Welcome to the Cyborg Institute

The Cyborg Institute is a research cooperative that explores interaction between computer systems and their users, as well as the links between the emergent technological and sociological phenomena. Our current work centers on digitally-mediated collaboration and cyberculture. In the pursuit of our goal, to develop more effective and empowered methods and habits, we employ a diverse set of tools and critical perspectives.

Our work progresses in the open, primarily on the wiki. From time to time we may also work directly with individuals and teams to facilitate projects of mutual interest. If you are interested in the kinds of issues and questions we pose or are doing related work, we would very much like to work with you and help support your efforts in whatever way we can. Above all we invite you to participate!

Recent Developments
If you enjoy this post from our blog, please comment, read more, or subscribe.

I suspect that this will become something of a regular feature, but I've realized that given how I tend to concentrate my blogging energies on the tychoish.com project, even for subjects that would be relevant to the Cyborg Institute blog[1], that it would be useful to create a semi-regular Cyborg Institute feature to keep you all up to date on what's going on beyond the scenes.

On the Wiki

  • First, I've been doing some revisions with the wiki, and the good news is that everything works. I though everything worked when I started out, but it turns out OpenID was a bit buggy, and I had some problems with the git interface, but everything seems to be in order now. My general move has been to de-clutter some pages--the index primarily--split up things that went on too long in a given page (i.e. the current work on Sygn).

  • I've been working on consolidating, clarifying, and tweaking the Sygn System pages to be a bit more organized and descriptive.

    If you didn't notice, Sygn is a project to create a federated social networking data standard. This sounds really geeky and more "technological," than "cyborg," but in point of fact the "geeky" parts are (relatively) simple, and the implications and applications Sygn are very "cyborg." Ongoing work on the wiki and the sygn chat room and we hope to begin work on a test implementation soon.

  • I started working on some exploration for a wiki project hosted under the umbrella of Critical Futures, to explore the ways to do fiction and creative work using wiki as a tool. This is Cyborg if ever there was one.

  • I've moved the Content Incubator off of the main page, and done a little bit of work to consolidate the initial footprint of the wiki and make the whole thing a bit more approachable.

General Site Things

  • I've enabled a couple of sub-domains to work a little bit better for people who might be interested in various Cyborg Institute related projects therefore (.net and .org domains, at the moment are all identical to the .com):

  • I'm thinking about giving up the pretense of the blog, as a first class publication of the Cyborg Institute and trying to fold the content into the wiki, and do more posts along the lines of this post.

    In pursuit of this I've imported the backlog of posts that were really just sketches of one sort or another into a personal sketchpad in the wiki. You can find that here.

    Thoughts?

Do be in touch, and thanks for reading.

one tries them.


  1. I suppose one can't plan for these kinds of things until

— Sam Kleinman on 01 October 2009 • permalinkcommentary
tags: news, developments


About

The Cyborg conflict arises anytime we as humans, interact with technology and computers. The Cyborg Institute explores this conflict and works to develop a individual, social, and technological responeses to these encounters to help you address the technology in your life more effecively.

Cyborg Links

Projects

Cyborg Projects

The Cyborg Institute works on a diverse selection of projects and aims to suport the entire field. Fundamentally, our goal is to further our understanding of how people and communities use technology. Beyond this, we aim to enhance the use and experience of technology for all. Our projects address the indivudal "process" dimensions of this "cyborg interaction," as well as the full range of social, technological, and cultural implications. Watch for news of updates on our blog, or particpate in our evolving projects on the Cyborg Institute Wiki.