TELEMORPHOSIS: THEORY IN THE ERA OF CLIMATE CHANGE, vol. 1
edited by Tom Cohen (University at Albany)
Freely available here

The writers in the volume explore how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alter or redefine a series of key topoi. These range from figures of sexual difference through to bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, and time. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of “humanistic” thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary “life as we know it.”

# Introduction: Murmurations—“Climate Change” and the Defacement of Theory by Tom Cohen

# 1. Time by Robert Markley

# 2. Ecotechnics by J. Hillis Miller

# 3. Care by Bernard Stiegler

# 4. Unicity by Justin Read

# 5. Scale by Timothy Clark

# 6. Sexual Indifference by Claire Colebrook

# 7. Nonspecies Invasion by Jason Groves

# 8. Bioethics by Joanna Zylinska

# 9. Post-Trauma by Catherine Malabou

# 10. Ecologies of War by Mike Hill

# 11. Notes Toward a Post-Carbon Philosophy by Martin McQuillan

# 12. Health by Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen

IMPASSES OF THE POST-GLOBAL: THEORY IN THE ERA OF CLIMATE CHANGE, vol. 2
edited by Henry Sussman (Yale University)
Freely available here

The diverse materials comprising Impasses of the Post-Global take as their starting point an interrelated, if seemingly endless, sequence of current ecological, demographic, socio-political, economic, and informational disasters. These include the contemporary discourses of climate change, ecological imbalance and despoilment, sustainability, security, economic bailout, auto-immunity, and globalization itself.

# Introduction: Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks by Henry Sussman and Jason Groves

# 1. Anecographics: Climate Change and “Late” Deconstruction by Tom Cohen

# 2. Autopoiesis and the Planet by Bruce Clarke

# 3. Of Survival: Climate Change and Uncanny Landscape in the Photography of Subhankar Banerjee by Yates McKee

# 4. Global Warming as a Manifestation of Garbage by Tian Song

# 5. The Physical Reality of Water Shapes by James H. Bunn

# 6. Sacrifice Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay) by Rey Chow

# 7. Security: From “National” to “Homeland” … and Beyond by Samuel Weber

# 8. Common Political Democracy: The Marrano Register by Alberto Moreiras

# 9. Bare Life by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

# 10. Sustainability by Haun Saussy

# 11. The Global Unworld: A Meditative Manifesto by Krzysztof Ziarek

# 12. Bailout by Randy Martin

# 13. Auto-Immunity by Henry Sussman

Special issue of Culture Machine, vol. 14

edited by Joss Hands (Anglia Ruskin University) Greg Elmer (Ryerson University) and Ganaele Langlois (University of Ontario Institute of Technology)

This special issue of the peer-reviewed, open access journal Culture Machine on the concept of ‘Platform Politics’ will explore how digital platforms can be understood, leveraged and contested in an age when the ‘platform’ is coming to supplant the open Web as the default digital environment.

Platforms can be characterized as resting on already existing networked communication systems, but also as developing discreet spaces and affordances, often using ‘apps’ to circumvent any need to access them via the Internet or Web. For this issue of Culture Machine we are seeking papers that explore the nature and distinctive aspects of the ‘platform’: as something that can be positioned as more than just a neutral space of communication; and as a complex technology with distinct affordances that have powerful political, economic and social interests at stake. In this respect the platform constitutes a zone of contestation between, for example, different formations and configurations of capital; social movements; new kinds of activist networks; open source and proprietary software design. Platforms also constitute spaces of struggle between mass movements and governments, users and the extractors of value, visibility and invisibility: witness the various debates over the role of ‘social media’ in the Arab Spring, anti-austerity, student and occupy movements. Such struggles entail a compelling intersection between technology and design, capital, multitude, the democratization of technology and ‘subversive rationalization’. 

The platform represents not just a question of software and control, then; it also connects to wider social struggles in the sense that ‘platform’  can refer to a ‘political platform’, and can thus take on the agenda setting or framing role of political discourse more generally. Accordingly, this special issue will look to understand ‘platform politics’ as a broad social assemblage, complex or form of life. Linking particular platforms across the molecular and molar, it will think about platform politics as a distinct new context of power operating at the intersection of technological development, software design, cognitive/communicative capitalism, new forms of social movement and resistance, and the attempts to contain them by the exiting democracies. As such, platform politics requires a distinct mode of engagement, which this special issue of Culture Machine will endeavour to encourage and provide.

 We invite contributions on topics such as:

• Protocols as machinery of the platform – its common language, including ideas of control and/or the possibilities and limitations of open, non-proprietorial platforms.

• The specific relationship between networks and platforms (including the discussion of whether the former are being subsumed by the latter), and distribution vs centralization/aggregation -- not least in terms of user created content and content management systems (code politics of algorithms, and the use of APIs).

• The question as to whether a process of enclosure is taking place via the struggle over the creation and expropriation of 'network value', or whether it entails a more parasitical engagement with, and enhancement of, the existing network architectures.

• Visibility/invisibility: platforms as political spaces to be seen/heard, or indeed tactically escaped and eluded.

• Resistance: how the above described issues relate to the potential for cultural, political, social and economic praxis, which in turns opens up a space from which to address recent global events. (See, for example, RIMs (Blackberry Messaging’s) enclosure, which ironically creates spaces of resistance as well as disturbance and securitization.)

• New software possibilities: for example, Drupal’s opening up and democratization of content management, which perhaps creates a kind of ‘platform commons’? The potential of ‘Diaspora’, the open source social network, to offer a viable alternative to proprietary social media.

• The role of intrinsic network tendencies, as opposed to political and economic decision-making, taking in explorations of the relevance of graph theory, the role of power laws and the network-specific characteristics of ‘communication power’.  

Deadline for submissions of complete articles: 1st November 2012.

 Please submit your contributions including contact details by email to Joss Hands: <joss.hands@networkpolitics.org>.

Culture Machine’s Guidelines for Authors:

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

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Established in 1999, CULTURE MACHINE http://www.culturemachine.net is a fully refereed, open-access journal of cultural studies and cultural theory. It has published work by established figures such as Mark Amerika, Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, Ernesto Laclau, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Cathryn Vasseleu and Samuel Weber, but it is also open to publications by up-and-coming writers, from a variety of geopolitical locations.

 !!! New 2012 issue on attention economy coming out soon!!!

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Joanna Zylinska, Media Spaces, 2009

The proofs for my book, Life after New Media: Mediation as Vital Process (co-written with Sarah Kember and forthcoming from the MIT press in the autumn of 2012) have just arrived.

Here are the first few paragraphs  from the book's Introduction, in which we begin to outline our argument for moving on from the study of "media" to the study of the processes of mediation.

New media, old hat

In Life after New Media we set out to examine the current debates on ‘new’ or ‘digital’ media. In doing so, we want to make a case for a significant shift in the way new media is perceived and understood: from thinking about ‘new media’ as a set of discrete objects (the computer, the cell phone, the iPod, the e-book reader) to understanding media predominantly in terms of processes of mediation.

            The argument developed in our book, as reflected by its title, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, is threefold:

(1) In an era when being on Facebook or Twitter, having a smart phone or a digital camera, and obtaining one’s genetic profile on a CD after being tested for a variety of genetic diseases has become part of many people’s lives, we maintain that there is a need to move beyond the initial fascination with, and fear of, ‘new’ media; and beyond the belief in their alleged ‘newness’, too.

(2) There is also a need to look at the interlocking of technical and biological processes of mediation. Doing so quickly reveals that life itself under certain circumstances becomes articulated as a medium, which is subject to the same mechanisms of reproduction, transformation, flattening and patenting that other media forms (CDs, video cassettes, chemically printed photographs, and so on) underwent previously.[i]

(3) If life itself is to be perceived as, or, more accurately, reduced to a medium, we need to critically examine the complex and dynamic processes of mediation that are in operation at the biological, social and political levels in the world, while also remaining aware of the limitations of the stand-alone human ‘we’ that can provide such a rational critique.

            Yet is this proposed move ‘beyond new media’ not a little premature? It was barely a decade or so ago that a new disciplinary alignment emerged at the crossroads of the arts, humanities and social sciences which was given the name ‘new media studies’--although the use of the term ‘new media’ can be traced much further back, at least to Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.[ii] The first phase of ‘new media studies’ was predominantly focused on technology’s function in new media platforms and devices (the use of the Internet by children, the global spread of mobile telephony, etc.), and on a radical division between analogue and digital media (letters vs. email, film vs. CCD camera sensors[iii]). Understandably, much energy during that first phase was spent on developing descriptions and definitions--concerning what these new media really did, how new they actually were, and how they differed from ‘traditional’ or ‘broadcast’ media. It should be noted that the question of the relation between media and technology was elided in many of those debates, a state of events which resulted in the frequent conflation of ‘new media’ and ‘new technology’. Media also tended to become equated with the computer--or, to cite Lev Manovich, ‘media became new media’[iv]--thus erasing the specificities of, and distinctions between, existing old and new media. Entities such as data and information, and processes such as interactivity, convergence and digitization, became the focus of the rapidly developing discipline of ‘new media studies’.

            Many theorists of new media have attempted to make a mark in this emerging field by setting themselves against its earlier definitions and proposing ways to move on and beyond them. For example, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, one of the editors of the anthology New Media, Old Media, argues against a non-critical adoption of the ‘new media’ term by saying: ‘The moment one accepts new media, one is firmly located within a technological progressivism that thrives on obsolescence and that prevents active thinking about technology-knowledge-power’.[v] Yet Chun does not recommend abandoning the term altogether. Instead, she recognizes that ‘new media’ has already been consolidated into a field with its own emerging canon and institutional space. At the same time, Chun argues strongly against perpetuating the myth of the singular uniqueness of new media, insisting instead that the new ‘contains within itself repetition’.[vi] To a certain extent, it can be argued that ‘new media’ was already born as a problem, and that the majority of the theorists who have used this term have always done so somewhat reluctantly, with a sense of intellectual compromise they are having to make if they want their contribution to be recognized as part of a particular debate around technology, media and newness. Through running the MA program in Digital Media at Goldsmiths, University of London, and through working on our own publications in the field of ‘new media studies’,[vii] we have become increasingly aware of both the disciplinary seductions and the conceptual limitations of this term.

            Generally speaking, scholarship in media studies fits into two methodological frameworks. Those from the social sciences and communications-based disciplines typically approach the media through a mixture of empirical research and social theory, with questions of political structures, economic influences, social effects and individual agencies dominating the debate. Those from the humanities, in turn, predominantly focus on what different media ‘mean’; i.e. they tend to look at media as texts and at their cultural contexts. Of course, there are also those who have never felt comfortable to be pigeon-holed in this way, and for whom questions of language and materiality, of culture and politics, have always needed to be studied together. (Work undertaken from the perspective of the actor-network theory influenced by Bruno Latour, of the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and of science and technology studies has contributed towards blurring the distinctions between the two frameworks, or ‘camps’.)

            It is at this point that we enter the debate on new media in our book. However, our aim in Life after New Media is to do something other than merely provide an extension or corrective to the current field of ‘new media studies’. Instead of developing an alternative definition or understanding of new media, we propose to refocus the new media debate on a set of processes that have so far escaped close analysis by media studies scholars. In other words, with this book we are not so much interested in moving the debate on new media on, but rather in moving on from the debate on new media; and, in doing so, focusing on the concept of mediation. The distinction is of course primarily heuristic, i.e. provisional and strategic, and the purpose of separating mediation from media will be to clarify the relation between them. Mediation does not serve as a translational or transparent layer or intermediary between independently existing entities (say, between the producer and consumer of a film or TV program).  It is a complex and hybrid process, which is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological and technical. Mediation, we suggest, is all-encompassing and indivisible. This is why ‘we’ have never been separate from mediation. Yet our relationality and our entanglement with non-human entities continues to intensify with the ever more corporeal, ever more intimate dispersal of media and technologies into our biological and social lives. Broadly put, what we are therefore developing in Life after New Media is not just a theory of ‘mediation’ but also a ‘theory of life’, whereby mediation becomes a key trope for understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technological world, our emergence and ways of intra-acting with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the world into media, agents, relations and networks.

            Our theoretical inspiration for this argument predominantly comes from the work of two philosophers: Henri Bergson (and the materialist-vitalist philosophy subsequently developed by Deleuze) and Jacques Derrida (and his deconstructive thinking around concepts, processes and the ethico-political nexus). It is with Bergson and Derrida that we start approaching media as a series of processes of mediation. This entry point will take us towards the examination of the temporal aspects of media--its liveness (or rather, lifeness),[viii] transience, duration and frequently predicted death. Our primary reason for turning to Bergson is that he allows us to raise questions about the more traditional perception of media as a series of spatialized objects (the iPod, the computer) and also about mediation--i.e. multiple, entangled processes of becoming. However, we have to bear in mind that the process of mediation is also a process of differentiation; it is a historically and culturally significant process of the temporal stabilization of mediation into discrete objects and formations. In the encounter with Bergson’s notion of ‘creative evolution’, Derrida’s notion of ‘différance’ functions as a kind of interruption or ‘cut’ to the incessant flow of mediation, facilitating as it does the discussion of the symbolic and cultural significance of this interruption. The negotiation between the Bergsonian (or perhaps, more appropriately, Bergsonian-Deleuzian) and the Derridean philosophical traditions is nevertheless only of interest to us here in as far as it allows us to think, move with and respond to the multiple flows of mediation. It is not therefore an intellectual exercise in its own right, just as the book is not about Bergson, Deleuze or Derrida in any straightforward way. Our attempt to read media as ‘mediation’, both critically and creatively, is informed by a rigorous playfulness towards philosophy, borrowed from the long line of feminist critical thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, or, indeed, from Bergson, Deleuze and Derrida themselves. As well as drawing, specifically, on Bergon’s intuitive method, we recognize our allegiance to what Braidotti terms a ‘nomadic, rhizomatic logic of zigzagging interconnections’.[ix] The latter logic manifests respectful irreverence toward one’s predecessors. Resisting the injunction to speak in our masters’ or mistresses’ voices, we are therefore seeking methods of thinking and writing that can allow us to see and make a difference.

            One of the central issues that concern us in this study of the temporal aspects of media is the relation between events and their mediation. Our argument is that events are never merely presented and represented in the media, and that any such representations are always to an extent performative. Philosophers such as Derrida and Stiegler, as well as many media scholars, associate media--especially television--with the illusion of liveness. Liveness is particularly linked with television news and the coverage of disaster and catastrophe. Generally, it is regarded as a sleight of hand. Yet if we regard such illusory liveness as performative, i.e., as being able, to an extent, to bring about the things of which it speaks--things such as ‘the credit crunch’ or ‘war on terror’, say--then not only will we be able to explore questions such as ‘Did Robert Peston (BBC Business Editor) cause the recession in the UK?’, but we will also avoid a reading of media that is overly constructionist, static and, ultimately, lifeless.

            As a continuation of the above argument, we will suggest that mediation gives us insight into the vitality of media. By the latter we mean something more than just the liveness of media which we know about through television studies of catastrophes and other ‘newsworthy’ occurrences. We are referring instead to the lifeness of media--i.e., the possibility of the emergence of forms always new, or its potentiality to generate unprecedented connections and unexpected events. This raises the following set of questions for us: If we are saying that the events we have looked at are, to differing extents and in different ways, performed through their mediation, then how should we respond to them in our critiques? Are our critiques not also forms of invention? Or, more broadly, can we think of a way of ‘doing media studies’ that is not just a form of ‘media analysis’, and that is simultaneously critical and creative? Could it allow us to challenge the opposition between ‘media theory’ and ‘media practice’ that many university media departments have adopted somewhat too comfortably over the years, at worst privileging one over the other, at best aiming at some kind of dialectical resolution which in the end only reaffirms the division?

...

More soon in print!

[i] Although we will argue throughout this volume, and in chapter 2 in particular, for the configuration of media and liveness, mediation and life, we will also seek to avoid Bergson’s ‘false division’ between life and matter. This division is ‘false’, or problematic, because it enables him to abstract life from material and symbolic forms--including, in our case, media forms. Our claim is that, while media continue to stake their claim to liveness (live TV, live Tweeter feeds, etc.), by virtue of being inseparable (though different in kind) from processes of mediation, media are co-constitutive of life itself--which, under certain circumstances, and through a sequence of reductionist operations, can subsequently also take a media form (a CD with one’s genetic profile; synthetic biology database, etc.).

[ii] See Benjamin Peters, ‘And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History’, New Media and Society, Vol. 11, Nos 1-2 (2009): 13-30.

[iii] CCD stands for a charge-coupled device, in which electrical charge can be manipulated to obtain translation of signal into digital value. It is frequently used in digital cameras.

[iv] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 25.

[v] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?,’ in New Media, Old Media, eds Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 9.

[vi] Chun, ‘Introduction’, 3.

[vii] See, for instance, Sarah Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) and Joanna Zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2009).

[viii] The term ‘lifeness’ we propose in the book is aimed to go beyond what we will argue is quite a static view of media as espoused by terms such as ‘live TV’, ‘live news’, etc., in an attempt to convey what we see as the dynamic vitality of mediation processes.

[ix] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press),

Evolution may be greater than the sum of its parts, but it’s not all that great: On Lem’s Summa Technnologiae

            Is the human a typical phenomenon in the Universe or an exceptional one? Is there a limit to the expansion of a civilization? Would plagiarizing Nature count as fraud? Is consciousness a necessary component of human agency? Should we rather trust our thoughts or our perceptions? Do we control the development of technology or is technology controlling us? Should we make machines moral? What do human societies and colonies of bacteria have in common? What can we learn from insects? For answers to all these questions and more, Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae is undoubtedly the place to go.

            Lem (1921-2006) is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the novel Solaris (1961), the film versions of which were directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Grand Prix at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival) and Steven Soderbergh (2002). However, science-fiction aficionados all over the world have been reading Lem’s original and often surprising novels--translated into over forty languages--for years. Be that as it may, the Polish writer’s attitude to science fiction was not unproblematic. Witness his spat with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association, which was incensed by Lem’s unabashed critique of the majority of the works within the genre as unimaginative, predictable, and focused on a rather narrow idea of the future. Lem’s own novels take a rather different approach. Drawing on scientific research, they are deeply philosophical speculations about technology, time, evolution, and the nature (and culture) of humankind. What makes Lem’s writings particularly distinct is his ironic writing style, which is full of puns, jokes, and clever asides. Yet on another level his gripping stories about space travel, alien life, and human enhancement are also complex philosophical parables about human and non-human life in its past, present, and future forms.

            The philosophical ambition of Lem’s fiction is carried through to what is probably his most accomplished and mature work: a treatise on futurology, technology, and science called Summa Technologiae (1964). With a title that is a pastiche of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, Lem erects a secular edifice of knowledge aimed at rivaling that of his scholastic predecessor. His Summa sets out to investigate the premises and assumptions behind the scientific concepts of the day and, in particular, the idea of technology that underpins them. As Lem writes in the book’s opening pages: “I shall focus here on various aspects of our civilization that can be guessed and deduced from the premises known to us today, no matter how improbable their actualization. What lies at the foundation of our hypothetical constructions are technologies, i.e., means of bringing about certain collectively determined goals that have been conditioned by the state of our knowledge and our social aptitude--and also those goals that no one has identified at the outset.”

            Despite having been written nearly fifty years ago, Summa has lost none of its intellectual vigor or critical significance. Some specific scientific debates may have advanced or been corrected since Lem published it in 1964, yet it is actually surprising to see how many things he did get right, or even managed to predict--from the limitations of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program through to artificial intelligence, bionics, the theory of search engines (Lem’s “ariadnology”), virtual reality (which he terms “phantomatics”), and nanotechnology. However, it is in the multiple layers of its philosophical argument that the ongoing importance of his book lies. Biophysicist Peter Butko, who published an explicatory essay on Summa in 2006, describes the book as “an all-encompassing philosophical discourse on evolution: not only evolution of science and technology ... but also evolution of life, humanity, consciousness, culture, and civilization” (2006, 84).

More soon in print from UMP!

My group show, Home and Away, opened at the ISE Cultural Foundation at 555 Broadway in New York on Friday 4 November.

My own project is called 'Will You Ever Go Back?'. It is probably the most personal piece I've ever done, although it also aims to raise questions for any unproblematic approximation of 'personal experience' and its potential representations in art.

Anyway, here is the project description:

Joanna Zylinska has been living in the UK for nearly fifteen years. Dwelling on the question she regularly gets asked, by Brits and Poles alike, ‘Will you ever go back?’, for the project presented here she revisits her Polish home town in search of the ghosts of the past. This memory trip leads to some further questions: What does it mean to want to return home? Or not to want to, for that matter? What do we take with us when we leave? What do we leave behind? Most importantly, is there much point in talking about returning if we have not yet established whether ‘leaving home’ is ever even an option? It is the uncertainty of the response to these questions that the series presented here attempts to capture.

British theorist of Caribbean origin Stuart Hall reflects on this vexed experience of leaving home in the following terms: ‘The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: “Why are you here?” and “When are you going back home?” No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one-way trip. There is no “home” to go back to. There never was’. Zylinska’s installation is an attempt to stage this impossibility of capturing something that perhaps never was, at least not in any substantial and fixed way.

In the blurriness of the landscape images and the faded colours of the interior shots, the viewer can also perhaps see the projection of their own memories and fantasies of what is often referred to, however inaccurately, as ‘communist Poland’. Thus some may see the ugliness of the concrete block architecture, joyless repression, martial law and economic crisis, while others may be able to detect outdoor play, shared Christmas meals, traces of sunny holidays in Bulgaria and Cuban oranges.

But the project also goes against photography’s representational, indexical and eidetic ambitions. As we know both from theorists of the image such as André Bazin and Roland Barthes, and from our own experiences of living with snapshots, albums and digicams, photography is typically associated with memory: it is seen as an attempt to capture and preserve memories, to reconstitute them and to both mourn their loss and celebrate their at least partial recuperation. Yet the question that underpins the ‘Will You Ever Go Back?’ project is how one can actually photograph a memory or even a fantasy of a place. What does such a meta-photographic attempt ‘at one remove’, as it were, deliver, and what does it withdraw from us?

LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in its series Living Books About Life.

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access.  On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles.  On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.

These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- together with interactive maps and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing.  It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’

Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections:  Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

Contact the Living Books about Life series editors:
Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall
E: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk
E: j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk
E: c.s.birchall@kent.ac.uk
W: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

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The practice of cutting is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becoming-different-from-the-world. It therefore has an ontological significance: it is a way of shaping the universe, and of shaping ourselves in it. Deleuze and Guattari claim that a concept, any concept -- which is for them an attempt to find a solution to a problem or a different way of looking at things -- is a ‘matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting’ (What Is Philosophy?, 16). The process of cutting is one of the most fundamental processes through which we emerge as ‘selves’ as we engage with matter and attempt to give it (and ourselves) form. Cutting reality into small pieces -- with our eyes, our bodily and cognitive apparatus, our language, our memory -- we enact separation and relationality as the two dominant forces of material locatedness in time.

Photography is particularly well predisposed to take on this task of incessant 'cutting and cross-cutting'. In this, it produces life forms, rather than merely recording them.

I respect Cuba as a figure of resistance, for we should respect all the forms of resistance to the hegemony of the global market, and to its principal organiser: American imperialism. But Cuba provides singular testimony of an outmoded conception of politics. And so Cuba will have, unavoidably, very serious problems, internal problems, because it bears witness, with incontestable grandeur, to a figure of the Party-State that belongs to another political age. Everything that exists is born, develops and comes to an end. After which we move on to something else.

Here are a few images of Cuban not-so-new media:

You can view more here.