BIOTECH

BIOTECH

Question: is it Spectacle or Festival, or both?
Some say Festival -->The digital circus is stopping off at Linz. This year´s ArsElectronica Festival will openwith a host of attractions. -- such as "the body is obsolete" -- This new posthumanist technobody art taking shape through cyborg constructions, computers, and the net --- "In the Parasite performances the cyborged body enters a symbiotic/parasitic connection with information. Images gathered from the internet are mapped onto the body and, by a muscle stimulation system, the body becomes a reactive node in an extended nervous system". (press here) for the story.

Similar theme - metabody.com is an abstract of the CD ROM, Metabody: From Cyborg to Symborg, an exploration of the human machine interface, robotics, golems, automata and avatars, featuring an archive of the work of Stelarc (press here). And (press here) for stories.

09/14/99Robotics and Evolution Evolutionary Machines...

Robotics researchers have traditionally focused on developing controller algorithms that could produce an adequate response when downloaded to an appropriate platform. New approach has been adopted more recently: it involves the process of adaptation through evolutionary search (press here).

Others say spectacle:

BODY BIOTECH - SPECTACLE OF PRODUCTION and CONSUMPTION:

Jan. 31, 2000 salon.com > Health & Body Long-distance surgery Telemedicine allows doctors to be in several places at once. BY ROBERT BURTON, M.D. - Virtual Reality (press here).
January 31, 2000 Gene Project Yields Spinoff: Digital - Odor Synthesizer By LAURIE J. FLYNN - Coimputer Games that Smell. (press here). Ny Times
January 11, 1999 - THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE VOL. 153 NO. 1 The Biotech Century BY WALTER ISAACSON Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It's time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now we're just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time: deciphering the human genome, the 100,000 genes encoded by 3 billion chemical pairs in our DNA. (click here) for Times.com story.
April - 1998 The new cannibalism - Chinese surgeons extracting vital organs from condemned prisoners. Indian villagers selling a kidney for a dowry. And all to feed the booming global traffic in human organs for transplant. A shocking report from Nancy Scheper-Hughes (press here). Source: The Body.

Postmodern Article on THE BODY - Let's conclude with a little holistic exercise. The world is a body, your body. The top half of your body, the Northern part, say, gets all the goodness it needs to survive and more. In some parts it's actually quite bloatedThe bottom half, the Southern part, say, is in a state of perpetual struggle to get what it needs to survive. It has plenty of vitality, is capable of joy, but somehow it never gets quite enough goodness or nourishment in relation to the energy it expends just to stay alive.