The final image of this excessive essay is Cyborg, a 1989 painting by Lynn Randolph, in which the boundaries of a fatally transgressive world, ruled by the Subject and the Object, give way to the borderlands, inhabited by human and unhuman collectives (Figure 12).53 These borderlands suggest a rich topography of combinatorial possibility. That possibility is called the Earth, here, now, this elsewhere, where real, outer, inner, and virtual space implode. The painting maps the articulations among cosmos, animal, human, machine, and landscape in their recursive sidereal, bony, electronic, and geo­ logical skeletons. Their combinatorial logic is embodied; theory is corporeal; social nature is articulate. The stylized DIP switches of the integrated circuit board on the human figure's chest are devices that set the defaults in a form intermediate between hardwiring and software control—not unlike the mediating structural-functional anat­ omy of the feline and hominid forelimbs, especially the flexible, homologous hands and paws. The painting is replete with organs of touch and mediation, as well as with organs of vision. Direct in their gaze at the viewer, the eyes of the woman and the cat center the whole composition. The spiraling skeleton of the Milky Way, our galaxy, appears behind the cyborg figure in three different graphic displays made possible by high-technology visualizing apparatuses. In the place of virtual space in my semiotic square, the fourth square is an imaging of the gravity well of a black hole. Notice the tic-tac-toe game, played with the European male and female astrological signs (Venus won this game); just to their right are some calculations that might appear in the mathematics of chaos. Both sets of symbols are just below a calculation found in the Einstein papers. The mathematics and games are like logical skeletons. The keyboard is jointed to the skeleton of the planet Earth, on which a pyramid rises in the left mid-foreground. The whole painting has the quality of a meditation device. The large cat is like a spirit animal, a white tiger perhaps. The woman, a young Chinese student in the United States, figures that which is human, the universal, the generic. The "woman of color," a very particular, problematic, recent collective identity, resonates with local and global conversations.54 In this painting, she embodies the still oxymoronic simultaneous statuses. 329


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