A Robotic Poet, Challenging Traditional Notions of Identity

: In 1985, Donna Haraway published “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism. The article puts together several ideas on some of the most discussed concepts of postmodernist state of mind in the 80’s. In the article, Haraway creates a base for discussion on feminism, identity politics, cybernetics, technological advancements and the article becomes a milestone in the posthuman theory.

Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” challenges traditional notions of identity. She argues that the cyborg represents a new kind of subjectivity that breaks down the boundaries between human and machine. It allows us to imagine new forms of resistance and liberation that are not based on essentialist and dualist notions of identity, but rather on the fluidity and flexibility of the cyborg subject. She argues that the cyborg represents a new kind of communication and connection between humans and machines, which has the potential to create new forms of social and political organisation.

In a series of different projects under the same title: Deniz Yılmaz, artist Bager Akbay challenges the human machine and body mind dualities in the context of creative production. “Deniz” is the most common genderless name and “Yılmaz” is the number one most common last name in Turkish. Deniz Yılmaz is an artificial intelligence algorithm that writes poems and plots them onto a paper as a CNC plotter. The “robot poet” then sends all of its poems to a national newspaper to make them published in the newspaper’s “National Poets” column.

With this artwork, Akbay raises multiple questions on several different concepts. While he was teaching how to write a similar algorithm for such a poet in one of the events connected to this artwork, on another occasion he was trying to sell the poems as “artwork”. Its language model was trained with similar poems that were sent to the same newspaper that it was aiming to get involved in. So it formed a kind of a cumulative consciousness and with it’s robotic art it turned them into a product rather than just data.

Throughout its career, Deniz Yılmaz became subject to multiple discussions. Badger’s main idea was to focus on “robot rights” as in the term civil rights and he did not name who the real artist was in this “artwork” or “research as an art practice” with his words. In conclusion, Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” is a visionary text that challenges traditional notions of identity and offers a new vision of subjectivity that is fluid, flexible, and hybrid. Bager Akbay’s project “Deniz Yılmaz” is an example, where he raises questions about the boundaries between human and machine, the role of AI in creative production, and the rights of robots. Together, these works invite us to imagine new forms of connection and communication between humans and machines, and to explore the potential for technology to create new forms of social and political organisation.