Portland, Oregon, Hosts First-Ever Cyborg Camp

Portland, Oregon -- On Saturday, Dec. 6, Portland, Oregon's thriving tech community hosted a brand-new one day conference: CyborgCamp, held at CubeSpace in southeast Portland.. The idea of CyborgCamp was born on micro-blogging site Twitter, which many people in the Portland tech community use on a daily basis. Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case was one of those who came up with the idea and spearheaded the planning. A cyborg, says Case, is "symbiotic fusion of human and machine." Since technology has already become so integrated with human life today, Case (like UC Santa Cruz professor Donna Haraway) considers us all cyborgs.

As a writer who spends a great deal of time attached to her computer, I decided to attend CyborgCamp to find out more about the relationship between humans and technology.

But why was this called CyborgCamp? "Camp" has recently become the term used for a mini-conference, often only one day. The term comes from the popular tech conferences known as BarCamps. These are user-generated conferences, also known as un-conferences. They are typically free or cheap for attendees (CyborgCamp cost $10 to register), relying on sponsorship to cover costs. There is often no set agenda; participants can come up with their own session topics, and anyone can lead or facilitate a session during the camp.

CyborgCamp 2008 did include three planned keynote sessions. The first was a talk by Bill DeRouchey on how technology influences culture: "Is Machine Language Expanding Human Language?" Participants could choose to attend this session or to participate in un-conference sessions on "What Do Cyborgs Eat?" and "Immersive Environments."

The second keynote was by Lia Hollander. Hollander has an insulin pump connected to her body to manage her Type I diabetes. She discussed how technology keeps her alive and gives her a much better quality of life than she had before she started using the pump.

The third keynote was given by Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki format. Cunningham talked about (and demonstrated) using technology to track pictures and sound, and showed visual representations of tracking sunlight over time, and tracking sound waves over time (this was a little beyond me, but looked cool). Un-conference sessions were also available during these two sessions.

The time following the third keynote was completely given over to unconference sessions, such as "Left Behind: The Singularity and the Developing World" and a session on creative thinking by concept creator and strategist Hideshi Hamaguchi of LUNARR.

One highlight of CyborgCamp was the accompanying live video stream, provided by Joe Christenson of BlazeStreaming. All events occuring in the main conference room were streamed live to the internet for anyone to view, free of charge. A text chat room accompanied the live stream, so that online participants could discuss the sessions, and at times, they were able to actually participate in sessions! I actually left the conference after the third keynote, but was able to view the live stream later, and even had one of my discussion questions brought up in the conference room by someone who was there in person. In addition, people from Los Angeles, New Jersey, Germany, England, and Japan were able to participate in the conference via live stream. The video operator at times projected the chat room discussion onscreen in the conference room, so that in-person participants could view the online discussion.

Videos from CyborgCamp will also be posted on the CyborgCamp blog at http://www.cyborgcamp.com.

SOURCES

Amber Case, "A Short Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology", http://oakhazelnut.com/2008/08/23/a-short-introduction-to-cyborg-anthropology/

Susan Stryker, Stephen Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader, Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=HBRR1isU-VAC&pg=PA103&dq=%22a+cyborg+manifesto%22+donna+haraway&ei=wGk8Sc24No_AlQTi5bWPBg#PPA568,M1

Wikipedia, "BarCamp", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp