Since its founding almost 20 years ago, SLS has been a home to creative people. Writers have walked among us and probably always will. In two affiliated sessions, some of the novelists, playwrights, poets, short story writers, cybernetic artists and coders of SLSA would like to read from their works. By reading, we hope to initiate a discussion about how the creation of new literature can help people to appreciate the complex relationship between literature and science. The first session will feature creative works exploring neuroscience and the mind; the second, works engaging science, society, and social issues. We would like to link these two sessions to "Creative Integration" and "Teaching Science with Theater" to form a creative writing stream at this year's conference.

Lauren Gunderson, Playwright and Creative Writing Teacher, "MASS"
A one-woman play exploring Lieserl, the true lost daughter of Einstein. Using relativity, the play presents a young woman searching for her father through space, time, and the history of science. Character: Lieserl-age 18, dark, serious girl. Dressed for today's weather, but her clothes are dark and reminiscent of late 19th century style. Setting: Today, somewhere nearby. A simple over-head projector nearby. Lauren Gunderson is an Atlanta-based playwright, screenwriter, short story author, and actor. Her work has received national praise and awards including the Berrilla Kerr Award for American Theatre, Young Playwright's Award, Essential Theatre Prize, Virtual Theatre Prizes and many others. She has been produced off-Broadway, off-off Broadway, regionally, and locally in Atlanta. Her play Leap has just been published with Theatre Emory's Playwriting Center, and her first collection of plays Deepen The Mystery: Science and the South Onstage was published with IUniverse this January. She is interested in science, history, world intellect, social politics, feminism, and global humanism.

Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, "Slipping Glimpse"
In "Slipping Glimpse," Strickland and Jaramillo use code to enhance the fluctuational quality of text and to make it responsive to "silent reading" by moving water; or, more exactly, by videos of moving water shot expressly by Paul Ryan, an ecological activist, to capture chreods, those structually stable islands into which every natural process decomposes. They aim to speak as part of the flow of living in a living flow, to speak "creek" language, a language that relates to the patterns and pathways by which living is organized as these were theorized by Waddington, Thom, and Bateson." Stephanie Strickland is both a print and a new media poet with several prizewinning works in both media. She has taught at many universities, including Parsons and The New School for Design, and serves on the board of the Electronic Literature Organization. Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo is a new media artist, educator, and technologist. She is currently Director of the Integrated Design Curriculum and Assistant Professor at Parsons The New School for Design.

Sue Hagedorn and Cheryl Ruggiero, "The Catalyst Trilogy"
The year is 2207. Fearing predatory images she picks up from the Ghessi, an alien mammalian species at whose Earth embassy she serves, empathic protocol aide Sophia Bellis agreed to be trained as an undercover agent and to be treated with what she believes are human DNA fragments that will enhance her empathic sensitivity. She hadn't planned on loving Mike Deem, the rash exomicrobiologist who both discovered and injected the fragments, nor on becoming pregnant, nor on having the fragments form a collective sentience in her brain that is learning to talk. These catalysts also trigger reactions in her unborn son and his father that would have killed them if they were not, at the opening of the story, being kept alive in a semistasis tank, provided Sophia goes ahead with a mission to the new Ghessian embassy. Leaving, she wonders if she is still human, with the secret alien sentience in her brain, and whether she will truly be able to return--the catalysts seem to threaten all male mammals, including human males.

It is probably the case that the capabilities we employ for reading complex fictional narratives evolved to meet the demands of decipherment and communication among hunter-gatherers. Yet these same capabilities serve us well enough to sustain an enormous market for difficult texts that appear on the face of it inessential to species survival. This panel is devoted to the continuing exploration of the ways in which our ancient cognitive equipment serves and is served by these extraordinarily refined cultural instruments.

Lisa Zunshine, University of Kentucky, "The Novel as a Cognitive Experiment"
My talk draws on my new book, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, which explores the implications of one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology, Theory of Mind (ToM) for the field of literary studies. ToM, also called mind-reading ability, is a term describing our capacity for attributing states of mind (whether correctly or not) to others and to ourselves. Drawing on the novels of Jane Austen, I suggest that although the investigation of ToM is very much a project-in-progress, enough carefully documented research is already available to literary scholars to begin asking such questions as, is it possible that literary narrative builds on our adaptations for mind-reading but also tests their limits? How do different cultural milieus encourage different literary explorations of these adaptations? How do different genres? Speculative and tentative as the answers to these questions could only be at this point, they mark the possibility of a genuine dialogue between cognitive psychology and literary studies, with both fields having much to offer to each other.

Elizabeth Drew, Trinity College Dublin, "Between the Lines: Cognitive Contexts and Literary Reading"
The experience of art takes place within a context of expectation that is updated dynamically through interaction with the artwork itself. In the case of temporally serial art forms such as linear narrative, each new element in the flow of a piece is experienced according to cognitive expectations set by previous elements that are no longer actively represented in conscious. Artists use the relationship between the context of expectation and each new element in the flow of a piece to prompt continued engagement with the work. This process relates the cognitive experience of significance to a balance of redundancy and surprise. Redundancy sets expectations, and unmet expectations cause surprise. Texts that deviate strongly from contextual expectations force readers to become aware of their expectations, and in extreme cases, the experience of a work is dominated by the process of making sense. This paper will explore the means by which unconscious contexts of expectation influence engagement, communication, and sense-making in the creation and interpretation of literature. The analysis will draw upon information theory, cognitive science, and consciousness studies. Textual readings from works that deviate from expectations will explore decontextualization and its phenomenological usefulness in studying cognitive processes.

H. Porter Abbott, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Evolving oeuvres: The Role of Failure in Literary Invention"
An important strain of cognitivist literary and cultural studies has focused on not just the inevitability but the actual value of certain kinds of failure in cognition. This work connects with the key importance of imperfection, mistakes, errors in evolution itself. Ellen Spolsky, and more recently F. Elizabeth Hart, have developed a powerful argument for the congruence of post-structuralism and cognitive theory in this regard among others and have developed it as part of what Hart calls a "cognitive post-structuralism" in which the radical instability of post-structuralist epistemology is both supported and "constrained" by cognitivist ontology. In this paper, I propose to expand on their work through the examination of the work of several late modernist authors--Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, J. G. Ballard--who incorporated into their writing practice ways in which authorial control is strategically undermined. If these lapses do not in themselves deliver effects (as does chance in works by John Cage and Andy Warhol), they play a vital role in the heightened invention of unexpected departures that parallels both the evolution of species and the operation of conscious understanding.

Shilarna Stokes, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, "The Stranger's Eyes: Telegony in Ibsen's 'The Lady from the Sea'"
That the concept of telegonic tranference held an ambiguous place in 19th century evolutionary discourse is evident from this 1896 definition: "those doubtful instances in which the offspring is said to resemble, not the father but an earlier mate of the mother." Nevertheless, in a pre-Mendelian era telegony held the imagination of many Naturalist dramatists of the day, most notably Henrik Ibsen. This paper investigates Ibsen's 1888 play, "The Lady from the Sea," proposing that the remarkable instance of telegony that occurs in the play serves to interrupt and reimagine biological and narrative linearity. In doing so, it opens a space for a critique of patriarchal order, marriage, and patterns of heterosexual domesticity. Furthermore, because in this case the "mother" and the "earlier mate" also figure as mermaid and merman, the revelation of telegonic transference in the play allows for the reexamination of a disavowed evolutionary past: the life of the sea. Through this reexamination, Ibsen offers an unusual alternative to the received evolutionary narrative in which adaptation to life on land is regarded as a mark of the species" progress.

Paul Youngman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "An Evolutionary Necessity? Machine and Human (Co)evolution in Heinrich Hauser's "The Giant Brain"
Heinrich Hauser's 1948 novel Gigant Hirn (The Giant Brain) contains a remarkably prescient analysis of human and computer co-evolution which, in the 1940s and 50s, read like the most hair-brained of science fictions. From the year 2005, however, that which Hauser foresaw regarding the capabilities of computers does not seem so far fetched. On the contrary, the discussions of technological evolution found in Gigant Hirn are cutting edge today. In 1990, for example, Norbert Bolz famously declares there to be little difference between the mechanical and the organic world. In 1999, Ray Kurzweil proclaims technological evolution "a human-sponsored variant of evolution." And in 2004, Steven Shaviro cites mere "leaky distinctions" between the evolution of humans and machine evolution. He does not go so far as to claim that the distinctions have been eliminated, but he does believe the "boundaries that used to define them have become 'permeable.'" Using Hauser's work as a springboard, this paper will analyze human and machine co-evolution with a particular focus on the following questions: Are we comfortable with technologically removing the limits to the organ we use to think, and what are the evolutionary implications of removing the limits to the brain using computing technologies?

Marcus Boon, Dept of English, York University, Canada "Philip K. Dick, Gnosis, and Evolution"
The concept of evolution is hard to extricate from that of progress, even when scientific or post-Nietzschean discourses imply that it is morally neutral, non-humanist, adirectional and so on. The notion of survival itself, one of the defining characteristics of that which evolves, is itself impossible to extricate from moral categories and valuations. In his notebooks, the German poet Novalis argues that all stages of evolution take the form of sins or transgressions: plants are the sins of stones, animals are the sins of plants and so on. In this paper, I explore the possibility of gnostic evolution. The novels of Philip K. Dick are rich with ideas that support this notion. One thinks of Dr. Willy Denkmal's Evolution Therapy clinic in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the drug users of A Scanner Darkly, or the Vast Active Living Information System of VALIS. If gnosis is itself a kind of evolution, in Dick's work it is an apocalyptic evolution that involves the destruction of that which evolves, the non-survival of that which becomes, and an accompanying sense of sin or criminality that appears to celebrate the failure to evolve. In this paper I will explore the paradoxes of gnostic evolution in Dick's work, and make the argument that there is a submerged but highly active gnostic impulse in many versions of contemporary evolutionary theory.

Irving Massey, English and Comparative Literature, SUNY/Buffalo, "Against the Grain: Some Questions about Physiological Psychology"
It is probably misleading to use the term "evolution" with respect to the history of ideas. Because of its biological associations, it suggests an advantageous development, or, at least, a movement towards greater complexity. Complexity in aesthetics can, indeed, be increased by the inclusion of techniques from the sciences; whether the results (which usually presuppose the acquisition of a technical vocabulary) represent an advantageous adaptation is for the individual critic to decide. I myself would like to take the devil's advocate's, or anti-evolutionary, position. I have long harbored doubts about the philosophical underpinnings of cognitive science. More to the point, I would like to question some premises of a body of thought that I take very seriously: namely, what is now called Neuroaesthetics. This is a movement that might in fact be called "evolutionary," in the sense that it could not have reached its present stage without recent studies of the brain, though in earlier forms physiological aesthetics goes back a long way.

This panel explores how authors writing in the wake of Darwin adapted narratives of evolution to their own critical and creative ends. Our first two panelists demonstrate how turn of the century fiction writers used mainstream literary forms to test the principles of social and biological evolution and, in doing so, to question commonsense assumptions about the inevitable distinction between rich and poor and human and animal. Our second two panelists explore how early- and mid-twentieth century comic strip artists and science fiction authors used their own aesthetic genres to engage the commonly-accepted idea of biology as destiny, especially as this idea was used to make sense of the distinctions between women and men. Taken together, these panelists show how narrative forms derived from Darwin provide authors with spaces in which to work out their hopes and fears about the impact of science on society.

Mark Schiebe, CUNY Graduate Center, "Social Darwinism and the Limits of the Literary Imagination: The Case of Stephen Crane"
This paper proposes to revisit Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie, Girl of the Streets, focusing on the author's unique incorporation of the philosophy of Social Darwinism, prevalent in American intellectual discourse during the last quarter of the 19th Century. Crane's engagement with Naturalism (the literary movement influenced by Emile Zola, and bringing to bear the principles of Social Darwinism as expounded by Herbert Spencer) raises the question of the efficacy of literature, in general, to realistically imagine and objectively depict the social and biological determinism of Spencer and his apologists. Following in the wake of Michael Davitt Bell's revisionist reading of Crane in The Problem of American Realism, I will attempt to show that this novel, considered by most commentators to be Crane's most naturalistic, in fact makes use of formal naturalistic strategies in order to hollow them out from the inside. That is, in this seemingly objective depiction of Maggie's fatalistic progression from the tenement slums of New York's Lower East Side into a life of prostitution, Crane, by deliberately cultivating a style that calls attention to itself, subverts the key assumptions which would lend credence to a naturalistic rendering of the life of the abject poor.

Doug Davis, Division of Humanities, Gordon College, "Devolution and Animality in Jack London's Dog Stories"
Nineteenth century French naturalist Emile Zola claimed that authors interested in "the inevitable laws of heredity and environment" should create literary works that read like "case studies." This paper shows how such authors put Darwin's theories evolution to the literary test, focusing specifically on American naturalist Jack London and the rapid evolutionary experiments he conducts in his stories about dogs. In the extreme environments of the tropics and the arctic London dramatizes the interaction of heredity and environment in a two-fold way. Over the brief course of a London story dogs become developed characters possessed of understandable motives while humans become dogs left to rely on instinct and bodily ability. Significantly, these forced evolutions and devolutions are set within environments that connect earth to outer space and thus dog and human alike to the grand workings of the cosmos. In his own protean way, London takes liberties with science to dramatize different kinds of becomings, blurring the boundary between animal and human to imagine a kind of co-evolution that anticipates 20th century critical theories of the animal condition (particularly those proposed by Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, and Derrida).

Patrick Sharp, Department of Liberal Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, "Helpless Heroines: SF Representations of Military Women in the 1920s and 1930s"
Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) depicted the history of human evolution as driven by men who were naturally selected for their ability to invent and use tools. This was centrally important for sexual selection, according to Darwin, because those men who could out-fight and out-think their male rivals would be able to reproduce with the best females. Women, on the other hand, were seen as passive and beautiful creatures who watched battles from the sidelines. Early twentieth century science fiction authors drew on Darwin's ideas about technology as the center of human progress to spin tales of the future. However, science fiction authors increasingly imagined future worlds where women fought alongside men in war. Unfortunately, science fiction heroines created by authors such as Philip Nowlan were still limited by the stigma of physical inferiority and technological ineptitude. They remained damsels in distress who merely provided an opportunity for the male action hero to show his superiority.

Lisa Yaszek, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, "Why Not a Woman? Science as Women's Work in Postwar Science Fiction"
I demonstrate how women science fiction authors used evolutionary narratives to make sense of the changing relations of science, society, and gender after World War II. While the postwar period marked the golden age of American science, prevailing convictions about the feminine mystique-which claimed that women were perfectly evolved for nurturing and homemaking-justified the marginalization of women in science. At the same time, the advent of the space race led government agencies such as NASA to warn that the United States would fall dangerously behind the Soviet Union if it did not fully utilize women's intellectual and physical abilities. Science fiction writers Kay Rogers, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Judith Merril responded to these contradictory ideas with stories that celebrated women's domestic lives as inspiration for technoscientific discovery. Like other midcentury Americans, these authors did not directly challenge the notion that marriage and motherhood would still be central to women's lives in the future. But they insisted human biology was beside the point and that human society must evolve past patriarchy so women could combine work and family as their individual natures dictated and, in doing so, lead all of humankind to the stars.

Featured artists in four different genres of literature will discuss science as element, structure, and inspiration. Questions we will pose and address will include: What is the evolution of form in terms of science-creative-writing? What common artistic vernacular does science provide? What makes art and science true and applicable? When is science science-fiction? The four panelists will jointly create and support a blog in order to explore collaboration among different artists with a scientific theme. The results of this blog-collaboration will be included in our presentation.

SCREENWRITING: Ray Brown has written numerous short stories and poems and recently began screen writing: The Robbery, a surrealistic drama about the possibility of recovering from child abuse, and A Country Doctor, a drama about the plight of women to find their place as leaders of society. Dr. Brown has published numerous scientific papers, has been an invited speaker, a distinguished lecturer and is a referee for scientific journals.

CREATIVE NON-FICTION/ POETRY: Janine DeBaise, SUNY-Environmental Science and Forestry, teaches writing and literature in Syracuse, New York. She is a poet and literature professor who works on a science campus, with a strong interest in environmental issues. For the past fifteen years, she's published primarily poetry, although during the last two years, she has shifted to writing creative non-fiction. She has done some performance poetry and many presentations on the topic of ecofeminism. Much of her writing explores a connection to place, to landscape, and she is interested in the ways that scientific knowledge can enhance emotional, spiritual, intuitive responses to the land. She writes about both the landscape and the body as places where we see the environmental crisis played out.

PLAYWRITING / SHORT STORY: Lauren Gunderson, Playwright and Teacher. Graduating from Emory University, she was a finalist for the Chesterfield Screenwriting Award, The Princess Grace Award, and the Heidmann Award. Her short story "Cancer/Dish" was recently awarded the Noremberga Short Fiction Award, She has spoken nationally and internationally on the intersection of science and theatre at conference all over the world including University of Glamorgan, University of Santa Barbara, Wofford College, and Texas Lutheran University. She participated in the Creative Writing in Math and Science Residency in Banff, Canada this summer.

Panelists who have explored the teaching of physics and math through the use of plays will present ideas and experience in teaching science by using theatre, plays, and dramatic retelling of science history, as well as teaching drama and playwriting using science and scientists. Having written and taught playwriting and creative writing using science and scientists as thematic and structural tools, we will provide curriculum ideas for teachers, explore using drama as scientific inspiration, and discuss the evolution of teaching higher education through multi-disciplinary approaches.

Sid Perkowitz, Dept of Physics, Emory University
Sidney Perkowitz was born in Brooklyn, NY, and was educated at Polytechnic University, New York, and at the University of Pennsylvania. As Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University, his research on the properties of solids has produced over 100 scientific papers and books. In 1990, his interests turned to presenting science to non-scientists via books and articles, the media, lectures, museum exhibits, and stage works. His popular science books Empire of Light and Universal Foam have been translated into six languages. Media appearances and lectures include CNN, National Public Radio, European radio and TV, the Smithsonian Institution, and the NASA Space Flight Center. He has written the performance-dance piece Albert and Isadora , and the stage plays Friedmann's Balloon and Glory Enough (in progress). His newest book is Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids. He is also a playwright whose writing has covered early big bang theory, relativity, DNA discovery and more.

Steven Zides, Physics, Wofford College
Since joining the Wofford College Physics Department in 1999, Zides has taught a wide variety of classes from astronomy to electrodynamics, and for the last four years, in Wofford's Freshmen Learning Communities. Through the intentional linking of science and humanities courses, these learning communities offer the students a chance to make interdisciplinary connections in a non-threatening environment. He has enjoyed successful collaborations with the English, Philosophy, and Theatre Departments.

Steve Abbott and Cheryl Faraone, Middlebury College
Steve Abbott joined the Mathematics Department at Middlebury College in 1995 in the areas of function theory and real analysis, but he has also been a regular reviewer of theater and film in the monthly publications of the Mathematical Association of America. Cheryl Faraone has been teaching and directing in Middlebury's Department of Theatre since 1986. Cheryl is also co-founder and Producing Director of the Potomac Theater Project the Washington, DC area. Recently, she has focused theatrically on the teaching and direction of plays exploring issues of science. Their early collaboration on a production of Arcadia led to a series of interdisciplinary team-taught courses exploring the growing list of critically acclaimed plays dealing with science, scientists, and scientific ideas. In 2005, Middlebury put forward their joint work-in-progress for a major project convened at Harvard sponsored by the Spencer Foundation called "The Forum for Excellence and Innovation in Higher Education."

Peter Gaffney, University of Pennsylvania, "Poised at the Edge of Chaos: Man Ray's Emak Bakia and the Tremulous Self-Knowledge of the Bioid"
Manuel DeLanda opens his article on "Nonorganic Life" by citing Thomas Kuhn's theory of a "paradigm induced gestalt switch." According to this theory, scientific inquiry fails to notice whatever phenomena fall outside the integrated structure, or gestalt, that gives meaning and context to its discoveries; real breakthroughs come only at the price of the old paradigms. DeLanda suggests that chaos theory has allowed science to take account of ambient fluxes of energy and matter that previously passed unnoticed, and that help explain the possibility of a "machinic phylum," including crystal formations, weather systems, and other self-organizing phenomena. In this paper, I consider how the switch from conservative to complex scientific systems corresponds to an earlier evolution in the arts, brought about by developments in the technology of the moving image. Analyzing Man Ray's 1926 experimental film Emak Bakia, I ask whether we might not think of cinema as a new kind of consciousness, one that integrates representation with the unrepresentable, noumenal with the phenomenal, reason with affect. The moving picture, I argue, is not merely a kinetic representation or representation of kinesis. It is qualitatively different: a non-subjective intelligence, as it were, a self-consciousness of the bioid.

Shoshana Milgram, English, Virginia Tech, "J. Robert Oppenheimer in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Top Secret"
In January, 1946, Ayn Rand interviewed J. Robert Oppenheimer as part of her research for a film, tentatively titled Top Secret, about the development of the atomic bomb. Although she ultimately decided not to complete her screenplay, she made use of her research when she created the fictional character of Dr. Robert Stadler for her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Stadler, who is sometimes called simply "the scientist," is dedicated, brilliant, and tormented by moral conflict. In the screenplay Top Secret, "Oppenheimer" would have been a hero; in the novel Atlas Shrugged, "Dr. Robert Stadler" was a villain. This paper--which makes use of her interview notes, her projection of the "Oppenheimer" character in the unproduced screenplay, her notes for the character of the scientist in Atlas Shrugged, and the text of the novel's depiction of Dr. Robert Stadler--shows how a novelist, in different texts and with different purposes, portrayed a scientist, in the context of the moral consequences of the ways he chose to use his mind.

Jaime Weida, Graduate Center, CUNY, Borough of Manhattan Community College and Hostos Community College, "Ghosts and Girls in the Machine: Technology and the Human in Japanese Visual Popular Culture"
My paper will examine how cyborg technology appears in Japanese animated movies and television series. In Japanese anime, there is a recurring theme of the human either being supplanted or enhanced by mechanistic technology. Within this genre, how does the human redefine itself? My discussion will especially focus on the role of the female cyborg in anime, and the ways in which these characters are in dialog with traditional gender roles. I will examine the replication of the cyborg as compared to the actual generative capacity of the human female, and I will also discuss the issue of reproduction and replication of the cyborg in conjunction with the marketing and production techniques used to distribute and merchandize the actual DVD's and associated commodities. Many of the cyborg characters appearing in anime are not only female, but highly sexualized, and I will discuss the implications of this trend. I will also discuss the evolution of the cyborg in anime, from the late 1980s and 1990s to the present day, and what connection this evolution has with the actual evolution of technology. Films and series I will consider include, but are not limited to, the movie "Ghost in the Shell," the OVA "Armitage" series and the related movies, as well as the television series "Chobits."

Bob Martinez, Dept of Biology, Quinnipiac University, "The Gold Shop"
Martinez's short story "The Gold Shop" deals with the contrast between economic systems and real value, what is important in life and what is not important, and the idea that we should appreciate things for their own value, not for values that are imposed on them by others. It is set in the Principality of Asturias, in northern Spain, at some uncertain time in the past (maybe 200 to 300 years ago), and fuses the real, the mythical and the magical. Born in California and raised in Niagara Falls, New York, Martinez earned his BS in Biology at Niagara University and his PhD in Genetics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Biology at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, where he has served as department chair for 18 years. His teaching interests are both scientific and interdisciplinary and include genetics, bioethics, and a course in science and literature which touches on biological evolution, cultural evolution, genetics, philosophy, religion, history, languages and linguistics, and issues of censorship.

Bruce Beasely, Dept of English, Western Washington University
Beasely will read from his recent collection, Lord Brain, poems which are drawn from neuroscience and cosmology. The book is an extended meditation on the nature of mind and self, interweaving language and images from cosmology, neuroscience, and theology. Beasely is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Lord Brain (winner of the University of Georgia Press contemporary poetry series competition). He won the 1996 Colorado Prize (selected by Charles Wright) for his book Summer Mystagogia, and his book The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems will be published this fall. His sequence on DNA and the Human Genome Project, "Genomic Vanitas and Memento Vivi," appeared recently in The Kenyon Review. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and two Pushcart Prizes in poetry.

Suzanne Paola, Poet and Non-Fiction Writer
Paola (Susanne Antonetta) will read from her poems and non-fiction works on environment, radioactivity, and cloning. Paola is the author of the nonfiction works A Mind Apart (Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), a study of neurological diversity and its role in processes of evolution, winner of the NAMI/Ken Johnson award for promoting understanding of mental difference, and Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, a life story told through the lens of environmental pollution. Body Toxic was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an American Book Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Lives of the Saints, weaves together theological immortality, the half-lives of radiation, the US Human Radiation Experiments of the Cold War, and such contemporary dilemmas as cloning.

Laura Otis, Dept of English, Emory University, "Lacking in Substance"
"Lacking in Substance" follows the cross-country trek of a scientist-turned-creative writing teacher who is struggling to write a novel and to rekindle a relationship that foundered 20 years ago. Her adventures on the road are told alternately with scenes from her emerging novel, in which an indigent young woman cares for a demented old woman who was herself a scientist in her youth.
Otis began her career as a Biochemist and Neuroscientist and changed her focus to literature in the mid-1980s. She is the author of the academic books Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), and Networking (2001) and the translator of Santiago Ramon y Cajal's Vacation Stories (2001). Since 1997, she has been writing novels, of which Lacking in Substance is the fourth. She is currently a Professor of English and Liberal Arts at Emory University and a guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Matt Rowe, Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science, Indiana University, "Mapping the Evolution of the Sestina"
Literary history typically involves after-the-fact recognition of a cultural norm-applying a label to a coherent slice through temporal strata of economic, social, linguistic, and other factors. The strict forms of structured verse, though, leave immediate and clearly legible traces: the forms themselves, which act as memes guiding the development of individual poems. I examine the history of the sestina from this perspective. From its isolation as a species in Provence in the late 12th century, through the development of robust cultivars and hybrids in Italy and England, to modern experiments in France, the sestina demonstrates memetic evolution at work on literary form. A map of this history offers solid grounding for "distant reading" and gives botanical resonance to the notion of the flowering of a form.

Sharon Lattig, University of Connecticut at Stamford, "Lyric Mind, Lyric Nature: Gregory Bateson and Poetic Embeddedness"
I begin with the homology Gregory Bateson draws between the mental process of learning and the physical process of species evolution to argue that the systemic nesting he presumes is both assumed and exploited by the formal structures of the lyric poem. I interpret the lyric's constitutional principle of deixis to correspond to Bateson's systemic criterion of "difference" and examine deixis in terms of Peircean secondness. The layered forms deixis takes within lyric poetry prompt an emergent process that gestures toward the ultimate deictic negotiation within the lyric poem: that transpiring between the "I" and the "you." A quick gesture to neurodynamics uncovers an analogous material basis for deictic emergence within the brain. The next of Bateson's criteria for mind, that it operate as a "hierarchy of orders of recursiveness" is shown to be enabled and occasioned by the traditional formal dynamics of the poem. Finally, the nesting of mind and nature within lyric poetry is argued to insure that the font of Peircean firstness, the precondition for secondness, the Darwinian variety Bateson conceives in stochastic terms, is replenished, permitting the continuing emergence, or survival, of the poem.

Bill Benzon, Independent Scholar, "One Candle, Ten Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme"
I consider a single "meme," the word /xanadu/, and how it has traveled from a 17th century book, to a 19th century poem (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"), into the 20th century where it was picked up by a classic movie ("Citizen Kane"), an ongoing software development project (Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu), and another movie and hit song, Olivia Newton-John's "Xanadu." The aggregate result can be seen when you google the word: you get 2 million hits. What is interesting about those hits is that, while some of them are directly related to Coleridge's poem, more seem to be related to Nelson's software project (no surprise there), Olivia Newton-John's film and song, and (indirectly) to Welles' movie. Thus one cluster of Xanadu sites is high tech while another is about luxury and excess (and then there's the Manchester Swingers Club Xanadu).

Science deals with fact and performance with illusion. Nevertheless, the theatre, television and film have become important sites for the discussion of science issues, portrayals of the lives of scientists and exploration of science methodology. This panel will discuss scripts written for the stage and screen which address science topics.

Roald Hoffmann, Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Cornell University. Recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and author of poetry, essays, and the plays "Oxygen" (with Carl Djerassi) and "Should've."

Brian Schwartz, Professor of Physics and Vice President for Research at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaches the course "Staging Science" with theatre historian Marvin Carlson.

Taniya Hossain was awarded the Sloan Foundation Grant for her screenplays The Speed of Light (2003) and Chemistry Set (2004). Her plays have been produced across the U.S.

S. Casper Wong is a New York based, Sloan-funded writer, director and producer. In a previous life, she served as Senior Counsel at IBM and led graduate research in biomedical engineering.

Moderator: Adrienne Klein, co-Director, Science & the Arts, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since 1999 Klein has helped produce over 70 public events that bridge science and the arts.

Ian F. Roberts, Department of English, Missouri Western State University, "Of Actual Use or Too Abstruse?: Literature and Science in the Classroom"
While there have been no shortage of purely theoretical presentations at past Society meetings, the practical teaching of Literature and Science has been almost entirely ignored. Apart from one or two isolated papers through the years and one productive panel which I chaired in 2003, the place of Literature and Science in the classroom remains sadly unexamined. Unfortunately, the Society's syllabi archive has also somewhat languished. I argue that this pedagogical neglect has profound and far reaching consequences for the field. For example, perceptions of Literature and Science as little more than a trendy and ephemeral area of research without relevance to general education or to broader social concerns are only reinforced by a failure to address teaching. Moreover, lack of pedagogical discussion also discourages the development of new courses in Literature and Science, even while it impoverishes those classes that are currently taught. This, in turn, limits interest in and growth of the area. My presentation will consider such aspects of Literature and Science as course design, choice of texts for study, assignments, and enrollment.

Todd Avery, Department of English and Nanomanufacturing Center of Excellence, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, "Nanotechnology in a 'Two Cultures' Classroom"
The purpose of this paper is threefold, corresponding to the discourses in which it participates. As a work of literary criticism, its purpose is to explore literary representations of nanotechnology. As a contribution to intellectual and cultural history more broadly, it also considers these representations in the context of continuing tension between the "two cultures" of humanistic and scientific inquiry described by C. P. Snow in the late 1950s. Finally, as a contribution to institutional conversations on the purposes, benefits, and limits of interdisciplinary exchanges in the classroom, it discusses literary engagements with nanotechnology in relation to current efforts within higher education to bridge the two cultures through an array of inter-, multi-, trans-, and postdisciplinary undertakings. In other words, this paper traces the braiding of three strands of academic work in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first: developments in two cultures relations since Snow's 1959 lecture; the history of interdisciplinarity with respect to science and literature since the emergence of cultural studies in the early 1960s and science studies later; and developments in nanotechnology since 1959, when Richard P. Feynman delivered "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," the founding document of nanotechnology. This paper addresses these issues in the context of an NSF-funded undergraduate general education course module on nanotechnology and literature. Keywords: nanotechnology, interdisciplinary, "two cultures," general education

Stephanie S. Turner, English, University of Houston-Downtown, "Can Bioethics Curricula Bring Literature and Science into Conversation?"
Bioethics topics are often described as "hot button" issues because they tend to provoke wide public discussion. Elected officials debate whether the federal government should fund embryonic stem cell research, legal experts examine the constitutionality of DNA dragnets, and talk show hosts and their guests dispute the relative merits of physician-assisted suicide. Inherent in these and other bioethics issues are the related forces of narration and discovery, the urge to tell stories and find answers that brings expressive forms and scientific investigation into conversation. Drawing from the scholarship of medical humanities and a review of the uses of literary texts in biomedical curricula, this presentation identifies some recent trends in the potential of bioethics to leverage the literature/science connection.

ORANGE Media and E-Literature

This panel consists of four presentations at the breakdown and permeability of art, theory, and digital media. The presentations will dissolve oppositions of performance / lecture, showing / talking. The goal is not to separate real versus the virtual, but to insist on their porosity or "fuzzy" overlap. The "virtual" is not the subject of the work. These are works about the becoming of the virtual and the real towards other content--or even towards the "content of the other"--on political, social, sexual, linguistic, narrative, psychoanalytical, even spirtual grounds.

Sandy Baldwin, Department of English, Director of the Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University, "The Virtual has Potential"
I will discuss codeworks at the intersection of computer gaming and recycled text. These works make scenes in first person shooters and tactical military computer games, re-purposing the games but also falling for the war world that they posit--which is nothing less than the world we all inhabit today. These works are the temporal playing out of figures cut in game-space, serial metonymizations of contexts that "take place" in the real time of digital media. Digital writing names the space of this taking place. In these works, writing is the terminal point of visibilities that become images and graphematic sign chains that become codified. I call these works "digital literature," where literature is not a canon of works but a problematization of mediation, a "turning literary of the literal," a stoppage where media become literature. I argue for a turn against the theoretical promise of the readable image or the perceived text (which I take as the premise of "media theory"). This turning shows the purely institutional relation of representation and context within our notions of mediation, on the one hand; and intimates at interiority within mediation, on the other.

Toni Dove, Independent Artist/Scholar
I work with narrative responsive environments - environments that combine computer programs designed to assemble and display media with interface triggers that accomplish this assembly in real time. Programs that perform, or perhaps I should say programs that perform the body, perform perception. These works involve re-seeing narrative through an analysis of perception and re-casting cinema as a spatialized, embodied experience. In other words, we perceive our environment and each other based on an assembly of physical sensations cued by environmental triggers. How can this be articulated in interesting ways to create virtual space? Mutable improvisational media loops with the body to create place, a sensory, embodied experience. In this case, the virtual is a space of potential and affect. It exists as much in time and in physical experience as it does in media. The players activate programs, audience is performer - time is experienced through improvisation in real time - the urgency of time - the suspense of time.

Alan Sondheim, Independent Artist/Scholar
My performances bring together video projections of cyborgian, mutating, sexual bodies and the artifacts of battlefields soaked in banal horror. Together, they offer a distorted beauty of the disasters of war and the pleasures of love. I work through laptop performance of video in combination with live audio and real-time text. I inhabit the semantic domain, whether real or virtual--I make no distinctions, and this absence of boundary is part of the work's content. Analog and digital, mathesis and physical reality, intertwine. The subject and subjectivity move through, and are transformed by, the presentation. The message is the medium, not the other way around.

Tom Zummer, Indpendent Artist/Scholar, "An Inverse Genealogy of Disembodiment"
In this paper I will address the disposition of the material body in its various mediations, tracing certain modifications of corporeality through a technical register including online and telecommunications systems, cinema, radio, television, telegraphy and telephony, but also examining the popular mythologies of disembodied virtuality in literary accounts of ether, spiritualism, vivisection, and robotics. The history of "modern spectrality"--what Jacques Derrida has called "hauntology"-- is folded into the history of technology's relation to bodies. I will trace some of the familiar, as well as some of the more unlikely, tributaries of the virtual.

Stephanie Strickland, Electronic Literature Organization, and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Director, Integrated Design Curriculum, The New School for Design, "Dovetailing Details Fly Apart--All Over, Again, In Code, In Poetry, In Chreods" Poetry and code--and mathematics--make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations, both those written by available pathways and patterns and entropy budgets, and those we conjure out of "nothing."

Nick Montfort, University of Pennsylvania, "Story, Discourse, and Re-Shaping Interactive Fiction"
Interactive fiction (IF) indicates a form of text-based computer game, a sort of dialog system, and a kind of literary art which has existed for about 30 years. Since Aristotle, theorists of narrative have distinguished between the level of underlying "story" (corresponding to the simulated world in IF) and "discourse" (corresponding to the way that events and things in that world are related.) But although IF has been around for 30 years, IF systems have not yet embodied this distinction by abstracting the telling from what is told. I describe an IF system that is based on this distinction, extending techniques from computational linguistics (specifically, from natural language generation) by using concepts from narratology.

Talan Memmott, Creative Director and Editor of beeHive, "Thinking/Reading/Writing the Multi-Modal"
Literary Hypermedia (un)rests somewhere between the visual, the procedural, and the literary. As such, it requires different modes of signification, and different way of thinking about writing practice. Text in works of literary hypermedia is more than the written word, with interface environment and interactivity having as much rhetorical value. Though it may seem that these modes of signification, when broken apart, are in competition with one another, it seems more valuable to consider the harmonics and resonances between them as an holistic meaning-making device. Through a demonstration of a number of works, this presentation will look at the process of multi-modal meaning making in literary hypermedia.

Daniel C. Howe, Media Research Lab, New York University, and Aya Karpinska, Independent Designer, "Geometry and Recombinant Poetics"
This presentation will explore how geometry, which studies relationships of angles and surfaces, can complement recombinant poetry, which uses configurations and arrangements of words and phrases to generate meaning. We all have intuitions about how geometric shapes behave in the world around us. Shapes will fit with each other in a predefined and finite number of ways, just as words and phrases in a recombinant text only "fit" (have meaning) in certain ways. In our collaborative work, three-dimensional shapes often inspire the writing. The spatial relationships among these shapes are what matters - change the shapes, and the writing must follow. At the heart of creative writing lie constraints; geometry provides a logical basis for constraints in a visual space.

Timothy Allen Jackson, New Media, Department of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, "Metaphors and Taxonomies: Art as Basic Research"
From the creation of one-point perspective in the Renaissance to the recent invention of the CAVE, art research has a long and distinguished history. Indeed, Alan Kay's remark, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is as applicable to art in the 21st century as it is to science and engineering. Within new media art practice, I would make the case that the modernist avant-garde has been replaced with an approach to aesthetic and poetic innovation centered on collective empathy (e.g., interactivity) and networked consciousness (e.g., telematics). Art researchers provide a bridge between the humanities and sciences linked to technological innovation, and contribute to the larger research culture in meaningful ways. This presentation will explore some of these considerations through exemplary works in light of a projective history for art as research in the 21st Century.

Shawn Brixey and James Coupe, Artist, Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle, "From Simulation to Emulation: A Field Theory for Telematic Art in the 21st Century"
Leibniz once claimed that it was impossible for a human to construct something that would equal or surpass him/herself. A wealth of 19th and 20th Century art, science and literature has wrestled to validate this terminal horizon, and sustain our lingering "fear of Frankenstein." Nevertheless, as humans have become more aware of the intricate physical, social and biological universe in which we reside, we begin to assemble a unique and comprehensive perspective on who we have been and what we may become. The transition inherent in this realization of our cultural, aesthetic and scientific selves is emblematic of emerging new art forms that seek to synergize the physical and biological sciences and define a new mode of arts practice that is significantly deeper than the rich but ultimately superficial, simulative or merely illustrative history from which they emerged. The paper will be presented as a dialog oriented around a number of specific art projects, presented via laptop computer(s).

Nina Czegledy, Independent Media Artist, Curator and Writer, Toronto, "On Art Research: Hybrid Projects"
Today, research forms an integral part of contemporary art practice, especially collaborations involving art, science and technology. Established academic programs and publications in North America and Western Europe illustrate a wide range of opportunities. This study presents alternate options from other regions where individuals or small informal groups often initiate novel concepts and where the boundaries between research, education and art production, are frequently blurred. Case studies include the NextLab, Budapest, Cultural Center Lindart, Tirana and Trinity Session, Johannesburg. The "research" of these groups seems to be flexible and fluid--extending to broader interpretations such as experimentation, groundwork or scrutiny.

Trace Reddell, Digital Media Studies, University of Denver, "My Ghosts in the Life of Bush"
In a lecture delivered to the Naropa Institute in 1976, William S. Burroughs describes the cut-up techniques of Brion Gysin in terms of their revelatory power: "when you cut into the present, the future leaks out." Burroughs articulates a system of divinitory processes incorporating multiple media of composition (paper, magnetic tape, film). Ultimately, he proposes a system in which prophecy is indistinguishable from memory: "cut-ups put you in touch with what you know and do not know that you know." A year earlier, in the liner notes to "Discreet Music," Brian Eno describes his investment in "situations and systems" for automatic composition. But it wasn't until his work with David Byrne on "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" (1981) that Eno's ambient-generating networks turned into a complex, divinitory system. Our present is glimpsed repeatedly as possibility in this album, and the effect is unsettling. To get at the prophetic dimensions of the album, I position the work as a form of "entheo-media," a technology for calling out the divine, which waits with unreconciliable tension somewhere between invocation and exorcism.

Cary Wolfe, Department of English, Rice University "Echographies from the Bush of Ghosts"
I'm interested in exploring the relationship between the visual archive that accompanies the re-release of David Byrne and Brian Eno's "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts" (http://bushofghosts.wmg.com/home.php) and the music itself, and what it all, taken together, tells us about the uncanny quality of this record/event: that the ether of electronic media is our "bush of ghosts" (across which, as it were, the vocal tracks the record traverse, "like transmissions from a desperate planet" as Byrne puts it). What makes this formulation anachronistic, of course, is that both components of the project were executed using analog, not digital, technologies. The audio "sampling" was done with analog tape and in some cases boomboxes, and the visual elements were created, for example, by pointing a video camera at a TV screen to induce feedback, which was then photographed using a Polaroid camera. The thesis I will explore, then, is that the uncanniness of this project is that it fashions an analog sonogram or "echography" (to use the phrase of Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida in Echographies of Television) of the "bush" of the media-to-come, whose apotheosis (so the story goes) is the-digitizaton-of-all-media, whose "spectrality" (to use Derrida's formulation) is in some sense "scooped" by low-tech, analog means.

Marcus Boon, Department of English, York University, Canada, "On Appropriation"
Byrne and Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts"is an experiment in and meditation on appropriation, made by analog means at the dawn of the age of digital sampling. Byrne and Eno appropriated the title of the disk from a novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, which itself is a meditation on appropriations of various kinds in West Africa: the slave trade, possession by the Yoruba deities, conversion to Christianity, technologies of various kinds. The concept of appropriation can also be found at the core of contemporary debate about copyright and intellectual property. Appropriating Heidegger's argument that Being itself can be thought of in terms of appropriation, I will explore what it means to appropriate and be appropriated. In particular, I will consider the relationship between sound, technology and appropriation, arguing that pioneer sampling artists such as Byrne and Eno "possessed" a peculiar insight into the power of appropriation, its history and its politics.

This panel will continue the discussion of Brian Eno and David Byrne's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" by shifting into roundtable format and further opening up both the audio and visual components of this seminal project. In addition to our usual suspects

Trace Reddell, University of Denver
Marcus Boon, York University
Bruce Clarke, Texas Tech University

we will be joined by two other distinguished observers of the music scene:

Simon Reynolds, born in London, has been resident in New York since the mid-Nineties. Reynolds is the author of four books, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 (Penguin, 2006), Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Little, Brown, 1998), The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock'n'Roll (Harvard University Press, 1995), and Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (Serpent's Tail, 1990). His latest tome, Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop is due to be published in summer 2007 by Faber & Faber. A freelance contributor for magazines including Slate, The Observer, Village Voice, The Wire, Blender, and Uncut, Reynolds operates a weblog at http://blissout.blogspot.com/ and a website at http://www.simonreynolds.net/.

Paul Rapp is an intellectual property attorney based in Housatonic, Massachusetts. Rapp teaches art & entertainment and copyright law at Albany Law School, and has been a guest lecturer at the School for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the annual Visual Art and the Law conference in Taos, New Mexico, and many other places. Rapp is counsel to The Yesmen, and has worked with Negativland, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Massachusetts and New York branches of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. He writes regular columns about information, art, music, and the law for Metroland Magazine (Albany, New York) and The Artful Mind (Great Barrington, MA). Rapp maintains blogs at splattofestival.blogspot.com and rapponthis.blogspot.com. Also known by the name F. Lee Harvey Blotto, Rapp plays drums with 80s music video pioneers Blotto.

"Futurism" is often associated with the 20th Century's Italian and Russian avant-garde, and with ambiguously fascist and communist approaches to imagining futurity and technology respectively. Are there other futurisms and has futurism evolved--or critically devolved--from these influential perspectives? A complex relation to these earlier "futurisms" is found in "AfroFuturism." AfroFuturism loosely articulates a broad spectrum of practices, discourses and philosophies - literature, music, science, writing, politics - tied to the technological imaginaries of the black diasporia and, significantly, beyond. In this panel we examine the technoshamanism of jazz in John Coltrane, RAMM:ELL:ZEE's graffiti sign-systems, and the decay of Detroit in relation to the constraints of digital rhetoric. ("Negative Evolution" title provided by Underground Resistance, Detroit.)

Trey Conner, Pennsylvania State University, "From Communication to Commons Formation: Coltrane's Cosmic Model of Rhythmic En-Trane-Ment"
"Once you become aware of this force for unity in life, you can't ever forget it. It becomes part of everything you do. In that respect, [Meditations] is an extension of A Love Supreme since my conception of that force keeps changing shape." -John Coltrane During 1965, John Coltrane's musician collectives regularly and seemingly summarily summoned a spectacular resonance. When Coltrane's ensembles sampled from Eastern sacred traditions, they remixed the jazz ensemble playback format, troping it towards one of the oldest genres of information compression, the mantra. "A Love Supreme," "Evolution," "Cosmos," "Om," and "Meditations" are at once information compression algorithms and, at the same time, a sequence of sonic snapshots that regulate and transduce Coltrane's cosmic "force of unity." Coltrane's experiments continue to provide a model for diverse media ecologies moving from communication to commons-formation, and as such, can help us tune in on the role of rhythm in technocultural production. Diverse rhetorics emerge in these digital attention economies in order to describe and participate in these evolutionary dynamics.

Marcel O'Gorman, University of Detroit Mercy, "Detroit Devolution: Memoirs of a Tourist in the Apocalypse"
Detroit, Michigan--burned out, abandoned, and in rapid decay--is the post-industrial city par excellence. But of course we all know this because Detroit, America's urban apocalypse, has played host to a multitude of tragedy tourists. These post-urban colonizers, from the out-of-state graffiti artists looking for fresh walls, to the suburban DJ's hosting dance parties in empty automotive plants, are eager to capitalize on the city's empty spaces and sublime ruins. In this presentation, Detroit Techno will play backbeat to a sampling of texts and images from America's urban apocalypse. What I hope to demonstrate is nothing less than the constraints of cyberculture, or more precisely, of digital rhetoric. I will argue that the unwillingness of digital culture to "ground itself," to embrace the finitude of the body, to choose place over space, leads us headlong into esotericism, devolution, entropy. I will conclude by examining an urban ecology movement that acknowledges this disembodied carnival, but grounds it in the materiality of lived space.

Tobias C. van Veen, McGill University. "Typefighter Writer / Typewriter Fighter (Burners & Aporias)"
RAMM:ELL:ZEE first exhibited his graffiti sign-systems in 1974 on NYC's trains, "the biggest distribution gallery for any art form known to man." Shortly thereafter, Ramm elevated WildStyle tags ("burners"), into IKONOKLAST PANZERISM ("Wild Style Corrected"), taking as his inspiration 10th-15th century European monks and their "MEDIEVAL MECHANISM" of armoring letter-carriers . Meanwhile, in Montreal, Jacques Derrida elevated (if we can play a sample) "the question concerning technology," taking as his inspiration the aporias of language in signaling an "increasingly powerful historical expansion of a general writing," of which truth, presence, consciousness and other themes of metaphysics would be "effects." This paper seeks to demonstrate how RAMM:ELL:ZEE enters the equation--"equations have no parents"--at the closure of philosophy and the revolution of AfroFuturism. and to investigate the world of Gothic Futurism as it inscribes its "interplanetary" signs.

Jay A. Labinger, Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology, "A Connectionist Model for SLSA: Evolutionary Consilience?"
Some commentators have characterized SLSA-type projects as consisting largely of fuzzy metaphoric connections between hard scientific knowledge and softer humanistic knowledge--at best irrelevant, at worst subverting scientific authority. E. O. Wilson's Consilience purports to offer a program for reconciling the two realms; however, it is presented in a rhetoric not of alliance but rather of colonization, applying the methodology and standards of the former to the latter. Making use of yet another (possibly fuzzy) metaphor, I will argue that Wilson's project is analogous to an algorithmic, rules-based learning model, whereas the SLSA program is better described in terms of connectionist and evolutionary models of brain development, represented by Gerald Edelman's theory of Neural Darwinism, in which connections between an assemblage of neurons are made and tested, not according to any a priori rules, but rather by whether they contribute effectively to improved function: those that do are strengthened; those that do not, atrophy and disappear. An analogous connectionist approach to the generation of knowledge by an assemblage of individual intelligences seems by far the more promising.

Wayne Miller, Duke University School of Law, "Web 2.0: Collective Intelligence and the Problem of Mediated Evolution"
"Web 2.0" was coined to describe how users and developers are creating a different Web through such interactive technologies as blogs, wikis, the Semantic Web, and social networking sites such as myspace.com. At the core of the hype and controversy is a specific claim: "that [these innovators] have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence" (Tim O'Reilly). Whether "collective intelligence" is uniquely human or biologically speaking ubiquitous, it presents a specific problem for discourses about human evolution. Since Turing formulated his test, there has been speculation about the role of artificial intelligence in evolution. Now there is a discursive space in which a mediated but still human intelligence forms the link to a new and brighter human, or post-human, future. We have reason to be skeptical. Friedrich Kittler finds that media have become privileged models for self-understanding "exactly because it is their declared purpose to delude and deceive this very self-understanding" (Optische Medien ). In this paper, I will seek to go behind "Web 2.0" to bring out the media structure from behind the collective.

Roddey Reid, Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego, "Social Marketing as a Global Communication Technology in a Postcolonial World"
An interdisciplinary field based in the methods and tools of the behavioral sciences and the entertainment industry, social marketing's roots are transnational and go back to the 1960s and programs in international development. Many of the contemporary commercial marketing methods and techniques used in health promotion were first developed during the 1970s and 1980s for family planning and breast feeding campaigns in South and East Asia, Latin America, and Africa by US private firms and adopted by US-based foundations and international NGOs and organizations. As its focus, this paper will look at several social marketing firms (for example, The Academy for Educational Development) and their worldwide activities in terms of claims for social marketing as a flexible, "systems approach of universal application regardless of problem or local situation"; methods of segmenting populations and assessing consumers' "needs"; the choice of communication media; and neoliberal forms of government.

Aden Evens, New Media Studies, Department of English, Dartmouth College, "The Digital, the Virtual, and the Virtual"
The digital is characterized by two different virtuals. One is the popular notion of the virtual--anything that happens in or through computers. The concept of virtual reality is the apotheosis of the popular virtual, an eventual total immersion that eliminates the interface of the computer as well as the danger of real world encounters. Though this popular notion of the virtual is often opposed rather strongly to the sense of the virtual drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze, this paper argues that digital ontology can only be understood through the attribution of both senses of virtuality to the digital. To understand how the digital matters, it must be connected to the virtual as a process of differentiation, which cannot be equivalent to the deterministic logical calculus that governs the flow of electricity through computer chips. This paper looks for those events that mark the intrusion of the Deleuzian virtual into the popular virtual, both historical developments in the history of computing and technical contrivances that inject a measure of indeterminacy into the midst of the self-identical 0s and 1s that constitute the binary code.

Marija Cetinic, Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, "string theory"
While there has been a great deal of attention to the convergence of discrepant media via digital technology, there has been comparably little attention devoted to the persistence of analog and retro technologies as a concurrent feature of our technoscientific situation. Nor has sufficient attention been paid to the propensity of recent literature to return to such "low" technologies as a mode of narrative invention: as a means of imagining new models of community and of conveying affective tonalities that both respond to and interrupt the discursive hegemony of the World Wide Web. To name three such texts, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005), and Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String (1995) all practice a brand of magical realism that deploys "old-fashioned technologies, most of which resembled children's toys" (Foer) as modalities of contact, attachment, and transmission between isolated bodies. This paper reads this literary turn to retro technology in relation to work on embodiment and new media.

Jessica Pressman, Department of English, UCLA , "The Revolution and Evolution of Flash-ing Literature: Bob Brown's Readies and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries"
This paper participates in charting the "evolution" of new media and, in particular, electronic literature by examining the connections between two techno-literary projects separated by seventy years. In 1930, to advance the "Revolution of the Word," avant-garde writer Brown proposed to build a reading machine that would speed up the pace of reading literature and thereby change the kind of literature we read. His plans reflect a techno-determinist view that our reading machines affect both how and what we read; they also inspired modernists as Stein, Williams, and Pound to contribute poems to his collection Readies for Bob Brown's Machine (1931). His Readies are important to contextualizing a more contemporary form of avant-garde, machine-based literature: Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries produce some of the most innovative electronic literature online, Flash works that flash onscreen at heightened speeds. In this paper, I read between and across these two literary endeavors to examine what is illuminated about our contemporary literary moment by exhuming its relationship to a related but relatively unknown artistic and technological past.

Daniel Tripp, Department of English, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, "The Survivalist Rhetoric of Literary Innovation"
Ever since Marshall McLuhan helped popularize a Darwinist view of medial evolution, American literature has been increasingly imagined as participating in a grand competition for representational supremacy, a competition it is often considered to be losing on most fronts. This paper examines what I call the survivalist rhetoric of literary innovation, or the critical discourse through which scholars, critics, and writers alike have sought to recalibrate the specificity, and in some cases the superiority, of print literature in an expanding media ecology. The challenges posed to print literature by intermedial rivalry have necessitated both the defense and revision of the literary exceptionalism that for several centuries has taken for granted the privilege and prestige of literature as a mode of representation. Among other things, I argue that the mediatization of American literature, and the subsequent drive to reinvent mimesis, has sparked an arms race for the real that can be read in the accelerated speciation of literary forms and the proliferation of survivalist rhetorics since the 1960s.

Dave Ciccoricco, University of Canterbury, "The Play of Memory's Shadow: Episodic and Procedural Memory in Video Games"
A range of critical approaches has been invoked in the study of video game design and production, including varied modes of narrative theory and the custom-built discipline of "game studies," which are often cast as opposing methodologies. What has emerged thus far from this dialogue, at the least, is that games are not narratives per se; that games contain narrative elements; that narrative elements are often fundamental in 1) structuring gameworlds and 2) motivating gameplay; and that, ultimately, games and narratives yield different kinds of experience. But whereas the experience of reading and interpreting narrative art has been studied in detail by way of psychological and cognitive frameworks appropriated for narrative theory, the user's experience of simulative digital environments has not. This paper employs Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus (2005) to further qualify gaming experiences by applying the basic distinction of episodic and procedural memory from cognitive science, illustrating how participation in simulative digital environments not only draws on but also relies on both forms of memory.

Bernadette Wegenstein, Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Johns Hopkins University, and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Filmmaker and Fulbright Scholar, Communication and Culture, York University "
The documentary Made Over in America is a collaboration between the media theorist Bernadette Wegenstein and the filmmaker Geoffrey Alan Rhodes. Fox's reality makeover drama The Swan (2004-), has served as a point of focus and departure to investigate the makeover culture-complex of cosmetic surgery, new media, and celebrities in which young women are coming to adulthood. No simple answers are sought; instead the contradictions and ambiguities through which these young women must forge their identities and body images are explored after the values of phenomenology and ethnographic film. The project was envisioned as an interdisciplinary approach to popular culture criticism, combining sociological analysis, frameworks based on psychoanalytic, body, and media theory, and experimental video. The final feature film product (71 minutes) communicates the responses by different voices of the U.S. makeover culture. The film traces the construction of a "cosmetic gaze"--the underlying looking mechanism according to which makeover viewers, cosmetic surgery consumers, image makers, and cosmetic surgeons operate-- in order to show the state of a twenty-first century body: not a fixed entity, a given, but something that is always in flux, volatile, and therefore to be constantly stabilized. Makeover is then a mode of "stabilization" of such an evasive body identity. This stabilization and "fixing" of the body is also the goal of makeover's critics: both the practitioners and critics are, in the end, searching for an "authentic" self. The key questions and criticisms are put into the hands of the documentary's audience to resolve: what does "natural" mean in a body context? What does "beauty" mean? What does it mean to cultivate the desire for a "better self"? Why not look your very best? Though we present no definitive answers in the film, we deliver differing voices as to what the twenty-first century body means as a place of inscription, as a performative realm, and as a platform for a culture's investments in a "better self," a "better look," and an ultimately "better life."

This panel looks at the modalities of code as a media form. In relation to new media arts and visual arts, traditionally code has performed as the architecture in relation to a functional or actual output. The papers on this panel address the question of what are some of the significant changes theoretically and in the production of art and cultural works when code is engaged as representational media form. A discussion of contemporary reworking of information and aesthetic theory is central to the panel. The panel is composed of media theorist and media practitioners (code writers and artists using code), which brings diverse and highly engaged perspectives to the subject. The issues discussed in the various papers include generative aesthetics, networked art works and network culture, and the history of aesthetically oriented code.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Modern Culture and Media, at Brown University, "Order From Order"
"Order From Order" interrogates the odd erasure of computing necessary to the emergence of digital media and to the formation of "visual culture studies" and "transparent society" (our computers are fundamentally non-visual and non-transparent devices) by outlining some of the surprising parallels between software and race as visualizations of invisible causalities. Software, unforeseen by the early computer designers and non-existent at a physical level, has become a privileged way of explaining the relationship between nature (hardware) and culture (software), the operations of heredity (genetic program), and the functioning of narrative (rhetorical software). Software's power stems from its programmability and from the ways it concretizes causality: high-level procedural languages in particular reduce language to a series of imperatives, which in turn generate visible effects in an invisible yet understandable manner. Race was, and still is, a privileged way of understanding the relationship between the visible and invisible: it links visual cues to unseen forces.

Mark H. Hansen, UCLA, "Aliis exterendum"
The early statisticians recognized the effect of "the law of large numbers," the possibility for regular behavior in aggregates (crime rates, births, deaths); and even applied the normal distribution (the bell curve) to sociological data. These early statisticians, however, were asked to 'confine...attention rigorously to facts...stated numerically and arranged in tables', because interpretation was, as declared by the motto of the London Statistical Society, Aliis exterendum--to be threshed out by others. This stance did not hold sway for long, and statistics evolved from pure data collection to the study of making inferences from data. In the last decade, we have experienced an unprecedented leap forward in our abilities to collect and analyze data, and in particular, our languages to describe patterns, statistical representations of phenomena. In this presentation, I will examine a series of recent works (installations and a planned performance piece created in collaboration with Ben Rubin, EAR Studio) from the context of the "backend," the code that links observed phenomena and the narrative threads of the ultimate artworks.

Alexander R. Galloway, Culture and Communication, New York University, "A Formal Grammar for Artist-Made Game Mods"
This paper articulates a formal grammar for the genre of the artist-made game mod (short for "modification"). Game mods are an unusual thing, for they seem to contradict their very existence: When the mod rises to the level of art, rather than a gesture of fandom--as "Counter-Strike" was to "Half-Life"--then, more often then not, the game looses its ruleset completely and ceases to be a game after all. Jodi's untitled game" follows this contradictory logic when it removes all possibility of gameplay from "Quake" and propels the game into fits of abstract modernism. Using Peter Wollen's seven theses on counter-cinema as a guide, this paper presents a new framework for understanding game mods based on the following formal principles: foregrounding, aestheticism, visual artifacts, invented physics, and non-correspondence.

Beth Coleman, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Mr. Softee Takes Command: Morphological Machines Advance"
In this paper I look at the ramifications of cybernetic theory and practice, specifically the demands of contingency, feedback, and automation, on the workings of a generative aesthetic in new media production. I argue that particular forms representative of the categories of "new media art" or "new media" in relation to popular visual culture make a break with the tradition of plastic arts and film/video history exactly in regard to the issue of the generative. I use concepts basic to the theory of cybernetics, information theory, and the "culture of code" as instructive guides by which to discuss new paradigms of cultural production that, as this paper argues, are influenced in equal parts by the history of computing as they are the history of aesthetics. Areas of analysis include the history of electronic and digital arts design and practice in the genre of networked artworks, "deconstructive" digital artworks, generative programs, and Machinima automations. The theoretical works cited include Norbert Wiener's Human Use of Human Beings, and texts by media and cultural theorists N. Katherine Hayles, and philosopher of technology and temporality Bernard Stiegler.

Suzanne Anker, Art History Department, School of Visual Arts and Eve Keller, English Department, Fordham University
This roundtable discussion will bring together a visual artist, a molecular biologist, and a literary scholar to address from their differing perspectives, some of the changing conceptions and representations of the human and non-human fetus, from the Enlightenment to modern times. Though each presenter will speak briefly from his or her own discipline, the intent of the session is to generate conversation, both among the presenters and between the presenters and the audience, about how different disciplines approach and construct the object(s) of their attention.

Mark Pizzato, UNC-Charlotte, "The Evolution of Racism in the Brain's Performativity: Dutchman as Case Study"
How do modern American notions of "race" relate to the evolution of the human race out of Africa, with eventual variations in skin color, and to the performative elements in our brains: a myth-making, left hemisphere and an earlier developing, mimetic, right hemisphere with stronger ties to the primal passions of the limbic system and brainstem? To approach these politico-historical, evolutionary, and neurological relations, this essay will focus on Amiri Baraka's 1964 drama, Dutchman, and the 1967 film made from it by British director Anthony Harvey. It will apply evolutionary psychology, neurology, and psychoanalytic theory to Harvey's revision of Baraka's script about an interracial love affair and murder on a New York City subway car. How does the experience of this drama as cinema, with a white woman seducing and killing a black man onscreen, reflect race and gender relations--not only in the 1960s and today, but also regarding the longer time scheme of human evolution, from nature's drives to culture's vexed identifications of skin and sex? Do Dutchman's screen bodies simply express the destructive dangers of racial envy and manipulative passions--or do they demonstrate the potential of theatre and cinema, in distinctive ways, to contribute to our cultural evolution as black and white, male and female, within one species?

Helen Keane, Gender, Sexuality and Culture Program, School of Humanities, Australian National University, "Prozac, Prescription and Problems of Mass Consumption"
In medical literature, antidepressants are commonly described as under-prescribed, depression as under-treated and patients as resistant to anti-depressant therapy. Physicians are advised to treat depression more aggressively and be more alert to subtle signs of its presence. In contrast, public debate and bioethical discussion about the rise of serotogenic anti-depressants such as Prozac present images of excess and mass consumption: prescription rates are soaring, everyday sadness is being medicated and consumers are demanding access to drug treatments, prompted by media and marketing campaigns. This paper will explore these divergent constructions of antidepressant use and misuse (and the difficulty of distinguishing use from misuse). It will focus on the refiguring of medical prescription and prescribed drug consumption in an era of pharmaceutical commodification. How are the actions of doctors and patient/consumers being problematised in models of under- and over-consumption, especially in relation to ideals of autonomous selfhood?

Kiki Benzon, Department of English, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, "Sanity and the Small Screen: Approximating Mental Illness on Television"
I will consider how various facets of the psychiatric "industry"--patients, physicians, drug companies, treatment institutions--are simultaneously depicted in and constructed by recent American television series such as e.r., Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. Televisual modes (melodrama, education/propaganda) and techniques (mise-en-scene, narrative sequencing) potentiate a scope of representation that a complex field like psychiatry would require. The "tactility" (McLuhan) of television, furthermore, may facilitate a visceral expression of disorders like depression, bipolarism, and schizophrenia, which are largely beyond intellectual comprehension. But the productive and revelatory possibilities of television are inextricable from the commercial and culturally prescriptive functions of the medium. I will illustrate how programming that deals with institutions surrounding mental illness operates in a double bind that is intrinsic to television itself, where any psychosocially illuminating, didactic or "tactile" renderings of psychiatric disorders coincidentally propagate a vision of "normalcy" that benefits a late capitalist context.

Eugene Thacker, School of Literature, Communication & Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology Pestilence and Political Theology"
Historical narratives of plague and pestilence often bear forth a mytho- poetic and political function: plague is often represented as an exceptional instance that is weaponized by a sovereign diety, usually taken to be a sign of divine punishment. The character of these punitive forms, while divinely instrumentalized, involves an intervention into the natural order. If, as Carl Schmitt argues, the miracle in theology is analogous to the exception in politics, then the case of plague-as-punishment presents a conflicted case, existing of the order of nature and yet totally outside of it. This paper will explore the relation between this mytho-poetic and this political function of plague and pestilence. Taking up the dialogue on political theology between Schmitt, Benjamin, and Kantorowicz, this paper will also touch upon current programs in 'biodefense' as an ambivalent engagement with the questions of political theology.

Ira Livingston, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, SUNY, Stony Brook "Dumb Luck Versus Intelligent Design in Origin-of-Life Metaphors"
This paper explores the logic of several scientific metaphors of the origin of life, especially physicist Murray Gell-Mann's account of "frozen accidents" and chemist A.G. Cairns-Smith's image of "paradoxical structures." I argue that this logic enacts dialectical contradictions within current paradigms and thus points the way toward new frameworks. Between the extreme inadequacies of both "Intelligent Design" and the scientific response that might as well be called "Dumb Luck" (as in Daniel Dennett's assertion that "the designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own"), can scientific theory affirm an intelligent universe?

Ed Cohen, Women's and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New Bruswick, "The Inheritance of Inheritance"
The current vogue for genetic testing raises a number of questions about the political inheritance of, and the economic and psychological investments in, the biological concept of "inheritance." As made evident by the popular embrace of genetic testing--whether for purposes of personal identification, property claims, access to resources allocated to designated ethic and racial groups, citizenship rights, or child custody and support--the metaphor of genetic "inheritance" today literalizes the political, legal and economic assumptions upon which it rests. Inheritance was first adopted in the nineteenth century to describe the continuities of "traits" across generations of individuals within a species. Prior to this biological incarnation, inheritance served primarily as a political, legal, and economic concept which defined the temporal disposition of property and position through kinship not biology. The eventual apotheosis of the new bio-political concept in the strands of human DNA, which now figures as the vault where this "inheritance" reposes, thoroughly naturalizes its metaphorical genealogy and thereby conceals its juridico-political origins. Yet as recent critiques of the dogma of DNA suggest, it behooves us to consider the attributes that we inherit when we inherit the trope of genetic inheritance--which is what this paper will do.

This panel (Linda Layne, Heather Swain, Lynn Paltrow) consists of excerpts from two episodes of "Motherhood Lost: Conversations," an award-winning educational television series co-produced by Linda Layne and Heather Bailey at George Mason University Television which advocates a women's health approach to pregnancy loss. Footage from "Normalizing Miscarriage Through Popular Culture: A Conversation with Heather Swain, author of Luscious Lemon" and "Combating the Criminalization of Stillbirth and Miscarriage: A Conversation with Lynn Paltrow, Esq., Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women" will be the starting point for a discussion comparing the strategic potentialities of different forms of representation. When, why, and whose pregnancy losses are hidden or made visible? What roles can/should art play? What are the special qualities of fiction, first person, and expert testimony as expressive media for loss? What is at stake when pregnancy loss is kept hidden or made visible?

Rich Doyle, Department of English, Penn State University and Alexandra Shields, Institute of Health Policy, Harvard Medical School
This panel centres on a video/dance performance about asthma as an experience, social and political-economic phenomena, and object of scientific concern. The performance brings together the work of a video artist (Surajit Sarkar, Department of Arts and Integrated Electronic Arts [iEAR] Studios, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), an ethnomusicologist and dancer (Tomie Hahn, iEAR, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), an electronic musician (Curtis Bahn, iEAR, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), a historian of science (Mike Fortun, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and a cultural anthropologist (Kim Fortun, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). The dancer unfolds a layered costume to become a projection space for images and sounds of various facets of the asthma experience - from the vantage point of affected people, their care-givers, and scientists from different disciplines; at different scales, from the genetic to the community to the national. The performance take viewers through the lived experience of asthma; possible triggers and physiological dynamics of asthma; efforts to understand how gene-environment interactions contribute to asthma incidence and exacerbation; diverse ways of treating asthma; and, finally to trackings of extraordinary and socially uneven prevalence of asthma in different locales today. A video of the performance is accompanied by two talks on asthma genetics, followed by commentary.

Medical education can take many forms across the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate stages. Within this hierarchy, traditional medical pedagogy has focused on the sciences and their application; this focus, in fact, potentially increases in our modern technological age. The humanities, however, offer our institutions another avenue for inculcating in medical students (regardless of their educational stage) an appreciation for their patients and the human condition overall. This panel presents three approaches for adding that depth to medical education through the humanities.

Ruben J. Nazario, M.D., Section of Inpatient Pediatrics Kentucky Children's Hospital, "Humanities in Medicine or Medical Humanities? The Evolution of Medical Humanities Programs"
The purpose of this paper is to explore the underlying curricular paradigms driving the collaboration between the humanities and medicine. The essay will explore the philosophical evolution behind the inclusion of the humanities in the medical school curriculum, starting with the perception by medical school educators in the middle of the twentieth century that medicine was undergoing a technical shift away from its humanistic basis. The paper will examine some of the curricular models currently used in medical humanities programs. Finally, the essay will examine possible avenues for the implementation and interaction of the humanities and medicine.

Robert J. Bonk, Widener University, "From Page to Stage: Exploring Medicine through the Humanities"
Both a science and an art, medicine reflects more about a society than simply our technological paradigms. By exploring medicine through the humanities, students can discover mirrors within societies that reflect the many facets of medicine--especially the dichotomies of life-death, health-illness, and provider-patient. To provide this viewpoint, I developed an undergraduate course at Widener University that targets Honors students with an interest in medicine and related healthcare fields. A key element of the original course focused on a public session of staged readings directed by a local theater expert (funding provided through an internal grant). In this first offering, students' evaluations documented the value they perceived from exploring and appreciating medicine through literature. A key aspect was