Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. ed. H. Arendt, Translated by H. Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969. 

Benjamins’ main idea is that art will lose, what he terms, its aura when it is mechanically reproduced. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” (Benjamin 3). This element of time and space is the aura. He goes further: “one might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” (Benjamin 4). This aura is applicable to the human reproduction of the piece and how the piece was circulating across social media. Obviously not everyone is able to physically see the piece, so the next best thing is virtually. Benjamin asks if that can be considered authentic since that ‘aura’/ time and place stamp has disappeared. 

Betterton, Rosemary “Body Horror?: Food (and Sex and Death) in Women’s Art,” in An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996), 130-60.

The abject is a state of being in which the subject is loose or open, where it is in some way protruding and causing social discomfort as a result of pressing up against these preordained boundaries of being. Some characteristics of the object include the idea of the open and closed body. When it comes to states of hybridization there is always a level of unease associated with them. The idea of the abject and bodily grotesqueness gives us a way of describing why these states can make us uncomfortable. The posthuman is a space of creation and is a gray area, and I would say that the concept of the abject makes some of those posthuman boundaries more concrete. Betterton's analysis of the abject lends itself as a viable segue with how hybridized forms are/can be monstrous.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013. 

Given that this text was a building block in this course, for my purposes it only seems fitting to include it. I took a lot away from this text, as dense as it was, including those ideas of art and nonhuman-ness. Her section on Dolly the Sheep was one of my jumping points for this entire project, especially beginning from her descriptions of Dolly’s pronouns and her body as a space for capitalistic gain. I quote from Braidotti often because of how many of my ideas were jump started from her text. That being said, I found one of her limitations during her section on death. I thought her argument lacked an emotional touch seeing how she hardly discusses grief in conjunction to death. These two, I feel, shouldn't be separated since neglecting grief completely neglects one key part of our own experiences with death. That being said, her somewhat optimistic proclamation of moving past death does coincide with Lyon’s arguments on reimagining death. 

Campbell, Jeff. “Dolly & The Clones.” Glowing Bunnies!?: Why We're Making Hybrids, Chimeras, and Clones, Zest Books, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, pp. 94–99. 

Oddly enough I found this book by chance while at work, and good thing I did since it really helped to explain what exactly was necessary to create Dolly. It allowed me to get around diving down overly scientific articles for just a simple explanation. In addition, Campbell does a really great job of breaking down the ways Dolly’s creation kickstarter cloning as a lucrative operation. My argument was strengthened by what he outlined with both the treatment of surrogate mothers and all other ways cloning could be problematic, dangerous, and in relation to capitalistic practices. I think there is something to be said about even if a source is not from an esteemed institution there is still great worth to be found in it. Sometimes it is easier to create your own ideas from something that is not overly complicated to begin with so your energy is not spent in simply breaking down the language.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory : Reading Culture.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.  

One of the main reasons why hybridized creations are so anxiety inducing has to do with humanity's longstanding tradition of categorization. Seen often in fairy tales/ folklore, creatures that are not fully categorizable (like half human half beast creatures) are often villainized. Take werewolves for instance. They are neither completely man nor completely a beast therefore they become a vessel of social issues and can become an agent to dispense lessons of morality. Cohen explores this idea of the categorization crisis, as it is culturally applicable. He also discusses how the body of monstrous figures have been shaped and used for other purposes, like my previous example with the werewolf. My overall takeaway concerns perceptions of hybridized monstrosity and alternative uses of monstrous bodies (and how a body becomes monstrous). 

García-Sancho, M. Animal breeding in the age of biotechnology: the investigative pathway behind the cloning of Dolly the sheep. HPLS 37, 282–304 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-015-0078-6

Simply as a case study, I was really captivated by the situation of Dolly the sheep in the post-human conversation. Because of this I really wanted to dive deeper into her and her history. One thing this piece touched on was how Dolly reinvented biotechnology where "One of these unanticipated effects was that the boundaries between animal and human health became blurred. As a result of this, new professional spaces emerged and the identity of Dolly the sheep was reconfigured, from an instrument for livestock improvement in the farm to a more universal symbol of the new cloning age," (García-Sancho 282). Going back to my previous source on transplants, Dolly follows a similar train of thought when it comes to human vs nonhuman boundaries and also just how much of an impact a cyborg/ hybrid creature can have. The themes of birth and creation that Dolly is a vessel for I think will also serve me while over the course of this project.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2016, pp. 3–90. 

I’d heard mentions of Haraway’s work before, upon actually reading it found there were some useful parallels in her discussions on cyborgs and my research. She unpacks the existent layers in human and nonhuman dynamics/relationships while calling to arms a better understanding of how cyborg-like creatures are both at risk and threatening in our ever evolving world. I think it is also interesting just how far she goes with the cyborg both as a concept and as an influential entity in our past, present and future. They (cyborgs) “appear in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed,” (Haraway 11). They perfectly represent the liminal space between different entities. We (humans) relate to them because “ we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism— in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality,” (Haraway, 6). I wanted to further explore how I can be included into this category of hybrid. Where I think the relationships she analyzes and the concept of the cyborg dip into my previous themes of hybridization. 

Leckert, Oriana. “Inside the Eccentric World of Ethical Taxidermy Art.” Artsy, 27 Dec. 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-inside-eccentric-ethical-taxidermy-art. 

At the end of my project I think I can say that some of my assumptions on taxidermy have changed. Of course with a grandfather who hunts and mounts his kill, my view on it has always been rather narrow. What I found interesting in this piece was how effective it highlights taxidermy as both an art form and also as an emotional medium. In a sense, it argues for a new level of empathy to be included in the practice, which I think often gets a bad reputation for being male oriented with a focus more on mounting kills made while out hunting. It also makes a lot of people uncomfortable. People who get their pets taxidermied often are met with mixed reviews because of the assumption that it is a cruel state after death and is disrespectful. Perhaps they are right, however that post death state gains a new perspective that I found useful in my discussions of Dolly and her body after death. 

Lyons, Siobhan. Death and the Machine : Intersections of Mortality and Robotics. Palgrave Pivot. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0335-7.

Lyon’s main quandary is: can a robot die? It is a weighted question, to be sure, but she further elaborates and explores all the ways one can read/answer/interpret this question. This includes breaking down how we understand what it is to be a human, to be alive, types of deaths, how/if we can consider a robot a living thing, how we would define an "authentic" human to then constitute an "authentic" death, and all the gray areas in between. She discusses how human death is often prioritized which then makes way for our meanings of death to be limited to and only based on our own definition of it. For her, death is not a concrete solid kind of end, and how we can in fact allow for the term to extend well beyond our previous definitions. A death does not need to come from a "living" organism. With Can't Help Myself, with so much of the response towards it was empathizing with the robot's 'death,' this piece opens the door for a new idea of what death is.

Additional Sources/ Media:

Weng, Xiaoyu. “Can't Help Myself.” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/34812. 

“Artist Profile: Sun Yuan & Peng Yu.” YouTube, Guggenheim Museum, 3 Nov. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGV3Y28DtNw. Accessed 3 Apr. 2023. 

Spaghetti And Meatballs, director. He Looks so Tired. TikTok, TikTok, 14 Sep. 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/@spaghettandmeatballs/video/7143143272410516782?q=can%27t+help+myself&t=1678888768539. Accessed 3 Apr. 2023. 

Diana_clp1124, director. TikTok, Tiktok, 3 Dec. 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/@diana_clp1124/video/7173040205723634950?q=can%27t+help+myself&t=1678888768539. Accessed 3 Apr. 2023. 

“Characteristics of Living Things.” Science Learning Hub, 12 June 2012, https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/14-characteristics-of-living-things.