Women/Machine Relationships. Investigating the Body within Cyberculture

The science of cybernetics - the study of automated, self regulated control - was first investigated after World War II and conceptually mythologised and popularised in the writing of the cyberpunk authors, such as William Gibson. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in Necromancer (1986) to suggest the imaginary space within computer networks. Although at the time his computer landscapes represented a fictional futuristic fantasy, many of the cybernetic possibilities he discussed are now available. These technological environments include artificial intelligence, supercomputers, virtual reality and the global computer networks. The concept of cyberculture has been adopted from its fictional background to denote an area of cultural activity at the user/machine interface, a space where humans can enact a dialogue with computers or other technologies. The concern here is with the relationship between 'interactive technologies' (the machine agents) and the users (the human agents).Arts, Education & Law Group, Queensland College of ArtNo Full Tex