Session 02: Stefan Helmreich

Session 2 (Seminar)
Stefan Helmreich: The Death of Artificial Life

Some interesting visual materials I found while reading a paper on distributive agency from the 2010 SLSA Conference - the paper acually had them in the bibliography.

www.powersof10.com/film

"Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames, rereleased in 1977. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.

In 1998, "Powers of Ten" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

kottke.org/10/02/insanely-deep-fractal-zoom

These visuals were very inspirational to me while reading the short peice on complexity. Hope you'll enjoy them too!

Metaphors shape our understandings of things, and are also shaped by current cultural circumstances and understandings. But metaphors also act in the world and have real material effects; in Haraway's words, they are often "more than metaphor". In An Archaeology of Life Underwater, Stefan suggests that water can act as "a persuasive rhetorical referent in the visualization of [artificial life] simulations" (326) and this afternoon we talked a lot about building metaphors of biobricks (tm!) and lego used in synthetic biology.

My thought is that we could use this forum thread to track different metaphors that come into play as we trace histories of life, origins of life, and the creation of life. How have these metaphors differed, and how have they differently shaped and been shaped by understandings of life during particular periods? How do these metaphors relate with modes and methods of intervention into life and life processes?

And on a related note, does metaphor function in the same way as analogy? If not, what are the differences?

Information is another very important metaphor about which we'll learn today, I guesss, that it has been around for a while already, albeit with a completely different meaning than we associate with it today.