[Sci-tech-public] STEFAN HELMRICH - CMS Colloquium Thursday 10/2/08/ 2-105/ 5PM/ Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology

[meinbres]

    Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:46:18 -0400
    From: Generoso Fierro <generoso at MIT.EDU>

CMS COLLOQUIUM

WHEN: THURSDAY 10.02.08 | 5-7 PM |

WHERE: 2-105

Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology
Stefan Helmreich
This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to
the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person
submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the
dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into
liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an
anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a
submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense
of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a
medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of
sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses - scientific, everyday,
and anthropological - of embodied sonic presence. Stefan Helmreich is an
anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the
computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial
Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work
in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial
Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in
the limits of "life" as an analytical category for contemporary biology.

Best,
Generoso Fierro
CMS @ MIT

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