Viewing entries in
Posthumanism

sk-interfaces (Liverpool, FACT, Feb 2008)

New exhibition and conference starting the FACT programme. Looks good!

"Designer hymens, a composite coat made of blended skin cultures by legendary French artist ORLAN, a brain infused with glowing moss and non-animal ‘leather’ growing in the galleries, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) presents a ground-breaking UK exhibition exploring the idea of skin as a place where art, science, philosophy and social culture meet.

sk-interfaces opens 01 February until 31 March 2008.

Curated by Jens Hauser, sk-interfaces launches FACT’s Human Futures programme in Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture and as an interdisciplinary exhibition will feature works from 15 international artists, including 2007’s Golden Nica winners at Ars Electronica.

“What used to be understood as a surface that represents the limit of the self and between the inside and the outside can today be seen as an unstable border. sk-interfaces is ideally placed within the cultural programme of Liverpool 08: Artists are exploring trans-species relationships, xenotransplantation, satellite bodies, endogene design, telepresence, permeable architecture and the ever pushed limits of art itself,” says curator Jens Hauser.

Formerly known for her surgery-performances in which she refigured her face and created new images referring to non-Western cultures, ORLAN presents her new work Harlequin Coat, a patchwork life-size mantle, which contains fusing in vitro skin cells from various cultures and species. This prototype of a biotechnological coat is made to symbolise cultural cross breeding.

The Tissue Culture and Art Project’s Victimless Leather investigates the possibility of producing ‘leather’ without killing an animal. Three miniature stitch-less garments are tissue-cultured live in the gallery. Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr are behind the award-winning lab project SymbioticA (Golden Nica in Hybrid Art 2007 Prix Ars Electronica), the Australian–based research facility dedicated to artistic enquiry.

French duo Art Orienté objet has created biopsied, cultured, hybridized and tattooed skin made from their own epidermis and pig derma to create living biotechnological self-portraits. Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin’s work is intended to be grafted onto collectors themselves so they can physically wear and absorb an artists’ piece.

American artist Julia Reodica’s hymNext Designer Hymen Series confronts the values of purity and gender roles using the artist’s own vaginal tissue and animal muscle cells to create designer hymens. The sculptures pose as products to be marketed and are intended as objects of novelty for ‘re-virginisation’ thus addressing the issue of how different cultures value female virginity and the associated pressures.

Zbigniew Oksiuta from Poland will come to Liverpool to create a new version of his project Breeding Spaces in which a large 3D sphere of gelatin is grown in situ. The artist proposes the possibilities of designing biological spatial structures that can serve as a new kind of habitat and presents a new form of spatial coexistence between man and nature.

sk-interfaces will also feature further commissioned and existing projects from international artists such as Eduardo Kac, Jun Takita, Wim Delvoye, Olivier Goulet, Zane Berzina and Neal White among others.

Mike Stubbs, Director and CEO of FACT says, “FACT opens its 08 programme committed to pushing at the boundaries of how and what creative technologies and art can be. Touching on some of the biggest issues of our day FACT invites debate and conversation around life sciences and our changing relationships with our bodies and technology"." 

Ethical Futures

The RSA event last week was a whirlwind through so many different technologcical futures that tying everything together was quite a challenge. We roved from Web 2.0 to artificially intelligent robot soldiers in a matter of hours.

Human Futures @ FACT

It's perplexing how i can be invited all over the world to speak about this subject and, on my own doorstep, not a peep. There's a moral here somewhere, and it's a good one. Anyway, visit Human Futures @ FACT, then get down to London next week for Ethical Futures @ RSA where I am speaking to the title 'Justifying Human Enhancement: The Accumulation of Biocultural Capital [straight after which I'm taking a motorcycle taxi to make my train. life is complicated]

Science as Culture (CFPs)

Science as CultureCALL FOR PAPERS: special issue on ‘Technology, Death and the Cultural Imagination’

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: November 17th, 2007

This special issue will explore concepts of death – its causes, its prevention, its ambiguities, its interfaces with life – and how these relate to technocultures.

As well as technologies of death (as used in warfare, execution and death camps) and technologies closely associated with death (aeroplanes, cars and early industrial technology, for instance), medical technologies which aim to prevent or delay death have had a considerable impact on what it means to die and, conversely, what it means to live.  Cryonic suspension for example keeps the body in a form of undeath and offers the possibility of resurrection into a future world while the cloning of replacement body parts blurs the boundaries of identity and thus poses questions about concepts of death, life and individuality.  Similarly, technologies which keep the body 'alive' complicate legal definitions of death.  Science fiction in particular has been concerned with reconceptualising what it means to die.

We are interested in papers which explore these ideas and their expression in art and literature, including critiques of recent films and publications or re-readings of classics, as well as readings of other cultural objects. We also welcome papers which have a historical perspective and focus on pre-twentieth century technologies of death.  Subjects for consideration may include (but are not limited to) the following:

Consumer technologies and 'unusual' death. Vampires. Modern/Postmodern Frankensteins and concepts of (re)animation Technology and the language of death (e.g.,'collateral damage'). Technology, global capitalism and death. Brain death and the preservation of the body. Technologies of/and death as the subject of art. Science fictions of death/undeath. Celebrity resurrections. Drugs and the concept of 'living death'. Technologies and the life of the body after death. New technologies and preservation at the point of death. ‘Ghostly’ body parts and transplanted organs. The status of the unborn or ‘potentially’ human.

Science as Culture is dedicated to exploring the culture of technoscientific expertise and how it shapes the values which contend for influence over the wider society.  The journal encompasses people’s experiences at various sites – the workplace, the cinema, the computer, the hospital, the home and the academy.  The articles are readable, attractive, lively, often humorous, and always jargon-free. SaC aims to be read at leisure, and to be a pleasure.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent, by either post or e-mail (with SaC in the subject line) to either of the following addresses, to arrive no later than November 17th, 2007:

Debra Benita Shaw Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies School of Social Sciences, Media & Cultural Studies University of East London 4-6 University Way London E16 2RD United Kingdom d.shaw[AT]uel.ac.uk

Megan Stern Senior Lecturer in English, Critical Theory & Media Studies Department of Humanities, Arts & Languages London Metropolitan University Tower Building 166-220 Holloway Road London N7 8DB United Kingdom m.stern[AT]londonmet.ac.uk

european neuroscience and society network

The launch of the ENSN takes place in London next month on 12th and 13th November. I'll be there as will Alex Mauron who's speaking in the final plenary. [Alex and I have written a couple of papers together with Bengt Kayser.]

Programme:

Neurosocieties: the rise and impact of the new brain sciences November 12 & 13, 2007 Regent’s College Conference Centre, Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London Monday, November 12, 2007 9.00 – 9.30 Conference Registration (Regent’s College Conference Centre, Main Lobby) 9.30-10.00 (Room D06) Welcome: Neurosocieties: the rise and impact of the new brain sciences Professor Nikolas Rose, Director, BIOS Centre for the study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics 10.00-12.00 (Room D06) Plenary One – Public health and the politics of the neurosciences Professor Kent Woods, CEO, Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency “Regulation of medicines in a changing world: the challenges of neuropharmacology” Professor Matilde Leonardi, Neurological Institute Carlo Besta, Italy “Neurosciences and neuropolitics: the challenge of brain disorders” 12.00– 1.00 (Room D05) Lunch 1.00-3.00 (Room D06) Plenary Two – Neuroeconomies: markets, choice and the distribution of neurotechnologies Zack Lynch, Executive Director, Neurotechnology Industry Organization “The Global Neurotechnology Industry 2007 and Beyond” Dr. Philippe Pignarre, University of Paris; Publisher, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond “The birth of neuroeconomy” 3.00 to 3.30 Coffee Break 3.30 to 5.30 (Room D06) Plenary Three - Sources of the neurochemical self: consciousness, personhood and difference Professor Alexandre Mauron, University of Geneva Dr. Ilina Singh, BIOS Centre, LSE 5.30 Wine Reception & Conference Dinner Herringham Hall, Regent’s Conference Centre Tuesday, November 13, 2007 9.30 – 10.00 Coffee and Tea 10.00-11.00 Workshop One: Public health and the politics of the neurosciences (Room D05) Discussants: Dr. Andreas Roepstorff, University of Aarhus Dr. Joao Arriscado Nunes, University of Coimbra, Portugal Workshop Two: Neuroeconomies: markets, choice and the distribution of neurotechnologies (Room D06) Discussants: Dr. Paul Martin, University of Nottingham Dr. Ilpo Helen, University of Helsinki 11.00-12.00 Workshop Three: Sources of the neurochemical self: consciousness, personhood and difference (Room D05) Discussants: Professor Kenneth Hugdahl, University of Bergen Dr. Cordula Nitsch, University of Basel Workshop Four: Neuroscience and Society: Future Directions in Europe (Room D06) Discussants: Professor Trudy Dehue, University of Groningen Professor Ilse Kryspin-Exner, University of Vienna 12.00-1.00 Lunch 1.0 to 3.00 (Room D06) Plenary Four – Neuroscience and Society: Future Directions in Europe Professor Steven Rose, Open University “Future Directions in Neuroscience: a twenty year timescale” Professor Alain Ehrenberg “Brain, Mind and Society: the Threefold cord” 3.00-3.30 Closing Remarks Tea and Coffee served

Bruce Sterling

Today, I joined the RCA's Design Interactions again, at the invitation of Tony Dunne. The project was on Robot Ethics this time and I gave a lecture that talked about the relations between Prosthesis, Robotics and Artificial Life. Also speaking this morning was Bruce Sterling, whom it was a delight to meet. I have read Bruce's work for some years and had email contact with him some time ago in relation to CTHEORY. After the morning sessions, we chewed the fat on urban regneration, Richard Florida, creativity and the trivialization of everything. 2007.10.08-BruceSterling.JPG Here are some notes on his talk that I made. They might be impenetrable:

Design Interactions, Oct 8 2007

Robots Bruce Sterling

Why no humanoid reobots? From literature and theatre Usually, humanoid, dim witted Can take some limited orders from humans

Contemporary robot is different C3P0 R2D2 – drone – remotely piloted Humanoid vs ME: non-humanoid

Terminologies blur - both referred to as droids

androids supposed to be different – semi-biological - form and shape of human, but semi mechanical

gianoids – women shaped mechanical objects

robot in metropolis - blog.wired.com/sterling - robo veganza

when robot word invented, made from goo – poured into moulds

mechanical version came later

there is one household robot you can buy – disc shaped vacuum cleaner - animals hate them - can get stuff on things: destroy themselves - no brains - no emotional relationship - not pets

why did robot dog fail? - people played with it then forgot to plug it in. - Sony iBo

These objects lack common sense, so cannot have relationship with

Put a face on our relationship to technology - cannot have moral discussion with it - can have one with dog – but not a robot dog

does not have morality

sony also built humanoid robot, but never launched

Institute of RoboEthics, Italy - afraid to release, for fear of hackers

‘they can dance’

There aren’t any smart machines - none that can ustd commonsense language - not even translating machines

no embodiment

strings of 1s and 0s

nothing remotely behaves like this, nor getting closer to it

serious advances in robots - intelligence NO - solving Turing Test? NO

what we’ve got is ‘arms and legs’ - big Dog – darpa project, bath tub on legs; no head

uncanny - not a perfect version of a robot human - reach a

Marvin Minsky - artificial emotions - AI doesn’t work since human brains don’t work in the way he imagined - Must be an emotional substrate below intelligence

Robots have no sense of preservation. They don’t reproduce

They don’t value their own existence

There’s no way for us to give them anything

Minsky now emotions

Hans Moravec - most advanced schemes ‘bush robot’ – equipped to do nanotechnology - ‘utility fog’ – get rid of everything and keep fingers o a kind of gas – oozing through peoples bodies o Behind a scheme like this is difficulty and tragedy

Melancholy tale of how the word robot was invented - invented by a painter – jozef char

satirical play about industrialism – RUR – Rossums Universal Robots - parody of industrial production - basic researcher and industrial technologist - scientist decides will make a mimic of human - first makes a dog, but doesn’t work very well - his son says it’s not working, so suggests try making an industrial labour - get rid of parts that would make money – no sexuality, no emotional attachment, just really good memory, doesn’t sleep, eats anything, work tirelessly on assembly line - robot = worker

communism,

humane

Human Futures

FACT's new programme for 2008 is advertised in their Oct-Dec brochure. Human Futures looks to be an excellent series of exhibitions, events and debates about such themes as medicine, the body, technology, art and more. It's so closely tied to so much of my research that I doubt I'll have much cause to leave Liverpool while it's running It also shares similar themes with 'Ethical Futures' , a project that I have become involved with at the RSA. Perhaps the two communities will meet

Neurosocieties: the rise and impact of the new brain sciences (12-13 Nov, LSE)

neurosocieties: the rise and impact of the new brain sciences Launch Conference of the European Neuroscience and Society Network

November 12-13, 2007, London, UK

This conference will mark the inauguration of the ENSN, a networking project funded by the European Science Foundation and convened by researchers at the BIOS Centre, London School of Economics.

The last twenty years have seen unprecedented innovation in the neurosciences. Despite evidence that advances in the neurosciences are having a significant influence on the lives of individuals across Europe, there has been little formal engagement within the European social sciences with the ethical, social, legal and security implications of recent developments in this branch of scientific experimentation. The European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN) has been established to serve as a multidisciplinary forum for timely and necessary engagement with the influence of the new brain sciences on our lives.

The November conference will be the first in a series of international workshops and conferences bringing together leading neuroscientists, philosophers and social scientists for sustained discussions and cross-disciplinary dialogue on the following themes:

·       Neuroscience and society: framing the agenda in Europe

·       Public health and the politics of the neurosciences

·       Neuroeconomies: markets, choice and the distribution of neurotechnologies

·       Sources of the neurochemical self: consciousness, personhood and difference

Plenary speakers include:

Professor Kent Woods (Chief Executive Officer, UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency)

Professor Steven Rose (Open University)

Dr. Philippe Pignarre (University of Paris; Publisher, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond)

Professor Alexandre Mauron (University of Geneva)

Zack Lynch (Executive Director, Neurotechnology Institute Organization)

Professor Wolf Singer (Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany)

Numbers at the Launch conference on November 12-13 are strictly limited to ensure opportunity for participation, so please book early. To indicate your interest and request a registration form, contact Linsey McGoey (l.j.mcgoey@lse.ac.uk <mailto:l.j.mcgoey [AT] lse.ac.uk> ), Programme Coordinator, European Neuroscience and Society Network.

For more information about the ENSN, see: www.esf.org/ensn <http://www.esf.org/ensn> .

Art and Biomedicine - Beyond the body (Copenhagen, 3 September, 2007)

"A one-day symposium about creative visual practices at the frontiersof biomedicine organised by the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen in partnership with The Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts."

http://www.ku.dk/Satsning/BioCampus/artandbiomedicine/index.asp

Between the Human and the Post-Human: Technology and Humanity

We are pleased to announce a forthcoming one-day conference to be heldby the Science Technology Culture Research Group at the University of Nottingham (UK) on 19 September 2007. I would be very grateful if you would circulate the attached poster to all interested members of your department or institution:

Between the Human and the Post-Human: Technology and Humanity

Technological developments in fields such as IT, biotechnology, genomics, and reproductive technologies may well take us into a new and distinct era of human evolution. Consequently, terms such as 'posthuman' and 'transhuman', have gained a degree of common currency in recent years. The aim of this conference is to generate new interdisciplinary discussion on issues relating to potential reconceptualisations of the 'human' in the light of new technologies.

Speakers:

Don Ihde (Stony Brook University)

Lenny Moss (Exeter University)

Bronwyn Parry (Queen Mary London)

Robert Pepperell (Cardiff School of Art & Design)

To register, please contact conference organiser: john.marks [AT] nottingham.ac.uk

Posthuman Conditions

Now available: Subject Matters Vol. 3, No. 2/Vol. 4, No. 1

a special issue on ‘Posthuman conditions’ guest edited by Neil Badmington

CONTENTS

Introduction: posthuman conditions NEIL BADMINGTON

“ . . . a drowning of the human in the physical”: Jonathan Franzen and the corrections of humanism NEIL BADMINGTON

Critical posthumanism or, the inventio of a posthumanism without technology IVAN CALLUS AND STEFAN HERBRECHTER

Posthuman metamorphosis: narrative and neocybernetics BRUCE CLARKE

From inoculation to vaccination: smallpox and the shifting ground of what it means to be human TERESA HEFFERNAN

Parrots: speech and subjectivity JESSICA MORDSLEY

Plastic man: intersex, humanism and the Reimer case IAIN MORLAND

Mutation, history, and fantasy in the posthuman R. L. RUTSKY

When you can’t believe your eyes: the prosthetics of subjectivity and the ethical force of the feminine in Dancer in the Dark CARY WOLFE

To subscribe, go to

www.subject-matters.co.uk

Critical Posthumanisms

I just discovered the new book series titled 'Critical Posthumanisms' published by the Dutch company Rodopi. The forthcoming volumes look very interesting. More information here: ISSN 1872-0943

General Editors: Ivan Callus, University of Malta Stefan Herbrechter, Trinity and All Saints, University of Leeds

Editorial Board: Neil Badmington, Cardiff University Timothy Bhati Manuela Rossini, University of Amsterdam Joanna Zylinska, University of London

‘Posthumanism’ may be understood as the paradigm that succeeds humanism, but also as the study of what might follow humanity's ends. After prompting an initial sense of novelty and shock, posthumanism has become a discourse whose unsettling anticipations of the future and timely critiques of the present have firmly established themselves within the academy. Posthumanism’s concerns—typically relating to the impacts of bio- and digital technology on body, mind, culture, and epistemology—are now part of mainstream debate within the humanities and within interdisciplinary explorations of the integrity of the human.

Critical Posthumanisms is a new series focusing on the exciting rise of posthumanism and its probable directions. It makes available studies by scholars whose perspectives on the posthuman vary in important and interesting ways, and should serve as a crucial point of reference for anybody working within the field.

Books within the series provide:

(a) analyses of the histories, idioms, and canons of different “posthumanisms”; (b) discussion of the main thinkers and trends of posthumanism; (b) alternative formulations of posthumanism, which downplay the centrality of technology; (c) philosophical and political critiques of the "prosthesization" of the human; (d) cross-disciplinary takes on posthumanism, particularly those allowing the humanities to engage with areas like Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, Virtual Reality, etc.

Editorial Address: Dr Ivan Callus Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Malta Msida MSD06 Malta

Email: ivan.callus@um.edu.mt

Dr Stefan Herbrechter Department of Media, Film and Culture Trinity and All Saints Brownberrie Lane Horsforth LEEDS LS18 5HD UK

Email : s.herbrechter@leedstrinity.ac.uk

---------------------------- Forthcoming volumes:

Volume 1. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus. Critical Posthumanisms: An Introduction.

Volume 2. Gloria Lauri-Lucente. Mutatas Formas: Posthumanism and Transembodiment in Ovid, Dante, and Petrarch.

Volume 3. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein. Virtual Reality: The Last Human Narrative?

The editors are also looking to commission further monographs in the areas described above.

Virtual Anxiety

Kember, S. (1998). Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies, and Subjectivity. Manchester, Manchester University Press.

"...the raising of the undead in technoscientific discourse signifies not only the validation of difference but the desire to effect new and illicit kinds of connection within and across academic and disciplinary boundaries as well as organic and inorganic realsm. Vampires in this context are about difference, technology and writing linked by the possibilities of 'as if'. They are a facet of feminist figurative writing in academic discourse which, tied to specific and declared investments, help to keep the monsters out of the closets and divert us from our virtual anxieties."

BIOCULTURES GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE (16-17 Nov, 2007)

BIOCULTURES GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE:>science >technology >culture >humanity

University of Illinois at Chicago, November 16-17, 2007

Keynote speakers:

Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California Lennard J. Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago

In the 1950s, C.P. Snow saw a fundamental split between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. But in recent years this split has faded, with theorists like Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway as well as writers like Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler examining what "the human" is in a world where recent biological and technological developments have profoundly shaken our assumptions about identity and power. At the same time, interdisciplinary work in fields like bioethics, gender studies, disability studies and critical race theory has begun to bridge this divide, offering up new ways of theorizing the body and its relationship to medical, cultural, and political knowledge. Putting projects like these in dialogue with one other, this conference seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that participates in the emergence of biocultures - the intellectual space where the humanities and the sciences converge. We invite presentations on biocultural issues from scholars and professionals from all disciplines. Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following:

> posthumanism > cosmetic surgery/body modification > cognitive mapping > prosthesis > eugenics/phrenology/scientific racism > psychiatric illnesses (post-traumatic stress, OCD, etc.) > the science of sexual deviance (sexology, the �gay gene,� etc.) > medical technologies > anthropology vs. genetics > birth control and reproductive rights > the human/animal boundary > psychiatry & brain science > transgenderism, transexuality intersexuality > literary representations of science and medicine > biopower/biopolitics > postmodern warfare > nanotechnology > cybercultures > eco-feminism > disability studies > bioethics

For more information and updates, visit our conference website at: http://www.uic.edu/depts/engl/biocultures/

This conference is part of Project Biocultures, an ongoing effort dedicated to exploring new ways of thinking about the intersections between the human and the technological. More information about Project Biocultures can be found at: http://www.biocultures.org/index2.php

Please send abstracts of 250-350 words to projectbiocultures [AT] gmail.com by July 1, 2007

Human 2.0: new minds, new bodies, new identities (9 May, 2007)

After having spent part of today talking about Aimee Mullins and body modifications, this event is awfully appealing. I am in NYC the following week, but it might be just too much of a stretch...http://h20.media.mit.edu/

Human2.0: new minds, new bodies, new identities

A One-Day Symposium, 5/9/2007 at MIT

Ushering in a New Era for Human Capability

The story of civilization is the story of humans and their tools. Use of tools has changed the human mind, altered the human body, and fundamentally reshaped human identity. Now at the dawn of the 21st century, a new category of tools and machines is poised to radically change humanity at a velocity well beyond the pace of Darwinian evolution.

A science is emerging that combines a new understanding of how humans work to usher in a new generation of machines that mimic or aid human physical and mental capabilities. Some 150 million of us are over the age of 80, while 200 million of us suffer from severe cognitive, emotional, sensory, or physical disabilities. Giving all or even most of this population a quality of life beyond mere survival is both the scientific challenge of the epoch and the basis for a coming revolution over what it means to be human. To unleash this next stage in human development, our bodies will change, our minds will change, and our identities will change. The age of Human 2.0 is here.

Hosts

JOHN HOCKENBERRY award-winning journalist; distinguished Media Lab fellow

HUGH HERR NEC Career Development Professor, MIT Media Lab

keynote OLIVER SACKS

special guests MICHAEL GRAVES MICHAEL CHOROST JOHN DONOGHUE AIMEE MULLINS DOUGLAS H. SMITH

The program will focus on the Media Lab's sweeping new research initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability to vastly improve the quality of human life. Presenters will explore how today's-and tomorrow's-advances will seamlessly interact with humans, giving us a glimpse into a future where all humans will integrate with technology to heighten our cognition, emotional acuity, perception, and physical capabilities.

The Media Lab at the Center

In a dramatic and crucially important new initiative, h2.0, the MIT Media Lab seeks to advance on all fronts to define and focus this scientific realignment. The Lab will leverage a new understanding of human cognition, emotion, perception, and movement to produce machines that better serve humanity.

Positioning itself at the center of a confluence of new science is a familiar place for the Media Lab. Understanding the adaptive impulse of humans and harnessing it for the pursuit of a new generation of machines is an endeavor as world shattering as anything the Media Lab has ever undertaken. The goal? New Minds, New Bodies, New Identities. Please Join Us

Technology pushes sporting boundaries (25 March, 2007)

Interview by Australian Associated Press while in Brisbane last week. Here's the outcome:

Technology pushes sporting boundaries

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411366/1035788

Dozens of leading professional golfers, including Tiger Woods, have had eye surgery to improve their vision. Some believe it gives them "better than perfect" eyesight and makes the tricky business of reading greens far easier.

Hundreds of American major league baseball pitchers have had surgery to implant stronger tendons from elsewhere in their bodies into their elbows. Many of them testify that they can throw the ball harder and faster than they could before the operation.

Now the day may not be far away when athletes have microscopic-sized devices implanted in their brains to help them perform better.

According to Dr Andy Miah, a British bioethicist, the line between using technology to improve sporting equipment and using it to improve the bodies of its practitioners is becoming increasingly blurred.

"Sports are technologically enabled practises," Miah said.

"We are pushing the limits of the body technologically and creatively - and I think the relationship between those two is quite close.

"People are fascinated with what the body can do in various kinds of performances."

Miah, who was in Brisbane this week to address a conference organised by the Australian Sports Commission, said functional elective surgery in sport is a more immediate issue than the
long-feared emergence of genetically manipulated athletes.

While the World Anti-Doping Agency concentrates on performance-enhancing drugs and worries about so called "gene-doping", it has no provision in its code for surgically enhanced athletes.

Woods, who was so short-sighted his doctor said he could barely count fingers held in front of his face, wore contact lenses early in his career.

He had laser surgery on his eyes in late 1999. After the surgery, which gave him vision rated at 20-15, Woods said the hole looked bigger to him.

Whether or not the surgery had anything to do with it, Woods won seven of the next eight PGA tour events he played in. The following year he began the "Tiger Slam" in which he became the first man to hold all four Majors at the same time.

Woods' surgeon, Dr Mark Whitten, says the eyesight produced by surgically altering the shape of the cornea gives golfers an enhanced three-dimensional view of the shot confronting them. "It
may be better than normal vision," he says.

Others who have had the surgery include Retief Goosen, Vijay Singh, Scott Hoch, Jesper Parnevik, Lee Westwood and Mike Weir.

Around 10% of major league baseball pitchers in the US have had surgery to strengthen their elbows, which come under enormous strain from repeatedly hurling baseballs at 150 kilometres an hour.

The procedure, called ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction (UCR), is widely know as Tommy John surgery after the pitcher who first had it done in 1974.

According to a report published in USA Today, it involves taking a tendon, usually from the wrist or leg, and grafting it into the elbow in a figure-of-eight pattern through tunnels drilled in the
humerus and ulna bones.

The surgery has saved the careers of hundreds of pitchers, and there is evidence that its success rate is encouraging younger pitchers with only minor elbow injuries to seek the surgery to help their careers.

Some pitchers say they come back better than ever.

"I hit my top speed (in pitch velocity) after the surgery," said Kerry Wood, who had the procedure five years ago and now pitches for the Chicago Cubs. "I'm throwing harder, consistently."

Miah believes there is now a new frontier in sporting technology, driven by the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.

All of these have profound implications for technological and medical developments generally, as well as within sport.

"It seems likely to me that sports will confront the implications of this convergence quite soon.

"We can imagine nanotechnological devices being utilised by athletes to keep them fit ... these are molecular-sized devices that could be inserted into the brain to elicit certain kinds of
physiological modifications."

The technique has already been used to implant molecular-sized devices into the brains of people suffering from Parkinson's disease.

The implants alter the brain's electrical output to help cure the  uncontrollable shaking that is the main symptom of the disease.

Technology such as this could have implications in shooting, snooker, archery and other disciplines requiring steady aim.

Miah, who believes genetic manipulation of athletes is not necessarily a bad thing, says the march of technology is throwing up some crucial philosophical questions.

"The development of biotechnology, stem cell research, cloning technology and the like has provoked a kind of moral encounter with what it means to be human and what technology might be doing to alter that.

"If we can develop devices that make it difficult to say these are external to the body, if they're implantable into the body then it becomes much harder to say that they are artificial."

Our Sporting Future (21-23 March, 2007)

Next month, I jet across to Brisbane to give a keynote by the title:  New Media Futures: The Challenge from Posthumanity.

The emerging technologies of new media are changing the way people work, enjoy leisure and communicate. This paper will explore the challenge raised from the convergence of technology platforms and scope the scene for what lies ahead for sports involvement. The paper identifies two crucial trends in development, the process towards ‘immersion’ (bringing audiences closer to the arena) and ‘abstraction’ (bringing athletes closer to simulated arenas) and discusses the collapse of bodies and technology as distinct categories, which raises prospects of the posthuman performer in competition. The discussion considers what tomorrow’s people will expect from the mediatisation of sports and explores some of the implications this has for the organisation of society and the role of technology within it. While dominant cultural narratives portray such futures as inhuman or dehuman, I argue that these transformations offer rich variation to contemporary life by appealing to imaginative ways of communication and embodiment.

I will also take part in a debate about the role of science in the contribution of winning medals.  It looks to be an exciting event and it's nearly 7 years since I've been to Australia. I just wish I was there for longer!

Somatechnics: Bodily (Trans)formations (19-21 Apr, 2007)

CFP DEADLINE: January 5th 2007 Somatechnics: Bodily (Trans)formations Conference 2007

April 19th-21st 2007 Carlton Crest Hotel Sydney Australia

'Somatechnics' is a newly coined term used to highlight the inextricability and mutually co-constitutive nature of bodies and 'technologies' (in the broadest sense of the term), of soma and techne. This term, then, supplants the logic of the 'and', indicating that technes are not something we add to or apply to the body, but rather, are the means in and through which bodies are constituted, positioned, and lived. As such, the term reflects contemporary understandings of the body as the incarnation or materialization of historically and culturally specific discourses and practices, and of activities involving bodies - in medicine, information technology, education, the arts, surveillance, science, law - as fundamentally formative and transformative, cultural and social.

Abstracts (approx 500 words) are invited for papers/performances/panels for the Somatechnics Conference, hosted by the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, to be held in Sydney, Australia on April 19th-21st 2007.

This is the third in a series of bi-annual conferences: previous conferences were Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves(2003), and Body Modification Mark II (2005) (see: www.ccs.mq.edu.au/bodmod ).

Possible topics include:

Technologies of gender/race/class/etc Body modification/sculpting Medical technologies Enhancement technologies Transgender practices and procedures genital surgeries Cosmetic/reconstructive surgeries Obesity, anorexia, and/or other body 'pathologies' Cyborgs Nanotechnology Euthanasia ageing Reproductive technologies Transplant technologies BIID and other 'pathologies' reproduction population control Disability Incarceration Racialization Torture Terrorism 'harm' War Sport Performance art Visual art Religious rituals Multi-media technologies Sense culture

Abstracts (of no more than 500 words) should be sent, as email attachments, to: nikki.sullivan [at] scmp.mq.edu.au AND smurray [at] unwired.com.au no later that 5th January 2007.

Further information

Nikki Sullivan Department of Critical and Cultural Studies Macquarie University North Ryde New South Wales 2109 Australia

Conference Website: http://www.somatechnics.org/conference

Contact Email: nikki.sullivan [AT] scmp.mq.edu.au