Ollivier Dyens: Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man. Technology Takes Over (2001)

For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts.

Ollivier Dyens’s Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century—which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture—Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives.

Translated by Ollivier Dyens, Evan J. Bibbee
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 0262042002, 9780262042000
Length 120 pages

Keywords and phrases
cyberpunk, cyborg, Robocop, Pamela Anderson, Metaman, ontology, Gregor Samsa, doublethink, Kevin Kelly, a-life, William Gibson, Cruel Miracles, Bruce Sterling, artificial intelligence, Joel Slayton, Reprogenetics, semiotic, extraterrestrial, Richard Dawkins, Bodies without Organs

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF

Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth (eds.): Re:skin (2007)

In re: skin, scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin—as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins—by plastic surgery, tattooing, skin graft art, and other methods—but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies.

The book’s agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of “body criticism”; a writer uses “faux science” to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another’s sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the “skin” of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re: skin claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture.

Contributors:
Austin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alicia Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0262062607, 9780262062602
Length 356 pages

Keywords and phrases
avatar, Lynx, carapace, NFL Street, Issy, uterus, video games, Cleve, VRML, Melinda Rackham, Lara Croft, EverQuest, wetsuit, Posthuman, Shelley Jackson, interventional radiology, phenomenology, MMORPGs, sports games, Blast Theory

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF

Vivian Carol Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)

“In these essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today’s image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we’ve all ‘had our eyes done’; why we are ‘moved’ by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of ‘making sense’ requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520241290, 9780520241299
328 pages

Keywords and phrases
phenomenological, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, metonymy, irreal, Elaine Scarry, rience, catachresis, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Decalogue, cyborg, Aimee Mullins, Walter Benjamin, synecdoche, Street of Crocodiles, Million Man March, prosthetic leg, transform fictional, semiotic, Medium Cool

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)