cyborg manifesto_2 [live performance]
sex kino roland, zurich
16 minutes, 2022



CYBORG MANIFESTO_2 is a part-irl, part-digital based performance by mercedes 666, drawing on Donna Haraway’s socio-feminist text A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) in relation to the scientific construct of cyborg as hybrid being that is both organic and machine.

Haraway explores the ‘cyborg’ through a posthumanist feminist theory as a dual, queer being whose sexual identity transgresses patriarchal and collonial binaries.

in CYBORG MANIFESTO_2, the artist reimagines cyborg theory as a queering of female desire in relation to an advancement of technophilia, and a new kind of sexual expression formulated by combining one’s organic sexual being (referring to the physical body and desires of the mind) with ones digital being (referring to the ‘self’ formulated by ones digital experience and to the digitalisation of ‘self’).

consisting of the artist’s organic body, a scanning bed, screens and a webcam, the performance investigates the significance of digital space in the reimagination of ‘the pornographer’, architectural mediators of sex and desire, and pornographic cinema.

the role of pornographer becomes something else: the artist is the actor and director, recording her sexuality through several technological devices (the scanner and the webcam), further receiving these images that depict her sexuality in digital form via screens positioned around her.
the digital images of her body contribute to architectural mediators of sex and desire as the digital paths, made up of pixels and light, become architectural in their own right.

pornographic cinema is redefined as the female actor is no longer a passive figure received only on screen via male directors’ desires, but as a queer cyborgian figure: experiencing her own desire through the combination of her organic body with the machines that she controls.




initial sketch