Radars & Fences

Event Time

Thursday, March 5, 2009
4:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Location

Information Law Institute
40, Washington Square South
Room VH218

Please RSVP at http://www.nyu.edu/media.culture/events/event.html?e_id=1336

Description

Radars & Fences II features five researchers and artists who have been at the forefront of the battle for the democratization of the life sciences over the last decade: Beatriz da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Richard Pell, Claire Pentecost, and Paul Vanouse will present their own work and discuss with the public models of interdisciplinary engagement at the beginning of the "biological century." (Rationale in the next post)

Schedule

4:30 – 4:40 pm Welcome

* Ted Magder, NYU Council for Media & Culture; Chair, Department of
Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU

4:40 – 4:50 pm Conference Overview

* Marco Deseriis, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Media, Culture, and
Communication, NYU

4:50 - 6:30 pm Panel: Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology (Part I)

Beatriz da Costa, Associate Professor of Arts, Computation, Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Of Pigeons, Microbes and Humans: Earthly Encounters at the Species Boundaries

Richard Pell, Assistant Professor of Art, Carnagie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Permitted Habitats and Endangered GMO's: An introduction to the Center for PostNatural History.

Claire Pentecost, Associate Professor, School of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago. Fields of Zombies: Biotech Agriculture and the Privatization of Knowledge

6:30 - 7:00 pm Evening Break (Refreshments will be served)

7:00 - 8:30 pm Panel: Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology (Part II)

Paul Vanouse, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies, University at Buffalo. Buffaloed and Bamboozled: DNA Hype in the Post-biological Era

Natalie Jeremijenko, Associate Professor of Visual Arts, Department of Arts and Arts Professions, NYU. Living together: on the shocking realities of cohabitation, the human biome, the microbial imagination and wrestling the strongest animals in the world.

The panel is moderated by Alex Galloway, Associate Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU

Radars & Fences II
Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology

March 5, 4:30-8:30 PM
Information Law Institute, Room VH218
40, Washington Square South
New York University


In the age of genetics, biotechnology, and bioinformatics, life is increasingly
fashioned and configured at the intersection of several discourses and practices,
such as population genetics, molecular and informatic sequences, human enhancement technologies, and the therapeutic and agricultural applications of genomics.

Asides from raising crucial epistemological questions, these technoscientific practices compete for attention, credibility, and funding within the scientific community,
the market place, and the public domain. But as the far-reaching implications of biotech research unravel, the opacity and secrecy surrounding the industry and the patenting of life become increasingly problematic. This is partly due to the difficult ethical questions raised by the life sciences, but also to the rapid extension of
scientific knowledge production to a number of non-scientific environments.

As Bruno Latour (2001) has pointed out, the tendency of the experimental method to transcend its modern boundaries is the result of three distinct processes: 1) the end of the scientific laboratory as a secluded space available only to specialists; 2) the increasing agency of patients and ordinary citizens in formulating the scientific questions to be solved; 3) and the extension of the scale of scientific experiments to the whole planet, as in the case of global warming, AIDS, and so on.

Within this triple displacement, which turns the technoscientific experiment into a more and more collective endeavor, a thriving community of bioartists, researchers, and hobbyists have provided new analytical and activist models by which to intervene and participate in the life sciences. Through a broad set of hands-on interventions that provide a critique-in-action of both the political economy and the naturalization of the biotech industry, bioartists and researchers have fostered interspecies contacts, engineered hybrid life forms, and set up independent Biolabs. Together, they propose new scientific protocols and call for a wider, and far more direct participation among lay, artistic, activist, and academic publics.

Radars & Fences II features five researchers and artists who have been at the forefront of the battle for the democratization of the life sciences over the last decade: Beatriz da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Richard Pell, Claire Pentecost, and Paul Vanouse will present their own work and discuss with the public models of interdisciplinary engagement at the beginning of the "biological century."

***

This forum is being coordinated by doctoral candidate Marco Deseriis as part of a grant awarded by the NYU Council for Media and Culture with assistance provided by the Information Law Institute

***

The conference is free but seating is limited. Please RSVP on the Council for Media and Culture web site.

Selected audio excerpts from Gabriella Coleman's lecture Old and New Net Wars over Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$, Radars & Fences, New York University, 07/04/2008.

A Culturally Antipodal Relation
"Why have internet enthusiasts, so many of them geeks and hackers, been drawn to denounce Scientology, so vehemently and for over a decade? (Anonymous is just the most current incarnation.) Or to put it more bluntly it strikes us as a little bit odd, and does a need of explanation, that one of the oldest and recurring battles on the internet is between this two kinds of people. Today I hope to make this oddity a little more sensible by examining both the historical reasons behind these battles as well as especially the cultural reasons... What I think we need to look at is how these two groups stand in culturally antipodal relation to one another, and if there is such a thing as a cultural inversion machine..."

Continue reading "Gabriella Coleman @ Radars & Fences" »

Selected audio excerpts from Trevor Paglen's lecture Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere, Radars & Fences, New York University, 06/04/2008.

The Black World
"What is the Black World? A good place to start looking at that question is the Defense budget... [The Defense budget] contains blank spots, classified programs, special programs. You have entire agencies whose budget is a giant blank spot... One of the axioms of the kind of geography that I do is that money does not disappear into a vacuum but congeal in the surface of the Earth in a way it produces space."

Continue reading "Trevor Paglen @ Radars & Fences" »

Selected audio excerpts from Ron Deibert's* lecture The New Geopolitics of the Internet, Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 07/04/2008.

The Citizen Lab
"On the research side the main project we have been engaged [at the Citizen Lab] is a collaborative project with Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities called the OpenNet Initiative. The purpose of that project is to document patterns of internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. The second project is a development project. There is a piece of software that we created called psiphon that was released last year, and it helps people get around internet censorship..."

Continue reading "Ron Deibert @ Radars & Fences" »

Selected audio excerpts from David Lyon's lecture Stretched Screens: Ubiquity, Interoperability and Identification Protocols, Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 04/07/2008.

National Identification Systems
"National Identification Systems are the biggest single identification systems being developed in the twenty-first century. They are historically completely unprecedented and they are huge. When you think that China and India are thinking of biometric-based, RFID-enabled smart cards for identification on a national level, you can imagine the technological and commercial opportunities that this raises..."

Continue reading "David Lyon @ Radars & Fences" »

Conference
March 6-7
New York University

Radars and fences, satellites and walls, networks and bunkers. Two
different sets of technologies confront us: the former epitomize the
selective and flexible character of what Gilles Deleuze termed the
“societies of control”; the latter embody the “old” disciplinary
paradigm based on separation, physical mass containment, and restriction
of the freedom of movement. Most of the times control and discipline
coexist ad reinforce each other; sometimes they seem to collide. This is
due to a variety of far-reaching factors and transformations occurring
in the productive sphere.

As a matter of fact, it is the very structure of the network society,
with its decentralization of tasks and constant multiplication of
electronic eyes that threatens the opacity of physical and immaterial
bunkers. By looking at the grey areas where control and discipline,
transparency and secrecy, democracy and the state of exception overlap
and collide, Radars and Fences provide a cross-disciplinary platform
whereby researchers, artists, journalists, filmmakers, and activists can
negotiate new and critical positions.

(Extended rationale in the next post)

Conference Schedule

Thursday, March 6, 5:00-8:30pm
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
Vanderbilt Hall
Room 206

5:00 – 5:15 pm Welcome

* Ted Magder, NYU Council for Media & Culture; Chair, Department of
Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU Steinhardt

5:15 – 5:30 pm Conference Overview

* Marco Deseriis, doctoral candidate, Department of Media, Culture, and
Communication, NYU Steinhardt

5:30 - 8:00 pm Panel: The Military between Transparency and Secrecy

Speakers:

James DerDerian, Director of the Global Security Program, Watson Institute, Brown University
The Desert of the Real, the Simulacrum of War, and the
Weaponization of Culture


Trevor Paglen, Artist and experimental geographer, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley
Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere


John Sifton, Human rights attorney, Executive Director of One World Research
Why the CIA Secret Prisons Were not Really Secret


This panel is moderated by prof. Stephen Duncombe, NYU Council for Media & Culture; Gallatin School, NYU

8:00 - 8:30 pm Reception

Friday, March 7, 10:00-2:00 pm
NYU Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square South
Room 808

10:00 am – 1:00 pm Panel: Identification Protocols, Net Wars and the Struggle over the Securitization of the Internet

Speakers:

David Lyon, Director of the Surveillance Project, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
Stretched Screens: Ubiquity, Interoperability and Identification Protocols


Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU.
Old and New Net Wars over Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$


Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab and the OpenNet Initiative, University of Toronto.
The New Geopolitics of the Internet




This panel is moderated by Becky Lentz, Visiting Scholar, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU.

1:30 – 2:00 pm Closing Remarks & Reception

This conference is being coordinated by doctoral candidate Marco Deseriis as
part of a grant awarded by the NYU Council for Media and Culture with
assistance provided by the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and the Information Law Institute.

***

Please RSVP on the Council for Media & Culture web site

Radars and fences, satellites and walls, networks and bunkers. Two
different sets of technologies confront us: the former are transparent,
discreet, mobile, and selective; the latter are opaque, conspicuous,
immobile, and non-discriminating. The former epitomize the modulating
and flexible character of what Gilles Deleuze termed the “societies of
control” while the latter embody the “old” disciplinary paradigm based
on separation, physical mass containment, and restriction of the freedom
of movement. Most of the times control and discipline coexist and
reinforce each other; sometimes they seem to collide. This is due to a
variety of far-reaching factors and transformations occurred in the
productive sphere over the last three decades.

If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of ICT seemed to
foretell, if only for a while, the decline of disciplinary apparatuses,
the new millennium presents us with an extremely functional “return” of
dividing and enclosing technologies – from the U.S.-Mexico fence and
Israel-Palestine wall to the steady growth of the U.S. prison-industrial
system. In other words, besides that such a "return" may be in fact a
process of constant strengthening, the Foucaultian disciplinary paradigm
and the Deleuzian control societies are coming to form a mesh, where
individualized immaterial control and physical mass containment of the
workforce seem perfectly integrated and complementary.

However, if in authoritarian states such as China and Iran such
integration of discipline and control needs little justification in
ideological terms (at least on the inside), in the West such a
co-existence is not frictionless. During the Cold War, the emerging
rhetoric of transparency and accountability associated with control
societies had primarily a propagandistic function against the opacity
and closeness of real socialism. But with the rise of the network
society, transparency has increasingly become a necessary and material
component of open workflows, management methods, and governance. At the
same time though, an excess of openness puts at risk industrial secrets,
military R&D, intellectual property assets, state secrets, and political
careers.

To be sure, in the control societies access to information is restricted
and modulated by codes and passwords. However, a number of notable
examples – from the Abu Ghraib scandal to the leaking of the Windows
source code, from the unveiling of the NSA eavesdropping program to the
CIA extraordinary renditions – show how hard it is for governments and
corporations to obfuscate and seclude information from public scrutiny.
And yet, there are areas of public life that formidably resist the
rhetoric of transparency: around the 10 per cent of the DoD budget is
allocated to the so-called “black programs,” top-secret military
programs whose very existence and name is unacknowledged by the
government; immigrants’ detention facilities are situated in the
remotest regions; and biotech research is highly protected in spite of
its far-reaching consequences on the ecosystem and human life.

On the other hand, it is the very structure of the network society, with its
decentralization of tasks and constant multiplication of electronic eyes
that threatens the opacity of physical and immaterial bunkers. By
looking at the grey areas where control and discipline, transparency and
secrecy, democracy and the state of exception overlap and collide,
Radars and Fences provide a cross-disciplinary and experimental platform
whereby researchers, artists, journalists, and activists can negotiate
new and critical positions.