In a time defined by the relentless circulation of information and intensive digital saturation, it’s difficult not to feel nihilistic. We face uncertain terrain. It is difficult not to feel overloaded by the constant onslaught of information that circumnavigates us and the ever-approaching midnight of the doomsday clock. The despairing disposition that can be interpreted from Nihilism is a common mode of thinking in the modern world. Our experience of reality is increasingly shaped by technological progress, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructures. While nihilism emerges from the collapse of traditional meaning, posthumanism, particularly cyborg art, offers new possibilities of constructing meaning through embodied technological experience. This raises crucial questions, what happens to meaning in a post- human world no longer centered on the biological human experience and how can we use nihilism as a starting point to question this.
Nihilism is often defined as the belief that values are unfounded and existence lacks inherent meaning, a despairing viewpoint. When Nietzsche declared ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.,’ he was acknowledging the cultural shift in which the foundations that shaped the society he lived in were beginning to change. The pursuit of knowledge, and scientific understanding of the enlightenment period gradually made it increasingly difficult to centre God and the divinity of the human experience as the centre of all meaning. Nietzsche viewed the consequences of this as both a crisis and an opportunity, the death of God and the retraction of the threat of traditional divine punishment frees us to experiment with different ways to live, while simultaneously plunging us into nihilism. Nietzsche believed that we could eventually work through this state of meaninglessness and find an alternative course for humanity and become ‘over human’ or ‘Übermensch.’ Nietzsche did not view nihilism as an endpoint but as a catalyst that triggers the creation of new values. Can new technological progress provide conditions and tools for new values, conventions and meaning to emerge?
Posthumanism, a critical, philosophical framework emerges within this context, rethinking the human in relation to technology. It views biology, nature and technology as a vastly interdependent network, without hierarchy, removing humans as the dominant agent and dissolving the boundaries between them. In our continuous quest for progress, we have begun to transcend the limitations of the biological world and evolve into an increasingly cyborgian state, where technology is an inherent part of how we relate to and understand the world. If nihilism destabilises meaning through the death of divine authority, posthumanism furthers this by decentring the human experience as the primary source of meaning and questions the boundaries and hierarchies that we take as apparent.
Donna Haraway, a key post humanist theorist, defines a cyborg as: ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ Haraway’s definition emphasizes that the cyborg is not just a physical fusion of human and machine, but also a conceptual one that challenges boundaries between humans, animals, machines, the physical and non-physical. The cyborg transcends limitations, rejecting the old metaphysical structures of God, nature, and humans as a dominant organism, viewing the interconnectivity of nature and machine. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” (Haraway, 1985) The cyborg does not mourn the loss of divine origin but completely rejects the need for origin. Working within these frameworks we are actively positioned to reconstruct meaning rather than recover it and question the vast inequalities between human and non-human life.
Moon Ribas Performing ‘Waiting for Earthquakes’
Moon Ribas, a visual artist and a co-founder of the cyborg foundation, a platform for research and development of projects related to the creation of new senses. Through seismic implants in her feet, Ribas developed a seismic sense, translating this into physical movement in a piece called ‘Waiting for Earthquakes.’ Since having them removed she says she now experiences phantom seismic sensation that confuses her nervous system and physiology. She is interested to see how this transition to lacking a seismic sense will go. This is a great example of Cyborg Art, which is defined by the cyborg foundation as follows; ‘Cyborg Art is an artistic movement where artists extend their senses beyond their physical boundaries by applying technology into their bodies. The artwork of a cyborg artist is the new sense, but it’s an artwork that happens inside the artist. They are the only audience of their own art.’ Does Ribas’ work embody the idea of the ‘Übermensch,’ that Nietzsche identified, transcending physical and sensory limitation of perception, where meaning is no longer derived from external structures but generated through embodied experience?
Cyborg Art is a direct engagement with the creation of new conventions and meaning. The Cyborg Foundation defines this as; ‘If we extend our senses to perceive our planet in a deeper way, our behaviour and understanding towards it will probably change. We experience the world through our senses, so by creating new senses our experience of reality changes and gets deeper. We believe that by creating new senses we reveal reality that our natural senses don’t allow us to perceive.’ (Cyborg Foundation, n.d.) This internal generation of meaning can thus affect external conditions and allow us to engage with reality through new perspectives, a fundamental shift from loss (nihilism) to reconstruction (posthumanism) changing the conditions in which meaning is produced.
While Nietzsche identifies nihilism as the collapse of meaning following the death of God, Haraway extends this by rejecting the notion of a fixed human subject. Meaning is no longer discovered but constructed through technological and embodied practices. Cyborg art exemplifies this shift, suggesting that nihilism does not mark the end of meaning, but the conditions for its reinvention. This reinvention is a powerful tool for speculative thinking about future possibilities, positioning nihilism as a potential catalyst for change.
References:
-
Haraway, D. (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
-
Haraway, D. J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
-
Nietzsche, F. (1882) The Gay Science.
-
Residency Unlimited (2022) ‘Moon Ribas removes her seismic sensors’. Available at: https://residencyunlimited.org/moon-ribas-removes-her-seismic-sensors/ (Accessed: 7 March 2026).
-
Herbrechter, S. (2019) Posthumanism and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
-
Nietzsche, F. (1961) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Classics.
-
Cyborg Foundation (n.d.) Moon Ribas. Available at: https://www.fundacioncyborg.org/ (Accessed: 7 March 2026).The Ethics Centre (2018) Ethics Explainer: Post-Humanism. Available at: https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-post-humanism/
-
Cyborg Foundation (n.d.) Cyborg Foundation. Available at: https://www.fundacioncyborg.org/