Wetwares
Experiments in Postvital Living
Richard Doyle
Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality—in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks.
Wetwares looks at new bioinformatic technologies in a manner that is neither celebratory nor condemning, but locates and dwells on the positive potentials for change that adhere to these technologies.
Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism
The mind of the machine, the body suspended in time, organs exchanged, thought computed, genes manipulated, DNA samples abducted by aliens: the terrain between science and speculation, fraught with the possibility of technological and perhaps even evolutionary transformations, is the territory Richard Doyle explores in Wetwares. In a manner at once sober and playful, Doyle maps potentials for human transformation by new ecologies of information in the early twenty-first century.
Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality—in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks. Viewing technologies of immortality—from cryonics to artificial life—as disciplines for welcoming a thoroughly other future, a future of neither capital, god, human, nor organism, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.
$24.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-4009-6
$60.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-4008-9
256 pages, 7 x 10, 2003
Richard Doyle is associate professor of rhetoric and science studies in the Department of English at Penn State University. He is the author of On beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (1997).
The book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.
Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society
Wetwares looks at new bioinformatic technologies in a manner that is neither celebratory nor condemning, but locates and dwells on the positive potentials for change that adhere to these technologies.
Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism
Doyle’s methods of discursive refraction afford some very useful insights.
Mute
CONTENT
Acknowledgments
Chapter 0. Welcome to Wetwares™, N.0 1
Chapter 1. Representing Life for a Living
Chapter 2. Simflesh, Simbones: At Play in the Artificial Life Ribotype
Chapter 3. Disciplined by the Future: The Promising Bodies of Cryonics
Chapter 4. “Give Me a Body, Then”: Corporeal Time-Images
Chapter 5. “Remains to Be Seen”: A Self-Extracting Amalgam
Chapter 6. Uploading Anticipation, Becoming Silicon
Chapter 7. Dot Coma: The Dead Zone of Media and the Replication of Family Values
Chapter 8. “Take My Bone Marrow, Please”: The Community in Which We Have Organs in Common
Chapter 9. Wetwares; or, Cutting Up a Few Aliens
Chapter 10. Sympathy for the Alien: Informatic Ecologies and the Proliferation of Abduction
Notes
Index