SLSA ’07 in Portland, Maine

 Proposals 

 

 Paper Submissions 

Stacy Alaimo, “Posthuman Desire: Queer Animals, Science Studies, Environmental Theory”

Suddenly, it seems, animal science is discovering that a multitude of animal species engage in queer sex. The scientific studies of queer animals have been popularized by such books as Bruce Baghemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity and Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, and even by a museum exhibit in Norway—“Against Nature”—which “outs” these animals “by means of models, photos, texts, and specimens.” This paper will investigate the scientific, theoretical, and popular stagings of queer animals in order to explore the possibilities that queer animals suggest for a queer, green, science studies as well as for a scientifically-engaged posthumanism.

Drawing on work in science studies, environmental philosophy, and queer theory, I will consider the following questions: What sort of relation between scientific knowledge and political culture is implicit or explicit within this queer appeal to nature? How well do the concepts of biological diversity and sexual diversity travel across animal science, environmental science, environmental politics, queer politics, and queer theory? Do the accounts of these animals work to queer nature by endorsing values of (bio)diversity and (evolutionary) deviation, or does the invocation of nonhuman queers normalize and naturalize GLBT people in ways that tame their political bite? Can queer animals provoke an understanding of “nature” as evolving, intersecting “naturecultures” (Haraway) rather than a homogeneous passive resource? Would it be beneficial to understand queer animals along the lines of Bruno Latour’s recent formulation, not as “matters of fact” but as “matters of concern” that seduce the critic toward, rather than away from, material realities?

Dr. Stacy Alaimo
Associate Professor of English
University of Texas at Arlington
stacya@exchange.uta.edu
http://www.uta.edu/english/alaimo/

keywords: animal studies, environmental theory, queer theory, posthumanism, biological diversity/deviation

Andrea Albrecht, “Literary and Philosophical Negotiations of Maps and Codes: Heinrich Hertz, Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil”

From a mathematical point of view coding is based on the concept of a “map”, which associates to a set of objects other objects called images. For example, a scientific model can be considered as a map which encodes empirical facts in formulae. While premodern scientists thought that science strives to imitate and copy nature, modern scientists like Heinrich Hertz argued, that scientific images need not resemble the empirical facts, just as an encoded message bears no resemblance to the original.

This modern concept of mapping quickly became a ferment within cultural theory and literature: Referring to Hertz’ analysis, Ernst Cassirer argued in “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” that mathematical and non-mathematical language share a common semiotic ground which gives insight to the symbolic character of human speech. Following this Neokantian proposal, Walter Benjamin and Robert Musil studied semiotic systems which do not represent reality in a mimetic way, but provide “images without resemblance” (“Bildsein ohne Ähnlichkeit”) or “non-sensual resemblance” (“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit”). While Benjamin’s philosophical writings focused on the differences between mathematical and lingual codes, Musil used in his novel The Man Without Qualities mapping as a formative concept for his theory of emotions.

Analyzing these examples, the paper shows how the rigorous mathematical concept of maps penetrated the exact sciences around 1900, found its way into literature and philosophy, and became a fruitful paradigm for an interdisciplinary reflexion of representation and language.

andrea.albrecht@gmail.com
Dr. Andrea Albrecht (German Dept., UC Berkeley)

keywords: mathematics, German literature, philosophy, 20th Century

Christian Ulrik Andersen, “The Live Coding of Slub—art oriented programming as media critique ”

Computer art is often associated with computer-generated expressions (digital audio/images in music, video, stage design, etc.). In recent computer art, however, the code-text itself – not the generated output – has become the artwork (Perl Poetry, ASCII Art, obfuscated code, etc.). This paper will analyze and discuss code as the artist’s material. In particular, it will focus one particular artistic code- praxis: the Live Coding performances of Slub (programming computer music live, visually showing the coding).

The artists Alex McLean and Adrian Ward (aka Slub) along with Geoff Cox declare: “art-oriented programming needs to acknowledge the conditions of its own making – its poesis.” (Cox et.al. 2004) The paper will argue that this statement formulates a media critique. As Florian Cramer has proposed, the GUI represents a media separation (of text/code and image) causing alienation to the computer’s materiality/text. (Cramer 2003) The paper will then propose that object of art oriented programming – in an avant-garde perspective – must be to recuperate an interchangeability of data and processing. How?

The particularity of Live Coding does not rely on the magical expression – but nor does it rely on the code/material/text itself (as one might say is the case in some code-art). It relies on the nature of code to do something – as if it was magic: in the performative aspect of the code. Relying on performance theory (Austin, Carlson) the paper will demonstrate how the computer in the Live Coding sessions is much more than mere mechanic performance. The paper will explain how code itself is staged as performative language (interchanging data and process) and further focus on the performance of code before an audience. Arguing that the performance excludes the audience (esoteric code), the paper will raise the question of whether listening to the code (at a non-textual level) may provide an embodied experience of data-processing. The performance can be regarded as a collective appreciation of the code artist as a musician using code as his/her instrument, interchanging data and process live.

cua@multimedia.au.dk
Christian Ulrik Andersen | Assistant Professor, Ph.D,
Dept. of Information and Media Studies | Aarhus University |
Helsingforsgade 14 | DK-8200 Aarhus N | Denmark

keywords: live coding, code art, media criticism, performance art

Christopher Todd Anderson, “‘To Woo the Fearful Small’: From Invertebrates to Microbes in Contemporary American Poetry”

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.

cta@fusemail.net
Christopher Todd Anderson
University of Connecticut
860-456-3106

keywords: poetry, microscopic organisms, invertebrates

Philip Armstrong, “Feral animals as code-breakers”

“Biological imperialism” is Alfred Crosby’s term for the animal and environmental dimensions of the history of globalising modernity. He describes how colonists travelling to the Americas and the South Pacific took with them “a scaled-down, simplified version of the biota of Western Europe”; a “grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche” (Biological Imperialism, 1986, 88, 194). Yet, rather than simply sculpting their new territories into obedient replicas of home, these human and nonhuman colonists found themselves occupying what Nigel Clark calls “zones of turbulence,” created by the meeting between complex systems. The unpredictable nature of such meetings resulted in states of ferity. As “the first elements to break out of the state of equilibrium” (Clark, “Wild Life,” 1999, 152), feral species provide vivid opportunities to study the ideologies and practices of modernity, both in their ideal state and in their breakdown. If modernity has a code, feral animals are its code-breakers.

There is also a literary history of ferity. Robinson Crusoe’s goats, Gulliver’s Yahoos, Frankenstein’s Creature, the “coming beast” that invades the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, are all manifestations of the peculiarly modern experience of nonhuman ferity. My paper will survey the place of code-breaking feral animals in these texts and in some of their more recent re-workings: Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Peter Høeg’s The Woman and the Ape (1996), and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003).

philip.armstrong@canterbury.ac.nz
Philip Armstrong, MA PhD
Co-Director, New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies
School of Culture, Literature and Society
Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch
Aotearoa New Zealand

keywords: ferity, literature, code-breaking, biological imperialism

Laura Balladur, “A Secret Code: Charles Bonnet and Eighteenth Century Proto-Biology”

Eighteenth-century preformation theories seem so naïve in comparison with contemporary biology, especially when we consider the sophistication of the genetic code. But one should not be too quick to dismiss eighteenth-century early proto-biology. The eighteenth century was a period rich with puzzle-solving activity in reproduction and generation. Amid this scientific pluralism, the work of the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720-93) comes closest to articulating the new direction biology was to take. This may seem contradictory in light of his description of preformation, a theory whereby all potential forms are contained within a single germ. Yet as Thomas Hankins rightfully pointed out, his revival of preformation strangely prefigures our contemporary theories in genetics.

Seeing beyond what microscopes revealed, Charles Bonnet theorized a secret mechanism lying at the heart of reproduction. Like a lock’s secret mechanism, the puzzle of reproduction could never be seen, yet was essential to the reproduction of species. Bonnet clearly identified this secret mechanism as a necessary abstraction, a necessary code.

My talk contextualizes Bonnet’s work in the puzzle-solving activity of eighteenth-century theories on reproduction. My close reading of Bonnet’s work reveals, not only how his secret code prefigures biology, as Thomas Hankins’s helpful rereading of Bonnet has shown; but also how Bonnet applied a similar theory to the field of psychology, where the code now revealed desire. Indeed Bonnet’s genius lay in his ability to locate and translate the code, to abstract and interpret from what he saw.

lballadu@bates.edu
Laura Balladur
Visiting Assistant Professor
Bates College

keywords: Bonnet, description preformation, reproduction, biology, eighteenth century

John Barber, “Mind Transfer and Radical Augmentation: Articulating Code for Posthumanity from Science Fiction Literature”

Interest in posthumanity, as a potential state of human evolution, is situated at the cusp of science, literature, the arts, and culture. Each arena applies its own theoretical, codified considerations to its inquiries regarding the nature and application of posthumanity.

One dominant position is articulated by N. Katherine Hayles who, in How We Became Posthuman, defines posthuman as a point of view characterized by four assumptions: informational pattern is privileged over material instantiation, consciousness is considered an epiphenomenon, the human body is a prosthesis and its extension or replacement is a continuing process, and the human being is configured so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (2-3). Outcomes can be demonstrated by, among other methods, mind transfer (transfer of human mind to artificial substrate, like robots or computers), or radically augmented humans (cyborgs).

Given Hayles’ definition, posthumans, whether resulting from mind transfer or radical augmentation, are, arguably, a product of code (informational patterns, more fundamental than consciousness, involved in a continuing process of replacement and configuration, undergoing a seamless articulation).

But where might we look for examples of such code? And how might we extrapolate useful information from its examination? This presentation suggests that examples of codified product and process for both mind transfer and radical augmentation are well depicted across a wide range of science fiction (SF) literature, a genre noted for its “what if” speculative and future explorative nature, as well as its serious inquiry into science, the arts, and culture. Representative depictions of posthuman code will be noted and discussed.

As patterns, blueprints, systems, and translations, both genetic and digital, this posthuman code carries the potential to inform our thinking about the meaning of posthuman or cybernetic existence and Hayles’ notion of the human-machine interface. The upshot is that articulating code for posthumanity from SF literature may foster mythologies that, as Leslie Fiedler contends, speak to “the transcendence or transformation of the human . . . into something else” (508).

For those attending this presentation, the relevance of this “something else” is an understanding that such codified depictions of posthumans are at once speculative, resonant, complex, and evolving, especially as we consider how posthumans will interact in our world, and we in theirs.

Works Cited
Fiedler, Leslie. “The Mutant.” Partisan Review 32 1965: 505-525.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

jfbarber@vancouver.wsu.edu
John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University
Vancouver, WA

keywords: science fiction, literature, Hayles, posthuman, mythology

Nancy Barta-Smith, “Through the Lens of Transcoding: Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation and Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow”

In the recent novel Jayber Crow, Wendel Berry fictionalizes the ecological philosophy he developed early in his career in The Unsettling of America. A reviewer of Berry’s novel credits it for “warmth and luminosity” in spite of its “freight” of ideas, while Berry himself warns readers in an opening epigraph to beware of those who would find his novel a “text,” search out a “subtext,” or “explain,” “interpret,” “explicate,” “analyze,” “deconstruct,” or otherwise “understand” it. In part his resistance to such maneuvers simply rings with the fiction writer’s distain for the death of the author, partly it exemplifies his philosophy itself, wary as he is of the “specialists” who have destroyed subsistence farming and ruined the planet. This paper will explore these comments in another context, however: that of Linda Hutcheon’s recent work A Theory of Adaptation. She reconsiders the derivative implications of adaptation by considering them as both product and process. In an attempt to question a hierarchy of genres, media, and modes of engagement, she examines adaptations not just as product but as process of creation and reception. She concludes that “there are precious few stories” that have not been “lovingly ripped off.” Texts are “transcodings” and “inherently palimpsestuous,” “haunted at all times by their adapted texts.” Although most adaptations are also the work of the originating author, some are the work of collaborations with authors. Ironically, in this case it is Berry himself who offers us his own critique or interpretation, as well as an illustration of Hutecheon’s conclusions. In one sense of coding, his previous text is an instruction in how to proceed with adaptation and illustrates the creative transformation necessary to meet the needs of a new genre and context. In another sense, the novel is read intertextually, at least by those familiar with his earlier work, as a palimpsest, veil, or code revealing its forbearer. Both works retell as well an earlier story, confirming Hutcheon’s belief that adaptations are not derivative aberrations but central to an evolving cultural tradition. Texts are repetitions with variation and so echo evolutionary processes on the level of nature—of niche construction, Baldwin effects, acquired genomes, and non-equilibrium dynamics as well as Hutcheon’s concerns with the what, who, why, how, where, and when of adaptation.

nancy.barta-smith@sru.edu
Nancy Barta-Smith
Professor of English
Department of English
314 Spotts World Culture Bldg.
Slippery Rock University
Slippery Rock PA 16057

keywords: adaptation, evolution, palimpsest, transcoding, Linda Hutcheon, Wendell Berry, niche construction, genome, Baldwin Effect

Mark Bartlett, “From Fantasy to Imagination: Trans-Coding Lacan’s equation: $>a”

In the words of Stuart Hall, “Culture is neither just the process of the unconscious writ large, nor is the unconscious simply the internalization of cultural processes…”

My paper will reformulate the Lacanian equation, $>a, in order to make specific the material conditions of the irresolvable tension Hall describes. For “culture,” I will substitute three specific territories: the “audiovisual” (AV), the “literary” (L), and the “informational” (I), understood as imbricated modalities, or, functions in the mathematical sense, that necessitate rethinking “>”, such that it reflects the material conditions which code and produce an AV-$ and an AV-a, for example. My intention is to “liberate” Lacan’s formula from reduction to psychoanalysis, and make it newly available for cultural criticism. What emerges is a materialist conception of the relation between a technocultural “subject” and its “imagination,” understood not psychoanalytically, but in terms closer to those used by Appadurai, available globally for “social use.”

Hall rephrases the above quotation in terms of the diasporic imagination, not in the sense of the nomadic, but, alluding to Gramsci, as constituted through positionality, and specified through “cultural repertoires of enunciation.” The audiovisual, literary, and informational produce very specific media-forms of enunciation, in which the diasporic imagination replaces symbolic fantasy. My paper will address the media-specific codes and processes by which this substitution occurs.

mark@globalpostmark.net
Mark Bartlett
Independent Scholar
Visiting professor, San Francisco Art Institute
2109 Emerson Street
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-717-7524

keywords: technoculture, psychoanalysis, diaspora, identity politics, Hall, Lacan, audiovisual, literary, informational

Douglas Basford, “‘It won’t be easy and can’t be a pleasure’: Aaron Kunin’s Binary Hand-Alphabet Translations of Pound and Maeterlinck”

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.

dbasford@jhu.edu
Lecturer, Director of IFP
The Writing Seminars
135 Gilman Hall
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218-2685
(410) 516-6139

keywords: encoding, translation, Kunin, binary hand-alphabet, body

Katherine Bash, “Perceptual Poetry: The Case of Janus Shade”

Visuo-linguistic liminal spaces result from the tensions that arise between language and perception. Though it is understood that language is a cognitive mediator of perception, there are suspect creatures in every day life that reveal a reversed hierarchy where perception, specifically visual scaling, mediates language.

I explore the linguistic and perceptual interplay between shade and shadow using English as the frame of reference as other languages such as Spanish differentiate them through context, rather than through terminology. Whereas most people can identify the “shade” and a “shadow”, few can articulate the difference if asked. “Shade” and “shadow” are different though there is a place where the two concepts overlap perceptually. As a linguistic intervention, I have identified and named this overlap the “janus shade”.

The act of identifying and naming this overlap is a poetic tool for revealing how the particular cognitive behavior of visual scaling against the environment affects the linguistic process of naming what is seen. Identifying the gaps in language, going there and asking how these gaps relate to consciousness, can not only reveal a new understanding of cognitive processing of language, but also new spaces for the poe(trees) of thought.

abrisamento@katherinebash.com
Katherine E. Bash
London House #2241
Goodenough College
Mecklenburgh Square
WC1N2AB
London, UK

keywords: janus shade, shadows, language, perception, visual scaling

Katherine Behar, “R/W/X: (read/write/execute): Materiality of Code and Questions of Representation in New Media Art”

Whether written or visual, conventional art forms function through linguistic signification and spectatorial illusionism. Complicating artistic and hermeneutic processes, code in art operates through embodied materialism. Most frequently we encounter art through reading and writing, but code evokes the third, more radical file permission by engaging us at the level of execution. Artists may write code, but their artistic product does not describe, it does. When code executes, material change occurs in the world. Bits flip, charges swap, electrons fly. Both Kittler and Hayles have asserted that strident materiality on one hand, and the facility for transubstantiation on the other, are code’s defining features. How, then, can artists use code to make meaning?

While akin to conceptual art and performance art, as an artistic medium code is distinct in its manner of representation. Traditional art – for reading and writing – masks the contingency of its structure by keeping the arbitrary semiotic relationship undisclosed; meaning in new media art – art to be executed – depends upon explicit, non-arbitrary connections between parts. As technologies, these new media artworks would cease to function were this connection severed; as representations, they would cease to convey meaning were it obscured. Analysis of select examples of new media art and new media practitioners’ accounts of the artistic process support this paper’s contention that a primary meaning to emerge from code’s materialism is the tenuousness of connectivity underlying technosocial experience. Rehearsing executions of connectedness exposes in each establishment of functional equivalence the material frailty of functionality.

kb@katherinebehar.com
Katherine Behar
MFA Candidate, Department of Art, Hunter College
Lecturer, Department of Film and Media, Hunter College
210 Rivington Street #19, New York NY 10002
www.katherinebehar.com

keywords: materiality, representation, linguistics, new media art, executability

Michael G. Bennett, “Codes Legal, Cyberspatial and Molecular in an Age of Technoscientific Adolescence”

In the wake of communication technologies’ global ascendency, the concept and practice of technological legislation has emerged within legal discourses as a predominant locale for the study of the relation between enabling digital codes and governing legal codes. Overlapping in time, the intensification of technical powers of molecular manipulations in material, computational, medical and manufacturing domains have presented actors in the legal world with parallel challenges to the meaning, significance and relevance of legal codes. Between politico-philosophical literatures (Langdon Winner), media studies (Jean Baudrillard), legal studies (Lawrence Lessig) and speculative engineering (E. K. Drexler) traffic in the concept and material articulation of “code” maps a potentially useful set of related concepts, problematics and themes germane to codes of law, cyberspace and molecules. Using this field of tools, this paper will present the outline of a theory of governance through code that privileges legal preeminence and revalues scientific knowledges and technological artifacts as objects of a politicized art criticism first, and operational, instrumental means second. In this theory of code-based technological legislation, active political discrimination and heightened powers of choice based in desire trump traditional reactive decision-making based in fear and perceived necessity.

mbennett@mtu.edu
Michael G Bennett
Social Sciences
Michigan Technological University

keywords: code, law, molecular architectures, governance

Kerstin Bergman, “Codes and Deciphering in Crime Fiction: The Dan Brown Examples”

Since the early days of detective fiction in the 1840s, the solving of riddles and puzzles, and the breaking of codes, has characterized the crime genre. Accordingly, the crime fiction detective has often been compared to other professionals specializing in finding patterns in large quantities of information, such as investigative journalists, humanities scholars, cryptologists, and other scientists. One of the most successful crime writers of the 2000s, Dan Brown, has made codes and puzzles fundamental to his stories, and taken the mentioned comparison literally by letting academics be the detectives of his novels.

In Digital Fortress (1998), the main plot involves NSA’s supposedly invincible code-breaking machine, which encounters a code it cannot break. A cryptographer/mathematician is given the task to break the code. In Angels and Demons (2000), a symbologist and a CERN scientist follow an ancient trail of symbols around Rome in order to save the Vatican. In The Da Vinci Code (2003), a symbologist and a cryptologist decipher riddles and puzzles in order to solve a murder and reveal a hidden secret. And in Brown’s forthcoming novel, “The Solomon Key” (title referring to NSA cryptologist Solomon Kullback), starring the symbologist from the previous novels, more puzzles and code breaking will allegedly be involved.

In this paper, I will explore the function of codes, and of the deciphering of codes, in Brown’s novels, in relation to the crime genre and its conventions. This is a pilot study for the research project “Science in the Crime Genre.”

Kerstin.Bergman@litt.lu.se
KERSTIN BERGMAN, Ph.D.
Comparative Literature
Centre for Languages and Literature, SOL
Lund University
Box 201
SE-221 00 Lund
Sweden
Phone: +46 46 222 8488
Fax: +46 46 222 4231

keywords: code, deciphering, Dan Brown, crime fiction

David Bering-Porter, “The Recessive Trait: Mendelian Secrets and the Dangerous Cipher of Life”

Gregor Mendel’s historic discovery of dominant and recessive traits led to the formation of modern genetics. Within this scientific paradigm, visible evidence was no longer proof positive of DNA structure and its physical expression. Rather, genetic influences could pass unseen and unknown from one generation to the next, emerging as patterns within larger hereditary networks. My paper explores the recessive trait as a key formation for the science of genetics and, by extension, for the systems of social organization and control that have arisen around this coded vision of life. Within genetics, the recessive has been an important nexus for the study of race and populations, with ramifications in fields ranging from medicine to political theory to eugenics. The recessive trait is framed as a dangerous secret within the genetic code that must be detected, deciphered and deleted for the well-being of both individual and social bodies. As such, this concept of the recessive serves as a useful site at which to uncover and re-evaluate the relation between the private and the public. Just as the secret is posed as the limit of the public and as that which is thus constitutive of private life, recessive traits are secrets encoded in the fabric of life itself. Mediated by and inscribed in the body, they illustrate the problems of knowledge within the social body surrounding the play between the visible and the invisible, the normal and the pathological, and the contingent and the controlled.

David_Bering-Porter@brown.edu
David Bering-Porter
Department of Modern Culture and Media
Box 1957
155 George Street
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
Cell: 315-345-6708

keywords: genetics, secrets, biopolitics, eugenics, public, body, Foucault, Mendel, Deleuze, Davenport

Zach Blas, “TransCoder: Queer Programming Anti-Language”

Code, the action language of technology, can be interpreted as an ideology. If, historically and traditionally, technological progress has been routed in heterosexist discourse, are all bodies bound to heterosexual control and ideology? If not, how do marginalized bodies react to/resist these power paradigms and reconfigure them? Or, is there a subcultural technology—a subcultural code—that offers empowering, subversive communicative structures and processes to all bodies, producing a freedom that exists as fact?

Throughout the history of linguistics, a history of homosexually coded “languages” exists: from Polari in the UK to Gail and IsiNgqumo in South Africa. They are action languages that help create queer formations and identities just as computer code is an action language that forms what it is running. Importantly, however, these gay languages implement the closet: although they create community, they also hide identities from the public, just as computer code operates ideologically as false freedom.

This paper will examine the potential for the formation of a queer computing “anti-language.” If, as Katherine Hayles writes, “language alone is no longer the distinctive characteristic of technologically developed societies; rather, it is language plus code,” how can the queer community learn from the coded languages of its past to create a new technological “anti-language”? Attempts to formulate a queer programming code implicates the urgency in carving out a queer freedom in hi-tech culture and providing the queer community with discursive/practical tools for activism, resistance, and communication.

zblas@ucla.edu
Zach Blas
1816 ½ Santa Ynez Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
617.470.7331

keywords: queer, Polari, ideology, anti-language, code

Maaike Bleeker, “Living the code, moving along: dys-embodiment and corporeal literacy ”

Dys-embodiment describes a condition of un-reality brought about by experiences that point to the involvement of our bodies in the constitution of the world. What evokes this sense of unreality is not the sudden awareness of our bodies, but the awareness of the unperceptability of their involvement, like what is described by Massumi (2002) when he realises that during his way up through the office building in which he works, his proprioceptive sense of direction gets disconnected and reconnected in a different way to his visual imagination, as a result of which, when he looks out of his window “my north was everyone else’s east”.

Massumi’s observations point in the direction of what Rob van Kranenburg and I have termed corporeal literacy. With corporeal literacy we argue for an expansion of the notion of literacy, not in the last place to question the notion of literacy itself, as well as the way in which it is part of a constellation of other concepts like Cartesian subjectivity, mind-body opposition, print culture and western modernity. Just as visual literacy not only involves a change in the object of the reading, but also what is involved in reading and what it means to be literate, so does corporeal literacy not simply mean the transposition of language related concept to the realm of the body, but rather a rethinking of the notion of literacy from a position beyond oppositions like language and the body, concrete and abstract, conscious and unconscious.

maaike.bleeker@let.uu.nl
Prof. Dr. Maaike Bleeker
Professor of Theatre Studies
Institute for Media and Culture Studies
Utrecht University
Kromme Nieuwegracht 29
3512 HD Utrecht
The Netherlands

keywords: corporeal literacy, dys-embodiment, Brian Massumi, Drew Leder

Ian Bogost, “Procedural Rhetoric: Code as Argument”

Since Kenneth Burke broke rhetoric’s coupling from orality and writing, rhetoricians have investigated how other media with different inscriptive practices construct arguments. One of the more widespread of these trends is visual rhetoric, the study of constructing arguments with images, as in photography or advertising. Another is digital rhetoric, the study of constructing arguments with computer-based writing.

But computers enact representation not by producing images nor by digitizing text—although they are certainly capable of doing these things. Instead, computers create representation in code. The practice of inscribing rules of behavior into a computational system through the authorship of code is sometimes called procedurality.

I suggest a new domain for rhetoric, which I call procedural rhetoric. Procedural rhetoric is the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively. Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes; it is a kind of rhetoric that makes claims about how things work by constructing models of how they work, rather than by describing their function in voice, letter, or image.

To illustrate the function of procedural rhetoric as an analytic strategy, I focus on videogames—a type of software that relies more on code than on images or text—offering examples of how to read videogames for the procedural arguments they construct. The discussion covers both popular commercial videogames and experimental/artistic videogames; some original games by the author will also be demonstrated.

ian.bogost@lcc.gatech.edu
Ian Bogost
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
The Georgia Institute of Technology
686 Cherry St.
Atlanta, GA 30332-0165
+1 (404) 894-1160

keywords: computation, rhetoric, procedurality, videogames

J. James Bono, “Cheat Codes: The Limits of Close Reading in Digital Games Analysis”

Few reputable literature scholars would rely solely on secondary materials like Cliff’s Notes (the literary equivalent of the gamer’s strategy guide) as stand-ins for close readings of primary texts. To thoroughly perform close readings of playable digital fictions that increasingly require a diverse range of activities such as cryptanalysis, “twitch” motor responses, and travel to real-world physical spaces as key elements of the narrative, the digital games scholar has little choice if they want to see the unfolding narrative through to its end.

This paper considers the increasingly murky line between cheating and close reading in light of developments such as alternate reality games, which invite the player to examine the underlying machine code of the text as a requirement of game play, and attempts to examine source code to find “cheat codes” in console games. I argue that any close reading of a digital game must necessarily consider all accessible elements of the game, including the underlying code, for two reasons: First, by examining the code we can facilitate progress through the narrative in its entirety. And, second, this allows for readings that are compatible with the traditional idea that a close reading should present not simply the “best” reading of a text, but all possible readings.

Drawing on contemporary discussions of close reading within new media, I present a methodology for game analysis that attempts to delimit the practical and ethical boundaries of such readings and identify the potential problems presented by altering the essential mechanics of play in the interest of thorough analysis.

jamiebono@gmail.com
jjb56@pitt.edu
J. James Bono
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
526 Cathedral of Learning
4200 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260-0001

keywords: digital games analysis, ARG, close reading, source code, cheating

Marianne van den Boomen, “Metaphorizing digital code”

The concept of ‘virtual community’ has been used to conceptualize e-sociability since the early nineties (Rheingold 1993). Nowadays, with the advent and hype of Web 2.0, references to community are still widely abound, loosely connected to ‘social networks’.

In this paper it is argued that both the concept of community and network function as reifying metaphors. Though metaphors are analytically productive—they highlight aspects which remain otherwise unnoticed—they are also seductive and reductive: they downplay other aspects. Notably, their seductive productivity might lead to reification: displacing the phenomenon with the metaphor, and treating it as a thing in itself.

My claim is that the virtual community metaphor, imported from the imagery of a pre-modern village, is connected to a delimited virtual space inhabited by a marked out group of communicating users. While pre web and early web ‘social software’ (IRC, Usenet, MUDs and web forums) indeed did enable virtual settlements in bordered virtual spaces (produced by the specific code and interfaces), this no longer holds for distributed web communication. Here nested web scripts generate fuzzy spaces without borders, reassembled from heterogeneous information and communication transferences which, while profoundly social, elude the community metaphor.

The notion of network might look more appropriate, but when invoked simultaneously as a model and as ontology, the network also becomes a reified metaphor, displacing unruly qualitative phenomena with a presupposed model of homogenized quantitative relations. I will end this paper by questioning whether other metaphorical concepts (Web 2.0, social capital, blogosphere, issue clouds) could provide better accounts of distributed e-sociability.

Marianne.vandenBoomen@let.uu.nl
Marianne van den Boomen
Universiteit Utrecht
Instituut Media en Re/presentatie
Kromme Nieuwegracht 29
3512 HD UTRECHT
phone: +31 (0)30 253 9607/ 6125
fax: +31 (0)30 253 6167
tel: +31 (0)30 253 9607

keywords: metaphor, e-sociability, software, web scripts, network, virtual community

Anna Botta, “Decoding Complexity”

In The Moment of Complexity, Mark Taylor writes: “We are living in a moment of unprecedented complexity, when things are changing faster than our ability to comprehend them. […] To understand our time, we must comprehend complexity.” (3) The philosopher is called to the task of developing an interpretation of an emerging network culture which entertains an ongoing dialogue between the sciences and humanities but also between different disciplines.

But how should we go about decoding complexity? Complexity (from the Latin “cum-plexus”) can be understood as an ensemble, one which embraces, encompasses, or connects several heterogeneous discursive terms. It requires a dynamic and flexible decoding model, one which is neither too much nor too little ordered, a structure where order finds itself always at the margin of chaos. For Mark Taylor, such a structure is “a seamy web in which what comes together is held apart and what is held apart comes together. This web is neither subjective or objective and yet is the matrix in which all subjects and objects are formed, deformed, reformed” (12).

I am interested in exploring the hermeneutical possibilities of the network as a decoding model in history, a discipline which is usually founded on a chronological linear narrative. In particular, I analyze the recent book by J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (2001) which shows how, since the earliest times, history can be viewed as a web of connections that link people to one another and allow them to exchange information.

abotta@smith.edu
Anna Botta
Associate Professor
Comparative Literature and Italian
Smith College
146 Elm St.
Northampton, MA 01063
Tel. (413) 585-3424
Fax (413) 585-3415

keywords: complexity, J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, network, Mark Taylor, web

Jason Buchanan, “Roguewords, Monkwords, and Useless Words: James Joyce’s Linguistic Coding of Death”

In Ulysses James Joyce engages in a literary investigation of death in the hope of escaping the double bind of passive suffering created by the two opposed existential responses to death, namely metaphysics and empiricism. The metaphysical response to “the unspeakability” of death yokes the finality of life to a cosmology that depends on a teleological system of good and evil. The empirical discourse opposes the metaphysical (or theological) idea of death and posits death as a unique event defined by its variable contexts and manifold causes. In Joyce’s view, this metaphysical and empirical binary form a linguistic code that relegates the individual to an existence of passive suffering. It is only by creating a new linguistic code for existence can the individual “work beyond suffering” to a new understanding of death.

My paper charts Joyce’s development of a new linguistic code of sacred “roguewords” that can create an active response to death independent from the “monkwords” of organized religion or the “useless words” of absolute materiality. I utilize the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Roman Jakobson to analyze how Joyce creates a “saturated phenomena” that rejects the dominance subjectivity and thus leave open a discursive space receptive to the building of new linguistic codes. Joyce uses linguistic experimentation to create a “saturated” text capable of expressing a radical openness to the uncertainty of death that allows it a sacred, but not divine, position.

jmbuchan@purdue.edu
Jason Buchanan
Purdue University
2851 Plaza Court
Lafayette, IN 47909
(765)- 714-2709

keywords: Joyce, language, death, empiricism, metaphysics

Roberta Buiani, “WYSIWYG: the map is the message?”

Whether presented in the form of simple or rudimentary schemes, complex design-heavy graphs that reproduce entire databases, or aesthetically pleasant techniques, mapping renders visible a reality that has been scrupulously coded through technologies of investigation, representation and simulation. Maps of geographic locations (the static, two-dimentional map of a city or a region) are today placed side by side conceptual and information(al) maps (the dynamic, time-sensitive maps that portray internet traffic, the development of an organism or a microbe etc.).

In The Information Bomb, Paul Virilio observes how the increasing power of amplification and exploration brought by technology has replaced alternative horizons to the geographical perspective, once provided by “the frontier” (Virilio 2000). Reaching these horizons means knowing, and, at the same time, controlling.

Following Virilio’s suggestion as a guide, this presentation utilizes the popular “Visualcomplexity” collection (http://www.visualcomplexity.com) as a case-study. In addition to confirming Virilio’s hypothesis, the variety and diversity of maps contained in this website illustrate how the practice of mapping reveals itself through a double, close-knit articulation. On the one hand, mapping proposes to shed new lights on the world: it insists in unravelling its secrets by dissecting and reconstructing it according to a variety of needs and circumstances. In this way, reality is seen through new forms, perspectives and interpretations. Thus, to many, the world seen through mapping embodies the above new horizons. On the other hand, because mapping is a translation, it is also a re- writing of reality. Thus, despite its claims of scientificity, neutrality, and truthfulness, mapping has the power to deviate or distort reality. This double statute, cognitive and political likewise, ends up holding the universe of the symbolic in a fairly fragile way.

robb@yorku.ca
roberta buiani
graduate programme in communication and culture
York/Ryerson University
Toronto, Ontario
Canada

keywords: mapping, representation, rendering, information visualization

Jennifer Burris, “Decoding the Subject: Parallels in Psychopharmacogenomics and Contemporary Visual Art”

Biotechnology, genomics, and the use of pharmaceuticals to treat mental and emotional distress, three examples of contemporary science which significantly impact notions of the subject at the beginning of the 21st century, are brought together by current research in psychopharmacogenomics: the attempt to link recently acquired knowledge in psychiatric and behavioral genetics with psychopharmaceuticals. The purported benefits of such an advance are twofold: (1) the ability to measure individual variation in drug response, which would allow a more ‘personalized medicine’ while contributing to the drugs’ safety and efficacy; and (2) the enhanced ability for ‘risk assessment’ through diagnostic tests which locate the presence of disease-susceptible genes, thus creating potential new marketing strategies to targeted consumer groups.

After introducing the general conditions and precepts of this clinical research, I will address the potential impact of this fast-developing medical technology on cultural ideas of the subject; how is our understanding of sadness, depression, and anxiety affected by the knowledge that such emotions and moods are, in part, genetically encoded?

Such explorations of a ‘biomedically-mediated’ subjectivity will take place against a backdrop of contemporary art, specifically photography and video. While I will address artistic ‘content,’ primary attention will be given to a discussion of form, arguing that the techniques and production methods of this art parallels theories of ‘coding’ that currently inform medical research. My paper will thus conclude with the assertion that, rather than ‘abandoning the subject’ (as is often claimed), contemporary art structurally reflects it through formal processes of coding.

jb477@cam.ac.uk
Box 874, King’s College
Cambridge, CB2 1ST
United Kingdom

keywords: genomics, psychopharmaceuticals, contemporary art, subject (subjectivity)

Jonathan Burt & Jennifer Boyd, “Vivisection and cross-species codes of conduct”

The setting up of a Royal Commission to examine the question of the use of live animals in experiments in June 1875, and the subsequent publication of that report and the ratification of the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876, marked an important shift in the ways cross-species relations were encoded in England. The establishment of a scheme of registration, licensing and inspection was an attempt to systematise the treatment of animals in science, whilst also removing science from the public view. Public vivisection lectures were banned, as were the use of animal experiments in medical lectures, except to illustrate the use of anaesthetic. Codes of conduct towards the animal in the laboratory were reconfigured. At the same time stereotypical codes of class, gender, profession, human and animal identity, amongst others, underpinned the debate over the rights and wrongs of vivisection and shaped different targets of attack. This was a prominent feature of the vivisection literature in public journals, which was especially extensive in the decade from 1875. These codes of identity were themselves, in principle at least, strongly determinant of social codes of conduct. This paper examines the phenomenon of vivisection at this period as a particular site of inter- and intra-species codes of conduct in transition. Drawing on government papers, as well as scientific illustration, painting, and literature, from the key period of the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, it examines vivisection in terms of postures of interaction and problems of conduct. This is slightly different from standard historical accounts of vivisection which tend to examine it in terms of the conflicts of social history. In this instance, the practice can also be seen as illustrating the tension between linguistic and non-linguistic codes in the formation of human-animal relations.

pcfav@aol.com
keywords: cruelty to animals, cross-species relations, England, vivisection, nineteenth century

Angela Campbell, “Georgiana Molloy and the Code of Modernity”

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 19th 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.

tandango@optusnet.com.au

keywords: Mallarmé, Georgina Molloy, colonization, rhizome, botany, modernity, ethnography

Michael Century, “Code and the Illusions of Digital Harmony”

John Whitney Sr. (1917-1995), an American experimental filmmaker who produced some of the first computer animations, is an emblematic figure in the early reception of digital code as a radical rupture in the cultural imagination. This paper re-contextualizes the artist’s theoretically over-determined practice in relation to current debates on embodiment, codification and the virtual in new media art. Whitney’s technical inventions and propensity for theory-making about new computer based art forms placed him uniquely at the crossroads between the mainstream film industry and the emerging computer culture of the 1960s. A legendary bricoleur who re-purposed WWII analog military hardware in the 1950s to control image dynamics, Whitney’s creative course changed markedly when he was adopted as a “demo artist” in 1965 by IBM, where his role was in part to humanize computing under the sign of artistic creativity. Whitney had emerged from a strain of experimental film concerned since the 1920s with “visual music”, but after his first digital productions, he began a search for what he considered to be operative laws, grounded in European music theory, for the regulation of a new computer based form of visual art. The series of films then produced by Whitney and his programming collaborators may be read as successive steps toward a grandiose theory of “digital harmony”, which proclaims a necessary transcoding of musical consonance, dissonance, and harmonic progression into visual structures. Affirming Massumi’s avowal that “digital technologies in fact have a remarkably weak connection to the virtual”, the paper presents Whitney’s trajectory from analog bricoleur to digital pontificator as a telling case study of the allures—and entrapments—of digital code.

century@rpi.edu
Michael Century
www.arts.rpi.edu/people/century

keywords: computer animation, digital harmony, visual music, codification, film

Edmond Chang, “‘How ya doin’, mon?’: Coding and Coded Race in World of Warcraft”

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.

changed@u.washington.edu
Edmond Y. Chang
Ph.D. student, Department of English, University of Washington

keywords: video games, World of Warcraft, race, Alexander Galloway, Lisa Nakamura

Boo Chapple, “Strange Transformations: Slippages and thresholds at the intersection of art and the life sciences”

When I see the word code, I tend to think of a discrete series of symbols, a set of rules. If I linger over the word a little longer, it starts to mutate. I begin to see that the discrete set of symbols, or rules, I had imagined is, in fact, a collection of designated, or abstract, points, or densities, existing within a series of transformations. And indeed, this is where the focus of my paper lies. In my practice as an artist engaging with the materials and techniques of what could widely be termed the life sciences, I am concerned with the politics of transformation; across the boundary of life and non-life, between organism and commodity, bodies and culture.

In this paper, I will direct my attention to some of the codes—crossing points, thresholds—that exist within the transformative material/cultural processes of producing work at the intersection of art and science. Examples of such codes include; discipline specific languages, representational codes implicit in translation, mapping and visualisation technologies, scientific protocols, and the network of metaphors by which we understand and reference our experience of bodies and materials. This discussion will be specifically grounded in examples from my own practice and works I have produced which explore ‘other’ possibilities and enact ‘strange’ trajectories of transformation using bone, collagen, and E. coli.

boo@corpuseclectica.net
Boo Chapple
RMIT University, SymbioticA – University of Western Australia

keywords: art/science, practice, transformation, metaphor, materiality

Amy Charles, “The Precog in the Bath: Scientific Image and Rhetoric in Minority Report”

How do scientific image and rhetoric shape the precog story in Minority Report? Significant differences between the presentation of the precogs in Philip K. Dick’s short story and the Cohen/Frank screenplay illuminate how scientific image and rhetoric in a fiction can affect the sense and meaning of underlying myths. In this case, the screenwriters’ adoption of bioscientific image/rhetoric, along with an effort to humanize Dick’s precogs, changes the sense of what seers are; it also affects the weight and themes they can carry in a story. Among the topics discussed in this workshop-style presentation will be scientific and ethical rhetoric surrounding animal use v. machine use. A background idea will be the suggestion that science communicators, often trained in art and literature, package their images and narrative in forms that are familiar and heavily connotative to artists, and that unwittingly, science communicators may be speaking in a sort of aesthetic code to which artists respond.

amycharles1@gmail.com
Amy Charles
University of Iowa

keywords: precog, visual rhetoric, fiction, scientific image, Minority Report

Una Chaudhuri, “Becoming Bird: Code Conversion as Interspecies Performance in two recent ‘Avianworks.’”

“Birdsong must be among the most captivating and complex sounds a human ear encounters. It is also the must elusive to describe. Trying to do so stretches both our linguistic and visual descriptive systems, and poses a very unique translation problem.” So begins Nina Katchadourian’s catalogue description of her performance-installation piece entitled “Please, Please, Pleased to Meet’Cha” (2006), a work which playfully engages one of the slipperiest slopes in Animal Studies: that between transcription and translation, recording and projecting, “speaking as” and “speaking for.” Reversing the anthropomorphic logic of most traditional animal representation, the work challenged its human performers to creatively attempt a theriomorphic expression that would employ and then surpass familiar modes of interspecies imitation. Beginning with a variety of human codes for representing birdsong (including mnemonic, phonetic, diagrammatic, and poetic codes) the artist used the protocols of “site-specificity” (the birds chosen were native to trees in the grounds of the performance venue, Wave Hill, a New York cultural center)—and, much more unusually, skill-specificity (the human performers were all United Nations translators)—to create an interspecies performance that materialized language as landscape, and characterized the species divide as a space of limitless creativity. This paper will analyze “Please, Please, Pleased to Meet’cha” in relation to Eddo Stern’s video-game-based performance event “Cockfight Arena” (2001), where interspecies imitation took the form of embodiment and screen avatars, dematerializing the space of human-animal interaction and producing a much more disquieting account of the species divide.

una.chaudhuri@nyu.edu
Una Chaudhuri
Professor of English and Drama
New York University
19 University Place, Room 518
New York, NY 10003
Phone: 212-998-8815


keywords: birdsong, avianworks, becoming, Katchadourian

Laura Chiesa, “Contemporary reading of Georges Simondon’s philosophy and the coding of the sensible”

This paper springs from an interrogation about Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical take on technology that in the last few years has received a strong reconsideration in critical theory (Adrian MacKenzie, Mark Hansen and Bernard Stiegler, among others). The main concept from Simondon’s philosophy that is targeted by critical theory is “transduction” (which entails other related concepts such as “pre-individual,” “transindividuation,” etc.). This concept furnishes a way to think, as MacKenzie has argued, about “how living and non-living processes differentiate and develop.” Hansen has articulated an interpretation of digital media whose theoretical tools have at their core the late philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (the question of embodiment and of Nature) and Simondon’s question of transduction and technics. The coupling of these two philosophies brings for Hansen a new understanding of the body that is not defined by the boundaries of its interiority; instead the body’s paradoxical form of “embodiment-disembodiment” marks its technical interpenetration with the flesh of the world.

A third, and very different, elaboration of Simondon’s philosophy is developed by Stiegler, who thinks transduction is a process that relates three elements (psychic, collective and technical). He considers the effects of the digital technologies as possible “liquidation” of Simondon’s transindividual and therefore of individuation. This may bring for Stiegler a loss of participation of the esthetical and to a “catastrophe of the sensible.” My presentation will investigate these three different interpretations of Simondon in order to see how the sensible is deciphered in our hypermodern time.

laura.chiesa@yale.edu
Laura Chiesa
Yale University

keywords: Gilbert Simondon, transduction, technology, sensible

Kevin Chua, “Gros and the Napoleonic Code of War”

Early-19th century French military painting has often been understood in terms of the formalist dynamics of neoclassical History painting; more recent accounts have productively analyzed them in terms of Napoleonic battle strategy—center of gravity, force, movement—most famously formalized by Clausewitz. In contrast to these approaches, and informed by post-1960s information theory, my paper will consider these Napoleonic “machines” in terms of coding, cryptography, and late-18th/early-19th century theories of information. Focusing on a core group of military paintings, especially Antoine-Jean Gros’ “Napoleon Bonaparte on the Battlefield of Eylau” (1808), I will ask: how are these paintings not just configurations of speech and writing (e.g., the military commander’s verbal Logos transcribed into “written” pictorial form), but also about code—scramblings and propagandistic obfuscations, informational repleteness and redundancy, flows and deadlocks? How also was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s army and the vast descriptive-epistemological enterprise surrounding the invasion of Egypt not marginal but central to the military advance on the European continent, and to Napoleon’s Enlightenment project in general? Through a focused consideration of the feedback loops between code and visual technology, this paper hopes to probe more deeply into the representational imperatives of the Napoleonic enterprise.

kchua71@yahoo.com
Kevin Chua PhD U.C. Berkeley Asst. Prof., Texas Tech University School of Art

keywords: battle, information theory, Napoleon, cryptography, war, painting

Amy Clary, “Wild Images: Simulation and Scopophilia on the ‘Last Frontier’”

From the automobiles that convey visitors to Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve to the advertisements and adventure narratives that first enticed them to the “Last Frontier,” nearly every aspect of the Alaskan wilderness experience is mediated by technology. Those who come to Alaska in search of wilderness find machines, publications, and products all promising to deliver wilderness—or at least a reasonable facsimile.

The goal of this essay is not to argue for or against the reality or authenticity of wilderness. It is, instead, to examine how technologies of mediation shape and perpetuate American attitudes toward wilderness. For instance, the widespread circulation of nature and wildlife photography have long served dual purposes for wilderness: they kindle popular fascination with the natural world by making wilderness images readily accessible at the same time as they obscure the material condition of wild landscapes by replacing them with technologically-simulated images. By influencing public attitudes about wilderness and wildlife, such technologies can influence public land-use policy decisions.

In tracing the impact of technology on the American relationship with wilderness, this paper focuses on the visual pleasure derived from wilderness images and the technologies that facilitate it. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Bradford Washburn, and Laura Mulvey, this paper will examine wilderness photography and videography as technologies that shape our relationship with Denali and other wilderness areas.

amyclary@alumni.bates.edu
PO Box 12, Farmington Falls, ME 04940
(207) 778-0373

keywords: Alaska, wilderness, photography, scopophilia

Alan Clinton, “The Code That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Ashbery, Turing, Roussel”

Oscar Wilde’s invocation in court of Lord Alfred Douglas’ “Love that dare not speak its name” could be said, with some qualification, to have inaugurated an entire industry devoted to uncovering the latent homosexual context within works of art and literature. While this industry has attained worthy political and ethnographic achievements, it also, to some extent, has elided Wilde’s devotion to what has now become known as the decadent 90s. The decadent tradition in fact bears many similarities to the logics of computing and its concomitant culture of postmodernism, with “art for art’s sake” representing the late 19th-century version of computer simulation and simulacra. It also opens the door to an alternate reading of the “love that dare not speak its name”: the love that dare not-speak-its-name. This latter phrase still contains the notion of erotics and specifically a queer erotics, and yet it suggests that secrecy and code need not only serve the purpose of occultation, but that occultation bears certain erotic qualities in its own right.

This combination of the academic and popular meanings of decadence serves as my entry-point into reading John Ashbery’s second volume of poems The Tennis Court Oath (1962) as a book that, in its elaboration of code for code’s sake, suggests influence from the queer history of contemporary computing technologies. Ashbery is a gay writer who, unlike say, W.H. Auden (who was responsible for Ashbery’s first volume, Some Trees, being published through the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956), does not necessarily feel a need to use poetic code to express his sexuality. Indeed, his first volume of poetry does not immediately strike one as “coded” in the manner of The Tennis Court Oath. The varying reactions of Harold Bloom are instructive here. Some Trees gave Bloom license to begin his hijacking of Ashbery’s output as “heir to the romantic tradition” while The Tennis Court Oath was largely incomprehensible to Bloom (or “disappointing,” as his ego would phrase it). Bloom’s failure to comprehend the significance of The Tennis Court Oath stems from a misrecognition of its digital propensities.

Metonymically speaking, Ashbery’s career could in fact seem to spring from a very important moment in computing history, Alan Turing’s suicide in 1954. The homosexual computer and the environment leading to his death also leads to Ashbery’s extended sojourn/exile in Paris to study the writings of Raymond Roussel, a homosexual writer who used codes/rules to generate texts that confused and angered the public with their absurd incomprehensibility. For Roussel, such “programming” served as a generative device that was dear enough to him to bequeath to the only people around who would appreciate it (the Surrealists in 1933), not as a means to express/occult his homosexuality. Ashbery’s multiple subject positions (subject positions?—yes, Michel Foucault was there studying Roussel at the same time, which led to his first book, published in 1963) as a transatlantic gay writer in the age of computing ultimately lead to The Tennis Court Oath, a book named after a revolutionary oath taken at the site of a game, a book whose fragmented appearance and multiple allusions to spy novels, codes, and secrecy evoke not only the paranoid environment of McCarthyism, but to some extent simulate the interference and static of machine-coded language itself as well as a stochastic eroticism lifted from the confines of the body.

alanclinton@earthlink.net
Postdoctoral Teaching Associate
Dept. of English
Northeastern University

keywords: erotics, Ashbery, Turing, Roussel, homosexuality, poetry, code, generative language

Mike Clody, “The Code of Nature: Secret and Translation in Bacon”

Francis Bacon’s bilateral ciphers seem to offer us a model for the greater “scientific” project of the “Interpretation of Nature.” The objects of study would appear to the natural philosopher as encoded in a double language; on the one hand, they speak to the fallen intellect of man, while, on the other, they reveal the power of God by playing a role in His Providential plan. Viewed in this way, we can see that the intellectual tool offered by the New Organon ostensibly enables the investigator to act in accordance with the divine motivation that directs the object’s potential and that it does so by suppressing the fallen intellect’s inclinations. While the investigator will recognize the success of his/her inquiries by the applicability of his/her knowledge, there necessarily remains a secretive impulse behind that knowledge, for the divine plan itself can never be understood.

Code, as it presents itself in Bacon, seems to be of such a nature that it can only be ‘cracked’ in translation rather than in the language of its divine creator. The consequence, it appears, is that the truth of the code, linguistic though it may be, ultimately resides outside language itself and within the realm of practical use. By relying on the theory of Walter Benjamin, my paper investigates the consequences that this relation of the objects of nature to code, translation, and truth in Bacon’s New Atlantis and Advancement of Learning may entail for the ontology of the new science.

mcclody@buffalo.edu
Mike Clody
SUNY at Buffalo

keywords: Francis Bacon, Walter Benjamin, translation, interpretation

Lucinda Cole, “Renaissance Physiognomy and Animal Speech”

Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century physiognomist, held in his library many works by the Renaissance natural philosopher and father of cryptography Giambattista Della Porta. In 1586 Giambattista Della Porta, best known for his work Natural Magick, published a now-rare text entitled De humana physiognomia which used woodcuts to illustrate resemblances between animals and human characteristics. While some scholars, and especially historians of science, have recognized the influence of Della Porta on the eighteenth-century Swiss physiognomist Johann Lavater, fewer have explored his texts in relation to Thomas Browne’s representation of animals. This paper will examine significant relationships between Della Porta’s doctrine of signatures and Browne’s argument in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors (1646) that he saw no organic reason why certain “quadrupedes…might not be taught to speak, or become imitators of speech.” Awareness of this esoteric tradition complicates recent animal studies scholarship in the humanities which has been dominated by a Christian paradigm of “difference.”

lcole@maine.rr.com
Lucinda Cole, University of Southern Maine

keywords: animals, speech, physiognomy, cryptography, natural philosophy

Trey Conner, “The Protos Chronos and the Figure of Compression: Code and Coda”

Key texts in molecular biology, infinitist mathematics, and the diverse musical minimalisms borne out of John Cage’s attention to “the frame” (such as La Monte Young’s compositions) seem to share more than just a concern with coding, as theological presuppositions and ad hoc metaphysics mixing codes of rationalism and mysticism in these discourses also produce fascinating transcodings that call to mind the technological and artistic heritage of Pythagoras and Plato. Scientists and artists in this lineage gravitate to versions of order that adhere in Bateson’s coding primer, “Every Schoolboy Knows....” where parsimony is posited as the fundamental presupposition of coding practice (Mind and Nature 23-37). Where Bateson likens coding’s premise to the figure of Occam’s razor, this presentation will instead weave an analogy to the similar but perhaps “lossier” trope of “compression” as it appears in another Greek musical tradition, that of the harmonikoi and of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, and compare the coding practices of their protos chronoi (primary time-lengths, the musician’s equivalent of the geometer’s point) with the meaning and utility of data compression today, including a consideration of so-called pseudocode, reflective/dynamic/object-oriented programming languages, sampling in dj culture, tagging, and codecs such as mp3 and oggvorbis. These coding practices have dramatically reorganized the function and phenomenology of music, programming, and writing in ways neither the Greeks nor the minimalists could anticipate, and this presentation will conclude with an allegorical account of “the listener” in these coding regimes.

The closing allegory will accompany a sound installation. Fragments of mantra, shards of tuned frequencies from an analog coupled oscillator, and free audience participation will provide coding elements, and George Gamow’s diamond code diagram (vis-a-vis Rich Doyle’s rhetorical analysis Gamow’s codes, cf On Beyond Living 39-64) will provide metacode. Simple coding elements and fragments will be offered up in advance, in stages, so that interested members of the SLSA community may, by means of an open-access wiki, participate in the sonic coda to the paper presentation (http://protoschronos.pbwiki.com/FrontPage).

trey.conner@gmail.com
Trey Conner, PhD
Assistant Professor
Languages, Literature, and Writing
College of Arts and Sciences, DAV 121
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
140 Seventh Avenue South
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
727 873-4783
http://courselinker.pbwiki.com/TreyBio

keywords: protos chronos, compression, rhetoric, La Monte Young, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, metaprogramming

Erik Conrad, “From text to touch: debugging mobile tactile media”

In his 1921 manifesto of Tactilism (the Art of Touch), F.T. Marinetti stressed the importance of remaining distinct from the plastic arts, from which there was “nothing to gain from, and everything to lose.” Touch tends to be subsumed by systems of abstraction. The process of debugging computer code or electronic circuitry is primarily visual, and thus somewhat similar to the process of composing visual media. However, when working with media that is 1.) mobile and 2.) tactile, parts of the standard troubleshooting process break down. In this paper I will discuss the process of creating a wearable tactile display system for the purpose of allowing walkers, properly outfitted, to feel the spatial form of the urban grid at their location as vibro-tactile rhythms on their body. Participants don a vest embedded with an array of vibrotactile actuators, a global positioning satellite receiver and custom electronics and then walk the city augmented by patterns of vibration. In this heterogeneous art practice—an entanglement of aesthetics, schematics and lines of code—systems of abstraction combine and compete for what is ultimately a tactile art. This paper describes the designing, building and debugging responsive tactile media and what it is like to program for the body and skin in space.

erik.conrad@gmail.com
erik conrad
phd student | topological media lab
concordia university
http://www.peripheralfocus.net

keywords: tactilism, art and technology, design practice, wearable computing

Thomas Cornell, “Designing the New World Picture”

Art and science can work together to construct human flourishing. We recognize the height of Greek culture that celebrated empiricism and the birth of democracy. The Italian Renaissance is acknowledged as the rebirth of that intelligent discipline. We celebrate the conciliation of art and science and the ability to solve problems and construct a better world. Phidias and Leonardo, empirically measuring proportion and discovering anatomy’s meaning, symbolize artists working towards seeing the truth. These prior cultural achievements are signified by a transition from theism to recognition of the real “daemon” powers that we must contend with—nature and life, Dionysos and Eros.

In our time, the problem isn’t anatomy/physiology, it is ecology/equality—not concerns of the city- or nation-state, but global family. Now, concerns for global justice require a reformation/renaissance. I define 1945 as the turning point, with Oppenheimer’s famous quotation, “I am become death,” because we began to see, and now see the lethal naivety of theistic and technological hubris—and the necessity of designing the new world picture. With the aid of modern science, particularly ecology and the Gaia Hypothesis, we see the world as an interpenetrating culture.

The birth of nature and death of narcissus, BNDN, is the universal code of environmental justice—and an evolving emergence of a supervening global culture. The code signifies two moral necessities: First, acknowledge obedience to nature, and secondly, transfigure our childish narcissism and wish for omnipotence/superiority. BNDN signifies that we need to decode the purposiveness of nature in order to design environmental justice—a tacit birthright to a fair share of nature.

tcornell@bowdoin.edu
Thomas Cornell
Bowdoin College

keywords: birth of nature, environmental justice, Gaia

N.C. Christopher Couch, “The Geometry of Emotion: Doorways in Will Eisner’s Comics”

Comic books, invented in New York City in the 1930s, are geometrically and tectonically structured adaptations of bedsheet newspaper comic strips to the format and proportions of newsstand magazines. Will Eisner, who created the American cooperative system of comic book story creation (combining the creativity of writer, penciller, inker and letter in a shop or small-batch production system), also coined the term for an published the first original work described as a graphic novel (A Contract with God, New York, 1978). The geometric code of panels (the sequential frames of comics, as explored by McCloud in Understanding Comics) as spatial constructs and architectonic fields for human feelings can best be understood through Eisner’s work. In the comic book pages of The Spirit, circulated through American newspapers in the 1940s, Eisner created the splash page and the entryway of menace, danger, and sexual transgression in the small geometies of stenciled glass, transoms and cropped and angled doorways. In his finest graphic novel, To the Heart of the Storm (1992), reversing views through doorways chart the discovery and rejection of a Jewish suitor of a German-American girl by her family just before World War II. The syntagms of Eisners doorways create the paradigms of expressive panels and the language of metapanels that was key to the development of the modern graphic novel.

nccouch@complit.umass.edu
N. C. Christopher Couch
Program in Comparative Literature
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Herter Hall
Amherst MA 01003
Tel: 413-577-1309

keywords: Will Eisner, graphic novels, comics, sequential art, yiddishkeit

Cynthia Current, “‘Liminal Lives’: Fingerprints, Genomics, and the Disruption of Identity in Mark Twain and Octavia Butler”

This paper suggests that biological archiving provokes and reconstitutes subjectivity and experience contributing to what Joseph Dumit refers to as “objective-self fashioning…the set of acts that concerns our brains and our bodies deriving from received-facts of science and medicine.” Susan Squier expands on such notions of objective-self fashioning by asking us to consider what she terms “liminal lives,” beings “whose new [identities challenge] the accepted time frame of a human life as well as the accepted notion of civil status available to human beings” (3). Such beings now include frozen embryos, stem cells, and human cell lines, what Kaushik Sundar Rajan refers to as “biocapital.” In nineteenth century America, such biocapital included slaves. These examples, spanning over 100 years, suggest that the boundaries of the cultural and the biological remain fluid and are continually under revision. Crucially, however, such scientific and technological revisions also consistently focus on the codification and reorganization of race, gender and reproduction.

I explore such concerns through two novels, Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894)and Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987). I argue that a narrative bridge exists between the fingerprinting revolution suggested in Pudd’nhead Wilson and the genomics revolution posited in Dawn. Each novel charts a technological surge that attempts to counter the repeated resurgence of the body represented through the hypermediacy between bodies and technologies. Fingerprinting creates a biological archive, a system and medium to classify and encode identity that, by the late twentieth century, shifts into the surge of technology associated with genomics. That scale of interpretation, of gene scanning and physical mapping, is then transformed by Butler back into the body itself—the ultimate dividing and sorting machine. Most importantly, however, technology in Dawn becomes deeply engaged with, in fact inseparable from, sexual desire and reproduction, which informs a new synthesis of Twain’s understanding of biology, technology, and acquisition in Pudd’nhead Wilson.

current@email.unc.edu
Cynthia A. Current
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English
University of North Carolina
CB #3520
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520

keywords: fingerprinting, genomics, Mark Twain, Octavia Butler

Kimberly De Vries, “Coding Reality: From the Spells of Neil Gaiman to the Programs of Second Life”

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.

kdevries@csustan.edu
Kim De Vries, PhD
Assistant Professor and Director of Composition
English Department, CSU Stanislaus
http://web.csustan.edu/English/DeVries/

keywords: code, Gaiman, Second Life, play, magic

Elizabeth Drew, “Literary Ciphers: The Cognitive Experience of Interpretation”

The literary text is a complex system of codes. Although it is important that readers possess the key to a few codes (language, for example) in order to decipher the rest, the mark of literariness may be the need to discover and create new codes out of a clash of patterns operating on multiple dimensions, such as sound, syntax, metaphor, genre and language as well as social and cultural milieus. Although the conscious experience of interpretation may sometimes resemble code breaking, much like the process James Joyce famously envisioned for future readers confronted with his “enigmas and puzzles,” on the whole cracking the literary code is a subtler enterprise. The richness of aesthetic experience seems to be exquisitely connected to those elements which elude conscious grasp, whether due to the minuteness of perceptual discrimination, the complexity of the relationships among elements or often unexamined identifications with characters, settings, or situations. Although these aspects of interpretation seldom feel like code breaking, they are acts of deciphering, of negotiating patterns and creating meaning. This is what the brain does, and does most often without awaking conscious awareness. This paper applies recent developments in the study of the cognitive architecture of consciousness to the cognitive experience of negotiating literary codes.

elizadrew@gmail.com
Elizabeth Drew
PhD, Trinity College Dublin, 2006

keywords: literary interpretation, cognitive science, consciousness, information theory

Brian Duff, “Family Talk in American Politics”

This paper seeks to crack the code of familial language in American politics. American politicians obsessively explain and justify their policy decisions in terms of language about family. This paper explores the way that ideas about family interact with citizens’ political predispositions, creating the environment for political elites’ family talk to either succeed or fail.

The paper shows that it is possible to identify a sort of neo-authoritarianism in American attitudes. This neo-authoritarianism is associated with the very popular idea that having and raising children is the best way to have a fulfilling or meaningful life. The paper examines the extent to which people agree that raising and caring for children is what makes life meaningful, and the political attitudes associated with this belief. The paper shows that most Americans consider having children crucial to leading a fulfilling life. The paper goes on to show that this belief is associated with lower feelings of social trust, less warmth toward racial outgroups, less critical attitudes toward the elites running major American institutions, and lower levels of political participation, even when controls are introduced for ideology, party identification, and a host of demographic variables. This cluster of attitudes bears a strong family resemblance to the original “authoritarian personality” conceived of by Adorno et al. The idea that having children makes life meaningful, however, does not sound authoritarian to the ear, and turns out to be largely distinct from authoritarianism when looked at empirically.

BDuff@une.edu
Brian Duff
Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of New England

keywords: family, politics, America, authoritarianism

Allison Dushane, “Bioliterary Code: The Human Condition and Faustian Narrative in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake”

How do we see ourselves as defined through biological codes (genomic science)? How do we re-define and read ourselves through literary codes (narrative structures)? In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt considers the nature of life in terms of a relation between the biological and man-made aspects of human existence. She draws attention to the potentially catastrophic consequences of increasing human scientific and technical knowledge and asserts that the question of what to do with this knowledge not only scientific, but also political. According to Arendt, the human condition is also distinctly literary: “the realm of human affairs...consists of the web of human relationships wherever men live together...[this] web ‘produces’ stories with or without intention” (Arendt, 184).

My presentation first considers Arendt’s theory as a framework especially suited to reading Faustian narratives, which employ literary form to posit the relation between the biological and the manmade, think through advantages and limits of progress and invention, and consider the impact of technology on the “web of human relationships.” I then focus on Margaret Atwood’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world brought about by a Faustian figure in Oryx and Crake in order to think through how genomic science structures the way we see ourselves in the present and how we imagine our future. I argue that Oryx and Crake is a text that works through a “bioliterary” code to theorize the balance—and the consequences of imbalance—between the biological, technological and literary elements of the human condition.

ald13@duke.edu
Allison Dushane
Ph.D. Candidate
Duke University Department of English

keywords: narrative, genomic science, dystopia, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood

Jake Elliot (criticalartware), “(moth): // in relay”

In a hybrid lecture/performance/artware development session, criticalartware core developers invoke code as an evolving area of praxis, from early “executable” conceptual art to contemporary net-based artworks. Codework ++ artware by the artists [[mez]], Netochka Nezvanova + others is patched, compiled, debugged, rebugged, and linked using the open source criticalartware compiler and its graphical rebugger. The performance reiterates and complicates criticalartware’s interest in the hyperthreaded personal hystories of software-as-art/art-as-software, and their connections/ruptures/dislocations with early {conceptual|code}-based works.

http://criticalartware.net/images/moth_in_relay.png
http://criticalartware.net/

racter@gmail.com

keywords: art, code, debug, rebug, compile, software

Seth Ellis, “The Alchemical Body: Descriptions of the Body as the Body”

“How does the body see itself?” is the question posed by Stelarc, a performance artist who allows his own body to be manipulated and controlled by machine. Stelarc’s work, like much art focusing on the postmodern, extended, decentralized body, focuses on the extensions—on external technology and how our bodies interact with it—rather than on our bodies in isolation as systems of biological relationships. But the biological body itself has been decentralized and expanded, and is thus increasingly incomprehensible to us. New scientific knowledge forces us to think about the body in new ways, but they are ways to which most of us don’t have access. DNA sequences, for instance, are a meaningless code to us as thinking beings; we cannot recognize an individual by looking at their code. By contrast, descriptive anatomy of the medieval and early modern periods analyzed the body literally as a microcosmic echo of the larger universe. Pre-modern anatomy contained narrative code about the body’s functions that allowed us to situate ourselves within the context of the macrocosm, itself allegorical in nature. It is this understanding that has had to give way to scientific understanding of biological functions. On this shifting ground, symbolic science—transcendental anatomy, so to speak—has been relegated to superstition or to poetic imagery; but that very shift has made the literary tradition of medieval natural history a deep and rich vein upon which to draw, to comment on our modern relationships to our body and to the larger world.

ssellis@uncg.edu
seth ellis | UNCG Art
230 Gatewood | 336.334.5753
http://sethellis.info

keywords: Stelarc, anatomy, allegory, narrative, determinism

Jason Embry, “The Defeat of Cohesion in Snow Crash”

In 1976, Richard Dawkins, in his seminal work The Selfish Gene, compared cultural data to genetic data in order to describe how certain social behaviors might be inherited or passed down through centuries of human development. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash utilizes this idea in order to construct a world that is both controlled by technology and infected by cultural viruses. These viruses attack the memes by hacking through the meta-linguistic structure buried within the brain in order to bring about a change in their cultural system. These codes are rules designed to enforce a system of order. In Stephenson’s text, these codes are both wet and dry; they impose order on humans as well as virtual avatars and the world these avatars inhabit. However, as any system of codes would suggest, a change in the rules enforces a new, updated order under the control of those who write the code. This new system makes the mysterious scientific, the ancient modern, the connected fragmented. The individual survives the reprogramming of the unified. Thus, Snow Crash through its use of both wet and dry encoding simultaneously connects all living things and sends them scattering. Stephenson’s desire for a unified encoding of humanity is disrupted by the impulse toward individuation. The collective unconscious is subverted in favor of the individual’s right to program itself. Stephenson’s fear of the collective unconscious symbolized by Dawkin’s memes and the assimilated Sumerian civilization is finally exorcised by his hero’s programming savvy and his struggle for individuation.

jembry3@mail.gatech.edu
Jason M. Embry
Brittain Fellow
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
404.894.6816

keywords: Stephenson, Jung, Dawkins, collective unconscious, memes, decentrality

Brian Evans, “Mapping Data: Coding Signals: Making Metaphors, (a statement of a digital artist)”

Maps are metaphors. Through metaphors we connect what we experience to what we remember. We create knowledge by connecting the new (the present) to what we know (the past) and so maybe predict what happens next (the future).

Our desire to predict fuels our desire to live, to survive. Desire is the foundation of narrative. Narrative reduces to desire, action and result—the structure of story. We exist in endless loops of desire—layer upon layer of stories of varying temporalities and shifting priorities—all synchronized to rhythms of breath and heart.

I make maps. I start with raw code—simple numeric models. As all is number in the computer I can map the numbers to the senses—turn numbers into tangible experience?

The maps loop in time and in the moment. There is synchrony in the sensory vertical and the temporal horizontal. Image and audio derive from the same numeric source. Each maps the other in the moment and through time. It’s visual music in a synaesthetic counterpoint.

Musical narrative developed over centuries, moving the listener through time with the Pythagorean struggle of harmonic conflict, dissonance seeking consonance. My little loops engage that struggle at various levels. Color shifts. Composition flows. Image and sound agree, complement, disagree and resolve.

Perhaps it’s abstract expressionism, true to its digital materials, founded in musical traditions and Modernist formalism. But it’s loosened a bit. It’s meant to be fun (God forbid). It’s jazz in color, shape, sound and computation. Relax. Hear the colors. Listen with your eyes.

brian.evans@ua.edu
Brian Evans
Department of Art
University of Alabama
www.ghostartists.com (Check this URL for examples of the artist’s work.)

keywords: digital art, music, algorithmic art, computer animation, visual music

Kim Evans, “A Machine For Becoming Decent: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy-as-Algorithm”

On 8 January, 1918, Paul Engelmann wrote to Wittgenstein about a troubling observation he had made at their last meeting: “It seemed to me as if you—in contrast to the time you spent in Olmutz, where I had not thought so—had no faith.”

“It is true,” Wittgenstein replied, only “the difference between myself as I am now and as I was. . .is that I am now slightly more decent. By this I mean that I am slightly clearer in my own mind about my lack of decency.” Wittgenstein then proceeds to give an unsettling name to his particular practice of philosophizing: “If you tell me now I have no faith, you are perfectly right, only I did not have it before either. It is plain, isn’t it, that when a man wants, as it were, to invent a machine for becoming decent, such a man has no faith.”

Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is man-made, a contraption, a device—but one not designed for revealing the truth about the world. It is not, critically, a science, in that it cannot give the appearance of making or stating discoveries. A philosophical proposition is not rescued by subjecting it to objective tests; under logical scrutiny, the whole idea of ‘testing’ falls apart. Wittgenstein’s modest, radical claim was that strictly speaking philosophy is a procedure, which if designed carefully enough, can help a man who chooses to undergo it accomplish some difficult task. Becoming ‘decent,’ for instance.

Kim_Evans@redlands.edu
K.L. Evans
Assistant Professor of Literature
University of Redlands

keywords: Wittgenstein, algorithm, poetic composition, hausbacken (home-baked), faith

Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira, “Codes and Genomes: (Re)Editing Humanity?”

The introduction of animal genes into the human genome, and vice versa, constitutes a burgeoning and controversial area of research, some of whose results have been dramatized in fiction and film. A cluster of relatively recent works, including P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), Nancy Kress’s Maximum Light (1998) and Michael Crichton’s Next (2006), fictionally reflect on the possible consequences and ramifications these biotechnological experiments can bring about. In future worlds where fertility has dropped steeply, these biodystopias consider alternative scenarios where hybrid babies appear to be in some cases the only ones available.

Another aspect I wish to address, which is partially related to the concerns expressed above, is the commodification and consumption of animals by humans. This is being fictionally addressed, however, from the opposite perspective, that is, of the animals’ use and abuse of human beings, who in the texts I will engage with are treated as the inferior species, as objects to be exploited and not as subjects. I will thus briefly look at Will Self’s Great Apes (1997) and Michael Faber’s Under the Skin (2000) which, together with the narratives mentioned above, reflect on the future of human nature, the decentering of the human being from its anthropomorphically central perspective, as well as the precariousness of that position and the porosity of the genetically coded boundaries between the humans and the great apes. I will explore these scenarios with recourse to recent work on the genetic code and the genome, both from a scientific and a social point of view.

aline@ua.pt
Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira
Associate Professor (English)
Departamento de Línguas e Culturas
Universidade de Aveiro
Aveiro 3810-193, PORTUGAL
Ph/Fax: + 351-234-426-854
Mobile: + 351- 96-420-8890

keywords: biotechnology, animal, genome, literature

Annie Finch, “The Metrical Code: Poetry’s Wordless Language”

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?

afinch@usm.maine.edu
Annie Finch
Professor of English
University of Southern Maine
(207) 780-5973

keywords: meter, poetry, metrical code, Dickinson, Whitman

Tom Flynn, “Reclaiming Metaphors in Scientific Narratives: Images in Embryonic Stem Cell Research”

Embryonic stem cell research illustrates an ongoing conflict between scientists and religious groups. In spite of this ongoing conflict, these opposing groups share certain themes in their respective arguments. These shared themes become visible when the reported scientific facts of stem cell research are critiqued as narrative, image, and metaphor. This makes possible the ability to see some archetypal themes informing both sides of the debate in the embryonic stem cell narratives: innocence, salvation, sacrifice, and heroism. This presentation looks at images produced in embryonic stem cell research narratives as metaphors. For example, innocence resides in an unfertilized egg that lingers in the ovary (a Garden of Eden state of existence). The egg has not yet entered the bruising conflict of narrative between science and religion. In therapeutic cloning, parthenogenesis (virgin birth) is witnessed; a human egg has its DNA replaced in the nucleus and is then chemically tricked into behaving as if fertilized. The theme of heroism is apparent in the images of the lone lead scientist in the popular media, while the trusty sidekicks are in the background. These faithful scientists lead their charges towards salvation with a hope of the promised land: cures for Parkinson’s, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. As scientists decode and recode Nature, they are also decoding and recoding our mythic narratives. Archetypal themes