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For the first week of discussion at -empyre- on "Bioart: Material,
Practices, Politics" in September, I've invited Robert Mitchell (US) and
Cary Wolfe (US) to address the relation between Bioart and "Vital
Politics." Thanks Robert and Cary for leading the discussion for the first
week of September's -empyre-.
Here is a short bio for Robert and Cary:
Robert Mitchell is Professor of English and Faculty in the Institute of
Genome Sciences and Policy, as well as affiliated faculty in Women's
Studies at Duke University. Mitchell's research focuses on relationships
between literature and the sciences in the Romantic era, as well as
contemporary intersections among information technologies, genetics, and
commerce, especially as these have been played out in the legal, literary,
and artistic spheres. His most recent work has focused on the theory and
practices of experimentation in both the arts and sciences, the history of
vitalism, and the relationship between aesthetics and biological concepts
of population. He has published two monographs--Sympathy and the State in
the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity
(Routledge, 2007) and Bioart and the Vitality of Media (University of
Washington Press, 2010)--and is co-author of the monograph Tissue
Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 2006)
and the DVD-ROM Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (U of
Pennsylvania P, 2008). He is also co-editor of several collections of
essays, including Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003),
Romanticism and Modernity (Routledge, 2011), and Releasing the Image: From
Literature to New Media (Stanford UP, 2011), and co-editor of the book
series "In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science" (University
of Washington Press). His most recent monograph, Experimental Life:
Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, is forthcoming in 2013.
Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and is
Director of The Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University.
Wolfe’s books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American
Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, 2003),
the edited collections Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota,
2003) and (with Branka Arsic) The Other Emerson (Minnesota, 2010), and,
most recently, What Is Posthumanism? (Minnesota, 2010) and Before the Law:
Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago, 2012). He has
also participated in two recent multi-authored collections: Philosophy and
Animal Life (Columbia, 2008), with philosophers Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking,
Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell, and The Death of the Animal : A Dialogue
(Columbia, 2009), with philosophers Paola Cavalierii, Peter Singer, Harlan
Miller, Matthew Calarco, and novelist J. M. Coetzee. He is founding editor
of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press, which
publishes six books per year by noted authors such as Donna Haraway,
Roberto Esposito, Isabelle Stengers, Michel Serres, Vilem Flusser, and many
others. He continues to publish widely in areas such as animal studies and
posthumanism, systems theory and pragmatism, biopolitics and biophilosophy,
and American literature and culture, and he has written numerous pieces on
art, music, architecture, and other kinds of non-literary culture. He is
currently working on a book project to be called Wallace Stevens’ Birds:
The Poetics of Extinction, and, as of July 2012, will be founding director
of a new center at Rice devoted to theoretical study across the disciplines.
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