As a new student in the ACTLAB at UT, I was a little nervous about my first project. I come from the Department of Communication Studies, where I am a Ph.D. student. However, I embraced Sandy Stone's TRANS: DANGEROUS BORDER VIOLATIONS class and the idea that it would encourage me to take a brief departure from the world of academic research and writing and stretch my creative abilities a bit. The first project in our class led me to explore the idea of the RHIZOME as explored by Deleuze and Guattari.
The common thread between both the PostTransexual Manifesto (click on Sandy below to read it in its entirety) and the Cyborg Manifesto (click on the technogoddess to read it in its entirety) seems to be the blurring of distinctions between seemingly binary categories (body/mind, nature/technology, male/female, science/art, individual/community, human/machine, etc.). To capture this blurring, and to try to make it a little less intimidating, I constructed my "Sixth Grade Science Project" model of a rhizomatic depiction of the two manifestos. Using wooden dowels (covered in paper printouts of the two manifestos which I glued to the dowels) to connect styrofoam balls, the model shows how some of the major concepts from the two manifestos are interconnected.
