[-empyre-] Cellular Risk

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Thanks so much, Bishnu, for posting these provocative thoughts on cellular risk culture.  It will be interesting to pursue this line of thinking next week when Bill Leiss is our featured guest, who, as you know, has led Canada's discourse around these issues of balancing risk culture between biomedical/ biocapitalist advancement  and social responsibility for what some might prefer to think of as the biodata offsetting new nefarious applications of biopower.

Our community might be interested in revisiting, along these lines, the net.art exhibition of CTHEORY Multimedia that Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and I curated a decade ago on "Tech Flesh: The Promise and Perils of the Human Genome Project": http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue2/issue_main.htm  In this issue, works by 14 international artists probed the network, economics, metaphors, and promises of the newly lauded Human Genome Project.  CTHEORY.net accompanied this issue with a journal issue of essays on the topic.  As I cruise the Tech Flesh issue, I'm now struck by how timely our four curatorial essays remain to be.

What's interesting in view of your post, Bishnu, are the questions we raise about the enigmatic openness "of the aesthetic register" of the gene.  I'm wondering, now ten years later, how you might respond to our then optimistic embrace of mediatic responses to cellular risk as a counterpractice of what was quickly developing as the corporatist profiting of scientific research.

Looking forward to hearing more.

Best,

Tim

Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
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