technology

Laura U. Marks - The Skin of the Film

Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film, Duke UP, 2000.
If cinema is an audiovisual medium in nature, why does Laura Marks look for nonaudiovisual sense experience in cinema? Of course, the films and videos she tries to examine are not just the general cinemas but what she calls intercultural cinemas. Why does intercultural cinema… »

Paul Feyerabend - Against Method

Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. 3rd Ed. Verso, 1993.
This book is, as the title is saying plainly, challenging the idea that in science there is and has been a proper methodology for scientific research distinctive from non-science and pseudo-science. If only one methodology were allowed in science, we could not have had science as what we… »

Norbert Wiener - Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd Ed. The MIT Press, 1965.
Cybernetics was the field of control and communication theory which laid groundwork for the computer culture now we live in. It was an integration of diverse sciences and disciplines asking how to design a model for the… »

Chris Hables Gray - Cyborg Citizen

Chris Hables Gray. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge, 2002.
Curiously, all the theories of posthumanism have been disappeared, and discourses of the postmodern have receded like a popular fad. As if there is not any longer a serious discussion on the virtual reality today, though we have just arrived the time we expected… »

Eugene Thacker - The Global Genome

Eugene Thacker. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. The MIT Press, 2005.
Although the main object of Thacker’s The Global Genome is biology (and body itself), the context in which he deals with the object throughout the book is more complex than simple investigation on scientific discipline (genomics) or biological matter (genome). Rather his context… »

Precarious Citizenship in the Late Capitalist Society

- Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton UP, 2002.
- Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke UP, 1999.

How do self and social identities change in a state of transition? How does the relationship between individuals and the state change in a rapid or gradual social crisis? How… »

Sheila Jasanoff - The Fifth Branch

Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers, Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.
Under the democratic constitution, it is generally and traditionally recognized that there are three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) as we know already. With the expansion and complexity of modern society, people’s needs of the fourth branch have been brought up…. »

Dona J. Haraway - Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Dona J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991.

This book might be one of the most original, thought-provoking, and influential books in the history of social studies of science and technology since the 1980s, transversing from feminist theories and SF literatures to primate studies and military communication technology. Haraway tries to… »

Bruno Latour - The Pasteurization of France

Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Harvard UP, 1988.
What can we write on (the history of) invisible microbes? Maybe we can write on how the medical and biological sciences could have dominated and controlled the diseases and the bacteria. Considering that this book, The Pasteurization of France was originally published in France in 1984 with… »

CFP: CREATIVE MEDIA

Special issue of Culture Machine vol. 11; http://www.culturemachine.net
edited by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (both at Goldsmiths,
University of London)
This is a call for papers and non-papers alike. It is open to artists,
intellectuals, writers, philosophers, analysts, scientists, journalists
and media professionals who have something to say about the media that
extends beyond the conventional forms of media analysis…. »