Becoming-Cyborg
Gregory Minissale
Abstract
In this essay I examine how the matter, technology and psychology in-
volved in producing and experiencing film come together in a process I
call becoming-cyborg. Rather than stressing the semiotic, rational and
mechanistic processes usually attributed to the figure of the Cyborg,
becoming-cyborg involves asemiotic, open-ended, chaotic and contingent
exchanges between the matter of the mind and matter outside of it.
Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) provides the opportunity to drill down further
into the details of how multisensory, kinaesthetic, abstract, conceptual,
technological, material and neurological entanglements sustain becoming-
cyborg.
Keywords
film, cognitive psychology, becoming-cyborg, Tarkovsky, Stalker,
Deleuze, Guattari, Bergson, mind wandering, matter, psycho-cinematics
1. Introduction
In the popular imagination the Cyborg evokes images of mechanical
technology made up of inanimate materials used as prosthetics for a
human host. This view of the Cyborg as a human who is mechani-
cally extended gives way to later versions of Cyborgs as humans al-
tered or enhanced by bio-technology and nanotechnology invisible to
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