ecofeminism

Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser  eds    Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological reader
Vandan Shiva                                           Staying alive: Women, Ecology, and survival in India

metabody/metamedia

http://www.metabody.eu/conference.htm

The control of movement, of multiplicity and emergence, is a fundamental historical preoccupation of power regimes. In despise of other traditions and knowledges, our current perception of movement is profoundly conditioned by a mechanistic tradition, with roots in euclidean geometry, Renaissance perspective, cameras, screens and ubiquitous interfaces. This tradition assumes movement to be subsidiary to matter and external to it; but movement is immanent and ontogenetic at all levels: molecular and cellular, individual and social, planetary and cosmic.

In the past decades there has been an overwhelming development of new technologies for sensing and choreographing movements of bodies at all scales, human and non human, as well as a new realm of technologies of capitalization, preemption and production of emotional and affective spheres that have become central to the current functionings of power: a triple affective turn that operates increasingly on the microscale of movements while it appeals directly at the production and modulation of emotional and affective spectrums, both at the level of recognisable human emotions and of imperceptible affects.

The paradigm of the panopticon as described by Foucault, seems to have transformed into a panchoreographic: a new (and old) regime of affective and kinetic power, whose privileged field of operations is in the structuring and preempting of perception and movement. The panchoreographic exceeds the panopticon in that it accounts for both the visible and the invisible. The panchoreographic engineers a superalignment of perception built upon multiple strata, from euclidean geometry and Renaissance perspective to ubiquitous cameras, screens and interfaces.

What is the role of Information, conceived as disembodied pattern, distinct from its material substrate, in this turn of Biopower? How, when and why has this transformation of Biopower into an affective-kinetic power happened? What paradigms, objects, practices and spaces have been forged by movement alignments throughout multiple temporalities? What is the role of photography, visual arts and performance arts in this process? How can we redefine technological paradigms embracing corporeality in its irreducible differential becoming, rather than erasing it?

If cybernetics is in the substrate of what Katherine Hayles has described as our present posthuman condition, how has the posthuman transformed over the last decades, what are its (increasing) dangers and (failed) promises? How far is the human a perceptual fiction that contains in its origins a posthuman technogenesis? What are the genealogies and histories of the posthuman over the past millenia? If currently humans are aggregating into a super-cyberorganism, what is the history of this phase of formation? What are the lines of flight that traverse and destabilize this process?

How can we generate a technological paradigm of posthuman embodiment, one that takes into account the constitutive movements of bodies and relations in an ecological manner, accounting for multiplicity and becoming, rather than preemption and control?

An understanding of this affective, kinetic and perceptual power requires new ontologies and epistemologies, ethics and ecologies of movement. What new understandings of movement can be derived from new fields of cognitive sciences, such as proprioception, premovement, enaction and affordance theories, as well as quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, kinetic theory or molecular biology, in intersection with affect theories and other fields of research?

The conference will attempt to provide a counterpoint to mainstream approaches to affect, perception and movement in fields such as Human Computer Interaction, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and architecture, genetic and nanotechnology, biology, photography, television, cinematography, audio-visual and sciences of communication, plastic and performance arts, history of science, cultural history, history of emotions, epistemology and other fields in which contemporary fields of power, bodies and the social are being engineered.

"Kinetic Screens: epistemologies of movement at the interface" Lisa Parks pp.37-57

in Mediaspace: place, scale and culture in a media age
edited by Nick Couldry and Ann McCarthy      Routledge 2004

p. 39 The visualization of the user's movement through the World Wide Web, his/her process of navigation, is effaced at the interface. What we see, instead, is the economic mobility of digital corporations such as Microsoft and Netscape whose browsers feature animated logos which signal the movement data from servers to the monitor and reinforce the corporation's status as data portal, carrier or delivery system.
What is at stake here are issues of technological literacy. By effacing the infrastructure through which date moves, web interfaces tend to keep users naive about the apparatus that organizes and facilitates online navigations and how its processes occur in time and extend across space.

p40 Since most interfaces are designed for either maximum efficiency or an aesthetic that Alan Liu calls ''information cool," they tend not to circulate technical knowledge about their own operation, and thus as they circulate data they perpetuate 'knowledge gaps' between experts and amateurs and information and poor communities.

p49-50
The Basel Action Network (BAN) is an international activist consortium that investigates hazardous waste conditions worldwide. It emerged in 1992 after the adoption of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous wastes and their Disposal, and one of the organization's most recent and high profile projects has been the investigation of the e-waste crisis in Asia. (www.ban.org)

SCIENCE FICTION: SPECULATIVE FICTION AND DYSTOPIAS (Donna Jones)

Book List

Capek, Karol: R.U.R; Dick, Philip: Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep; Hoffman, E.T.A.: The Tales of Hoffman; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Mieville, China: Perdido Street Station; Wells, , H.G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau

Other Readings and Media

Children of Men; Gattaca; The Matrix; Pumzi

Description

This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature’s encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material and technological mediation stand the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of ‘being’, a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course.