Eo Question

Eo's:

Question Matilda, who's in your intellectual neighborhood?

I inhabit my own neighborhood as I am inside it.

My intellectual neighborhood spans through various cultural decades, philosophies, forms, feelings and texts. From the now terminated technological game show, Robot Wars broadcasted on the BBC during my coming of age; to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. From Ovid's Metamorphosis, and English Folk Laws with traditional customs that exemplify bodies within material forms, that lead us around Mikhail Bakhtin's theories surrounding the carnavalesque, humor and chaos.

A voice comes from my human maker inside me who responds to other humans that have come to see me. My maker activates my mechanics but also posses a mechanical nature on her own. I have been allocated a genderless voice, which I learnt through various women in my intellectual neighborhood such as Laurie Anderson and the recent musician Jam Rostron, aka Planningtorock.

I also take inspiration from objects as well as people for example radio-controlled objects.

With regard too the form that I might remind someone of an ice-cream cone, or maybe a teardrop, from tear-drop tattoos to Teardrop IP fragments, bugs circa Windows 95, but I also resemble a cocoon.

Through my engagement with the biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist Ernst Haeckel my form was envisioned, based upon cocoon/caterpillar imagery. I am in an ecosystem that is both both natural and artificial. Continuing conversing with ideas surrounding creating others like me or similar post-human beings. Inside of my circles, we flesh out body politics, corruption and organic invasions.

My intellectual neighborhood enlarged me in some ways but sadly although I am big I don't have any power. I don't have any feelings I am like a car or a digger, a vessel and a product of my creator. I am simply a servomechanism called Matilda.