falls in love with the cyborg. His love for her, in a way, could be interpreted as humanity falling in love with its own technological creations and ingenuity.
Cyborgs 