Matthew Biro’s spirited account of the cyborg in the Berlin Dada movement reveals how artists imagined new forms of hybrid identity and challenged contemporaries to reflect on their own technologically-mediated lives. Engaging with politics, perception, embodiment, and the urban experience to define what it means to be human, Dada artists developed constellations of questions that remain central to artistic practices today. Brushing history against the grain, as Benjamin urged us to do, Matthew Biro combines formal analysis with critical theory to understand Weimar Germany’s profound cultural legacy.

Impressively well-researched, The Dada Cyborg provides a series of insightful readings of various montage works and activities in order to reconstruct the Dada movement as one with which we—as citizens of a cyborgian age—should be deeply familiar.

In this highly original, well-researched text, Biro grafts contemporary theory to formal and contextual analysis to examine manifestations of machine-human hybrids in Dada media including performance, literature, advertising, and art.

The research for this volume moves well beyond art proper, providing a powerful synthesis of science, technology, politics, and culture.

Rejecting a particular fixed definition of the cyborg, Biro enriches the concept by introducing, employing, and critiquing both Norbert Wiener’s implicit, mechanistic, and humanist definition and Donna Haraway’s explicit, unbounded, and posthumanist version. In doing so, he reveals the very malleable nature that is pertinent to Dadaist artistic practices of appropriation, fragmentation, and bizarre juxtapositions. . . . Biro convincingly shows that the Berlin Dadaists’ journals, performances, happenings, media hoaxes, and lifestyles, as well as their cyborgian images, demonstrate issues of the body, mass media, and everyday life that corresponded with the post-World War II concept of the cyborg.

The Dada Cyborg is easily the best book on Berlin Dada in English. It is well-researched, fluidly written, and covers most of the essential ground.

Within the trajectories that Biro establishes and follows in this excellently written and well-researched volume, we come to see that the figure of the Dada cyborg assumes a multiplicity of possible incarnations. At once a figure of the potentials of a hybrid identity, a figure for the dangers of a technically seared ‘new man’ borne of the battlefield, and a figure that anticipates the cybernetic systems and posthumanist horizons of contemporary thought, Biro’s illumination of the Berlin Dada cyborg provides an essential and compelling view with which to understand the range of critical, art historical, sociopolitical, and cultural strands taken up by this important movement.

Dense, richly researched and theoretically venturesome.