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Leonardo Electronic Almanac  volume 11, number 10   October 2003
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ISSN #1071-4391

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                           |  CONTENTS  |
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EDITORIAL
---------

< Technology and Difference, by Irina Aristarkhova >


FEATURES
--------

< Phytodynamics and Plant Difference, by Gunalan Nadarajan >

< Biotech Bodies/Difference/Resistance, by Faith Wilding >

< Online Activist Media Collectives in Los Angeles: An Argument
Against the Dematerialization View of Cyberspace, by Robert
Bodle >

< Resonant Culture, by Diana Mccarty >


LEONARDO REVIEWS
----------------

< Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and
Creativity, reviewed by Bronac Ferran >

< Crepuscular Dawn, reviewed by Sean Cubitt >

< Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpetriere, reviewed by Allan Graubard >


LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE 
--------------------------

< Public News Network: Digital Sampling To Create a Hybrid
Media Feed,
by Jack Stenner >


ANNOUNCEMENTS
-------------

< Leonardo Call for Papers - ArtScience: The Essential
Connection >


ISAST NEWS 
----------

< Pamela Grant-Ryan Celebrates 20 Years with Leonardo >

< Robert Root-Bernstein Joins Leonardo Editorial Board >

< Marc Battier Elected President of Leonardo/OLATS >

< Artmedia VIII Symposium Proceedings >


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                           |   EDITORIAL   |
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TECHNOLOGY AND DIFFERENCE

Irina Aristarkhova, Guest Editor

Information and Communication Management Programme, Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, 10
Kent Ridge Road, Singapore 119260
uspia@nus.edu.sg

This issue of LEA has come about as a result of my ongoing
interest and work in the area of technology and sexual/cultural
differences. While considering this particular focus of
interest, I realized that the general question of the
fundamental relationship between technology and difference has
been rarely considered in the field of new media art,
cyberculture, science, technology and society studies, and other
convergent areas where "modern technologies" are critically
engaged. As such, this issue comes from a conviction that any
specific study of difference in relation to technology has to be
seen within a larger framework that is sensitive to the historic
relationship between these two concepts. Moreover, there is an
urgent need to systematically and critically think through
"technology and difference" together, as a pair. 

Whether one frames it as technology and difference or (though
not the same, surely) difference and technology, it remains a
complex, albeit understudied, connection. While both parts of
this expression have been explored in Western literature -
philosophical, anthropological, historic, literary, cybernetic,
biological and so on - they have rarely been explored together,
with a few notable exceptions. Leaving the question of "why" to
the historians of ideas, this editorial addresses two main
questions: first, what, fundamentally, do the concepts of
technology and difference reveal and what role have they have
played in Western thought and beyond; and second, what is the
relationship of art to our understanding of technology and
difference. Any analysis that we undertake here would be
necessarily limited, not only by the lack of space, but also by
(desirable) acknowledgment of the specificity of the language in
which it is written and thought through, with all its obvious or
unintended consequences. One should also see the following
points exactly as questions, openings for a future discussion,
rather than theses or theoretical imperatives of the topic at
hand.           

TECHNOLOGY AND DIFFERENCE REDEFINED

What is technology? According to Stiegler, technology has come
to be "the discourse describing and explaining the evolution of
specialized procedures and techniques, arts and trades - either
the discourse of certain types of procedures and techniques, or
that of the totality of techniques inasmuch as they form a
system: technology is in this case the discourse of the
evolution of that system" [1]. By its very definition in Western
tradition, *techne* is tied to its carrier, its maker, most of
the time understood as "human" [Ed. note - as the last letter of
the word "techne" is Greek, and thus unreadable in this text-
only format, it has been rendered here using only standard
English characters]. It is a skill, something one acquires,
practices and, in that sense, can be a tool or an instrument.
When we say that it is tied to a human, the reverse is correct
as well: the human (especially "upright" human - see Marx, among
many others) is made by its tool, hand tool, in particular.
Human and technique form a system. Thus, *techne*  is an
attribute, as well as a defining essence of human. 

As such, in Western tradition, *techne* sets itself as a
differentiator to what the human is - its memory and history
(writing, language, database), its soul (mobile, self-creative
principle, everything that technical is not, according to
Aristotle) and not only to its self, but also, and always, vis-�-
vis "the rest" of its being in the world (establishing,
measuring levels of difference): the human from natural,
cultured from barbaric, human from animal and from plant,
animate from inanimate, such as automata and machine. However,
as Stiegler, following Leroi-Gourhan, argues, far from being an
"invention OF human," the technical *invents* human, so much so
that the entire discipline - anthropology - is foregrounded by a
close relation between "the *ethnic* and the *technical*." And
indeed, unlike the conventional view, that through technology
humans master nature, here we have an argument that anthropology
can be considered as technology - especially in its methodology,
in its main focus on "how" people "make" what they are - through
language, art, tools, various ways of doing things. 

We have seen, so far, that in questioning technology we come
close to the whole system of which it is a part: human, nature,
machine, society, the question of Creator(s). 

If we take into account Stiegler's argument of "technics as
inventive as well as invented [2]," the next question for our
couple "technology and difference" might be formulated as
follows: Can "technology" be subsumed under the concept of
difference? Is its "function" to enact, produce and "store"
difference? Definitely, it is one of its "realities," especially
for modern technologies. Rather than seeing *techne*  as a means
of dealing with nature, machine or other humans, we might
suggest here that it is acting as a "spacing", a mediator
between various groupings, so that they do not collapse into
impossible sameness. This suggestion might not appear obvious in
any particular technology, though it comes to the foreground
when we consider modern technologies' reliance on
differentiation, diversity and non-determinability. The ones
that are based on the strongest desire to unify and normalize
are the ones that are most obsessed with difference, defined by
it and the desire to "domesticate," assimilate or annihilate it. 

ART AND *TECHN(*

It is not accidental that this topic is raised in a publication
that is devoted to art, together with science and technology.
Many of the contributors are artists, work with artists or write
on art. Frequently in the definitions of technology, its essence
and its origin, art becomes "one more" translation of *techne*,
the "artificial," the "man-made." Otherwise, their difference is
traditionally established through the notions of function and
purpose: technology is supposed to be "utilitarian," purposeful,
while art is anti-utilitarian and use-less. While deconstructing
this opposition of art and technology, their difference, as well
as their relation needs to be addressed with a new radicality,
without collapsing one into another. Heidegger asserts that
"Because the essence of technology is nothing technological,
essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation
with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to
the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally
different from it. Such realm is art. But certainly only if
reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the
constellation of truth after which we are *questioning* [3]." 

Such questioning demands a simultaneous address of two
imperatives. On the one hand, we need to question the above
mentioned definition of technology as "the discourse describing
and explaining the evolution of specialized procedures and
techniques, arts and trades," as far as art is concerned. On the
other hand, we need to ask what kind of art works might engender
such questioning, in its own turn. The difference between art
and technology, its understanding, is probably what lies at the
heart of our specific formulation of the question: technology
and (its?) difference. It is also a question on what "other"
human might be, or has been, invented by art. 

Finally, by introducing "difference" back into "technology," we
seek to revive feminist, deconstructivist, genealogical and post-
colonial gestures of ethical questioning, a fundamental return
to "ethics," before, simultaneously and after technocentric,
anthropological, aesthetic, scientific or metaphysical
explorations. It is essential to raise this question of
interdependence of difference and technology, especially in the
light of a new optimism that problematically propagates modern
technology as a de-differentiating force: it supposedly builds
bridges, unites, globalizes (for better or for worse), brings us
closer to become the same, based on the "code" or some other
"common ground." 


This is the first of two issues exploring these themes. This
issue starts with two essays, followed by two project reports
and a "featured artists" section. in the First, Gunalan
Nadarajan explores the history and implications of our
conceptions of "plant difference" with reference to his work-in-
progress, *Moving Garden*. In the second essay, Faith Wilding
critically discusses new reproductive technologies, with
specific emphasis on stem cell research in relation to sexual
difference. Robert Bodle presents a project report on the on-
line activist media collectives in Los Angeles, followed by
Diana McCarty's critical consideration of two Berlin-based
initiatives in open source software. The "Featured Artists"
section offers selected works by interdisciplinary artists Mendi
+ Keith Obadike: *The Interaction of Coloreds*, *Keeping Up
Appearances* and *Blackness for Sale*. The second of these two
issues will include essays by Eugene Thacker and Raqs Media
Collective and project reports by Radhika Gajjala and Seda
G�rses. 

One can find both parts, along with illustrations, at the LEA
web-site: http://lea.mit.edu. In conclusion, I would like to
thank all the contributors and express my gratitude to the LEA
editors for their patience and editorial assistance.

REFERENCES

1. B. Stiegler, *Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus*
(CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 94. 

2. See [1], p. 137.

3. M. Heidegger, *The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays* (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) p. 35.  


AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Irina Aristarkhova is assistant professor of new media at the
National University of Singapore. She teaches courses on new
media aesthetics and technology and embodiment and conducts
research in cyberarts and cyberculture. She is currently writing
a manuscript, provisionally entitled "Matrixial Technologies." 

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                    |           FEATURES           |
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PHYTODYNAMICS AND PLANT DIFFERENCE

by Gunalan Nadarajan, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, 90
Goodman Road, Singapore 
gunalan@lasallesia.edu.sg

"Common suddenly felt the firm tug of gravity. He felt glued to
the spot, as if attached there. He was attached. Looking down,
he was dismayed to find his feet lodged firmly in the ground -
and himself a plant! Transformed into something soft and thin,
greenish brown, neither tree nor grass." - Kobo Abe [1] 

WHAT IS A PLANT? 

A plant is generally regarded as a biological entity that is
rooted to a particular location - an interesting coincidence of
etymology and existential condition. Tugged by gravity from
below and sunlight from above, being fixed to a particular place
and environmental conditions that it is unable to choose or
change by way of subsequent physical relocation, the plant seems
like an excellent exemplar of adaptation - it has to learn to
adapt to and/or manage the conditions as they are rather than
exercise the relatively simpler option of migration, available
to the more mobile animals. Its immobility is very often
conceived to be the reason for its incapacity and, as some such
as Aristotle argue, lack of necessity, to develop a complicated
response system, given the relative paucity of surprise and
novelty in its immediate environment. However, these notions of
immobility and a supposed lack of sensitivity that have come to
be attributed as natural to and constitutive characteristics of
plants have been culturally constructed. This means that what
one assumes to be essential and necessary qualities
differentiating the plant from other biological and non-organic
matter alike are merely qualities that plants have come to be
associated with *thus far* and which, therefore, do not form
exhaustive descriptions of what constitutes the plant. This also
suggests that plants could be described, and therefore
encountered, differently. 

In 1878, the Russian botanist Kliment Timiryazev presented one
of the most radical critiques of the distinctions between plants
and animals in his lecture, "The Plant and the Animal" [2]. In
the lecture, he highlights the fact that the "absence of motion
and outward activity is looked upon as the essential point of
difference between plants and animals," in most conventional
accounts of plants, both scientific and lay [3]. However, he
argues that it is problematic to define plants by their lack of
movement, as many plants display a wide range of movements. He
suggests that the surprise and amazement elicited by first-time
encounters with the movements of plants such as the mimosa
(Mimosa pudica) are indicative of a deeper cultural bias that
imputes *non-mobility* as a fundamental characteristic of

plants. 

Timiryazev argues that biologists and botanists have
historically circumvented the need to adequately conceptualize
the movements of plants when they encountered them. He notes
that they desperately sought to safeguard the integrity and
validity of their time-honored categories of "plant" and
"animal" by referring to them as anomalies, or aberrant
variants; they sometimes even called such plants that display
movement as *zoospores* (from zoos, "animal"). Pointing to the
fact that many of these movements seem to have "no apparent
stimulus," Timiryazev asks if one is justified in wondering
whether some of these movements are voluntary. He examines what
other distinctions, if any, can be instantiated between plants
and animals if movement itself is an inadequate distinguishing
characteristic. After deliberating on the nutritional and
respiratory habits of plants and animals, he shows that these
also form inadequate bases for differentiation. 

Timiryazev follows with the question of whether plants have
feelings and, by logical extension, consciousness and claims,
"If we allow the response to stimulus, i.e., irritability,
stimulation, to be a sign of feeling, we are bound to recognize
this faculty in the plant [4]." He states that insofar as there
are plants that show sensitivity to and sometimes even
discriminate between different stimuli, it is difficult to
completely deny them the capacity to feel. In an extension of
this argument about feeling, Timiryazev asks, somewhat
rhetorically, "Is the plant endowed with consciousness? ...Are
all animals endowed with it? If we do not deny it in the case of
the lower animals, why should we deny it in the case of the
plant [5]?" However, in a strategic turn, instead of
deliberating further on whether plants have consciousness,
Timiryazev chooses to draw his conclusion in terms of upsetting
the very distinctions between plant and animal. He states, in
what must surely rank as one of the most radical gestures in the
history of systematic biology, "the difference between plants
and animals is not qualitative, but only quantitative [6]."
According to him, "As a matter of fact, there are no plants or
animals as such, but a single undivided world. Plants and
animals are only averages, typical conceptions that we form for
ourselves, abstracting from certain characters of the organism,
attributing special significance to some properties, and
neglecting, almost ignoring the rest [7]." 

It is interesting that while Timiryazev identifies non-mobility
and lack of sensitivity as primary characteristics imputed to
plants, he does not attempt, in this essay or subsequently, to
systematically elaborate on the fact that this was historically
enunciated and maintained in contradistinction to movement and
sensitivity that are conceptualized to be fundamental
characteristics of what constitutes the "animal." It is useful
to state here that just as the concept of the animal seems to
have evolved in contradistinction to the "human," the concept of
the plant has been discursively elaborated in contradistinction
to the "animal." And in articulating this contradistinction
between plant and animal, the notion of movement has been
central. How did movement become such a primary marker of animal
status and the lack of movement basis for assignment to plant
status? And what if plants could move in ways that are not
easily explained within the oft-cited, biological imperatives of
nutrition, growth, procreation and survival imputed to them? 

ROOTING PLANTS 

In the historical development of botany, the philosophical
biases and methods of botanical speculation inherited from
Aristotle had a discursive stranglehold in determining the way
plants were conceptualized until the beginning of the last
century. The contemporary notion of a plant as a biological
entity that is fixed to a particular place and lacking in
sensitivity has been inherited from Aristotelian botany. One of
the foundational concepts in Aristotle's notion of the living
thing is the concept of "anima," conventionally translated as
"soul", though most accurately conceptualized in relation to the
notion of movement - "that which moves". According to him, the
living was distinct from the non-living by way of its capacity
for movement, either by some innate capacity for self-movement
or enabled to move by some peculiar vital principle.  

In Book II, chapter 3 of his *De Partibus Animalium,* Aristotle
provides a fascinating example of the analogical reasoning that
he used to make sense of plant and animal functions. In a
discussion of the natural heat required for the nourishment
needs of organisms, plants and animals alike, he first outlines
the role of the mouth and stomach as part of a continuous system
that concocts natural heat and nutrients for animals. Following
this same logic of animal nutrition, he speculates on that of
plants thus: "For plants get their food from the earth by means
of their roots; and this food is already elaborated when taken
in; which is the reason that plants produce no excrement, the
earth and its heat serving them in the stead of a stomach. But
animals, with scarcely no exception and notably all such animals
as are capable of locomotion, are provided with a stomachal sac,
which is, as it were, an internal substitute for the earth [8]."
Thus, for Aristotle, the earth and stomach become analogous
organs of digestion - one serving the fixed plant, the other,
the mobile animal. He continues this counterposing of movement
of the animal with the fixity of the plant further in his
description of the sponge. He claims that a sponge "completely
resembles a plant" since "throughout its life it is attached to
a rock and that when separated from this it dies [9]." The
fixity of the sponge is marked out as its primary characteristic
and thus constitutive of its status as plant. He notes, however,
that there are some problems in such classifications, insofar as
there are several exceptions to the principle of plant fixity.
For example, he notes that the Holothuriae and Sealungs that are
"free and unattached" still display plant-like qualities of
"being without feelings" and concludes that their life is simply
that of a plant, "separated from the ground." In a seeming
acknowledgement of the difficulties of categorically
differentiating animals and plants, Aristotle states in this
section that "(S)ometimes it is a matter of doubt whether a
given organism should be classed with plants or with animals
[10]." 

Julian Sachs, in his excellent account of the histories of
botany, suggests that the influence of Greek authors such as
Aristotle and Theophrastus was particularly strong in the
botanical literature, insofar as every succeeding author felt
obliged to refer to and build their own arguments from them.
However, Sachs notes that the influence of these "philosophical
botanists" has "led to no important result" and argues that
these authors had seriously hampered the progress of the
systematic and scientific enquiry into plants [11]. Sachs claims
that these authors "built their views on the philosophy of
botany on very weak foundations; scarcely a plant was known to
them exactly in all its parts; they derived much of their
knowledge from the accounts of others, often from dealers in
herbs [12]." 

Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) wrote his botanical classic, *De
plantis libri XVI* in 1583. Sachs considers this an important
contribution to botanical history, if not for its adherence to
classical Aristotelian notions. Sachs claims that "the whole
account is controlled by a teleology, the influence of which is
the more pernicious because the purposes assumed are supposed to
be acknowledged and self-evident, plants and vegetation being
conceived of as in every respect "*an imperfect imitation of the
animal kingdom*" (emphases mine) [13]. Cesalpino's conception of
the plant is no different from that of Aristotle, despite the
fact that the former had the advantage of several decades of
scientific observation. In a manner that echoes Aristotle from
*De Anima*, Cesalpino begins his book thus: "As the nature of
plants possesses only that kind of soul by which they are
nourished, grow and produce their like and they are therefore
without sensation and motion in which the nature of animals
consists, plants have accordingly need of a much smaller
apparatus of organs than animals" [14]. 

Joachim Jung, a German botanist who was a contemporary of
Kepler, Galileo, Vesalius, Bacon, Descartes and Gassendi,
represented a key development in the botanical conception of the
plant. His most important text, *Isagoge Phytoscopica*, (1678)
provides a fascinating thesis that both continues the
Aristotelian logic of conceiving plants as existentially
secondary to animals even as it breaks free from the
Aristotelian notion of soul in making such a distinction. Sachs
formulates Jung's basic arguments on the plant-animal
distinction thus: "A plant is ... a living but not a sentient
body; or it is a body attached to a fixed spot or a fixed
substratum, from which it can obtain immediate nourishment, grow
and propagate itself" [15]. The primary notion of Jung here,
"Plantes est corpus vivens non sentiens" is worthy of some
deliberation insofar as this consolidated the Aristotelian
thesis of the plant's inability to sense, based on his other
thesis about its immobility. Jung's argument was that the
immobile plant did not have a biological necessity for a
complicated sensory apparatus, given the fact that it was
unlikely to encounter and respond in the wide range of stimuli
that a mobile biological entity like an animal would. According
to Jung, the plant was thought to live in a world where there
were relatively little surprises, insofar as its immediate
surroundings were relatively unchanging compared to those of an
animal.    

It is no surprise, then, that even the first botanist to
systematically address the movements of plants, John Ray, in his
*Historia Plantarum* (1693), explains away those movements as
mechanical and physical phenomena, without according them any
significance to the physiological constitution and life of the
plant. For example, he explains the movements of the mimosa by
referring to them not as sensory responses but as a mechanical
process triggered by the pressure applied by the touch of an
animate creature or natural phenomena such as wind and rain. The
history of botany seems to have systematically circumvented
dealing with plant movement and its related issue of its
sensitivity to external stimuli. Varro, the Greek philosopher,
is the first to have noticed the heliotropic movement of certain
flowers; Pliny notes the clove leaves closing in bad weather in
his *Natural History*; Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century) and
Garcia del Huerto (sixteenth century) recorded the leave
movements of the Leguminosae; Cesalpino notes with some surprise
the climbing movements of some plants; Borelli notes the
irritability of the Centurae's stamens; and even Robert Hooke
has a short excursus on the movements of the mimosa in his
famous *Micrographia* in 1667 [16]. 

Following Ray, several botanists seemed to gain confidence in
studying plant movements, a field which came to be categorized
as *phytodynamics* by the late seventeenth century (although the
term itself, interestingly enough, has fallen into disuse). Even
within such studies of plant movements, there was greater
emphasis on growth movements that were generally explained in
terms of physical necessities as movement to sources of
nourishment like light, water and nutrients. The serious study
of the less regular, non-growth related plant movements, was
relatively rare. Linnaeus studied the periodical movements of
flowers in 1751 and of leaves in 1755, but was satisfied to have
categorized them as "sleep movements," not entirely dissimilar
to those found in animals. This tendency to draw similarities to
and differences from the movements of animals is also found in
Du Hamel's *Physique des arbres* (1758), where he has a chapter
entitled "Movements of plants, which approximate to some extent
the voluntary movements of animals." In this chapter, Du Hamel
ventures a mechanical explanation for these movements based on
the "direction of the vapours" inside the plants. This tendency
to seek mechanical explanations was also coherent with a larger
cultural climate in late eighteenth-century Europe, where a
mechanized world-view was gaining currency. Sachs notes,
however, that "the mechanical processes in plants were described
much in the way in which a person with very indefinite ideas as
to the nature of steam and the construction of the inside of the
steam engine might speak of its movements" [17]. These
mechanical explanations ranged from Tournefort's speculation
that the movements of plants were due to them possessing
"muscles" that acted similarly to those found in animals to
those postulating that there was a vital force that was
gradually *unwinding* itself from within the plant as expressed
movements. 

The nineteenth century witnessed more systematic efforts to
explain plant movements by careful experimentation. Andrew
Knight experimentally showed in 1806 that the vertical growth of
the stem and primary roots are due to gravitation while
Dutrochet showed in 1822 that the movements of the mimosa were
due to the alternating expansion of its pulvini. By the middle
of the century, the field of phytodynamics had settled on
differentiating between two kinds of movements - one that is
related to growth and the other, non-growth related movements of
parts of the plant that had already ceased to grow [18]. While
the growth movements were usually explained by reference to
nutrition-relevant stimuli, there was still some dispute as to
the non-growth movements. For example, De Candolle speculates
that the movements of mimosa constitute evidence for the
"excitability" of plants. The tendency to impute some mystical,
primary sensitivity to plants was still current in these
investigations. It was not until Brucke's 1848 study provided an
experimentally founded explanation of the mimosa's movements in
terms of alternating turgidity and relaxation of its pulvini
that the mysticism that surrounded explanations of plant
movements started to fade. 

The extensive experimental work of Darwin on plant movements in
his "The Power of Movement in Plants" in 1880 consolidated this
transition from mystical explanations to scientific ones. Darwin
concludes this study by noting that one cannot ignore the
striking resemblances between plant movements and those of
animals. He states "the most striking resemblance is the
localization of their sensitiveness and the transmission of an
influence from the excited part to another which consequently
moves" but quickly clarifies that "plants do not *of course*
possess nerves or a central nervous system; and we may infer
that with animals such structures serve only for the perfect
transmission of impressions, and for more complete
intercommunication of the several parts" (emphasis mine) [19].
Despite citing the different ways in which the sensitivity and
movements of plants and animals are similar, Darwin's conclusion
that the plant's sensitivity and corresponding movements do not
issue from their having some nervous system similar to animals
indicates that he follows the historical precedence of
understanding the plant's capacities as "reduced versions" of
those found among animals. 

A noteworthy development in research during this period was the
discovery of electrical activity corresponding to plant movement
and sensitivity. Becquerel discovered electrical activity in
injured plants (1851) while Buff studied the direction of such
activity in 1854. Burdon-Sanderson observed and recorded the
electrical changes in a Venus' flytrap and in a *Dinoaea* plant
in 1873, 1877, 1882 and 1888, concluding that such electrical
activity was similar to those issuing from stimulation of animal
muscles - a phenomenon that was being actively studied as bio-
electricity. Kunkel was able to measure significant electrical
activity from the stimulation of mimosa in 1878. Sachs (1887),
Waller (1900), Ewart (1903), Pfeffer (1905) and Jost (1907)
showed that such electrical activity is widely distributed in
most plant physiology and that it usually corresponds to
chemical reactions and changes in the plant [20]. The work of
Indian botanist Jagadis Chander Bose during the early part of
the twentieth century in the area of plant electricity is
remarkable for its extensive recording of such electric activity
under experimental conditions and using highly sensitive
equipment that he designed. He established the existence of
distinct action potentials of electric activity that could be
measured with reasonable accuracy, reliability and expression of
the most subtle variations. His work, primarily focused on the
*Mimosa* and the *Biophytum sensitivum*, showed that plant
excitability shares many similarities to features of animal
nerves: "The plant becomes fatigued if exercised too frequently;
stimuli too weak to cause movement on their own can build up
into a sufficiently strong signal that eventually triggers
movement; each movement has a waiting (latent) period before a
response is apparent" [21]. It is noteworthy here that while
botanists made comparisons between plant and animal electricity,
there is a surprising lack of interest in aligning or
understanding the relationship between plants and machines
through electricity. While there had been several interesting
investigations on the implications of animal electricity with
reference to mechanics and machines, notably in the works of
Benjamin Franklin, Felix Fontana, Luigi Galvani and A. von
Haller, there was practically no attempt to think through how
plant electricity and its corresponding movements and
sensitivity related to machines.      

The attempts to understand plant movements and sensitivity vis
a vis parallel phenomena found in animals has been extremely
unfruitful, insofar as it has led to the generation of and
reliance on somewhat clumsy and mystical concepts like "soul of
the plant," "plant muscles" and "plant nerves." The possibility
of such sensitivity and movements constituting *phenomena
peculiar to plants* has seldom been articulated because of the
discursive habits that define plants in contradistinction to
animals. It seems that for a proper understanding of the
difference of plant movement and sensitivity, one needs to
excise it from its relation to the animal. 

PLANT MOVES

In a series of unconventional experiments, Cleve Backster, an
American lie-detector examiner, beginning in 1966, discovered
that when attached to a galvanometer, *Dracaena massangeana*
plants displayed a rich array of electrical activity that was
related to different kinds of stimuli, ranging from real threats
to their lives to the life-threatening situations of other
plants and animals (See Tompkins and Bird, 1972: pp. 17-26).
Backster's experiments had interestingly enough caused a greater
stir in the parapsychology community than in the regular
scientific communities, which remained relatively skeptical of
his findings. The scientific community considered his
experimental conditions to be flawed and problematic and, most
damagingly, argued that these experiments were never repeated
successfully under stricter experimental conditions (for a
critical review of these experiments, see Simons, 1992: pp. 202-
203 and Galston and Slayman, 1979).  

In a radio interview in 1972, Backster said cheekily, "But if
you really want to make a psychologist sit up and take notice,
you could instrument a plant to activate a small electric train,
getting it to move back and forth on no other command than that
of human emotion" [22]. According to Backster, the abilities of
the plant to sense and respond in synchrony to human emotions
could conceivably make it function as a sort of relay station
for issuing signals to control non-animate machines and
processes. Tompkins and Bird give an account of how Pierre Paul
Sauvin, an electronics enthusiast keen on testing the
feasibility of Backster's instrumentation, actually developed an
experimental situation wherein he trained a plant to transmit
his emotions to trigger and control a toy train. They also
highlight the work of Ken Hashimoto, another researcher affected
by Backster's experiments, who was able to transcode the
electrical signals from a cactus into musical notes and simple
graphical messages [23]. While the authenticity of Backster's,
Sauvin's and Hashimoto's experiments and developments have been
rightfully challenged, the notion of aligning plant and machinic
processes brims with aesthetic and critical possibilities. The
machine, in being neither animal nor plant but historically
defined in relation to both, represents a useful point of
reference for articulating phytic difference as it has in
defining animal difference.  

Canguilhem argues that "a machine can be defined as a man-made
artificial construction that essentially functions by virtue of
mechanical operations." Identifying movement as a central aspect
of the mechanism as such, he stresses that "in every machine ...
movement is a function, first, of the way the parts interact,
and second, of the mechanical operations of the overall unit"
[24]. 

Drawing on movement as a central trope of the machinic and the
phytic, where both are defined with reference to their
differential capacities for movement, I have conceptualized a
series of artworks over the last few years, which I am currently
developing in partnership with various technical collaborators.
In this concluding section, I offer a brief description of one
such work, *Moving Garden*. 

*Moving Garden* is an *anthorobotic* (Greek, anthos, "flower")
installation for an outdoor location. The work is part of a
series of *phytorobots* (Greek, phytos, "plant") being
developed, where plants would control mobile robots through
their natural tropisms and propensities for movement. This work
has a group of mobile robots being controlled by the natural
"suntracking motion" of sunflowers that are connected to them. A
combination of mechanical (gauge sensors) and
electrophysiological (Galvanic Skin Response) sensors will be
used to detect electrophysiological changes resulting from and
accompanying the subtle movements of the flowers. A group of ten
anthorobots would be deployed in an outdoor area where the sun's
movements would trigger the sunflower's movements which, in
turn, would trigger the solar-powered robots to also move. The
sun thus becomes the choreographer of the complex dance
movements of these anthorobots. This *solar choreography* thus
binds the plant and robot in an intimate symbiotic relationship,
where their mutual nourishment is made possible by their ability
to function as a single entity. In addition to this work,
several other phytorobots drawing on various movements and
electro-sensitive activities of plants are being developed,
including a mimosa-controlled robot that develops a rich contact-
avoidance repertoire. 

UPROOTING PLANTS

In a fascinating short story, *Dendrocacalia*, Kobo Abe tells
of how a man, named Common, suddenly finds himself being
transformed into a plant. The transformations, which happen
without any warning, are characterized by short intense spells
where Common feels the strong tug of gravity that root his feet
to the ground and where his body becomes stiff and unwieldy.
Understandably, Common resists the transformations but finally
decides to give in to it on the advice of a messenger who has
guided other humans who have also been stricken by this
imperative of becoming-plant. The story presents an interesting
occasion to speculate on what constitutes the human in
contradistinction to the horror of the vegetal state. The
anxiety with which Common meets his transformation into a plant
are indicative of a larger cultural conception where the plant
and the vegetal are conceived to be states of inertia,
insensitivity and immobility. Phytorobotics as an aesthetic
strategy provides the possibility of technologically "uprooting"
the plant and the ways in which it is conceived, so as to enable
different encounters with it.     

_____________________________

REFERENCES

1. Kobo Abe, "Dendrocacalia," in *Beyond the Curve,* trans.
Julie Winters Carpenter (Kodansha International, 1992) p. 44.

2. Kliment Timiryazev, *The Life of the Plant: Ten Popular
Lectures* (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958).

3. [2] p. 306.

4. [2] p. 335.

5. [2] p. 337.

6. [2] p. 340.

7. [2] p. 338. 

8. Aristotle, *Historia Animalium*, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson,
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910) p. 29.

9. [8] p. 104.

10. [8] p. 104.

11. Julian Von Sachs, *History of Botany, 1530-1860* (Russell
and Russell, 1890) p. 17.

12. [11] p. 16.

13. [11] p. 43.

14. Cesalpino, cited in [11] p. 43.

15. [11] p. 60.

16. [11] pp. 535-562.

17. [11] p. 540.

18. [11] pp. 554-555.

19. Charles Darwin, *The Power of Movement in Plants* (William
Pickering, 1989) p. 571.

20. M.C. Potter, *Bioelectric Potentials* (W. Heffer and Sons
Ltd. 1933) pp. 3-36.

21. Paul Simons, *The Action Plant: Movement and Nervous
Behaviour in Plants* (Blackwell, 1992) p. 100.

22. Cited in Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, *The Secret
Life of Plants* (Penguin, 1972) p. 27.

23. [22] pp. 34-5.

24. Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism," in
*Incorporations*, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds.
(Urzone, Inc., 1992) pp. 45-46. 

_____________________________

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle, *Historia Animalium*, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). 

Aristotle, *De Anima*, David Ross, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1961).

Canguilhem, Georges, "Machine and Organism," in
*Incorporations*, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds.
(Urzone, Inc., 1992) pp. 45-46.

Darwin, Charles, *The Power of Movement in Plants*, (William
Pickering,  1989). 

Galston, Arthur W. and Slayman, C.L., "The Not-so-secret Life
of Plants," in *American Scientist*, Issue No. 67, pp. 337-344. 

Green, J. Reynolds, *A History of Botany, 1860-1900, Being a
Continuation of Sachs' "History of Botany, 1530-1860"*, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1909).

Potter, M.C., *Bioelectric Potentials* (W. Heffer and Sons Ltd.
1933).

Sachs, Julian Von, *History of Botany, 1530-1860* (Russell and
Russell, 1890). 

Simons, Paul, *The Action Plant: Movement and Nervous Behaviour
in Plants* (Blackwell, 1992). 

Timiryazev, Kliment, *The Life of the Plant: Ten Popular
Lectures* (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958).

Tompkins, Peter and Bird, Christopher, *The Secret Life of
Plants* (Penguin, 1972).

_____________________________

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gunalan Nadarajan is an art theorist and curator based in
Singapore. He is currently Dean of Research and Creative
Industries at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts. 

_____________________________

BIOTECH BODIES/DIFFERENCE/RESISTANCE

by Faith Wilding, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 280
S. Columbus Dr., Chicago, IL 60603, U.S.A.
faithwilding@cs.com

Human bodies have always been culturally constructed and
physically modified through technologies including tool-making,
agriculture, cooking, medicine and language. Today, radically
new biological bodies are being created through genetic
engineering, cloning, stem cell cultivation and transgenics.
Many knowledge/power systems and technologies intersect and
collide on this biotech frontier: visualization and computing,
corporate science, religion, philosophy, ethics, feminist and
post-colonial theory and genetics. But there is a lack of public
debate and critical analysis engaging crucial issues of
difference that the new biosciences raise. Genetic engineering
has ushered in an age of *matrixial technologies* that produces
irrevocable changes in reproduction and body processes. Women's
body parts - eggs, uteri, placentas, cord-blood and embryos -
often provide the raw materials for these processes; yet there
is no acknowledgement of how these technologies replay
historical colonization of female bodies, creativity and
productive labor. This essay takes a critical look at cultural
meanings of reproductive and recombinant biotechnologies, in
which (female) bodies, transgressing boundaries, are becoming
distributed, patented, migrational bodies - part of a global
flow and exchange of property and value.

MATRIXIAL TECHNOLOGIES 

"Matrix: mother, maternal, material, womb, pregnant animal.
Recent meanings: The movie, cyberspace, that from which
everything comes into being, endless self-generation" [1].

*Totipotent* human embryonic stem (hES)cells - cells capable of
being programmed to produce any bodily tissues including germ
cells - were first isolated and grown in the lab in 1998. They
are a highly desired commodity because they are
undifferentiated, programmable biological entities that can be
isolated, controlled, grown and replicated virtually without
limit under laboratory conditions. Potential bio-medical uses of
hES cells include fertility procedures, organ and tissue
regeneration, "rejuvenation" therapies, therapeutic and
reproductive cloning and drug manufacture. Since hES cells are
derived from human "early" embryos, the technologies developed
from them are literally *matrixial technologies* - maternal or
generative technologies, where the matrix is a culturing
environment or simulated uterus. hES cells can function as
external embryos from which cell lines can be cultured. In these
culturing processes, the matrix is *real*, not a metaphor; it is
simultaneously the cytoplasm of egg cells, the culturing medium
and the pre-embryo that gives rise to the new organism.

Both human and animal embryonic stem (ES) cell research are
being advanced as fast as possible by consortia of private,
academic and government entities, entrepreneurs and researchers.
The rhetoric surrounding hES cell research is promissory and
mythical - hysterical in its desire to dazzle scientists,
academics, government officials and the public alike with
possible medical miracles of tissue regeneration, rejuvenation
and saving lives. Research and deployment of these
biotechnologies are being pushed ahead rapidly, while public
fear and opposition is quelled by extolling the miraculous
benefits of transgenic and cloning sciences through hyperbolic
rhetoric. 

Fears and objections to Assisted Reproductive Technologies
(ART) were successfully silenced in public discourse through
strategic marketing campaigns that celebrated consumer choice
and control over offspring quality, and naturalized the eugenic
tendencies of these technologies. Initially, cloning and
embryonic stem cell research has been met with similar
objections to those raised against ART. The ideological/cultural
battle currently raging about human cloning and hES cell
technologies is not the focus of this paper. Suffice it to say
that the often ridiculously contradictory, legal and ethical
debates over hES cell research in the U.S. Congress testify to
deeply seated non-rational fears and motivations awakened by
this science of biological control. Ethicists have jumped into
the fray, pointing to the threat cloning poses to beliefs in the
sacredness of human nature and the value of individual human
lives [2]. 

However, not many of them seem very concerned about the
problems of potential loss of species difference, the corporate
control over Life Science and the privatization and patenting of
the world's genetic heritage. Meanwhile, corporately funded
scientists and entrepreneurs are betting that people will soon
forget their fears of the monstrous in return for medical
miracles that stave off death, disease and senescence. 

WHY ARE WOMEN LIKE CHICKENS? 

Scientists apply many of the genetic engineering techniques
learned from animal research to the production of human embryos
and hES cell lines. They argue that the sequencing of the human
genome has clearly shown that humans are not very different
genetically from animals after all, so that crossing species
boundaries in genetic engineering is really no different in
effect than traditional animal breeding. Animal genetic
manipulation is "unlocking the secrets of life," thus giving
humans more control over the production and reproduction of the
living world. 

Much of the controversy surrounding hES cell technology
concerns the use of human eggs and embryos as experimental
material. A human egg cell is needed to make a "transformed" pre-
embryo through nuclear transfer (NT) [3]. Totipotent cells with
similar potential can be isolated from "the gonadal ridge of the
aborted fetus" [4]. ART depends on the forced ripening and
harvesting of multiple human eggs, a time-consuming, painful,
risky and expensive procedure that requires the woman "donor" to
take massive doses of fertility hormones so she will super-
ovulate - sometimes producing up to 30 eggs per cycle [5].

Genetic engineering produces hybrids and so-called chimeric
embryos. Hybrids are the result of crossing two different
species or varieties within a species; every body cell of a
hybrid contains copies of the genomes of both parents.
Hybridization can now be done very efficiently by molecular DNA
transfer. Chimeras are genetic mosaics made by mixing body
cells, or parts from two individuals, by actually combining
cells with different DNA, or sprinkling DNA over cells in a lab
dish. Advanced Cell Technologies (ACT) has reportedly been
attempting to create "hybrid embryos" using cow eggs and the
nuclei from human cells. 

Much of the controversy surrounding such creations focuses on
language: "What do you call such a thing?" - which reflects the
fear that hybridity is actually a kind of pollution, or criminal
miscegenation [6]. The rationale for using an enucleated cow egg
is that human eggs are so much harder to come by and the cow's
egg simply furnishes a "way station", a kind of universal, de-
contextualized matrix, for human nuclear DNA to be cultured into
hES cells. It is already relatively commonplace and accepted
practice in transgenic science to transfer genes from one
species into another (human genes into goats and pigs) to
produce insulin or compatible transplant organs. Why, then,
object to temporarily housing an entire human genome (nucleus)
in the cytoplasm of a cow egg, or vice versa? 

In today's life-sciences, there is a head-on collision between
deep-seated cultural mythologies and taboos and latest style
capitalist science, which is erasing the particularities of
genetic species differences. That these differences are vitally
important is shown by the fact that the actual danger in
creating transgenic hybrids lies in mixing the mitochondrial DNA
(found in the cytoplasm) from one species with the nuclear DNA
of another species. Only a few monkey species, for example, are
close enough in their mitochondrial DNA to mix with human
nuclear DNA and have even one of the basic cell functions occur.
Thus species differentiation is still a major stumbling block of
genetic engineering; but this is not stopping corporate science.

Consider the intersecting fates of women and chickens in
corporate biology. Both produce eggs so necessary to genetic
engineering and cloning. Women's eggs (and other reproductive
tissues) are the matrix for hES cell line production. Chicken
eggs are important drug factories: "The chicken egg, as nature's
bioreactor, offers a far more preferable drug manufacturing
vehicle as compared to present equipment or other transgenic
production methods, such as mammals" [7]. Chickens have long
been the factory-farmed animals of choice. Continuous feeding
with medicated meal and hormones, crowded confinement inhibiting
movement and controlled lighting enables genetically "improved"
chickens to be raised to market-ready size in 49 days.
Conditions for workers in U.S. chicken growing and processing
factories (many of them women and undocumented migrants) are
similar to those of chickens: long hours, low pay, unspeakable,
dangerous working conditions, crowded housing and no job
security or benefits are their lot. These conditions have only
gotten worse as the efficiency technologies of genetic
engineering and rationalized food production are becoming
ubiquitous.

It seems likely that the genetic engineering of chickens for
transgenic pharmaceutical production will provide scientific
knowledge that will be applied to women. Already, patented, live
cell-lines derived from women's eggs are being circulated all
over the world for medical experiments, without compensation of
the donors or disclosure of the source of this valuable
material, the conditions under which it was obtained and who is -
or is not - benefiting from it. 

CONTESTATION AND RESISTANCE

"The cultivation of diversity has to be a conscious and
creative act, intellectually and in practice. It demands more
than mere tolerance of diversity..." - Vandana Shiva,
*Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge*, p. 119.

"...the genes, in making possible the development of human
consciousness, have surrendered their power both to determine
the individual and its environment. They have been replaced by
an entirely new level of causation, that of social
interaction..." R. C. Lewontin, *Biology as Ideology: The
Doctrine of DNA*, p. 123.

The crucial role of difference and diversity is increasingly
acknowledged in society, art, ecology and politics: difference
experienced as a fundamental principle of life itself. By
contrast, genetic engineering erases difference, or
instrumentalizes it for specific, controlled ends.
Instrumentalized difference negates the liquid transformational
possibilities arising from particular interactions of different
organisms/bodies with their environments. 

Living organisms are in a state of becoming, rather than a
genetically fixed or essential state as eugenic thinking
proposes. Cyberfeminist and post-colonial discourses of
difference contest the authoritarian systems of domination,
privatization and specialization that much scientific work in
the U.S. is infected with. Worldwide, activists and artists are
working on projects that challenge and critique eugenic
ideologies of control underlying much of current biotech.
Projects range from: farmer-initiated land-race seed exchanges
and land reclamation; Shiva's experimental pedagogical Indian
farm to expand diversity of food crops; Women on Waves' floating
reproductive health clinics; proposals for a "Genetic Commons"
protecting the world's genetic heritage; Natalie Jeremijenko's
projects showing that cloned plants develop differently in
different growing environments; Critical Art Ensemble's
contestational science projects that teach genetic-engineering
processes to enable people to detect and reverse-engineer
genetically modified food crops; subRosa's informational
performances, interrogating capitalist and eugenic basis of ART,
egg donation and the traffic in human organs and stem cells - to
name a few. Effective resistant strategies must start with an
analysis of the systems of biopolitical control within which all
organic bodies now exist, and must find provocative tactics to
disrupt this control.

_____________________________

REFERENCES

1. MatriXial Technologies project: collaborators, Irina
Aristarkhova, Margaret Tan, Adeline Kueh and subRosa. See
www.cyberfeminism.net.

2. Leon Kass, "Why Not Immortality?," in *The Future is Now:
America Confronts the New Genetics*. William Kristol and Eric
Cohen, eds. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

2002)

3. In NT, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced
with a nucleus taken from a stem cell of the person/animal being
cloned. The "transformed" egg is then stimulated and the cells
begin to divide into a pre-embryo that is a genetic copy (clone)
of the stem-cell donor.

4. "Introduction," *The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate*, S.
Holland, K. Lebacqz and L. Zoloth, eds. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 2001) p. xvii.

5. Do No Harm, a coalition of ethical scientists and others
opposed to embryonic stem-cell research has estimated that
"...in order to provide genetically matched embryonic stem cells
derived from cloning to treat the potential patient pool,
scientists would have to obtain at least 670 million eggs,
donated by at least 67 million women. See
www.stemcellresearch.org/info/dothemath.htm.

6. See [4], p. 230

7. See www.viragen.com/avian_chickeneggs.htm.
_____________________________


AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Faith Wilding, new genre artist/writer/scholar, is an associate
professor of Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. She is a member of the cyberfeminist art collective
subRosa, which initiates public discourse about the economic,
social and political implications of bio and genetic
technologies. Wilding co-edited (with Maria Fernandez and
Michelle Wright) *Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices*, a
subRosa anthology (Autonomedia, 2003).

_____________________________

PROJECT REPORTS


ONLINE ACTIVIST MEDIA COLLECTIVES IN LOS ANGELES: AN ARGUMENT
AGAINST THE DEMATERIALIZATION VIEW OF CYBERSPACE

by Robert Bodle, 2404 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 8C, Los Angeles, CA
90057-3342
rjrdr@yahoo.com


Recent studies lament the loss of historical specificity in Los
Angeles due to the destruction of landmarks and the removal of
ethnic neighborhoods, in addition to distorting representations
in the media that divide the city into narratives of celebrity
and crime. Selective de-industrialization, de-unionization and
the brutal demographic divisions that exist in the spatial
organization of LA also provide the preconditions for a loss of
regional identity and broad grassroots networking in the city,
home to 3.5 million Latino, black, Asian and white citizens that
inhabit its 464 square miles. Mike Davis, in his widely read
*City of Quartz*, suggests that the loss of public space in LA
is a central factor in preventing the mingling of its citizens,
preventing their ability to forge networks of solidarity that
can result from common experiences among classes, ethnicities
and races. 

In this essay, I advance cyberspace as a location that can
potentially provide a common space to enable Angelinos to
overcome class, racial and spatial divisions. Norman Klein
argues the dematerialization view of cyberspace, dubbing online
regional practice as "the digitization of forgetting," and its
ties to localism an impossibility due to the spatial
indeterminacy of cyberspace - "a spot un-rooted to any definite
spot on the surface of the earth" (Klein, 1999: p. 198). The
process of creating an Independent Media Center in Los Angeles
(LA IMC), however, establishes an offline/online nexus, creating
material conditions for social interaction and community-
building; ultimately enriching, rather than erasing, notions of
place, regional identity and community. 

Presently, language differences, ethnic insularity, the digital
divide, and the daily grind of the working poor prevent many
ties easily achieved in theory. Yet, the process of building
alternative online media collectives does provide a viable model
for overcoming urban processes of erasure and alienation, an
experience common to those that inhabit the decentralized sprawl
of Los Angeles. People forging links across online and offline
spaces, I argue, can engage in new social relations, linking
bodies across divisions of race, culture and space, creating
local networks of solidarity. 

_____________________________

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Robert Bodle is completing a Ph.D. in Critical Studies at the
School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California.
His dissertation, "Radical Culture in the Digital Age: A Study
of Critical New Media Practice," examines online cultural
activism and issues of access and control in informational
politics. Bodle is an early participant in the Indymedia
Movement.  

_____________________________


RESONANT CULTURE

by Diana Mccarty, Strelitzerstr. 2, Berlin 10115, Germany
diana@vifu.de

www.reboot.fm; www.bootlab.org; www.juniradio.net

*reboot.fm* and *Juniradio* are projects that combine local FM
radio  transmissions with open-source software. The aims of this
work are to create both dialogs and technologies that recode old
and new media for non-commercial arenas of cultural production.
They also raise numerous  issues around subtle forms of
inclusion and exclusion in what are understood as open
structures. *Juniradio* was a three-week experiment with FM
radio. As a collaboration between disparate partners, the
multiple social orientations exposed many faults within existing
open cultures like Free Radio and Open Source; at the same time,
it pointed towards an inclusionary social practice, where
emergent technological innovation can actually take issues of
race, class and gender on board in the technical development and
implementation of software and in the programs broadcast on
local radios. *reboot.fm* is an attempt to unfold such a
practice, one that not only allows multiple points of entry for
participation, but demands it.

COMMUNITY

Communities around Open Source and Free Radio offer alternative
uses and forms for the media often taken for granted; non-
commerical media that espouse democracy, non-hierarchical
structures and emphasize their heterogeneous make-up, liberal
values and inclusive qualities. Open source, with its emphasis
on non-proprietary software generated by users and objective
valuations of new tools that allows anybody to contribute to the
shared pool of resources. Free Radio, with its claim of
grassroots radio for the people and rejection of editorial
hierarchies. 

In spite of their myriad forms and multiple localized
manifestations, however, these groupings are commonly dominated
by middle-class white males with shared values and similar
histories. The norms for communication and participation are
dictated through those commonalities. The result is a free-media
practice that is open to initiates, those that know,
technically, how to enjoy the benefits of such a system. Rooted
in technology that includes the studio and releasing new
software, specialized knowledge is required to join. That
specialized knowledge, shared between initiates, defines and
controls access to the media being proclaimed open. It also
limits the terms of participation. Program schedules are decided
by those in control of the studio, community software is
developed by individual geniuses and both are delivered to the
multitudes as pre-defined packages, with little room for more
meaningful engagement with the structure, planning or
implementation. Good intentions translate into a closed circle
of insiders enjoying their own freedom, and an aura of
benevolence when shared with the less fortunate.

TUNING

*Juniradio* illustrated very clearly that social inclusion is
not an automatic process; open calls to participate in the
program were totally dominated by free radio advocates, that is,
those who felt they belonged. This problem was compounded by the
attendant homogenous social networks; race and gender simply
were not an issue with this crowd. To reflect the multi-layered
reality of Berlin, another approach was needed. This called for
extensive communication and specific invitations to participate.
It meant making groups and individuals feel that they belong by
creating a context where they actually do. To the extent that
the three-week transmission aired programs from a very broad
spectrum of social strata of Berlin, the hierarchical editorial
strategy was a success. Jungle kids from Marzahn spun their
discs and stopped complaining about house music long enough to
see the mixer smoke when the Prince was on the decks; latina
immigrants lobbied for legalization of informal work, comforted
by a latina sound technician; former RAF members talked politics
with teenage global resistance. Challenging the established
norms of open cultures, the city resonated with the sounds of
itself.

REBOOT

Taking those challenges further means that *reboot.fm* extends
that inclusive social practice into the development of open
source tools - here, a working environment that comprises
individuals that bring lived experience to the table, allowing
for different sets of knowledge and logics to inform the process
and define the function of a set of software. It means a
practice that values human input, voicing difference as part of
norm. The potential is for a collaborative process that extends
far beyond one project or temporary broadcast, but rather an
entirely different form of software development and model for
working with open cultures.

_____________________________

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Diana McCarty is a co-founder of bootlab and numerous critical
media projects, such as the faces and nettime mailing lists.
McCarty has co-organized and participated in media events
throughout Europe and the Americas.

_____________________________

FEATURED ARTISTS

[Works by the following artists, which accompany this issue,
can be seen online at http://lea.mit.edu.]


Mendi + Keith Obadike, 204 Mill Rock Rd., Hamden, CT 06517,
U.S.A.
Mendi Obadike e-mail: mendi@blacknetart.com
www.blacknetart.com

Mendi + Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists whose
music, live art and conceptual Internet artworks have been
exhibited internationally. their writing and art projects have
been featured in the film *Take These Chains*, in periodicals
(including *Art Journal*, *Artthrob*, *Indiana Review*, *Black
Arts Quarterly* and *Tema Celeste*), and in the upcoming
anthology, *Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multi-Media
and Music Culture (edited by Paul D. Miller). Their work
generated much discussion online and offline when Keith offered
his blackness for sale on ebay in 2001. In 2002, Mendi + Keith
premiered their Internet opera, *The Sour Thunder*, which was
the first new media work commissioned by the Yale Cabaret, and
they launched the *Interaction of Coloreds* (commissioned by the
Whitney Museum of American Art). In 2003, *The Sour Thunder* was
broadcast internationally from 104.1 in Berlin. Most recently,
Mendi's manuscript *Armor and Flesh* (forthcoming on Lotus
Press) won the Namoi Long Madgett award. 


THE INTERACTION OF COLOREDS
Mendi + Keith Obadike

http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/august02.shtml
www.blacknetart.com/IOCccs.html

This work is part of Whitney Museum's net-art portal,
"Artport." It was commissioned as a gate project and was
featured during the month of August 2002. It is an on-line skin
color verification system, part of the current pool of products
in image recognition and manipulation, that was developed "after
years of detailed Diasporic research." As its producers claim,
it is just necessary to "follow our strict jpeg guidelines and
answer a few detailed questions about family history", and this
color verification system will identify your true color. 

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
Mendi Obadike

www.blacknetart.com/keepingupappearances.html
www.blacknetwart.com/keepup.html

In *Keeping up Appearances*, a "hypertextimonial," Mendi
Obadike's aim is to "investigate the power of using forms which
often signify lack of power by using them in concert with each
other." In this hypertextual work, she explores what she calls
"disclosures" of autobiographical writing, in particular
inspired by the works and lives of Faith Ringgold and Audre
Lorde.  

BLACKNESS FOR SALE 
Keith Obadike 
http://Obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html 


In 2001, "Keith Obadike's Blackness" was auctioned at E-Bay, in
the category Fine Art. The description, among many other
benefits for a buyer of Keith Obadike's Blackness, lists the use
as being for "writing critical essays or scholarship about other
blacks" and for using it as a "spare" Blackness, in case "your
original Blackness is whupped off you." Instead of the planned
10 days, the work was auctioned for four days, after which E-Bay
management removed it, citing it as "inappropriate."

________________________________________________________________

                  _________________________________
                 |                                 |
                 |         LEONARDO REVIEWS        |
                 |             2003.10             |
                 |_________________________________|

________________________________________________________________

This month, Leonardo Reviews publishes another 20 reviews from
its increasingly active panel. We are also pleased to welcome
more new reviewers, filing for the first time: Bronac Ferran,
from the U.K., and Margaret Dolinsky and Allan Graubard, from
the U.S., join our regulars. Ferran draws our attention to a
major report - *Beyond Productivity: Information Technology,
Innovation, and Creativity* -  by William J. Mitchell, Alan. S.
Inouye and Marjory S. Blumenthal. Despite its U.S. origins, this
report affects the Leonardo community world-wide. As Ferran
concludes, as other countries establish commissions to
investigate the "dynamic intersection" between art/design and
technology, "the trend towards interdisciplinarity within
research appears to be unstoppable." The review is published in
full below and the report itself can be downloaded. Allan
Graubard's review of George Didi-Huberman's *Invention of
Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the
Salpetriere* revisits the rhetoric of medicine and the
fascination of a period when a new "science" was being developed
in response to an apparently unbridgeable gulf between biology
(as it was then understood) and consciousness. The extent to
which particular technologies of representation contributed to
the conceptualization of hysteria has long been argued, but what
is beyond doubt is that the images of hysterics subsequently
resonated in the work of artists in the early twentieth century
and shaped contemporary understanding, from the salon to
Hollywood. The social interface of the unstoppable trend towards
interdisciplinarity in the present day is the topic of Paul
Virilio and Sylv�re Lotringer's *Crepuscular Dawn,* reviewed by
Sean Cubitt. Here, a rather bleaker picture emerges than the one
painted by Mitchell et al in their report. 

As a trio, these reviews do provide a view of today's
(interdisciplinary) world in a grain of sand. As for the 17
other reviews of books, videos, catalogs and exhibitions, I can
only suggest a visit to: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-
journals/Leonardo/ldr.html to catch up on the latest postings
listed below and, of course, the archive.

Michael Punt
Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Reviews

_____________________________

LEONARDO REVIEWS - OCTOBER 2003

Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventure of a Couple,  by
Jean Starobinski, translated by Sophie Hawkes with Jeff Fort
Reviewed by Margaret Dolinsky

Beyond Productivity Information Technology, Innovation, and
Creativity, by William J. Mitchell, Alan. S. Inouye and Marjory
S. Blumenthal
Reviewed by Bronac Ferran 

Crepuscular Dawn, by Paul Virilio & Sylv�re Lotringer
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt 

The Curvature of Spacetime: Newton, Einstein, and Gravitation,
by Harald Fritzsch
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell 

Depression Dog, by Toby Olson
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens 

Giants of Delft: Johannes Vermeer and the Natural Philosophers:
The Parallel Search for Knowledge during the Age of Discovery,
by Robert D. Huerta 
Reviewed by David Topper 

Howard Finster: Man of Visions, a film by Julie Desroberts,
Randy Paskal and Dave Carr
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript
Painting in Europe, by Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick 
and

Treasures of a Lost Art: Italian Manuscript Painting of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance, by Pia Palladino
Reviewed by Amy Ione

The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of
Culture, by Henry Plotkin 
Reviewed by Rob Harle

Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography
of the Salpetriere, by George Didi-Huberman
Reviewed by Allan Graubard 

Twelve Japanese Masters, by Maggie Kinser Saik
Reviewed by Rob Harle 

Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th
Century, by Scott Bukatman
Reviewed by Dene Grigar 

The Mayne Inheritance, by Rosamond Siemon
Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold 

Memories Are Made of This: How Memory Works in Humans and
Animals, by Rusiko Bourtchouladze
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell 

Memory and Dreams: The Creative Human Mind, by George Christos 
Reviewed by Rob Harle 

Naturoids: On the Nature of the Artificial, by Massimo Negrotti. 
Reviewed by Rob Harle 

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B.
Leitch, et al., eds.
Reviewed by Michael Punt 

Seeing / Hearing / Speaking, by Takahiko Iimura. 
Reviewed by Fred Andersson 

Women Artists: The Other Side of the Picture
Reviewed by Aaris Sherin 

Zinat: One Special Day
Reviewed by Aaris Sherin

_____________________________

BEYOND PRODUCTIVITY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION, AND
CREATIVITY

William J. Mitchell, Alan S. Inouye and Marjory S. Blumenthal,
editors. 
Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, The
National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2003. 268 pp.,
illus. b/w, $35.00 ($28.00 web). ISBN: 0-309-08868-2. Library of
Congress Catalog #2003103683.

Reviewed by Bronac Ferran, Director of Interdisciplinary Arts,
Arts Council England, 14 Great Peter Street, London SE21 8LG,
England

bronac.ferran@artscouncil.org.uk
 
This is a timely and unusual publication, both from the
perspective of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board
(part of the U.S. National Academies) and from the perspective
of new media studies. It is the report of a committee
established under the chairmanship of Bill Mitchell in 2000 by
the CSTB, the leading U.S. computer-science policy advisory
body, with encouragement from Joan Shigekawa of the Rockefeller
Foundation. Its key area of investigation is the "dynamic
intersection" between art/design and technology. It tackles
issues common to policy-makers, artists, academics and art-
technology research institutes across the world. While the
specifics of most of its research are related to the United
States, many of its recommendations will translate to other
geographical contexts and, with some careful mediation, it could
also be usefully employed as an advocacy and communication tool
elsewhere. On page 2, it sets the agenda and context for the
report: "It has now reached a stage of maturity, cost-
effectiveness, and diffusion that enables its effective
engagement with many areas of the arts and design - not just to
enhance productivity or to allow more efficient distribution,
but to open up new creative possibilities." The book cites
numerous examples of projects in the U.S., and occasionally
elsewhere, analyzing why certain activities or trends have
emerged and suggesting how these might be built on and extended.
To ensure that the ground on which it is standing is demarcated
, the committee proposes a new term - Information Technology and
Creative Practices (ITCP) - to signify the range of its enquiry.
Its scope is impressive: it looks at tools and the influence of
art and design on computer science and vice-versa; it considers
venues, including public outlets; links with commercial labs and
studio-laboratories; networks of individual artists; regional
and local clusters; links with industry; the emergence of high-
speed networks and potential for distributed working.

The report considers (in one of its best chapters) the role of
schools, colleges and universities, and also delves into key
policy and funding support areas - very helpfully analyzing the
differences and strengths that one might find not only within
the United States but also, more broadly, in Europe and Asia.
Much of this analysis is sure to be used elsewhere in future. On
a slightly less positive note, the text is hard-going at times -
a desire for inclusiveness has occasionally buried important
points under the weight of detail. While it has real value as a
reference text, it lacks an index, which is unfortunate.
Similarly, the many footnotes carry an enormously interesting
storehouse of key references, but are hard to read. It was a
great relief to find the whole report available online, and
easily downloadable, in PDF format. For details of this and more
information about the CSTB, see http://www.cstb.org. I shouldn't
underestimate the task undertaken by the committee, particularly
the editors. Just achieving the objective of mapping and
surveying key clusters of activities will have been difficult.
The picture that emerges is inevitably a highly complex one, not
readily distilled or easily synthesized into a simple set of
achievable recommendations.

The sheer enormity of the gaps between established computer
science research infrastructures and the bottom-up, networked
trends in contemporary media art need acknowledgement and the
report does not pretend otherwise. That the gaps can be bridged,
though, is an initial premise and the report throws up some
useful practical observations, particularly relevant to academic
research. It asks a key question about "standards," i.e. "for or
against"? It also identifies the lack of parity among
disciplines in terms of reward structures, absences of 
validation mechanisms, difficulties of achieving legitimacy and
recognition, failure to sustain experimental models with short-
termism (an in-built weakness), the need for maturation of
assessment criteria, a need for development of enhanced
historical perspectives, challenges of presenting work to panels
comprised of specialists in singular areas, the scarcity of data
about emergent trends, and the benefits of appointing senior
figures, perhaps on a short-term basis, linked to ITCP projects
within universities to help raise profile and achieve much-
needed advocacy.

Soon in the U.K., research councils will be meeting to discuss
ways in which they can collaborate around
arts/science/technology interfaces. Collaborative fellowships
are being set up, as they are in Canada. Both Canada and
Australia are setting up cross-sectoral programs: the trend
towards interdisciplinarity within research appears to be
unstoppable. This book provides a clear platform upon which
further investigations can take place. Perhaps this is a good
time to propose the establishment of a network of agencies
involved in constructing solutions to the challenges so usefully
articulated here 

_____________________________

CREPUSCULAR DAWN

by Paul Virilio and Sylv�re Lotringer. Semiotext(e) (Foreign
Agents Series), 2002, 185 pages. ISBN: 9-781584-350132.

Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, Screen and Media Studies, University
of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. 
seanc@waikato.ac.nz

Paul Virilio has long been admired and cited by the
theoretically inclined techno-savvy of <nettime>. Nowadays,
largely thanks to the efforts of John Armitage (2000, 2002), he
is becoming an obligatory citation for many social and media
theorists of more traditional kinds. This book forms an
excellent career overview and contains plenty of surprises and
new material for readers who already know of his earlier work.
*Crepuscular Dawn* is a book-length interview with Sylv�re
Lotringer, himself a doughty figure in anarcho-artistic New York
as the eminence grise of Semiotext(e), the notorious journal and
publishing house. The book's title loses something in
translation - in French it probably has the paradoxical music of
Eliot's "midwinter spring" - and the translating is at times a
tad slapdash (for example, when an English film title is
translated back from the French), but these are niggling
criticisms of a fluent, likeable and invigorating portrait of an
exceptional, even visionary mind at the top of his bent,
relaxing with an old friend in caf�s around Paris, sparking
ideas, thinking aloud and on his feet. Dialogue is more often
praised than practiced in contemporary theory: this is less an
interview than a conversation, and a particularly eloquent and
enjoyable one to eavesdrop on.

Lotringer provides a handy introduction, then leaps straight
into the dialogue. Virilio recounts his early days as a radical
architect, in some detail, culminating in the Oblique Function
(you'll have to read the book to figure this one out). Then on
to Nanterre, epicenter of May '68. Every French intellectual
alive at the time, and many active since, have placed themselves
on the map of ideas in relation to Le joli Mai. Already
"anarchist Christian," Virilio marched with the black flags of
the anarchists until he had the idea of making himself a
transparent one out of clear plastic. With Julian Beck of the
Living Theatre, who had been invited to play there but sided
with the students, Virilio and his colleagues took over the
Od�on Theatre, a major center of the May events. Students who
heard him speak there invited him to teach at the Ecole
Sup�rieure d'Architecture, where he has remained, more a thinker
- and activist - than a builder of buildings.

The events of May also transformed Virilio's thinking.
Initially inspired by the architecture of the bunkers left by
the German army along the Normandy coast, the subject of a
remarkable early book, Virilio increasingly turned his attention
towards time, and specifically towards speed. Of the major
figures of the day, Virilio cites Henri Lefebvre and Gilles
Deleuze as colleagues with whom he had political disputes, but
who also took up, in their own ways and in their own good time,
the temporal problematic. Lefebvre is especially important,
given his active part in May '68 and his association with the
Situationists, especially Guy Debord. Lefebvre's Production of
Space (1991) is a landmark in the (post)modernization of
geography, but failed, in Virilio's view, to understand the
vector of time as it accelerates in the post-war period.
Virilio's basic discipline remains urbanism and town planning, a
field where transportation is a central concern. His uniqueness
comes from his understanding that media are also means of
transport (he has an eloquent description of the windscreen of
the car being a kind of TV screen), an apper�u that has become
more complex and richer as networks speed up, become more
ubiquitous, and lose their architectural anchorage to become
portable and wearable.

Virilio, as is well known, shares with Friedrich Kittler a
belief traceable back to Nietzsche that war is the typical state
of human societies. Here that idea is extended towards genetic
engineering, whose roots Virilio traces back to eugenics and,
most of all, to Menegele's notorious experiments on the inmates
of the death camps. This issue is, to add a geo-politically
particular note, extremely illuminating for New Zealand, where
this review is being typed. The last election and key
negotiations with the U.S. will be fought on bio-security of a
fragile and unique environment and the supposed rights of
Monsanto and the others. At the same time, the academic
community is being rocked, for the second time in a decade, by a
scandal concerning holocaust denial. For Virilio, the two are
strictly intertwined. Mengele's experiments and those of bio-
engineering are not only usurpations of God's role, from a
Catholic phenomenological perspective; they unleash the prospect
of the Genetic Bomb.

To clarify this point, we need to bring in another of Virilio's
major arguments. The invention of the railway is also the
invention of the train wreck, the automobile of the car smash,
the computer data crash, and genetic engineering of biological
collapse. To the extent that all our media and transportation
systems are now networked in real time, the accident stops being
a purely local or personal event, and becomes instead
potentially global: the General Accident. Virilio here puns on
the philosophical term "accidence," an actually existing
phenomenon which lacks the necessity of an absolute essence.
Essential matters have become inessential, simulacra and
simulations, and at the same time they have exploded. This is
especially the case with dimensions. Time has begun to vanish in
the perpetual acceleration of media, and space threatens to
disappear as media and transport systems become more and more
integrated into what was once a wholly human body.

It is easy enough to run a critique of these ideas. In these
interviews, Virilio is open and unapologetic about his
Catholicism, and vocal in his announcement of his
phenomenological bearings (among information theorists, he
reserves a good word for the phenomenologist Varela). Yet he is
not always accurate in his accounts: media are not
"instantaneous," nor is there much mileage in trying to find an
example of a society without media, or a human body untouched by
mediations, from gesture to clothing, language to food. The
materialism of contemporary science and contemporary theory
looks askance at the prospect of essences transcending the
accidence of physical reality. And though in some ways
Armageddon has been an option since the arrival of the A-bomb,
horror has a way of creeping through the world rather than
blasting it in some blockbuster finale.

But it would be wrong to treat Virilio as a systematic thinker,
whatever he thinks about the matter. His strength is as an
aphorist. "Apocalypse is happening all the time, every day since
Genesis. It never stops. Man is the end of the world" he says,
or, distinguishing carefully that he is addressing the labs
rather than the gas chambers, "Auschwitz was not only a crime
against humanity: it is the beginning of the accident of
science." For Virilio, there is a certainty, a destiny, involved
in human affairs. Fallen humanity sets out on broken paths, all
of which lead by crooked routes to the integral logic of their
conclusions. To the extent that the project of Western science
has been one of control, it has produced its opposite. To the
extent that it aims to secure a better life, it produces not
just a worse one, but death, and on a scale that beggars
imagination.

On the other hand, in the closing section during a discussion
of the Unabomber, Virilio recalls another biblical episode that
puts all this predestination into perspective, as if fate were
the product of a scientific principle - the principle,
presumably, of predictability. "That's what our job is," he
argues, "to wrestle with the genetic bomb as human beings - not
as gods. To wrestle with the information bomb so as to produce
something other than cybernetics. To wrestle with the atom bomb
so as to avoid blowing everything to kingdom come. So I don't
believe the world is finished, either. I am not a nihilist. I am
simply saying that we have to fight like Jacob. Each person must
wrestle with the angel."

Sadly this does not extend to many of the artists involved in
Leonardo. Stelarc ("futurist") and Eduardo Kac both get a
pasting. And the editor of these digital reviews is name-checked
as a "sorcerer's apprentice," but mistakenly identified as the
"semi-living" tissue work, the work of Oron Catts, not Mike
Punt. But the epigrammatist who asks us to reflect on whether
reflection has become reflex, and habitat a habit, has as his
task to spur us into thought - and action. Accuracy is a virtue
for accountants. The true visionaries will have to have it in
abundance, but till they arrive, it's good to have someone there
to remind us how high the stakes are that we are all playing for.

_____________________________

REFERENCES

John Armitage, ed., *Paul Virilio: From Modernism to
Hypermodernism
and Beyond* (London, Sage: 2000).

Henri Lefebvre, *The Production of Space,* trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, Blackwell: 1991).

_____________________________


INVENTION OF HYSTERIA: CHARCOT AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ICONOGRAPHY
OF THE SALPETRIERE

by George Didi-Huberman. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2003. 375
pp., illus.  Trade, $34.95. ISBN: 0-262-04215-0.

Reviewed by Allan Graubard, 2900 Connecticut Ave., NW,
Washington, DC 20008, U.S.A.
a.graubard@starpower.net


"What the hysterics of the Salpetriere could exhibit with their
bodies betokens an extraordinary complicity between patients and
doctors, a relationship of desires, gazes, and knowledge. This
relationship is interrogated here." (*Invention of Hysteria:
Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of The Salpetriere*, p.
xi)

With this, George Didi-Huberman opens his work on the
rediscovery of hysteria by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, founder of
neurology and a major influence on Freud. Since the book's first
publication in France in 1982, we still cannot avoid its
poignant reflections on the history of medical diagnosis and the
doctor-patient relationship. For, in the shadow thrown by this
book, there are still questions worth asking. They are not about
how far we have come, which is evident, but what we have
overlooked or refused to admit along the way. In effect, where
do epistemological issues intrude upon medical science and how,
within medical practice, can we fail to recognize that meaning
is an applied value? That these issues then had about them an
erotic and sexual significance, hysteria being predominantly a
"woman's" disorder, treated by men in a large institution where
control presided over cure or release to excess, reveals
something else about late nineteenth-century medicine at the
Saltpetriere: its exclusionary function and its theatrical
context; the latter, I suggest, still has not left us, however
radically its terms have altered.

In another sense, this work is as much a study of a
transitional moment in medical analysis - when the search for
the biophysical "lesion" turned to the characterization of a
psychological "disorder" - as a study of the limitations of that
analysis and the critical need to understand its cultural and
technological context, the advent of photography legitimating
Charcot's work with a cutting irony that Didi-Huberman captures
from the start. The visual identification of the "seat of the
illness," along with all its lexical derivations, deprives the
patient of an essential indeterminacy, the individual uniqueness
she desperately searches for through her symptoms and, if called
on, her appearances at Charcot's Tuesday lectures. There is
little hope for a way out, however efficiently the patient
satisfies her doctor's expectations in terms of symptom type or
kind, and the resulting constriction of space, both internal and
external, even perhaps of hope, cannot mask a violation, which,
for Didi-Huberman, turned to "hatred."

The medical science we know, or wish we knew, seems far afield
here. But then the title of this book, with its stress on
invention, carries the point throughout with a vivacity often
lacking in other historical works. For Didi-Huberman, the
argument evolves not only through the eye and his analysis of
the photographic oeuvre on hysteria, but in response to how
poignantly that oeuvre touched him. Indeed, it is difficult at
times not to recoil from the therapies inflicted on these women
by their doctors, whether performed to alleviate suffering or in
pursuit of a specialized bit of knowledge. 

Here again I take the author's tack and style as a strategic
difference that distances him from the kind of "confirmation"
that the photograph provided then, and which in our visual
culture also raises the stakes to a critical breaking point,
where voices such as Artaud and Bataille's resonate, especially
in regard to the hysterical body, the body dispossessed of
itself. A retrospective examination of "Charcot and the
Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere," as the subtitle to
the book terms it - yes, of course, but this retrospection,
intense, sustained and supple, approaches us without the usual
cautions, laying bare an invidious passion that the hysteric's
cry, at last, contravenes: the theatricalization of a diagnosis,
the staging of the body of disease.

Structured in two sections - "Spectacular Evidence" and
"Charming Augustine," referring to Charcot's prize hysteric,
whose photos in extremis would later captivate the surrealists -
the work concludes with important appendices of source
documents, including Augustine's account of a delirium that her
doctor(s) provoked by ether. 

*Invention of Hysteria* is a significant examination of an
often blurred landscape between pain and performance that we, in
the twenty-first century, continue to build our households in,
all wishful thinking aside.
     
________________________________________________________________

                    ______________________________
                   |                              |
                   |       LEONARDO ABSTRACTS     |
                   |            SERVICE           | 
                   |______________________________|

________________________________________________________________

LABS is a listing of Masters and Ph.D. theses in the
art/science/technology field, for the benefit of scholars and
practitioners. LEA also maintains a discussion list open only to
faculty in the field. Students interested in contributing and
faculty wishing to join this list should contact
lea@mitpress.mit.edu.

_____________________________


AUTHOR 
Jack Eric Stenner 
jack@jigglingwhisker.com

LANGUAGES FAMILIAR TO THE AUTHOR 
English

THESIS TITLE 
"Public News Network: Digital Sampling To Create a Hybrid Media
Feed"

ABSTRACT 
A software application called Public News Network (PNN) is
created in this thesis, which functions to produce an aesthetic
experience in the viewer. The application engenders this
experience by presenting a three-dimensional virtual world that
the viewer can navigate using the computer mouse and keyboard.
As the viewer navigates the environment she sees irregularly
shaped objects resting on an infinite ground plane, and hears an
ethereal wind. As the viewer nears the objects, the sound
transforms into the sound of television static and text is
displayed which identifies this object as representative of an
episode of the evening news. The viewer "touches" the episode
and a "disembodied" transcript of the broadcast begins to scroll
across the screen. With further interaction, video of the
broadcast streams across the surfaces of the environment,
distorted by the shapes upon which it flows. The viewer can
further manipulate and repurpose the broadcast by searching for
words contained within the transcript. The results of this
search are reassembled into a new, re-contextualized display of
video containing the search terms stripped from their original,
pre-packaged context. It is this willful manipulation that
completes the opportunity for true meaning to appear.

KEYWORDS 
Sampling, Streaming Video, OpenGL, Virtual Reality, Navigable
Space, New Media, Electronic, Context, Art, Online, Internet

YEAR IT WAS PUBLISHED/EXAMINED 
2003

URL
http://thesis.jigglingwhisker.com/

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THESIS 
English

COPYRIGHT OWNERSHIP 
Jack Stenner

THESIS SUPERVISOR 
Prof. Carol LaFayette, Texas A&M University, Department of
Architecture, Visualization Laboratory, lurleen@viz.tamu.edu

UNIVERSITY/PROGRAM AFFLIATIONS 
Texas A&M University, Visualization Laboratory

THESIS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
It will soon be available at: http://etd.tamu.edu/ETD-db/ETD-
browse also available at:

http://thesis.jigglingwhisker.com/downloads

________________________________________________________________

                    ______________________________
                   |                              |
                   |        ANNOUNCEMENTS         |
                   |______________________________|

________________________________________________________________

CALL FOR PAPERS - ARTSCIENCE: THE ESSENTIAL CONNECTION

What is the value of artistic practices, techniques,
inventions, aesthetics and knowledge for the working scientist?
What is the value of scientific practices, techniques,
inventions, aesthetics and knowledge for the artist? When does
art become science and science, art? Or are these categories
useless at their boundaries and intersections? Can an individual
excel at both science and art, or is even a passing familiarity
with one sufficient to influence significantly the other? Do the
arts ever contribute significantly to scientific progress? Where
will current scientific innovations lead the arts in the next
few decades?

*Leonardo* will publish a series of special sections over the
next three years devoted to exploring these questions.
Submissions can be from artistic scientists who find their art
avocation valuable; from scientist-artist collaborators who can
demonstrate a scientific or artistic innovation; from
scientifically literate artists who draw problems, materials,
techniques or processes from the sciences; or from historians of
art or science looking at past examples of such interactions.

Interested authors are invited to send proposals, queries
and/or manuscripts to Guest Editor Robert Root-Bernstein, 2201
Biomedical Physical Sciences Building, Michigan State
University, East Lansing, MI 48824-3320, U.S.A. 
E-mail: rootbern@msu.edu.
________________________________________________________________

                    ______________________________
                   |                              |
                   |           ISAST NEWS         |
                   |______________________________|

________________________________________________________________

PAMELA GRANT-RYAN CELEBRATES 20 YEARS WITH LEONARDO

Leonardo Managing Editor Pamela Grant-Ryan this fall celebrates
20 years working with the Leonardo network. Under Pamela's
leadership, the Leonardo publication landscape has been
transformed. Twenty years ago Leonardo was a small quarterly
academic journal published by Pergamon Press. Today the Leonardo
publications include the now bi-monthly Leonardo, including the
Leonardo Music Journal and CD Series, the Leonardo on-line
publications, Leonardo Electronic Almanac and the Leonardo Book
Series, all now published with MIT Press. Pamela oversaw the
transition from traditional print to desktop and now to full
hybrid on-line and print publication. Each issue of the journals
appears simultaneously on line and in print, reaching a diverse
international audience. This growth reflects the explosion of
interest in the intersection of the arts, sciences and
technology, but the success reflects Pamela's broad experience,
thirst for change, curiosity and community building. She has
worked with thousands of Leonardo authors, helping drive texts
into statements that can be understood by readers of diverse
cultures and levels of background. 

It is often hard for people to understand that the Leonardo
"empire" is piloted by a small group of five part-time staff, in
collaboration with hundreds of volunteers internationally.
Leonardo is, like all small visionary activities, financially
unstable; the Leonardo office has been in more than nine
different locations over these 20 years, reflecting the
continuous struggle to survive. Yet over 20 years, over 100
issues, Leonardo has always appeared on time. 

Through all this turmoil, Pamela has insisted on rigor,
originality and clarity, as well as ethical honesty. Our
community is the beneficiary of her dedication and
professionalism. We look forward to working with her over the
years to come to help Leonardo mutate yet again as we adjust to
the changes in the world around us. She is now working with a
new "Leonardo Experimental Issue" project to pioneer new ways to
bring new ideas and innovative work, especially from younger
scholars and artists, to the attention to a growing planetary
community seeking to build a sustainable new culture that
contributes to human development. Those of you wishing to join
us in thanking Pamela for her dedication to the Leonardo network
may wish to send an email to pgr@sfsu.edu.

_____________________________

ROBERT ROOT-BERNSTEIN JOINS LEONARDO EDITORIAL BOARD

Bob Root-Bernstein obtained his A. B. in Biochemistry from
Princeton University and his Ph.D. in the History of Science
with Thomas Kuhn at the same institution. He then did post-
doctoral work with Dr. Jonas Salk at the Salk Institute in La
Jolla, where he was awarded one of the first MacArthur
Fellowships. He is currently Professor of Physiology at Michigan
State University, where he studies the evolution of metabolic
control systems, autoimmune diseases, drug development,
scientific creativity and arts-sciences interactions. He is
himself an amateur artist and photographer who believes that
understanding can be achieved only by active participation in a
discipline, and integration through understanding. He can be
reached at Root-Bernstein@psl.msu.edu

_____________________________

MARC BATTIER ELECTED PRESIDENT OF LEONARDO/OLATS 

Marc Battier has taken up duty as President of the  Board of
Directors Scientific Counsel of Leonardo/OLATS. Battier has been
composing computer music for over 30 years (live and tape). His
latest CD, Nine pieces on works by Matta, with poems by Zeno
Bieanu, will be released in the Fall of 2003. As an author,
Battier has written books and numerous articles on electronic
and computer music. His research interests include the history
of electrical and electronic musical instruments, past of audio
technology, interaction with other arts, use of audio in
literature and poetry, development of electronic and computer
music and analysis methods for electronic music. As professor at
the University of Paris Sorbonne, Battier heads the MINT
research group (Musicologie, Informatique et Nouvelles
Technologies). Battier is also Vice-President of the Electronic
Music Foundation. 

Battier has been deeply involved in the Leonardo network on
many levels. He has published in Leonardo and Leonardo Music
Journal and is a Leonardo manuscript reviewer on the subjects of
technology, French culture, and European culture. Battier joins
a distinguished group on the Leonardo/OLATS governing board:
Annick Bureaud, Jean-Daniel Gard�re, Julien Knebusch, Jean-Paul
Longavesne, Roger Malina, Ramuntcho Matta, Christine Maxwell,
Samuel Okoshken, and Vincent Winter. Battier may be reached at
marc.battier@paris4.sorbonne.fr. 

_____________________________


ARTMEDIA VIII SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS 

The latest issue of the journal *Ligeia* is dedicated to the
proceedings of the International Symposium "Artmedia VIII: From
Aesthetics of Communication to Net art." Under the title "Art et
Multimedia," the texts of the December 2002 symposium in Paris,
co-organized by Annick Bureaud, Fred Forest and Mario Costa,
will be published in French, as well as a selection translated
into English. Information related to the symposium is available
on-line on the Leonardo/OLATS web site at
http://www.olats.org/setF11.html. 

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  |                   |
  |                   |
  |      CREDITS      |
  |                   |
  |___________________|


Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief
Michael Punt: LDR Editor-in-Chief
Patrick Lambelet: LEA Managing Editor 
Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant
Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor
Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee

Editorial Advisory Board:
Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Michael Naimark, Craig Harris,
Julianne Pierce

Gallery Advisory Board:
Mark Amerika, Paul Brown, Choy Kok Kee, Steve Dietz, Fatima
Lasay, Kim Machan

fAf-LEA corresponding editors:
Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae-Chang, Fatima
Lasay, Lee Weng Choy, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neusetter, 
Elaine Ng and Marc Voge 

________________________________________________________________
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  |                   |
  |      LEA          |
  | WORLD WIDE WEB    |
  |     ACCESS        |
  |___________________|


For over a decade, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) has thrived
as an international peer-reviewed electronic journal and web
archive, covering the interaction of the arts, sciences and
technology. LEA emphasizes rapid publication of recent work and
critical discussion on topics of current excitement. Many
contributors are younger scholars and artists, and there is a
slant towards shorter, less academic texts. 

Contents include Leonardo Reviews, edited by Michael Punt,
Leonardo Research Abstracts of recent Ph.D. and Masters theses,
curated Galleries of current new media artwork, and special
issues on topics ranging from Artists and Scientists in times of
War, to Zero Gravity Art, to the History of New Media.

LEA is accessible using the following URL: http://lea.mit.edu

________________________________________________________________
    _________________
   |      LEA        |
   |  PUBLISHING     |
   |  INFORMATION    |
   |_________________|

Editorial Address:
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Studio 3a, 35 Place du Bourg-de-four
1204 Geneva, Switzerland 

E-mail: <lea@mitpress.mit.edu>
________________________________________________________________
Copyright (2003), Leonardo, the International Society for the
Arts, Sciences and Technology

All Rights Reserved.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by:

The MIT Press Journals, Five Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA
02142
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Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited without
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________________________________________________________________
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________________________________________________________________

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  |  ADVERTISING   |
  |________________|

Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published monthly -- individuals 
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________________________________________________________________
   ____________________
  |                    |
  |  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  |
  |____________________|

LEA acknowledges with thanks the Rockefeller and Ford
Foundations for their support to Leonardo/ISAST and its projects.

________________________________________________________________

< End of Leonardo Electronic Almanac 11 (10) >
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