This book demonstrates how and why vitalism—the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism—matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences while simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, (...) as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory, and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity. (shrink)

Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and 'wetware', Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of (...) information systems. As well as offering suggestions for the evolution of [cyber]feminism in Alife environments, the author identifies the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilized in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralized and de-centralized control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of life-as-it-could-be. (shrink)

What is ubiquitous photography? The article addresses this question and argues that ubiquity signals something more than the proliferation and dispersal of photography into everyday life. Moving beyond the question of digitization and of new or digital media, the premise of the argument is that ubiquitous photography is inseparable from the claims and innovations associated with the wider field of ubiquitous computing. Here, photography and the photographic are realigned within the terms of the technoscience industries and their quest to generate (...) ambient intelligent environments, automated systems such as face recognition technology (FRT), animated artefacts and augmented reality (AR). Employing a feminist approach to technoscience, the article offers a gendered, genealogical and interventionist critique of photography’s ‘everywhere’ status. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point and its main problematic the status of evolution as a ‘sterile belief’ in contemporary technoscientific culture. Focusing in particular on the role of evolution across the boundaries of art and science in the contexts of artificial life and transgenic engineering, it offers a critique of the belief in evolutionary possibility as an abstract process. The lack of what François Jacob refers to as a dialogue between the possible and the actual is seen to (...) account for the sterility of evolutionary possibility and for its status as myth. In particular, evolutionary possibility recalls the myth of metamorphoses, the conservatism of which is demonstrated in an analysis of two art/science works - Galápagos by Karl Sims and Genesis by Eduardo Kac. Lacking a dialogue with the actual, metamorphic evolutionary possibility here becomes self-referential and produces nothing new. Rather than a rejection of evolution per se, this article takes up Jacob’s critique of its over-extension by showing how this operates in two works representing the fields of artificial life and transgenesis respectively. (shrink)

This article examines the role of the alien as the ultimate outsider and considers the challenges it poses to feminist theory. I argue that these challenges are based on the need to continue developing an ethics of relationality in which neither love nor relationality itself is deemed to be the answer; on rethinking agency and ontology in terms of becoming and the limitations of becoming; on a critique of representationalism which limits us to figuring the alien in rather than as (...) feminist theory and thereby invokes the archetypal story in which alien and human, monster and human switch sides; and finally on reconsidering modes of communication that resonate with their theme and emphasise the performativity, conceptual risk taking and creativity that might enable feminist theory itself to become alien again. (shrink)