May 1, Michael Thaler: "Writing Medical Ethics: Timing is Everything" abstract: According to Aristotle, "Matters of practical conduct have nothing invariable about them, any more than matters of health. This is true of ethics in general, and it is true even more of moral issues arising in particular cases. They require human beings to consider what is appropriate to specific circumstances and to specific occasions..." (Nicomachean Ethics). I shall discuss how two "codes" of medical ethics emerged from local contingencies separated by 157 years. The author in each case responded to "matters of practical conduct" by writing a set of rules intended to solve an institutional crisis precipitated by contested professional "turf" in a given place at a particular moment. Much later, each local code was adopted by the larger culture, actually becoming invariable until that culture was radically transformed . The earlier code spelled out rules of professional conduct for dealing with other physicians (etiquette) in a Manchester, England hospital in 1794, and was adopted by the AMA as its official "Code of Ethics" in 1847; the second was conceived in San Francisco in 1951 as a strategy to deflect accusations of "harmful" behavior toward patients made by one group of physicians against another. The second set of rules replaced the first in the U.S. by the early 1980's, i.e. after nearly 150 years, and was adapted to regulate moral practice in all relations with patients (biomedical ethics). Thus, each set of"appropriate" responses to specific circumstances became the standard of ethical conduct for the entire culture, reflecting the embeddedness of professional behavior in the social milieu and hence its variability despite rituals like the Hippocratic oath. Aristotle was right, timing is everything (what else is new?). What made the old code obsolete, or rather how was the larger culture transformed? In a word, by Science. April 10, Mark Hansen: "Affect as Interface: Confronting the 'Digital-Facial-Image'" abstract: Professor Hansen's talk will cover material from his new book, Framing the Digital-Image: Embodiment and the New Media Aesthetic, which develops concrete interpretations of particular experimental new media artworks that illustrate various aspects of the correlation of new media and human embodiment at stake in the process of digitization. The book weaves together three separate, but deeply intertwined stories: 1) how the image comes to encompass the entire process of its own embodied formation, what may be called the "digital-image"; 2) how the body acquires a newly specified function within the regime of the digital-image, namely the function of filtering information in order to create images; and 3) how this very function of the body gives rise to an affective or haptic supplement to the act of perceiving the image. The talk focuses on various new media artworks that position the image of the face as interface between the embodied viewer-participant and the domain of digital data. In this function, the digital facial image offers an alternative to the profoundly impoverished, yet predominant model of the Human-Computer-Interface (HCI): whereas the HCI functions precisely by reducing the wide bandwidth of embodied human expressivity to a fixed repertoire of functions and icons, the digital facial image opens up possibilitities for a rich affective dimension in the interface between body and information. This alternative is theoretically positioned by opposing it to the process Deleuze and Guattari describe as "facialization," that is the recoding of the body on the face. A draft of the Introduction to his book, now called "Framing the Digital-Image: Embodiment and the New Media Aesthetic." He urges interested parties to read the first 10 pages where he lays out the stakes of the project in (he what he hopes to be) fairly accessible terms. March 13th, Bruce Clark: Professor Clarke specializes in Romantic and modernist literature in relation to science and technology studies, media theory, and systems theory.šHe is director of the Center for the Interaction of the Arts and Sciences and graduate advisor for TTU's Comparative Literature program. He has authored numerous books and articles including Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001) ; Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) šand edited šThe Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990). Professor Clarke's webpage can be found at http://english.ttu.edu/clarke/clarke.htm paper titled:Strong Constructivism: Modernity and Complexity in Science Studies and Systems Theory In this paper I compare and contrast two modes of contemporary constructivism, the "heterogeneous constructivism" developed by Bruno Latour and his colleagues in science and technology studies, and the systems-theoretical constructivism developed by Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Luhmann in what is sometimes called "second-order cybernetics".šI bring Latour and Luhmann together especially on the topic of modernity, contrasting the former's notion of "nonmodernity" with the latter's description of modernity as hypercomplexity. šIn the process I compare Latour's idea of the "hybrid" collective of human and nonhuman agents with Luhmann's discourse on the paradoxicality of distinctions. šI conclude that Latour's turn towards nonmodernity can be redescribed as an instance of what Luhmann calls "second-order observation". šReferring to Luhmann's late remarks on the epistemology of ignorance, I pose (without answering) the question of what still cannot be seen from the viewpoint of nonmodernity - that is, what would be the environment constituted by nonmodernity as a social system? March 6th, Niklas Damiris, visiting scholar at Stanford, is a theoretical physicist turned economic philosopher. He is a member of the Research Laborarory of Monetary Economics at the Swiss Centre for Banking Studies. He is also a consulting advisor to the Dean of Humanities at UC-Santa Cruz, and an adjunct associate professor at the Copenhagen business School. He is writing a book on money and intellectual property rights. In 1999 he participated in the Stanford Presidential Symposium on: the Social Sciences, Law and Humanities where he gave a talk entitled " Money, Quantum and the Gift". For several years he was a research affiliate at Xerox-PARC working on the foundations of cognitive science, and prior to that he did post-doctoral work at Stanford in Neuroscience. paper titled: Electronic Money, Financial Intangibles, Virtual reality Reflections on the State of the New Economy As the Writing Science seminar's year long theme is on the topic of virtuality, I want to show how this concern bears on the ubiquitous, yet changing role of money and finance in society today. My aim is to point to elective affinities between the monetary and the virtual. My presentation will start with a historical introduction to Banking practices (their emergence, 'logic' and problems), and proceed to a conceptually rigorous but mathematically non-technical discussion of currency and stock speculation, accounting intangibles, and information-trading. These are all activities typically presented and analyzed in 'highly mathematical terms ( hence the view of financeers as 'Rocket-scientists'), and viewed as detached from the productive work in organizations people associate with business and the economy proper. Instead, I will argue that these 'abstract monetary phenomena' becoming pervasive thanks to electronic technology are, despite their counterintuitive character, helpful for understanding the money driven society we currently are all part of, like it or not. At the very least, by the end of my presentation, I hope attendees will have a clearer picture of a complex state of affairs, and can begin to think for themselves about the differences and similarities between the new information-based economy and the old industrial one. TUESDAY, February 12th (same time, same place) by our old friend and supporter Sha Xin Wei, who is Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication and Culture and Adjunct Faculty in Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, Georgia Tech. (xinwei@lcc.gatech.edu). He has given us the following title: "Why Didn't I Take the Blue Pill?" -- Responsive Mediaspace as an Experiment in Writing and Agency http://titanium.lcc.gatech.edu/tgarden/ When chip manufacturers advertise their ubiquity in our built environment, we glimpse how computation mediates and suffuses our everyday lives. In this sense there's a computational substrate to much of our everyday activity. Add to this the ever-growing pervasiveness of projected image and sound, and we have the elements of a media space resonating to our activity, registered in our buildings and on our instrumented bodies. But how would we inhabit and communicate in such potentially dense, mutating, responsive media spaces? In light of such technology, we re-examine questions about writing, play and agency. Questions such as: How would a person learn over time to make sense of a space richly populated by responsive media, without having to articulate that acquired knowledge in explicit language? How would a person learn to improvise gestures in a continuous space? How would we write? And how would we do this collectively? Over six months, a consortium of researchers, artists and engineers supported by institutions in Europe, Canada and the US, built a laboratory responsive media space called TG2001. Drawing upon experimental theater and performance, electronic music, live experimental video, and mathematical physics, we have begun to approach questions of writing and distributed agency in the concrete setting of a playful media space. I will report on our work to date from the internalist perspective of an author and researcher, but also from the perspective of a critic of new models for doing technoscientific research and cultural engineering. Wednesday, January 30th Malinda M. Lo "Dana Scully Uncovered: X-Files Fan Fiction and the Posthuman Body." "X-Files" fans, also known as "X-philes," come from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from conspiracy enthusiasts to former Star Trek fans. My research has focused on a specific group of fans: those who engage in the practice of fan fiction writing; i.e., writing stories featuring the characters and situations of "The X-Files." This paper will explore how fans, through fan fiction, engage with the character of Dana Scully. I will examine several continuing narrative themes from "The X-Files" that focus on the character of Special Agent Scully, and fan reaction to those themes as expressed in fan fiction. Those themes include fears about disease, specifically cancer; the ambiguous representation of Scully's sexuality; and the pervasive anxiety about reproduction that has peaked this year in the eighth season narrative arc of Scully's pregnancy.