READING is an AI-generated video: the face of a baby created by artificial intelligence recites Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto word by word through synthetic voice. The reading is steady, mechanical, and without emotion, removing the text’s original sense of body and feeling. What the audience hears is a de-subjectivized voice—information is continuously delivered, while the question of whether “understanding” takes place remains unresolved. Today, when algorithms can perfectly store, copy, and output text, reading is being turned into a kind of infrastructure—efficient and scalable, but gradually disconnected from experience, context, and responsibility. The work therefore asks: does meaning still require embodied subjectivity and situated practice to become “understanding”? Or, within technical systems, has the value of knowledge already become identical to its ability to be called upon and circulated?

 

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This change also rearranges the structure of “who is speaking.” The voice no longer comes from inner experience, but from computation and synthesis; what remains is only the continuity of sentences, not the formation of a standpoint. The work places the chain of “speaking—understanding—trust” into tension: when output no longer depends on comprehension, how are interpretation and credibility reassigned? Is reading still an ethical act, or only the execution of a technical protocol?

 

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By returning to Haraway’s imagination of the “cyborg”, the work does not create a new myth of human–machine hybridity, but instead tests a reality: where are the boundaries between subject and medium being rewritten, and what kinds of meaning can survive once separated from the body? It also connects to debates on the politics of contemporary images: when circulation outweighs context, how do texts and images lose judgment while gaining power through replication? The work does not provide answers, but offers a space that asks viewers to position themselves between “available information” and “unverifiable understanding,” and to rethink the responsibility of reading, the limits of subjectivity, and the conditions under which thought takes shape in the technological age.