Sixth Week Journal

The sixth week of 201, we are reading two essays by Mark C. Taylor and Sarah Kemper concerning embodiment.

I began my research on MarkKemper by finding him on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_C._Taylor which tell me that he has just recently started teaching at Columbia University after writing many books on many topics on philosophy of religion, to media arts, architecture to Derrida and postmodernism. He has received many very prestigious awards.

According to one person at the UniversityofFlorida that he is one of the greatest "one of America's greatest writer.

Sarah Kemper was much harder to find. Through the cyberfeminism hypertext with her name I got to http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=582 and Kristina Mc Fee who is exhibiting at the KemperMuseumofContemporaryArt in Kansas City. Very interesting, is there a connection? There is none.

Then, I found Sarah on Amazon. Here's what reviewers had to say about her book, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life: Kember is to be applauded for demonstrating how cyber-feminism can and must have an ethics, a politics, and a history, something that has been largely lacking from the field to date....A welcome addition to graduate courses on alife, cyber-feminism, and/or feminist theory, and is certainly a requirement for the library of any scholarly (cyber) feminist..–National Women's Studies Association Journal

She published the book in 2003 and is currently a Professor in New Technologies of Communication in the Dept. of Media & Communication at Goldsmiths College, London

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

The discussion was very interesting especially concerning the meaning of emergence. At the beginning of class, Troy stated that emergence is the situation when an organism becomes greater than the sum of its parts through connection. Mark Taylor begin his article with a look at the painter Chuck Close whose work reminds me of a cross between cubism and photographic realistic painting. Depending upon the distance of the viewer and the painting, there is a tipping point that allows the cells of the paintings become the greater portrait painting. This reminds me of Salvador Dali's painting of his wife's nude back and Abraham Lincoln. Depending upon the distance of the viewer and the painting there are two tipping points of emergence of either Abe or Gala.

Do these paintings embody the concept of emergence the same way as some the Soraya showed us from Shirley Shor's Landslide to Conway's game of life, the simulation of birds flock, Avolve and Louis Bec's Arapuca. The tipping/balance point is static for the paintings where with the other artists this point is dynamic and ever -moving.

What is cyberfeminism? Soraya passed around the first manifesto from VNS and showed us the OldBoysNetwork. This was very helpful to me.

[FeminismInCyberfeminism|http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fwild/faithwilding/wherefem.html

This links to an article Mark Taylor wrote about Derrida after his death. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/derrida/taylorderrida.html