TECHNOMORPHICA

Title: Technomorphica
Editors:  Joke Brouwer, Carla Hoekendijk
Issued: 1997
Genre: Interdisciplinary theory
Language: Dutch, English
Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color
Pages: 368
Dimensions: 16 x 23 cm
ISBN/EAN: 90-6617-186-3
 
Design: Joke Brouwer
 
 
Collection of essays on the merging of the biological with the technological.

With: Louis Bec, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Stefaan Decostere, Manuel DeLanda, Mark Dery, Jozef Keulartz, Knowbotic Research, Detlef Linke, Humberto Maturana, Wim Nijenhuis, Lars Spuybroek, Stelarc, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Paul Virilio.

Will technomorphization – the reorganization of the organic based on the intelligent machine model – become the dominant process of our age? Has evolution entered a technological scientific phase in which humans no longer develop in natural ways, in which the human body instead adapts itself to the parameters of a technological era?

In this book, fourteen internationally acclaimed authors give their views on this blurring of borders and the fusion of the biological with the technological. It offers ideas on angels and robots, viruses and mad cows, a world where machines are anthromorphized and humans technomorphized. If the glare of our monitors is all that illuminates us, is it time to build a museum for the sun?

“A body capable of incorporating movement that from moment to moment would be a pure machinic motion performed with neither memory nor desire ...”

Essays

• Stelarc: Parasite Visions
• Manuel Delanda: The Machinic Phylum
• Knowbotic Research: The Urban as Field of Action
• Gerburg Treusch-Dieter: Caught in the Net; from Limb-Machine to Cyborg
• Wim Nijenhuis: Assault and Absence
• Mark Dery: An extremely Complicated Phenomenon of a Very Brief Duration Ending in Destruction: The 20th Century as Slow-Motion Car Crash
• Kertin Dautenhahn: Life, Intelligence and other Dangerous Constructions of Mind and Matter
• Detlef Linke: Theoids, Androids and Clonoids
• Stefaan Decostere: Angels in Hell – Benjamin in Cyber
• Louis Bec: Squids, Elements of Technozoosemiotics
• Jozef Keulartz: Primitive Imagination in Mechanical Metaphors
• Paul Virilio: The Museum of the Sun
• Lars Spuybroek: Motor Geometry
• Humberto Maturana: Metadesign