Wolves are one of the most beloved and hated animals the world over. In the United States, one of the most controversial questions in environmental policy is whether, where and how to coexist with wolves. Routinely portrayed as a science-driven matter of natural resource management, the ‘wolf wars’ are a highly politicized conflict over the moral value of animals and nature, the efforts of local and national elites jockeying for power, and a cultural conflict over what it means to live sustainably. Because discourse is fluid and interpenetrating, there can be no singular or final classification of how wolves are coded. We can, however, identify discourses from ethics, science, politics and culture that are particularly important in shaping our individual and collective interpretations of wolves. From these discourses come ideas of wolves as biological machines, functional units of ecosystems, avatars of human virtue and vice, to name a few. The interplay of these discourses has a substantial impact on wolf recovery in regions like New England. The interpretation of discourse as a means of unravelling our coding of wolves also carries important lessons about interdisciplinarity in fields like human-animal studies.

What we call novels that foreground nonhuman animal subjects as talking characters or narrators determines who reads and discusses them, how they are marketed, and whether or not they are considered worthy of attention by scholars and historians of literature. How are the genres to which such novels are assigned regarded? Are such novels categorized as kiddy lit, young adult fare, or adult novels? An increasing number of college English professors now structure their courses around the subject/theme of animals. But how are these courses being categorized? Do they get called Animal Studies courses, Human-Animal Studies courses, or Animals in Literature courses, and what does each naming suggest about how they fit into a larger curricular scheme? While the focus of all of the courses may in fact be animals, each individual course title speaks volumes on the type of course it actually is. Perhaps, instead of accusing novels like Watership Down or Giraffe of anthropomorphism, we should, after recognizing that authors must see other animals through the mirror of self, see such labeling as evidence of the anthropocentrism that characterizes the Western Culture Story and use such novels as Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael uses Old Testament stories to encourage readers to see beyond the human to the animal self.

This paper uncovers both the suppression and expression of animal voices in contemporary graphic novels (comic books). Animals have been treated as puppets in many artistic fields, mostly used as a way to mirror and comment on human issues. Rarely are nonhumans given the freedom to comment on their own status in creative venues. Contemporary writers and artists have begun to resist the constraint of the traditional six-panel super-hero-themed comic book. This provides room for the dynamic exploration of a medium that is no longer limited to a child-like vision of the world. Comics now broach the full range of adult topics, including war, sex, love, poverty, racism, sexism, and more. As a result, animals, too, have become more three-dimensional. While nonhumans continue to be forced into the role as the mouthpiece of humans, they are also occasionally afforded communication in their own right as sentient, sapient beings. In some cases, authors even attempt to explore the minds of the animals they depict, placing their characters in a contemporary context in order to comment on the state of animals in our world. Still, there remains a fuzzy line between authors who reflexively rely on speciesist manipulations of their animal-characters as pseudo-humans, and those who let the animals speak truthfully for themselves. By extracting the implicit meanings in their text and drawings, it is possible to glean the author’s cultural coding of animals as both mirrors for humans and as inherently valuable beings

The AstroDime Transit Authority is a Think-Tank and public service organization, and media art collective that considers issues of transportation, communication and world and intergalactic citizenship. It is specifically interested in issues of race, class, gender and culture with respect to how human transportation and communication systems are constructed. In addition, the ATA consults and advises in sustainable communication and transportation systems off and on this planet. Its research includes curated video shows, surveys and performances which reveal and explore these issues. Media artists and educators sam smiley and Bebe Beard will represent the AstroDime Transit Authority.

Danielle Georges is a writer and educator. Her teaching and writing interests include contemporary American poetry, Caribbean literature, post-colonial literature, translation, and historiography. She is the author of a book of poems, Maroon (Curbstone Press, 2001), and has had work appear in a number of literary journals and anthologies.

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo is a new media artist, educator, and technologist. She teaches, works, performs, and publishes in the areas of electronic literature, interactive installation, time-based media, integrated learning, and design education. She most recently co-authored a chapter in the MIT Press book, New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (June 2006). Lawson is currently Assistant Professor and Director of the Integrated Design Curriculum at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

A recent “Mind/Body” special issue of Time Magazine, offers a “User’s Guide” to the human brain. Included among articles about consciousness, deception, stress, and mental time-travel are scores of artist renderings that map the brain and mind onto the head. Reminiscent of ancient cartography, these images code the brain as (un)charted territory. As one Time author comments: “Modern scientists have done a far better job of things, dividing the brain into multiple, discrete regions with satisfyingly technical names . . . and mapping particular functions to particular sites. Here lives abstract thought; here lives creativity; here is emotion; here is speech. But what about here and here and here and here—all the countless places and ways the brain continues to baffle us? Here still be dragons.” In this paper, I argue that these representations are not as uncritical or locationalist as they appear. Many of these renderings are, instead, illustrative of Luria, Frankin and Stacey’s conception of “nature seconded.” They reference mapmaking in very specific ways that redress scientific coding and re-evaluate the realism of brain scans while co-opting and displacing the brain as anatomical organ. The newly coded brains in Time and other popular media remind us that, as Baudrillard notes, “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.” Through a rhetorical examination of art, scientific image and text, I examine the contemporary and overlapping territories of brain science and brain art.

In Alice Weaver Flaherty’s critical memoir, The Midnight Disease, the excessive and voluminous writing associated with manic hypergraphia is understood as the result of temporal lobe epilepsy. In Flaherty’s text, like most work connecting regional brain activity with particular reactions or understandings, there is reliance on brain diagrams. Such diagrams employ a very particular rhetoric and diagrammatics that has developed in ways that are particular to how the brain is understood and represented. Brain diagramatics consist in large part of cross-sections, cut-aways, the portrayal of separate regions, color-coding, transparency, opacity, and 3-dimensional modeling. This array of tropes in the rhetoric of brain representation belies scientific and popular knowledge about brains. Furthermore, in Flaherty’s work on hypergraphia and other crossover projects like it that go to neuroscience to explain the arts, brain diagrammatics significantly inflect how the brain is understood in relation to human expression. Cut-aways, for instance, have become integral to explaining the significance of the cerebral cortex, while the rhetoric of opacity has been used to portray brains as integral to larger human bodies and neuro/circulatory systems. In this paper, by cracking the code of brain diagrams, I will show the significance of each representational strategy in relation to specific claims about cognition and the arts.

The power of the tiny is a recurring spiritual motif played out in parabolic, personal, and phenomenal contexts in the Old and New Testaments.

Christ’s parables dignify the small and the humble with their paradoxical power. A mustard seed grows into a tree lodge for the fowls. The good seed in good soil yields a hundredfold. The original seeds of every species reappear in countless fresh shoots. A speck of leaven flavors the whole lump of flour. The little flock need fear nothing because the Father has given them the kingdom. Two little mites of a poor widow outweigh the offerings of all the opulent. A little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Great strength abides in the mouth of suckling infants. The symbolic keys given to Peter withstand the gates of hell.

The minute dust particles become Adam’s building blocks and of his endless generations. The childless patriarch Abraham has his progeny in numbers as great as the dust of the earth. Bethlehem-Ephrata, though “the least of the thousands of cities of Judah,” is the prophetic birth-site of the Messiah.

As a phenomenon, the power of the tiny can either be a natural law or a prophetic principle, which turn human contexts into lived parables. The miracles of Cana’s wine and of the loaves show their abounding potentially ceaseless. A little one shall become a thousand and a small one a strong nation, the little nation of Israel is told. More strikingly, Moses reminds his nation that it has become God’s “peculiar treasure” among all world nations because of their size—the smallest. “Who has despised small beginnings?,” asks Zechariah, whose little plumb line signals the leveling of the threatening mountain.

The contest of quantity is resolved in the power of the small.

Every man has a secret in him, many die without finding it and will never find it because they are dead, it no longer exists, nor do they. I am dead and risen again with the jeweled key of my last spiritual casket. It is up to me now to open it in the absence of any borrowed impression, and its mystery will emanate in a sky of great beauty. (Mallarmé. Letter dated July 16, 1866)

Mallarmé’s secret is a code. Its mystery ticks through eternity like an internal clock, not only calibrating but also directing. It is a dynamic speech act, and evolutionary imperative, transcendent and material at the same time, deeply implicated in events but beyond them. The code describes reality, it also makes it. It is not the animating principle, but it animates. It is the machine that connects desire and an outcome that is always contingent, never inevitable. If we can understand our code, we have performed the right political act.

This paper uses techniques of performance to trace the rhizomatic incursion of the code ‘Modernity’ across an alien landscape. It is embodied within Georgiana Molloy and is revealed in observation of her far flung, colonial odyssey. She arrives on the West coast of Australia in 1830, one of the first settlers of the new Swan River Colony. She is 24, pregnant and ready to colonize. In time, she plants out a flower garden with seeds she has brought with her on the ship. Under the encouragement of the distant and mysterious botanist, Dr Mangles, Georgiana collects native specimens, dries, presses and labels them and sends them back to Kew Gardens. As they are placed within the Linnean system and held within the confines of her own proto-Darwinian culture, their previous emplacement in an Indigenous environment is uprooted, deterritorialized and for the most part, discarded.

Inspired by the popular ethnographic displays of the 19^th century, and their insatiable desire to colonize, classify and appropriate, I present the historical figure of Georgiana Molloy as an exhibit; a curiosity of natural science.

For centuries Swedish poetry has been dominated by references to nature, and nature’s processes, more so than many other European national literatures. One reason for this is an intertwined relationship between nature and culture we can trace back to the works of Linnaeus. In Swedish poetry cultured landscapes may be seen as even more “natural” than wild ones. This relation seems to inspire the poets with a new set of metaphors, and symbols, which are connected to Swedish national history and the rapid, but comparative late, urbanization of the Swedish society. The intermingling of nature and culture is an essential trait for the regional poetry of the south of Sweden (Scania), a region famous for its vast farmlands, and a certain, often oppositional attitude towards the government in Stockholm. My presentation deals with questions concerning modern poetry (in this context, that means poetry from the first half of the 20th century) and its relation to the “natural”, and the human habitat. Theoretically the paper is grounded in ecocriticism, and the works of Terry Gifford, Jonathan Bate, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Greg Garrard. I will thus stress the “ecological” perspective taken by the authors, a perspective giving man access to the necessary code of nature that will enable him a deeply rooted contact with the soil of his region. For this I will in this presentation use the term “dwelling” (derived from Heidegger), and the ideas put forth by Simon Schama in his study Landscape and Memory.

Appreciative attention to insects, worms, parasites, and various microscopic organisms has become surprisingly common among nature-oriented poets of the past fifty years. Focusing on A. R. Ammons and Theodore Roethke, with additional discussion of Gary Snyder and Pattiann Rogers, I will argue that the use of lowly animals as poetic subjects is correlated with the rise of the postwar environmental movement and the increasing prominence of ecology as a discrete scientific discipline. Whereas nineteenth-century poets usually depicted conventionally beautiful aspects of the natural world, many contemporary poets reject this traditional understanding of nature as a collection of relatively static large-scale creatures and landscapes. Instead, contemporary ecopoems employ small-scale organisms to represent the natural world’s flux and its ongoing interplay between order and disorder. In such poems, invertebrates and microbes represent the dynamism of natural processes that foster ecological cycles of growth and decay. The inclusion of minute creatures in poetry is based on a fundamentally scientific view of the world, relying on the close observation of nature and, in some cases, a familiarity with species accessible only through the microscope. However, the acceptance of science as a fundamental approach to nature has not resulted in an absolute rationalism. A major thrust of much contemporary ecopoetry has been to integrate scientific and spiritual perceptions of the natural world, and I will show that scientifically-informed attention to small-scale nature has been one way by which poets have reformulated old tropes of nature as a signifier of sacred truths.

If I am invited to participate in “CODE”, I will develop and deliver an oral and visual presentation entitled Survival Principal: the Art of Nurturing Nature which discusses the role of contemporary environmental art in distilling practices and gestures from other disciplines, including literature and science, in the formulation of new activist art strategies. The theme of the Twenty-First Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Art, “CODE”, will be addressed in my paper through efforts to define and explicate historical Western codes and principles concerning humanity’s interactions with nature (for instance the traditional Judeo-Christian ethos of human dominion over all life forms) and the ways in which these precepts have been altered and reshaped by growing public awareness of grave threats to environmental health worldwide. Through my research and writing, I am interested in identifying and exploring individual artists as well as collaborative efforts involving artists, writers and scientists that connect and combine research on biological processes and cycles, environmental awareness and activism, and technological advancements, in projects that truly nurture nature, expressing exceptional artistic merit and effective public outreach. Drawing upon the ideas and thoughts of influential writers, critics and artists, I will explain and contextualize these projects within a framework of ideas about nature and “the wilderness” which have been evolving on the American continent since the arrival of the earliest Europeans.

Poor George Adamski! Originator of the contemporary alien abduction narrative, Adamski felt validated when he received mail about his work from the US State Department. Unfortunately for Adamski, the letter was a hoax written by Gray Barker on stolen letterhead. Barker was a crucial and controversial figure in the field of ufology. Was he a researcher and believer in the truth that was out there, or was he nothing more than a hoaxer? I address this question, situated the fringe of knowledge and evidence, in terms of Gray Barker’s writing practice. In the Adamski case, or in other paradigmatic encounters—such as the Philadelphia Experiment, the mysterious story of the teleportation of USS Eldrige from Philadelphia to Newport and back and the subsequent coverup—Barker was the central node in discourse networks—e.g. newsletters, correspondence, small press books, but also reports from the Office of Naval Research and elsewhere within the government—where saucerian and official modes of discourse collapse and communicate. Maurice Blanchot referred to the “great hoax” as both the mythifying and self-validating nature of discourse, on the one hand, and the limit of this “hyper-sense” of discourse in literature, on the other; that is, a limit written to/in the non-present and non-absent other. Barker’s writing or hoaxing is a literary practice in this way: a pseudo-engagement in the discourse of ufology; a joking put-on and classic American con; and a limit text that solicits and produces hopes for evidence beyond current discursivities, hopes latent in the interior communication of science and its others.

Gray Barker published the first account of the Men in Black in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The Men in Black are best known from the two movies that carried their name in which they humorously help humanity. Their initial portrayal, however, was far more menacing. Barker describes three men in black suits walking in and demanding that stories about the recently seen UFOs remain unspoken. The depiction of the Men in Black changes over time, from Gray Barker’s “three men in black suits” to Alfred Bender’s supernatural reinvigoration of the phenomenon and finally through the numerous permutations that emerged from this initial literature. Some accounts suggested the Men in Black were sinister government agents while others concluded they were aliens with paranormal abilities such as materializing out of the air. My presentation will trace the development of the Men in Black while exploring their connections with the ends of knowledge. “They knew too much” is a recurring phrase that highlights the Men in Black as a higher level of order: an unknown other that knows the self, an arbiter of knowledge. The correlation between the Men in Black and the advanced technology of UFOs also invites questions regarding their relationship to the aims and practice of science. My research will emerge from the web of books, possessions, and correspondence that constitutes the Gray Barker archive.

Gray Barker adroitly integrated a host of diverse texts into what constitutes an ultimate postmodern novel/anti-novel, the Gray Barker archive: a hodge podge of correspondences, newsletters, sci-fi stories, photographs, alien seeds, amateur metaphysical musings, folklore, etc., most of which have the alien Other as a central thematic. West Virginia, where he resided and which Barker dubbed “the mini Bermuda triangle,” was indeed a rich resource for Barker’s vivid fictive and myth-making imagination. West Virginia’s location at the margins of American cultural and economic life lent itself to a production of strange folklore texts: mysterious swamp gas light shows, ghost stories, monsters and alien abductions. One of the “texts” from which Barker drew is the Flatwoods Monster encounter of September 12, 1952 in Braxton County WV. In this paper I will look at the way the Flatwoods Monster emerged as a text both at the local level as folklore and at the national level as one of series of alien encounters during the Cold War. I’m particularly interested in the way Barker folded the Flatwoods monster myth into his extant archive and the way he helped to develop and define the myth. The Flatwoods Monster emerged as a strange hybrid between monster, alien, and rocket ship. What is most intriguing about the Flatwoods Monster is just how early, like other alien abduction texts, it prognosticated the posthumanist transformation ushered in by the Cold War. The Flatwoods Monster was a kind of cyborg Other developed as folklore before the formal text of the cyborg was produced in the early 1960s.

Gray Barker’s relationship to UFOs and UFOlogy is inherently problematic; he simultaneously collected (and to some extent believed)—and created paradigmantic objects representative of ‘the alien’—the photography and rephotography of these objects contributes to an apocalyptic strain in American culture. For this presentation, I will reconstruct Barker’s constructions—from aluminum and plaster; I will offer a phenomenology and deconstruction of these objects; and I will present the possibility of deeply alien spaces online in such venues as Lambda MOO and Second Life. I will argue against both Cyborg and prosthetic models, instead favoring the anatomical analysis of Vesalius and Gray’s Anatomy. The presentation is multi-media, and will utilize research tools from the Virtual Environments Laboratory at West Virginia University.

Could it be possible, as the Baron of Muenchhausen recounts in one of his tales, to draw oneself out of a swamp by only pulling heavily enough on our own shock of hair? This allegorical tale refers to the issue of self-referentiality, and may well serve to illustrate also the state of philosophy in a Deleuzean, non-representational culture of thought to which the virtual is of crucial importance.

Virtualization as the possibility of determining the logical inertial systems that embed and ground any given entity has become characteristic for today. I will propose to conceive of codes as quasi-material infrastructures of logical inertial systems. As such they provide relative stability, fluid standardization and local common grounds. Viewed as infrastructures, codes are conceived as layered and complexly embedded embodiments of standards, both shaping and being shaped by communities of practice. Code systems thus provide medial milieus which can indeed be inhabited.

Vilém Flusser has developed a perspective on codification hinting at an affirmative theory of abstraction, beyond the totalitarian scope seemingly inherent to generalizations. In his book From Subject to Project, Flusser assigns a crucial role to self-referentiality for a theory of a media culture, in which we are just as much products of our own codifications as we are actors of abstractions.

The here proposed essay in designing conceptions for—or in conceiving design for—future living is of a tentative and hypothetical character. How could we furnish our territories, in the medial milieu of the binary code?

The pervasiveness and the heterogeneity of the today apparently ubiquitous Sprachspiel ‘Code’ encourages to ask for its structural internals. Beyond any buzzword hypothesis, code may be conceived as a quasi-material infrastructure actualized from the irreducible trinity of semiosis, modeling, and virtualization.

Deleuze emphasizes that the virtual is amongst the real, that there is no real without the virtual. The virtual in this sense gives rise to the advantageousness of the capability of anticipation and expectation. We distinguish three conceptual and qualitatively different layers as contexts of anticipation: facts, form and semiosis. Anticipation as an observational term can be further explicated as a modeling relation in a meta-mathematical sense (R. Rosen). In this way, codes provide the possibility for modeling and thus represent also particular models about the world in which they are used. The respective multi-layered infrastructure of codes may be conceived as a medium through which Peircean semiosis, i.e. sign-situations (E. Taborsky), take place.

Thereby we are well aware, of course, about codification itself being a fluidly fixed, individual and socially acknowledged habit, which indicates that there is an ortho-direction in the meta-relations of the Deleuzean differential. It is shown, how Gertrude Stein plays with the ortho-dimensionality and meta-differentials of her readers’ habits to encode the decoding, especially in the Tender Buttons and other non-representational writing. Arranging a rhythmical landscape of words used as mere pointers, disappointing expectations about facts and form, she provokes the virtualization of representational language as well as an emergent semiosis in situ.

Aaron Kunin, a poet in his thirties, has generated a number of “translations” of extended works—Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” to name two—into an extremely restricted vocabulary, 200 words or less, through a means he calls a “binary hand-alphabet,” in which his fingers translate each letter into a binary representation. The catch is that the “translation” derives as much from the compulsive practice of transcribing language (read passages, overheard conversation, etc.) in this manner, which he describes as appearing like fidgeting or piano playing, eventually becoming a kind of unconscious habit, one in which his hand appeared to spell out, of its own accord, phrases and sentences touched with a melancholic air, like “It won’t be easy and can’t be a pleasure.” A record of this “ambient language” generated in part through a form of automatic writing became the basis for the translation as it eventually appears in print.

This paper will examine the nature of this text encoding/translation, rendered through the body and the body’s relation to the unconscious, a kind of sign language resisting external communication through its obscurity, lack of expressivity, explicitly intentional approach towards shallowness, and sense of the mind speaking to itself.

Mathematical and scientific terms and allusions appear frequently in the poetry of Sherman Alexie, including such fields as geometry, cartography, chemistry, and probability. In these poems, the use of mathematical and scientific concepts is part of a broader commentary on knowledge work, and its relation to various cultural and other boundaries, that can be seen throughout Alexie’s poetry (and other work). Karen Barad’s theories of “agential realism” will be especially useful in this discussion, particularly her examination of the processes by which relevance is determined in knowledge work. The paper argues that, in these poems, mathematics is used as both a metaphor for, and an example of, the way that historical, social, and agential relations are implicated in knowledge production.

The “metrical code” refers to the patterns of connotations carried by the meter or meters in poems whose meter varies. For example, Emily Dickinson’s relatively rare lines of iambic pentameter constellate around interrelated feelings and concepts, while Walt Whitman’s constellate around groups of feelings and concepts that are separate from, but overlap with, with Dickinson’s. On the other hand, Whitman’s lines in dactylic rhythm invoke an entirely different group of connotations from his iambic pentameters. Certain poets’ attitude towards meters are part of their style, a wordless language with which poems can talk, resonate, and echo among themselves through the centuries.

Building on the introduction to the metrical code in the first part of the paper, the second part will look at some examples of the metrical code in contemporary poetry and will draw on the author’s personal experience writing poetry in free verse and meter. How have attitudes towards poetic tradition changed over the last century, based on metrical code readings? How do poets of the current generation, and emerging poets, relate to meter? What does the metrical code reveal about shifts in metrical preferences among poets?

Finally, the paper considers some of the larger issues raised by the metrical code: how essential is meter to poetry, based on metrical code readings of a range of poets? What can we learn about structure, pattern, and repetition, and their relation to meaning, from meter, that most ancient of verbal arts whose roots reach back well before writing?

Given the incredible global popularity of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, with a playership now exceeding eight million worldwide, there is still a dearth of scholarship on and cultural critique of the game, particularly looking at race. This paper attempts to identify and interrogate the “racial logics” of WoW, beyond a close-reading of fantasy race as allusion or allegory for real world race, to begin to theorize how race is coded, articulated, and cued. In other words, in a game of fantasy race, how and where and why might actual race and racism be deployed, negotiated, disguised, and taken for granted. What is the connection, if one can be made, between programmatic, algorithmic, gamic race and real world race and racial formation? More specifically, this paper tackles the question, in WoW, why does a troll speak with a Jamaican accent? Alexander Galloway in Gaming says, “Video games render social realities into playable form” (17) and “Play is a symbolic action for larger issues in culture. It is the expression of structure” (16). Moreover, Lisa Nakamura, author of Cybertypes, argues, “When users go online, race dwells in the mediating spaces between the virtual and the real, the visible and the invisible” (144). How then can we challenge and explore this playable form, this structure, this mediating space? Looking at character creation, game play, and game narratives, this paper argues for a productive opportunity in the play of, with, and play in race to discover “disruptive moments of recognization and misrecognition” (Nakamura 144) that can offer a way to unpack race in WoW, both protocologically and politically.

Erich Loest’s novel Reichsgericht (2001) offers an analysis of the relationship between the World Wide Web and its impact on what we understand as “historical truth.” Loest’s novel depicts an historian protagonist with access to a magical URL that allows him to interview German historical figures in his quest to detail the history of the German High Court from its inception in 1879 to its dissolution in 1945. Through the use of the fantastic URL, Loest offers a look into the German cultural reception of digital technology and the role it currently plays in Germany’s stridently contested past. In a manner that comes across as wish fulfillment for those who have tried for years to come to terms with Germany’s dark history, Loest portrays a World Wide Web that allows for the virtual reanimation of the dead through a powerful amalgamation of past and present unique to the Internet in an effort to reveal the truth of twentieth-century German history. The central question I address in this paper is: Can the Internet serve as an arbiter between past and present allowing the user to “pull” an accurate understanding of history from its pages, or is the Internet so powerful a medium and the information offered by it so easily manipulated that it can “push” an agenda-driven history even further into German cultural consciousness than more traditional media can, thereby muddling any possibility of historical understanding? More broadly put, do intelligent machines, when linked together, have the capability to reshape what we have come to know as reality? Loest’s work weighs in on this question by effectively juxtaposing the Internet with other, more traditional media.

This paper compares how codes in the forms of spells, riddles, and prophecies shape perceptible reality in popular fantastic fictions like those of Neil Gaiman, with the use of discrete programs created in virtual worlds like Second Life. In both cases, a correspondence is formed between abstract symbolic systems and “physical” reality. Demi-gods and programmers might seem to represent opposite views both of reality and abstract symbolic code, but as has already been pointed out by such theorists as Florian Cramer in his work on antique algorithmic patterning, these uses of language can be usefully considered as part of an historical tradition.

Comparing the codes used in different media makes the role of abstract symbols as a carrier of secrets and wonder, especially clear and suggests why, contrary to predictions, New Media texts have not replaced older forms. The act of encoding as it occurs both in the minds of the storyteller and coder, and the consonant act of decoding by reader, listener, or viewer enables imagination of what magic must be like, as another sort of translation and transformation.

Software that supports communication over the Internet has become significantly easier to use and has thus become more inviting to women. One could say that women have broken the code to communicating over the Internet, because engaging in this activity is no longer limited to those with technical backgrounds. We will look at one form of computer-mediated communication in particular, web logs or blogs. Blogs allow users to post daily entries on the Internet with little technical skill required.

Blogs started historically as electronic journals and have evolved into a number of different genres, such as political commentary, personal commentary, and informational. Certain estimates suggest that women and girls are creating blogs in equal numbers to that of men and boys. In this paper, we are interested in determining whether equality in participation translates into equal influence on the Internet. Are blogs created by women and girls afforded equal status to those created by men and boys? What type of blogs do teenage girls create in contrast to those created by adult women? Are there gender and age-based differences in how individuals express themselves through blogs? Within a particular blog genre, are there other stylistic differences between women and men? Is there an electronic ghetto for female voices? What determines who will be heard over the Internet? We will survey the state of affairs in blogging to see what women and girls are saying in their blogs and what factors may influence society’s inclination to take note of these expressions.

Since before the development of the World Wide Web, people have been finding communities online. Because of the anonymous nature of these communities, people have been free to “code” themselves, to develop online identities that have little to no relationship to their identities in the real world. Approximately equal numbers of characters in these virtual worlds (called multi-user domains or MUDs) are male, female and gender-neutral. In her seminal work, Life on the Screen (1), Sherry Turkle found, however, that a fair amount of gender-swapping, in which a man controls a female online identity or a woman controls a male online identity, has occurred so that it is difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of men and women inhabiting these communities.

Until the past few years, MUDs, such as LambdaMOO (2), were text-based. Inhabitants of these communities used an arcane language to build avatars to represent themselves and to navigate these virtual selves through the online world. In newer communities, such as Second Life (3), avatars are built using a graphical user interface and navigate the online world using the mouse and menus. In both types of online communities, however, women tend to be portrayed as vixens, voluptuous and scantily clad.

In this paper, we will examine the portrayals of female avatars in online communities such as LambdaMOO and Second Life. We will also discuss patterns of communication with avatars of various genders.

(1) Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Touchstone: New York, NY, 1995.

(2) LamdaMOO, telnet://www.lambdamoo.org:8888

(3) Second Life, http://secondlife.org

Perhaps it is no surprise that Sven Birkerts’s famous essay, “Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man” is considered one of the foundational texts in electronic media studies, for hypertext is often coded as “masculine,” perhaps because of its historical connections to technology and the computer science world. It is perceived as difficult and therefore prestigious and not immediately identifiable with women’s experiences or knowledge expertise. It should be no surprise, then, when a woman scholar in 2007 researches hypertext and hypertext theory that there are few (fewer then ten) peer reviewed articles published on the genre. However, in his pioneering work, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George P. Landow makes a complex argument that seems to make a direct connection between hypertext theory and feminism. In his book, Landow argues that the concurrent introduction of post-structuralist literary theory and computer hypertext created an important paradigm shift which changed the way we think about textuality and human thought. In his analysis, Landow foregrounds hypertext’s emphasis on intertextuality, multivocality, and decenteredness—three characteristics which can be argued to be integrally central to feminist epistemology and theory. This paper will explore the connections between hypertext theory, literary theory, and feminist epistemology through an analysis of one of the foundational hypertexts, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to illustrate how hypertext, rather than being a “man’s” genre, is in all actuality a perfect space for feminist theorization and experimentation with textuality, identity, and gender.

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) effectively shows that global warming due to greenhouse gases is real; but this film has been preceded by Hollywood features also showcasing pollution and climate change. In Soylent Green (1973), set in 2022, war and pollution have devastated the Earth, food production is down, and rising temperatures have eliminated winter. Waterworld (1995) and A. I. (2001) portray post-warming worlds inundated by water from melted icecaps; Chain Reaction (1996) and The Saint (1997) show scientists seeking new, non-polluting energy sources; and most intensely, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) shows devastating global warming through extraordinary special effects. [1] These Hollywood features routinely mistreat the science—for instance, global warming effects would occur over decades, not mere weeks—but they reach millions. An Inconvenient Truth is currently the third highest grossing documentary ever, yet its box office sales are paltry compared to the $540 million for The Day After Tomorrow. Fortunately, research shows that Day After Tomorrow has significantly influenced its viewers toward a more serious consideration of global warming. [2] The history of global warming on screen suggests that a general cultural awareness of its appearance and effects has long been prevalent; and that although sober documentaries can present the science well, a balance between scientific truth and dramatic need may be the most compelling way to alert people to climate change and similar pressing issues.

The burgeoning scientific literature on paleoclimates in recent years has focused on the extraordinarily complex relationships between biological (including human) evolution and climate change, and in the process has revitalized James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Rather than the benign, maternal planet of the 1970s pop redactions of Gaia, however, the Earth emerges in recent appropriations of Lovelock’s thesis as a world sliding, probably inevitably, into rapid, slingshot variations in its climate and mass extinctions of many of its life forms. This paper will explore the ways in which Gaia has been transformed by systems theory, notably second-order cybernetics, in the work of Lynn Margulis and Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia. A sophisticated understanding of climate change in their works resists simplistic techno-political models of “solutions” to global warming and instead forces us to consider the prospects for civilization’s “sustainable retreat” (Lovelock’s term) from fossil fuel economies, high population densities, and unchecked exploitation of the environment.

Hurricanes should present a greater challenge to Western narrative codes than they do. Given the transformation of literature in the wake of World War I, for instance, it would be reasonable to expect not just a distinct (if small) canon of hurricane literature in the U.S., but a fairly well-established set of narrative strategies shaped by hurricanes’ border-crossing geographies, culture-blending histories, and unspeakably powerful ability both to destroy and to nourish life. The truth is that hurricanes have impacted “hurricane discourse” in literature, the humanities, and the popular media far less than in the sciences, reflecting an imaginative poverty that has troubling implications in an era of global warming and rapid population growth. Large hurricanes can cover hundreds of square miles and release an amount of energy comparable to a series of ten-megaton nuclear warheads exploding every twenty minutes, but the dominant Euro-American discourses lose no time in emplotting these vast, ancient, world-altering cyclical storms according to the simplest, most linear, and most anthropocentric of teleologies. What about Hurricane Katrina, though; did it (to paraphrase Bush) change everything? My purpose in this paper is to anatomize hurricane discourse in the U.S. before and after Katrina, examining the storm’s role in generating alternative narratives and counterhegemonic narrative codings of hurricanes. While it would be naïve to claim that Katrina changed an entire society’s way of perceiving hurricanes, along with the racial disparities that Katrina famously “exposed,” I will argue that the birth of a new hurricane discourse may actually be at hand.

This paper will consider the ways in which the physical world has been codified for the purposes of air travel. As part of this study, I would like to briefly discuss how early European navigational practices, which positioned a disembodied body above a grid, both diverged from and intersected with embodied, non-instrument native navigational practices, such as those within the Polynesian voyaging tradition. I will consider how early aerial navigation in the United States was a combination of embodied and disembodied practice, and how radio signals and sophisticated electronic systems or “codes” would come to replace the need for visually specific maps, landmarks and celestial phenomena. By drawing on the work of technology theorists such as Don Idhe, I would like to analyze the ways in which these various codified interfaces both extend and limit human perception of, and experience within, the physical world. Ultimately, I will ask whether the experience of contemporary air travel can only be one of radical separation and alienation, for pilots as well as passengers.

This paper examines the ways in which strange fates of Hermione and Perdita, the lost women of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, trope the technology of early modern dramatic characters. This paper argues that the play represents a series of dispersals and gatherings, as Hermione is picked apart by Leontes’ inquisition and Perdita enters the world as a scanty array of objects—baby, jewels and Antigonus’ letter, “thy character” (3.3.47)—on a Bohemian beach. The metamorphosis of Hermione’s statue, in this analysis, represents the culmination of the process of redemptive mediation and reassembly, as a dispersed network of agents and objects—ranging from the Oracle of Apollo to Anitgonus’ bones—reassembles the broken house of Sicilia.

Paulina’s careful construction of her alcove, complete with curtains, music, costume, pedestal and the invocation of the craftsmanship of Julio Romano, allows Hermione to be simultaneously “like a statue” (5.3.20) and a living woman again. This scene has been read as Shakespeare’s defense of the dramatic author’s art, a magic “Lawful as eating” (5.3.105), but the very complexity of Paulina’s tableau, and the various human and artificial instruments it requires, undercut such a reading. Paulina the dramatist creates nothing new (even the statue is actually Hermione herself) but rather manages and assembles various objects—her audience positioned as carefully as her props—into an assembly that will allow Hermione to live again. Inside a carefully crafted dramatic machine, Hermione is not resurrected so much as she is rebuilt, and the dramatic author is less a poet than an engineer, combining given materials into ingenious new devices.

The automaton emerges as dehumanizing in Erin Labbie’s “Historical Materialism and Automata in Volpone.” Two minor mentions of automata appear in Jonson’s play (a clock, and a waterworks in perpetual motion), both of which establish a mechanical and technological context for the events of the play, and also reflect the metaphorical status of the characters: Volpone, Lady Politic, and several others are all described as automata. Labbie investigates these associations through the lens of historical materialism and Walter Benjamin’s critique of capitalism, wherein the seventeenth-century courtier emerges as an artificial being who, like a clock, marks time as he seeks to satisfy his own inhuman needs. Volpone’s ingenious attempts to fleece everyone around him reveal his situatedness in this new industrial moment, one which turns him into a machine. The courtier is thereby implicated in a kind of perpetual motion that does not progress, like the waterworks and clockworks that become symbolic of his dehumanization. Both of these images contribute to a prescient critique of capitalism within this early Jacobean play.

In the sole lyrical interlude of Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, the book’s peripatetic narrator/professional con-man, Jack Wilton finds himself visiting an exotic Italian estate. The showpiece of this estate is its elaborately constructed garden, in which everything—from the “beautifullest flowers that ever man’s eye admired” to the “clear overhanging vault of crystal”—is a mechanical simulacrum. Most marvelous of all are the hundreds of tiny singing automata, who “though they were bodies without souls,” produce dazzling songs; indeed, so perfect are their voices that “every man there present renounced conjectures of art, and said it was done by enchantment.” Art, enchantment, or science? Wilton doesn’t allow the reader to linger long in mystical reveries; instead dwelling for several hundred words on the minutiae of the birds’ pneumatic construction —until, bizarrely, his evocation of this alternate “paradise” begins to read like technical manual. But the vision of hundreds of ornithological automata, chirping in unison, is not merely a rhetorical showpiece. Instead, in this proto-novel featuring nothing so strongly as its own verbal pyrotechnics, it becomes an emblem for language and its gorgeously deceptive potentialities.

Meta-literary attention to the techne of language is not unfamiliar to scholars of Renaissance poetry. But what we have not taken account of is the regular appearance of the trope of the mechanical bird precisely in these literary sites of figural deception. This paper will explore three separate appearances of the singing automaton: the mechanical birds in Spenser’s Faerie Queene; those hydraulic creatures that appear to perch on the boots of Marlowe’s Hero (in his epyllion Hero and Leander; and those of Nashe’s Italianate garden.

Abstract Forthcoming

“New Media Studies” recently has emerged as a sort of quasi-field or discipline, located at the nexus of film studies, history of science, communications, and art history (and perhaps a few other disciplines). At the same time, though, many recent attempts to define a field of new media studies have focused almost exclusively on digital and visual new media, such as digital film, digital video, digital music formats, internet art, and virtual reality installations. As a consequence, the defining characteristics of new media have been understood primarily through the lens of digitization. Such an approach neglects one of the other key “new media” of the twentieth century—namely, the development of biological cell culture technologies and the linkage of such technologies to digital media. This presentation employs examples of recent “bioart” projects as an occasion to work toward a more general theory of new media: one that is capable of understanding both the newness of recent biological and digital new media in particular, but also the “newness” of media more generally (or, to appropriate and slightly abuse Carolyn Marvin’s felicitous phrase, the newness of “old media when they were new”). Biological media offer such an opportunity for rethinking, I argue, precisely because they emphasize the capacity of media to encourage systemic transformation. Understanding this latter capacity of media requires in turn a new philosophy, one that understands “transmission,” “translation” and “influence”—those concepts by means of which media often have been understood—as special cases of what Gilbert Simondon calls “transduction” and “individuation.” Such an approach, I argue, allows us to account for the specificity of our contemporary digital and biological new media, as well as the “newness” of older media (such as printed texts or telephones).

This paper will revisit the question of temporality and abstraction by looking at Hans Richter’s and Viking Eggeling’s abstract films in the years after WW I and in the context of the Zürich Dada group. The non-representational images of early abstract film challenged dominant ideas of the nature of cinema by separating the latter from photographic recording. Rather than facilitating mimetic, anthropomorphic identification, these films and their geometrical, inorganic forms (squares and rectangles in Richter’s case, and lines in Eggeling’s case) confront the spectator with non-organic temporality and movement, probing alternative ways to affectively relate to the moving image.

Hans Richter’s first abstract film Rhythmus 21 stands at the end of a number of attempts to create a ‘universal language’ along the lines of music and ideas of ‘life.’ In their scroll paintings, Richter and Eggeling had developed an elaborate system of time-based forms, grounded in an active, memory-based reception. Accompanied by intensive studies of Henri Bergson and other vitalist texts, they produced two different models of ‘non-organic life’; in other words, they incorporated cinema’s own ‘life forces’ of movement and rhythm into their films without subjugating it to human(ist) experience and form. This paper will question common notions of abstraction in film by situating Richter and Eggeling within vitalist discourses in science and in art, and by investigating the idea of the non-photographic trace as it also appears, for example, in Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronographies.

Most geneticists and their critics evaluate the concept of the gene from the perspective of the gene as a code for the production of phenotypic traits, what has become known as transmission genetics. It is increasingly obvious, however, that this conception of the gene’s role in development is much too limited. This paper will use recent insights from evolutionary and developmental biology, media theory on the techniques and processes of animation, and Paolo Virno’s political economic reflections on the role of virtuosity in informational societies, to promote a counter history of late twentieth century genetics: the gene as animating agent or initiator of specific sequences of events. Important to this argument is a model of temporal change based on animated processes, where time is easily visualized as changes in degrees of organization, or complexity. This position stands in contrast to filmic models of temporal change that rely more heavily on the photographic capture of spatial displacement. This change in how one conceives of the molecular and cellular temporality of organism lends itself to a developmental biology where codes initiate inorganic gradients that in turn create folds, chambers, organs, and even bodies.

Early modern books purporting to teach basic arithmetic frequently depend on narrative worked examples, familiarly known as “story problems” or “word problems.” Presenting domestic scenes, gender, rank and class, romance, courtly love and courts of love, inter-religious encounters, debauchery, and cozening, these narratives are remarkable for their non-mathematical specificity. In this paper I take up the very function of imaginative narrative in mathematical pedagogy, argue for its failure, and explain its abandonment. Such detailed narratives, similar in content and tone to commercially successful collections of novelle and fabliaux, argue for their own success with an audience that wished to teach itself basic arithmetic for use in everyday life, and drawn to a familiar form of printed entertainment. For all their entertainment value and commercial success, however, these texts were incapable of rigorous mathematics, and their narrative specificity seems to be directly to blame. Though frequently called “rules,” the narratives do not present general cases, and are often so mathematically and linguistically inconsistent (many such texts are translations), that there is a sense in which these books don’t teach mathematics at all. They do, however, gesture (though confusedly) towards an increasingly civic-humanist approach to mathematics that also appealed to their primary audience and was consistent with the moralizing strain of popular prose narratives. Eventually, mathematical tales were abandoned in favor of other generic forms, including the humanist dialogue and adaptations of Euclidean proof, as well as new forms of mathematical notation that signaled the algebraicization of arithmetic and its pedagogy.

Invented in the late sixties, string theory has grown to dominate the field of theoretical physics by promising to reconcile Einstein’s general relativity, which describes the realm of the very large, with quantum theory, that of the very small. It posits the string as the basic constituent of both matter and energy: a tiny open or closed filament vibrating in multiple dimensions, whose tension determines the type of subatomic particle it manifests. The scale of the string is 10^-33 centimeters, the Planck scale, a realm well beyond the capacity of contemporary particle collider technologies to plumb. Thus lacking in prospects for experimental validation, string theory currently stakes its legitimacy on its mathematical consistency. Simultaneously, since the late eighties, string theory popularizations—nonfiction texts authored primarily by string theorists themselves—have come out with increasing regularity. These popularizations aim to explain the theory to a lay audience, in part by introducing its key concepts stripped free of the constituting mathematics. Paradoxically then, since popularizations omit precisely the content that would grant the theory whatever scientific authority it hopes to claim, popularizations effectively present not physics but metaphysics, an imaginary that must resort to literary techniques to legitimize its objectivity. This paper will examine three examples of string images from popularizations and the strategies the texts employ to substantiate them. Using concepts from Gaston Bachelard and Michèle Le Doeuff, I argue that these string theory popularizations substantiate the string as an object through its contextualization within what I call a ‘domesticated mesocosm’, an imagined space that juxtaposes micro- and macrocosms by analogy through graspable objects on human scales, objects laden with affect. As such, these string theory popularizations transform the utterly alien into something approachably familiar.

Using Jeremy Bentham’s notion of fictions and Kenneth Burke’s concepts of hierarchical mystery and perfection, this paper examines how the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being, albeit in a new form, maintains a political structure used by humans to maintain dominance over animals. Specifically, the concepts of both Cyborgs and Cryptids are used to explore how science and folklore politicize the nature of Being in the contemporary world.

Viewed as discourse, the Great Chain of Being seeks to perfect the world. However, the epistemic rhetoric of the model does not always neatly match the ontological experience of the world. Therefore, humans have created beings, both “real” and fictional, to try to close the gaps, or provide “missing links.” Cryptids, especially quasi-humans or quasi-primates such as wodewoses or yeti, demonstrate how humans have used fictions to fill in the perceived gap between humans and animals. Cyborgs, conversely, use technology to either “complete” a human (through surgery or prosthesis) or elevate a “lower” animal to a more human like status (through genetics, as in the Onco-mouse; or through computers, as in some ape language studies). The paper concludes by addressing the political implications of such a linear and hierarchical model being used theoretically and ethically to articulate the nature of Being for human and non-human animals.

As the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s Watt indicates, the subject of Western humanism has suffered a “loss of species.” This is a loss keenly felt by Emmanuel Levinas, who, in the wake of modernist antihumanism, reaffirms the intelligibility and ethical centrality of the humanist subject. He locates human uniqueness in the face, the essence of the Other whose meaning “consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’” For Levinas, the link between language and the face forecloses the extending of ethical subjectivity beyond the human realm.

Although his philosophy, with its emphasis on the alterity of the Other, would seem particularly well-suited for consideration of the nonhuman Other, Levinas insists on the uniqueness of the human face even when faced with Bobby, the dog who befriended him in a Nazi camp. Bobby, as several critics have noted, problematizes Levinasian humanism, yet Levinas reads his “friendly growling” as silence and thus denies him a face. Given Beckett’s influence on post-war French philosophy, it is significant that Levinas cannot come to terms with the canine face, for dogs and their would-be masters frequently meet face-to-face in the posthuman landscape of Beckett’s fiction. In Watt and Molloy in particular, encounters between individual dogs and humans are overdetermined by an interspecies intimacy which marks even their excrement. In exploring the implications of this intimacy, Beckett’s human goes where Levinas fears to tread. I argue that Beckett’s dogs undermine the centrality of language and expose the need for a posthuman ethics which accounts for them.

In The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), Jack London’s narratives of co-evolution and co-operation for survival between humans and dogs pressure the boundary that separates animals from humans and suggest a shared genetic coding between human and non-human subjects. Using systems theory, I explore the idea of a posthuman subjectivity in London’s dog novels. Here, the subjectivity of dogs is an evolutionary process of “becoming,” rather than a fixed biological type. This process is guided by autopoiesis, defined by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan as, “life’s continuous production of itself.” Shaped by environment and heredity, the dogs’ experiences reflect on past evolutionary states that relate to the self-reflexivity of autopoietic systems. The perception of dogs is constituted through a field of observation that incorporates them in the act of constructing meaning. By “rewriting” animal thinking into language, London’s narratives thus enable us to reexamine how evolutionary theory affects non-human agents.

Yet London becomes caught between challenging humanist definitions of race, class, and gender and endorsing a picture of evolutionary development that could secure a national identity. The posthumanist rupture in subjectivity that London emphasizes in the biological kinship between humans and dogs can only be resolved in the closing violent fantasies, expressed in both novels, that act out desires for the restoration of a stable social order. The paper concludes by considering the ethical implications of animal subjectivities, examining the idea of animal rights as a politicized (re)formulation of biological kinship.

This paper examines the centrality of human ideas about animals and animality to the process of racial formation in early republic and antebellum America. It interrogates some of the myriad visual and textual representations of the resemblance between monkeys, apes and humans in an expanding popular and print culture, with a special focus upon advertisements for and audience reactions to animal exhibitions. These broadly popular entertainments included both scientific displays of anthropoid apes in museums and theatrical animal acts featuring performing monkeys. These exhibitions served as sites where, as Jennifer Ham writes, “continuities and discontinuities between man and animal could be dramatized.” Monkeys and apes also figured in newspapers, natural histories, periodicals and children’s literature. Accordingly, I also examine literary accounts of non-human primates, which, like animal exhibitions, prompted observers to reflect upon the boundary between ‘man’ and ‘beast’ and to use the natural order to comment upon a fluid social and political order.

Although one can find many human concerns that accreted around the exhibition of non-human animals, this paper is particularly interested in the ways in which ideas about monkeys and apes were implicated in discourses about and practices of slavery. A persistently negative association of human ‘others’ with non-human animals helped support chattel slavery at the same time that slaves and abolitionists drew upon “the dreaded comparison” in order to oppose the peculiar institution. While the relationships drawn between non-human animals and human slavery were complex and contested, they help illuminate our understanding of racial formation in America.

This paper investigates theories of human and animal labor in the Antebellum South with regard to race, class, and slavery. Specifically, it is an analysis of the metaphorical conflation of slaves and livestock found most frequently in abolitionist propaganda, but also in defenses of slavery based on legal interpretations of goods and chattel. Rather than approach this “dreaded comparison” as a literary construct, however, the paper examines that equation as a constitutive fact of the labor system that dominated the Southern states. In the words of the Jamaican planter, John Pinney, “slaves and stock” were the “sinews of the plantation.”

[1] As much as their labor powered the plantation, the capitalized bodies of slaves and stock funded the continuation of that system.

This nexus of slaves and stock is particularly well documented in the development of the thoroughbred, a racialized construct of the Atlantic world, in the United States. As a commodity, thoroughbred horses traveled south and west with slaves and north with raw materials, covering an expanding geography with an increasingly circumscribed gene pool. Unlike the slaves that went with them, these horses carried a record of their lineage. Printed in newspapers and the burgeoning sporting press, a republic of letters for American breeders, and disseminated through the spectacle of racing, the rhetoric of horse breeding provides a significant perspective on theories of labor, as related to slavery and race. By looking to the controlled breeding of horses, this paper examines not only the value of labor, but also the value of the laboring body in a market for bodies. Further, it elucidates a relationship between breeding and slavery embedded in the contested nature of labor and the physical body of the thoroughbred horse.

Ideas of Alaska in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century functioned as a space for Anglo-American men living in the southern United States to fantasize a utopic anti-civilization: a resource-rich, but forbidding landscape in which values of “Strenuous Life” masculinity were to be allowed full scope, and a libertarian democracy centered around a “sourdough code” of frontier law would spring up. Coded in this conception were ideas about the whiteness of the men who would prevail in this space, as prominent scientific and pseudo-scientific racists such as Madison Grant and Louis Agassiz spoke of the advantages of the Alaskan climate for men of Nordic and Anglo ancestry.

An important part of this construction was the relationship between the neonative white Alaskan and the sled dogs which enabled their travel in their North. In my paper, I will examine novels written for popular audiences—both juvenile and adult—and memoirs of men who spent time in Alaska during and after the gold rushes at the end of the nineteenth century. These popular narratives of white Alaskan experience employed the figure of the sled dog, and the relationship between the dog and his white owner/musher, to demonstrate ideal Alaskan domestic and working configurations, dreams that spoke directly to perceptions of growing dehumanization and competition in the working sphere of mainstream America. The settlers also used their relationships with dogs to illustrate key differences between themselves and the native Alaskans they found inhabiting Alaska when they arrived. By employing newly articulated late nineteenth-century anticruelty rhetoric, white neonatives claimed the label of “human” for themselves, while relegating native Alaskans and undesirable “others” to the denigrated realm of the “animal.”

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, set in the late nineteenth century, makes graphic the ways that slavery in the U.S. was supported by a discourse of animality which marked Africans and people of African descent as less then human by equating them with animals. Not only Beloved but also Morrison’s other novels show the ways this equation lived on for generations, permeating and infecting the identities of African Americans and the cultural concept of race long after slavery was abolished.

In this paper, I will examine some of the patterns of response to the discourse of animality that emerge in Morrison’s novels. For example, a number of Morrison’s female characters struggle with a sense of alienation from their bodies and sexualities, an alienation linked to the fear of appearing animalistic. Several of her male characters show a tendency to conceptualize women — especially women who will not comply with their wishes — as prey animals. However, Morrison’s novels do not respond to the destructive persistence of the discourse of animality by repudiating any kinship or likenesss between her characters and nonhuman animals. In fact, Morrison’s overall vision suggests that a connection with animals can also be a source of strength. Interestingly, a female character in Jazz turns the negative connotations of women as prey animals on its head, noting that the women she reads about in the newspaper, dominated and abused by men, are actually stronger and more apt to defend themselves than she once thought—qualities she equates with their animality. And a number of characters make important distinctions between equations with domestic animals, which tend to be disempowering, and equations with wild animals, which are sometimes empowering. Ultimately, I will argue that Morrison’s novels question and problematize the equation of African Americans with nonhuman animals in an innovative way that values what humans — all humans — share with other animal species.

Jan Piribeck will show examples of two collaborative ventures with SUBONE. The first is an aerial drawing in which the shape of the SUBONE logo was traced in a large green space located on the Portland peninsula. A GPS (Global Positioning System) data logger was used to plot the points of the graphic. Two USM Art students assisted with this project, which was approved by the Portland Percent for Art Committee and supported by Portland Parks and Recreation. The second collaboration is an LED (light-emitting diode) sign that was created for an exhibition called “Lost Sites” in which Piribeck worked with SUBONE on an intervention in an obscure inner city site. Piribeck’s research and creative work is developed around interplay between visual studies and geographic information systems. She will discuss the term geo-coding, a process by which the “real” world is translated into computer readable form, and will describe the ways code is used to analyze, interpret and activate the cultural landscape.

Tim Clorius, founder of SUBONE Urban Murals, will discuss the genesis of the project and its relationship to the “codes” of international graffiti culture and post-graffiti art. He will show examples of and describe the ideas behind community mural projects he has done in cooperation with arts coordinator, Andrew Coffin under the auspices of public agencies such as Portland Parks and Recreation, the Maine Arts Commission and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Clorius, who is an accomplished painter, has a long-standing interest in community oriented art projects. In his paper, he will address how his mural workshops cultivate creativity and decode the messages embedded in the language of graffiti, thereby cutting through stereotypical readings of a potent and ubiquitous form of personal and social expression.

Chris Thompson, critic and Assistant Professor of Art History at Maine College of Art, will broaden the historical perspective on the panel topic and will help place the collaborative work of Clorius and Piribeck within the framework of contemporary art and culture. Thompson received his Ph.D. from Goldsmiths College, University of London and teaches a range of courses in modern and contemporary art, cultural history, critical theory and visual culture.

In the contemporary context, artifacts which have been traditionally conceived in terms of a unique deictic presence—here and now—take place differently via forms of technical reproduction, appearing not simply as a plurality of individual instances, or a consecutive seriality, but as something both spatially (and temporally) distributed and mass-like (massenweise). They take place not as a mere collection of unique occurrences, but within a logic of supplementarity that circumscribes and enframes the possibility of origin, which at the same time recedes. Walter Benjamin’s problematics of aura are remapped from the claim to authenticity linked to the materialities of an originary instance to the ubiquity of artifactuality, within which the very clai