Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information

by Robert Mitchell (Editor), Phillip Thurtle (Editor)

Overview

In an age of cloning, cyborgs, and biotechnology, the line between bodies and bytes seems to be disappearing. Data Made Flesh is the first collection to address the increasingly important links between information and embodiment, at a moment when we are routinely tempted, in the words of Donna Haraway, "to be raptured out of the bodies that matter in the lust for information," whether in the rush to complete the Human Genome Project or in the race to clone a human being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415969055
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/06/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Phillip Thurtle is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Robert Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction. Phillip Thurtle and Robert Mitchell. Data Made Flesh: The Material Poiesis of Informatics Part One. Bodies Before the Information Age 1. Anne C. Vila. Reading the Sensible Body: Medicine, Philosophy, and Semiotics in Eighteenth Century France 2. Elisabeth Le Guin. Man and Horse in Harmony 3. Phillip Thurtle. Bastard Birth: Middle Class Mores and the Rise of Genetic Rationality Part Two. Control and the New Bodies: Modes of Informational Experience 4. Mark Poster. Fused Desire: Bodies, Families, and Information Machines 5. Rich Doyle. LSDNA: Consciousness Expansion and the Emergence of Biotechnology 6. Robert Mitchell. $ell: Body Wastes, Information, and Commodities 7. Tim Lenoir. The Virtual Surgeon: New Practices for an Age of Medialization 8. Mary Flanagan. The Bride Stripped Bare To Her Data: information flow + digibodies 9. Kathleen Woodward. A Feeling for the Cyborg Part Three: Flesh Remembered: Art, Information, and Bodies 10. Bernadette Wegenstein. If you won't SHOOT me, at least DELETE me! Performance Art from '60ies Wounds to '90ies Extensions 11. N. Katherine Hayles. Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments 12. Steve Tomasula. Gene(sis) 13. Eduardo Kac. Transgenic Art Online 14. Robin Held. Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics Biography Index

Editorial Reviews

"By establishing once and for all the inseparability of information and materiality, signifying practices and embodiment, Data Made Flesh will fundamentally reorient future debates over human technogenesis itself. I can think of no more pressing task for technocultural criticism today." — Mark B. N. Hansen, author of Embodying Technesis
"I found this collection inspiring, innovative and intellectually stimulating. It offers an ultra-contemporary terrain of current intellectual critique across a variety of academic disciplines and provides a new conception of the term 'information' with an emphasis on materiality and embodiment." — Barbara M. Kennedy, coeditor of The Cybercultures Reader
"It's about time embodiment got considered in relation to data! Once one gets beyond the not outdated theories of bodies and minds, particularly those of Cartesian heritage but extending to brains-in-vats, and gets to practices and uses of digital technologies, a very different perspective emerges. Data Made Flesh does just this. It is fresh, multidisciplinary, and does its work at a high level of critical and descriptive performance. Bodies, materiality, and the dominance of an information metaphor have had some attention, but the ways in which humans within the digital and data world experience and act call for the kind of attention this book gives." — Don Ihde, author of Bodies in Technology

From the Publisher