“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” (Haraway 2016, 5).

The world we live in is shaped and structured through boundaries. It gives us a sense of ease to know where everything belongs. Donna Haraway defines the cyborg as a hybrid entity that is simultaneously fictionalized, yet also exists all around us. The cyborg pushes our understandings of who/what belongs where and why. Taking from Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Theory, physically hybridized bodies are anxiety inducing because they resist any kind of easy categorization, thus they exist in a liminal space (Cohen 1996, 6). Over the course of my project I aim to take this idea of hybridity and push it to other spaces of thinking. I’m really interested in those moments when a binary is challenged, and especially the constructions that make a machine a machine, an animal an animal etc… I hope to explore these states of becoming and forms of hybridization both physically (from within the physical body/form), theoretically (how they are constructed), and how the cyborg/hybrid manipulates our understandings of life vs/and death. I will use two case studies in my exploration; that of Dolly the Sheep and the art installation Can’t Help Myself.