Wetwares : experiments in postvital living / Richard Doyle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doyle, Richard, 1963-

Series:

Theory out of bounds ; v. 24.

Theory out of bounds ; 24

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artificial life.

Life.

Physical Description:

235 pages ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2003]

Summary:

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. 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, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.

Contents:

Welcome to Wetwares

Representing life for a living

Simflesh, simbones : at play in the artificial life ribotype

Disciplined by the future : the promising bodies of cryonics

"Give me a body, then" : corporeal time-images

"Remains to be seen" : a self-extracting amalgam

Uploading anticipation, becoming silicon

Dot coma : the dead zone of media and the replication of family values

"Take my bone marrow, please" : the community in which we have organs in common

Wetwares ; or, cutting up a few aliens

Sympathy for the alien : informatic ecologies and the proliferation of abduction.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [217]-231) and index.

ISBN:

0816640084

0816640092

OCLC:

51281081