Biophilosophy and the Politics of Life

Venue

Kioloa Coast Campus, NSW (22 July - 27 July) /
Humanities Research Centre, ANU, Canberra (28 July - 31 July)

Dates

Dates: 22 July - 31 July 2003

Conveners

Sandra Buckley, Brian Massumi, Stephen Zagala

International Visiting Scholars

Isabelle Stengers, Philosophy, Free University of Brussels
Simon Penny, interactive media artist and theorist, Arts and Engineering, University of California-Irvine
Brian Massumi, Communications, Université de Montréal
Maria Fernandez, Art History, Cornell University
Sandra Buckley, Canadian Centre for Architecture

Australian Visiting Scholars

Stelarc, performance and interactive media artist, Melbourne
Stephen Muecke, Cultural Studies, University of Technology, Sydney
Andrew Murphie, School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales
Pia Ednie-Brown, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT
Paul Minifie, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT
Melinda Cooper, Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, Macquarie University
Stephen Zagala, Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, ANU
Paul Bains, independent scholar and translator, Perth

Overview of Workshop

It is machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines.-Samuel Butler

The workshop will consider how life is being re-engineered and re-conceived by forces such as technological change and global capitalism and seeks to discover ways in which creative and cultural vitality can be fostered and sustained.

Life is in the transitions as much as the terms connected.-William James

Workshop Structure

This 10-day residency is designed to facilitate an open and interactive environment that challenges more traditional structures of intellectual exchange. A primary goal will be to ensure that participants have the maximum opportunity to interact with visiting international and Australian scholars.

The lecture format will be replaced by other technologies of 'intervention' developed around a commitment to a politics of group production rather than individual performance. The residency itself will involve a mix of intensive small group work sessions, plenary open sessions, and roundtables. The invited international and Australian scholar/practitioners will act as "facilitators" of work sessions built around the 3 core areas of the project:

The residency will also include voluntary informal evening sessions that are intended to encourage all participants to explore the focus areas of the VSP in a modes of creative exchange beyond the academic paper format. These projects will be developed around the interdisciplinary and multimedia characteristics of the work of a residency that is actively bringing together scholars and students from the humanities and sciences, architecture and multimedia and performance arts.

Visiting Scholars Program Description

It is machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines.-Samuel Butler

Throughout the last century, from Samuel Butler at its steam-powered beginning to Donna Haraway at its cybernetic close, the intensifyied interconnection between the human and the machine was a constant refrain. Entering the twentieth-first century, the frontiers of the human are fraying. "Man" has not only annouced its own philosophical end (Nietzsche, Foucault), it is well on the way to engineering itself into a self-transforming assemblage, continuing to function through its immanent connection with the molecular basis of its own vitality (genomics). At the same time, it is working overtime to hack its own supposedly defining capacity "for thought" directly into the material substrate of its latest technological medium (biocomputing; neuron-silicon interface). The boundary has become fuzzy not only between the human and the machine, but between matter and thought, and the living and the inorganic. The question of the meaning of the human, and its end, has broadened into a question of life, and its means of persisting. Toward what end?

Any attempt to distinguish between an artificial and natural system, between the dead and the living, runs counter to the course of evolution.-Henri Bergson

Abstracting the machine

Increasingly, technology is no longer content to manipulate things. It strives to return to an earlier moment, seizing the principles from which things arise, in order to generate always more, in always greater variation. The object of technology is no longer the thing, but the matrix of its variable emergence: the abstract conditions of possibility that power its coming to be. This is often analyzed as a priority of code (genetic, digital) over content (Baudrillard). But it is perhaps more pointedly a technological capture of process over product. If the process is emergence, then what is being captured is nothing less than powers of existence themselves: potential being. Or, in a word, the "virtual".

Life contains only virtuals.-Gilles Deleuze

In taking up the virtual, is technology taking on vitality?

Powering the abstract

Political economists tell us that goods, in the the "information economy," are increasingly "immaterial" or abstract. The prime values are "intangible assets" (experiences, relations, processes, matrices, styles) that are imbued with the power to generate not just things, but more and more different things: pure variation. Further production is the product. Capitalism has become a self-feeding machine that ravenously produces and consumes proliferating variations of its own unfolding. By capturing powers of existence, technology has alimented the economic system with a potential for self-production akin to what biologists call "autopoiesis" and define as life. "Biopower" (Foucault, Agamben): this is not just a profitable power over life, but a life-like power animating the profit system. The new economy is not "global" because it is controlled by world powers. It is global because it is a worldwide power, in its own right. What exactly are its mechanisms? Is it disciplinary, controlling by way of new mechanisms, or do its operations raise affirmation to a new level? What is certain is that

There is nothing, no "naked life," no external standpoint, that can be posed
outside this field permeated by money.-Negri/Hardt

If there is no life outside of it , can there be any resisting it?

* * *

This visiting scholar's program will explore some of the techno-connections between life virtuality, and capital, remembering that

Life is in the transitions as much as the terms connected.-William James

Biographies

Visiting Scholars Program

Paul Bains is the co-translator of Felix Guattari's last work Chaosmosis: an Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (1995). He is also the translator of Isabelle Stengers' Power and Invention: Situating Science (1997). Paul has published essays on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Raymond Ruyer, and Humberto Maturana. His Phd thesis was entitled The Primacy of Relations and was concerned with the action of signs (semiosis) and the ontology of relations.

Sandra Buckley has held positions as Chair of East Asian Studies at McGill University (Montreal), Chair of Japanese at Griffith University and Director of the Centre for Arts and Humanities at the State University of New York-Albany. She is presently a senior scholar in residence at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Her early research interests developed around questions of gender and urban spaces in contemporary Japan and a strong focus on popular culture. Her more recent work is located at the theoretical convergence of urban cultural movements, popular culture, new digital technologies and alternative practices of community formation. Her current research project at the Canadian Centre for Architecture is entitled "Mobile Architectures" and is an analysis of new trends in youth culture, community formations, and movement in urban spaces in the context of emerging 3G mobile communication technologies. She is a co-founding editor of the Theory Out of Bounds book series with University of Minnesota Press, editor and primary contributor to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture, author of Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminisms (University of California, 1995).

Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow in the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy at Macquarie University, NSW. Her current research is concerned with notions of growth, crisis and limits at the intersection of the life sciences and economic theory.

Pia Ednie-Brown is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University where she teaches design and theory. In 2003 she launched a new a transdisciplinary postgraduate program at RMIT's Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory. Her work exploring nuances in digitally assisted design practices has been published in journals such as Daidalos and the Architectural Design Academy Editions. Prior to RMIT, she worked in six architectural practices in Perth, Melbourne and London, and co-founded an architectural practice and public gallery in Perth. During this period she co-produced a radio show 'Artbeat' and worked on the board of management of the Perth Fringe Festival (Artrage). She has written scripts for animated films, one of which was awarded first prize for excellence in the Metropolis short film festival (WA). For the duration of 1999, she worked in RMIT's Interactive Information Institute (Icubed) in a group of 5 PhD candidates that produced research reports for Telstra while individually working on their doctorates. This group was awarded the 2000 BHERT Award, for "Outstanding Achievement in Collaboration in Education and Training."

María Fernández is an art historian (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1993) whose interests center on post-colonial studies, electronic media theory, Latin American art and the intersections of these fields. She has published essays on these topics in the journals Third Text, Art journal, n.paradoxa, Fuse and Mute. She has taught at various institutions including the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Connecticut, and Vermont College, Norwich University. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Art History at Cornell University.

Brian Massumi teaches in the Communication Department of the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992) and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993) and editor of A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002) and The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Stephen Muecke holds a personal chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has worked extensively in Indigenous Australian Cultural Studies and is embarking on Transnational Cultural Studies of the Indian Ocean. He is co-author of Reading the Country (Fremantle, 1984, 1996) and author of Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (University of NSW Press, 1992) and No Road (bitumen all the way) (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997). He edited (with Adam Shoemaker) the 'lost' manuscript of the first major Indigenous writer in Australia, David Unaipon: Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (University of Melbourne Press, 2001). He is co-editor with Chris Healy of the Cultural Studies Review, and a recent book is a volume edited with Gay Hawkins for Rowman and Littlefield: Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (2002).

Andrew Murphie is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communications at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He has written on Deleuze, Guattari and technology, electronic music and arts, theories of the machine, and is co-author, with John Potts, of Culture and Technology (London:Palgrave, 2003). He is currently engaged in research at the intersection of digital aesthetics, poststructualism and post-connectionist theories of cognition.

Simon Penny is an artist, theorist and teacher in the field of Interactive Media Art. His art practice consists of interactive and robotic installations, which have been exhibited in the US, Australia and Europe. Current and recent projects include: Bedlam, a telerobotic/telematic interactive installation with machine vision, spatialised interactive sound and custom pneumatic robotics. (A collaboration with Bill Vorn, Concordia University Montreal. 2001-); Body Electric, immersive interactive installation in collaboration with Dr Malcolm McIver, the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, CalTech, and Art Center College of Design Pasadena.FugitiveII, a machine vision driven interactive video installation commisioned by the Australian Center for the Moving Image. Previous projects include: Petit Mal, an Autonomous Robotic Artwork (1992-5); Sympathetic Sentience, a multi agent interactive sound invironment (with Jamieson Schulte, 1994-6); Fugitive, a machine vision driven interactive video installation (1996-7); and Traces, a project for the CAVE immersive environment with custom multi-camera machine vision (1998-9). His essays on Digital Culture and Electronic Media Art have been translated into seven languages. He edited the anthology Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press 1995). Penny is Professor of Arts and Engineering at University of California-Irvine and Director of the newly established graduate program in Arts, Computation and Engineering (www.ace.uci.edu).

Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Faculty of Art and Design at Ohio State University in Columbus. Stelarc has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin. For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. Current projects include the EXTRA EAR (a surgically constructed ear that coupled with a modem and a wearable computer will act as an internet antenna), MOVATAR (an intelligent avatar with a physical body that performs in the real world), EXTENDED ARM (a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions), HEXAPOD (a walking robot that looks like an insect but walks like dog) and PROSTHETIC HEAD (a 3D avatar head which will speak to the person who interrogates it). Website: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au

Isabelle Stengers is professor of philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. In 1993 she was awarded the Grand Prix in philosophy by the Académie Française. She is the author most recently of Cosmopolitiques (7 volumes) and Penser avec Whitehead. Her works available in English include: Power and Invention: Situating Science, The Invention of the Modern Sciences, A History of Chemistry, The Invention of the Modern Sciences, A History of Chemistry, A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan (co-written with Leon Chertok). She is co-author with Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine of Order Out of Chaos: A New Dialogue with Nature and The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the Laws of Nature.

Stephen Zagala (né O'Connell) is currently pursuing a PhD in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. His thesis is concerned with the cultivation of dynamic visual forms in the Melanesian archipelago of Vanuatu.

Enquiries

Leena Messina, Programs Manager, Humanities Research Centre, ANU
Email: Leena.Messina@anu.edu.au