Mellan litteratur, vetenskap och teknologi

Seminariet "Tes-Antites-Protes" bjuder i samarbete med Glänta in till en kväll med N Katherine Hayles och gästartister.

Hayles kommer att inleda kvällen under rubriken "Computing the Human". Gäster blir Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson (poesi) och Mono Mono (performance).

Det hela äger rum på Pusterviksteatern, Stora Scenen, i Göteborg den 2 september kl 18.00. Entré 30 kr, Gläntaprenumeranter gratis.

N Katherine Hayles är professor i engelska och Media Arts vid UCLA. Hon är sedan länge sysselsatt med att undersöka gränssnitten mellan litteratur, vetenskap och teknologi och hon är en av de ledande teoretikerna inom områden som posthumanism och elektronisk textualitet. Föredraget hålls på engelska.

"Computing the Human": Mathematician Stephan Wolfram has recently proposed that many different kinds of complex systems, including human thought and action, can be modeled using cellular automata. These very simple computational systems have demonstrated that they are capable of generating complex patterns using simple rules. According to physicist Ed Fredkin, cellular automata underlie physical reality on a subatomic level; in his view, nature itself is software running on a Universal Computer.

This presentation will look critically at these claims, asking whether we should consider them as physical models or as over-determined metaphors that would inevitably emerge in a historical period when computation is pervasive. This issue, and its proliferating implications, will be explored through Greg Egan's print novel Permutation City, which imagines a world in which it is possible to simulate a person's consciousness inside a computer, creating a Copy that has all the personality and memories of the original.

För den som vill höra mer av Hayles finns redan dagen innan ovanstående arrangemang en möjlighet att lyssna på ett annat föredrag: "The Changing Form of the Print Novel" – ett samarrangemang med engelska och litteraturvetenskapliga institutionerna vid Göteborgs unviersitet. Den 1 september alltså, kl 18-20 i Stora hörsalen, Göteborgs universitet.

As the print novel takes its place in a robust media ecology it finds itself in an environment in which the long hegemony of print is giving way to niche markets, with the result that the print novel is challenged to show what it can do in contradistinction to other narrative media forms.

As if in response to this situation, a group of contemporary print novels has emerged that show an increased interest in engaging with the book's material specificities. In particular, they develop strategies that entwine narrative with the expanded resources of the print book considered as a visual as well as a verbal medium.

To illustrate this process, I will discuss a couple of recent novels: Mark Danie¬lew¬ski's House of Leaves and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The different strategies these novels employ, suggest that the novel is remedi¬ating within its own specificities the strategies typical of a wide variety of other media. These novels, that is, appropriate and re-represent in their own expan¬ded forms many other media types.

The dynamic suggests that the novel itself as a form is undergoing the trau¬matic experience of having its traditional territory taken over by the coloni¬zing incursions of other media. These books respond to this trauma by bursts of anxious creativity, thereby changing what it means to be a novel in print.


Publicerad: 2005-08-31

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