Genetically Modified Storytelling: Can Science Fiction Prognosticate Our Biotech Future?

Classes will be held Tuesdays at 7:30pm, March 6, 13, 20.

Never before attempted! Genspace will cross a literature course on science fiction with an intro to biotech. Get ready. It’s hands on.

Sci-fi writers write our future. Jules Verne gives us Captain Nemo and a century later missile-loaded submarines troll the seas. Gene Roddenberry gives us Star Trek in 1964, and just five years later the Apollo 11 mission brings man to the moon. William Gibson gives us Cyberpunk and 20 years later Wikileaks cracks open global diplomacy. So what about biotech. What does scifi predict? Is it the replicants of  Bladerunner? The biopunk megacorporations of The Windup Girl? Maybe it’s this beautiful and quiet story in the New Yorker?

Through short readings over three Tuesday nights we’ll explore the literature, and then use it to examine our biotech future–its ethics, its promise and its price. We’ll then get our hands dirty with experiments that illustrate and explain the science behind the fiction.
Daniel Grushkin writes about the intersection of science, business and culture for a number of science and business magazines, including Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science, Businessweek. He’s a cofounder of Genspace.

Wythe Marschall is the co-author of Suspicious Anatomy, an illustrated book of fake science, and the co-founder of the Hollow Earth Society. He is also a member of Observatory, a prominent art-and-science gallery/events space in Brooklyn. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, 5_Trope, Knock, The Kennesaw Review, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.

A Short Film Screening with Filmmaker and Ecologist Sharon Shattuck

At The Cornelia Street Cafe as part of the BODY AS FUNHOUSE MIRROR series

Sunday, February 26  •  6 PM  •  $10 (includes a drink!)
Presented by Hollow Earth Society and Ted Enik
Originally presented by Morbid Anatomy

Parasites challenges the notions of body, friend, inside, and out. The word “parasite” comes with loads of vile connotations, but in nature, nothing is purely good or evil. In the 27-minute experimental documentary Parasites: A User’s Guide, Shattuck embarks on a journey to decode some of the most misunderstood creatures on earth. The dramatic rise in autoimmune diseases, asthma, and allergies since the turn of the last century has confounded scientists, but some researchers think they have uncovered the key to controlling the skyrocketing rates: tiny parasitic worms called helminths… Through the seeming oxymoron of the “helpful parasite,” Sharon questions the nature of our relationship with parasites—and suggests a new paradigm for the future.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Shattuck and some friends: Radiolab’s Pat Walters, Scientific American’s Ferris Jabr, helminth researcher Dr. P’ng Loke, and two real life “users” of helminthic therapy. Please join us for the event, and if there are more questions for the panel than the performance can accommodate, we’ll move upstairs to the cafe afterwards!

Parasites: A User’s Guide (long trailer) >>

Sharon Shattuck is a producer/director/animator with Sweet Fern Productions, the production company she founded. Her previous experience includes work with the Smithsonian Institute, the Field Museum, NPR’s On the Media, and internships with WNYC’s Radiolab, and the BBC World Service/Stakeholder Forum. She has an undergraduate degree in forest ecology and a graduate degree in documentary and broadcast journalism. Her first film, the short Parasites: A User’s Guide (2010), was an official selection of the Traverse City Film Festival, the Camden International Film Festival, the Michigan Film Festival, and the International Science Film Festival. In addition to her work with Sweet Fern, she is a member of the creative team atWicked Delicate Films.

Parasites: A User’s Guide was presented at Observatory in Brooklyn by Morbid Anatomy in 2010.

***

About the series:

Cornelia Street Cafe and Observatory present a series of Observatory talks in the great borough of Manhattan: BODY AS FUNHOUSE MIRROR: Cultural Reflections On The Human Form. These talks will introduce Observatory to a new audience and give presenters the opportunity to update their work.

Produced by Wythe Marschall and Ted Enik. Originally produced at Observatory by Morbid Anatomy Library’s Joanna Ebenstein. Thanks to our hosts, Cornelia Street Cafe, and our presenters: Amy Herzog, Sharon Shattuck, and Mark Dery.

Check out our art show, Lunation: Art on the Moon, and then trip out to a Moon Phantasmagoria show by VJ Fuzzy Bastard. We’ll also be screening episodes from the Midnight Archive, a show featuring your favorite Observatory masterminds.

Libations will be provided courtesy of La Fée Absinthe.

There will also be:

• The luminous MC Lord Whimsy!
• Stellar giveaways courtesy of Kikkerland!
• Out-of-this-world raffle prizes, including:
• Gift certificates from the scrumptious SweetWolf’s and the delectable Palo Santo!
• Moonrise Perfume from Herbal Alchemy!
• 30 Minute Divination Session with Kathy Biehl - Tarot or Astrology – your choice!
• Audiobooks from Hachette!
• Occult Book Set including an autographed copy of Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America (Bantam), and Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Tarcher/Penguin)!
• Abraxas International Journal of Esoteric Studies with accompanying occult music CD!
• Lunavision Ritual Tea Set from Rebis Remedies!

And so! much! more!  We look forward to seeing you there.

IV. Is Poststructuralism Forever?

One thing that is likely to advance Baudrillard’s writings further into the future is the seeming permanence in theory of what we might term a post structural condition. While some will continue to ignore the loss of faith in capital “T” Truth”, capital “M” Meaning, and a capital “R” Real, most theorists have come to accept that truth, meaning, and the real (and here we are especially indebted to Baudrillard), exist only as restricted (non universal) concepts which each of us encounter along our local and restricted horizons. In this, Baudrillard has contributed a series of concepts, as have other poststructuralist thinkers, which may well assure the permanence of their own relevance. From the most radical contemporary perspective it seems unlikely that we are to pass out of our post structural condition anytime soon. If we ever do pass beyond it then thinkers like Baudrillard will most likely lose a good deal of relevance. Still, the likes of Barthes and Baudrillard will probably be remembered for their place in advancing a position in response to 1) the intolerable state of affairs in their own time and, 2) a universe which is completely indifferent to humans and their thoughts.

I love every version of “Is X forever?” or “Are we going to be Y-ing forever?” These questions always get me, always force me to pause and think. (No, of course not; Cthulhu/et al will come to destroy us, or we will destroy ourselves, or the oil will rise up and finally consume our food–water base, long before. Universe = indifferent. Still, fun to ask.)

Questions of forever, esp. as re great thinkers, only highlight the problems of becoming-thinker. You can’t force yourself, despite craft and care, into the position of transdiscursivity, discourse-genesis, paradigm-shift. You can only do what you do, and do it well, and (key point) have fun! I honestly think Baudrillard had fun. But then, I’m a big fan of his, as well as Dr. Coulter’s. Good article.

Also, this one—”Jean Baudrillard’s Karl Marx – Productivist Ideology, And The Future of the Left”—is even better >>

LUNATION: Art on the Moon

Opening Party: Saturday, January 7th, 7–10 PM, FREE

Artists and scientists have always been attracted to the moon…
Our closest celestial neighbor, the earth’s little sister, the moon creates the tides and illuminates the woods at night. For centuries, humanity believed the moon provided a key into the invisible realm: it called out the beast within us, freeing us to act as wolves, to run, to dance, to chant—and sometimes (as in Duncan Jones’ Moon) to split in two, to find our double, our changeling moon-self.

Is the moon home to life? Today we know it isn’t, but even as of 1830, speculation was rampant that the moon was inhabited by Christianized bat-people who worshiped in great ziggurats. (See The Sun and the Moon by Observatory alumnus Matthew Goodman for details.) Still, life comes to the moon. We know the moon contains frozen water, and we dream of using it as our jumping-off point for visiting even more alien vistas.

Down here, despite all the prowess and nuance of our latest telescopes, earthlings still look up naked-eyed with excitement at the full moon. Lovers and children gaze up at its slowly blinking façade in mute wonder. Artists portray the moon as a source of danger and power, and latter-day sorceresses and men of magic call up to that heavenly lamp, seeking to transcend the ordinary night. For them, the old myths have not changed so much: the moon is still a secret mirror, showing in pale light how the familiar contains always an element of the unexpected…

Artists Included

• Grace Baxter
• Jesse Bransford
• Susan Crawford
• Noah Doely
• Joanna Ebenstein
• Theo Ellsworth
• Michelle Enemark
• Theodore Enik
• Jesse Gelaznik
• Ethan Gould
• Dr. Gary Greenberg
• Maria Liebana
• Chad Merritt
• Heidi Neilson
• G.F. Newland
• Rebeca Olguín
• Kathryn Pierce
• Lado Pochkhua
• Dylan Thuras
• Binky Walker
• James Walsh
• Julianne Zaleta

LUNATION Dates to Save:

• Sat., Jan. 7 – LUNATION opening! Come drink wine with us and celebrate the many phases/faces of the moon—including ones you’ve never seen before
• Sat., Jan. 22 – Moon Magick workshop presented by Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile
• Sat., Feb. 18 – 3rd Anniversary Observatory Fundraiser Party: Help support your favorite interdisciplinarian art, science, & occult event space!

We presented a short retrospective on the Society and fielded questions about our possible collaborations within Elsewhere. Ethan wore a helmet, just in case.

Elsewhere is a fantastic “living museum” in Greensboro, North Carolina, that Ethan and I have been invited to work with next spring. We recently went down to check it out, and here are just a few iPhone images (hopefully Ethan will supply much better photos soon) of the constantly morphing gallery-museum-organism that is Elsewhere. The space is absolutely amazing.

"The Alone Zone." Yes—it's a room eating a small house.

Every living museum needs a baby cyclone...

Chocolate distribution system, built in two days.

Trypophobia-inducing plush-toys-in-plush-seedpods tree.

Also, “lady opportunity” is hipster code for receiving a clandestine message via pneumatic tube outside of the local microbrewery from the Jaguar Lady to don a peaked cap and American Apparel jodhpurs and meet at either the potash docks or the secret entrance behind the unwitting constabulary to receive coy glances, furtive glimpses of a silk kimono under a heavy greatcoat, and the promise of future canoodling in exchange for blueprints to planned Occidental megastructure-building apparatuses such as the Fabvershamsher Device.

History of the Grecian Urn

Abridged

Ut urna poesis.

***

Severe contemplators, observing these lasting relicks,
may think them good monuments of persons past, little advantage to future beings;
and, considering that power which subdueth all things unto itself,
that can resume the scattered atoms, or identify out of anything,
conceive it superfluous to expect a resurrection out of relicks:
but the soul subsisting, other matter, clothed with due accidents,
may salve the individuality.
Yet the saints, we observe, arose from graves and monuments about the holy city.

—Sir Thomas Browne, 1658.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make…

—William Butler Yeats, 1928.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—A Grecian urn, via John Keats, 1819.

Being art, the urn retains its ability to “speak” to all who observe it,
reminding us of our paradoxical dilemma as mortals who exist in finite time.

—Dennis Dean, of Keats, 1997.

I am at first inclined to agree…
But on re-reading the whole Ode,
this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem,
and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it,
or that it is a statement which is untrue.

—Thomas Stearns Eliot, of Keats and his contemplators, 1929.

…Behind the official’s sedan chair as it hurries away
there arises from the already decomposed urn
someone high up who is arbitrarily endorsed
as ruler of the village.
I like almost anything that falls from the sky——Franz Kafka, 1917.

you know, snow, hail—
sleet even, when the sleet is mingled with very white snow.
Or anything that’s white.
Or duck eggs.

Or things that always give you a clean feeling, like
a new metal bowl,or an earthen pottery cup…

—Electra, via Charles Mee, 1992.

FIN.

My man, philosopher Alain Badiou, is profoundly worried on just this point:  In an age of “Enlightened,” progressive, inclusive thinking, do we not simply turn each person into a new potential very special respected market?

Do we not say, if you are a sectarian with group X—any group—that we can now sell you your own image (coffee mugs of X, blog aggregators aggregating criticism around X, cable news shows gently mocking X, X events…)?  Maybe we do; maybe we have; maybe simulation and mass production have made this phenomenon more obvious or worse.

It is true that, in the Middle Ages, pilgrims didn’t necessarily buy the staff of the Crusader (the one “signed by the Cross,” lit., signed by the Sign…).  But still they had to acquire that identifying item, and of course the red cross itself, pinned to the clothing, and whatever national garb—certain pajamas for Bretons, others for Bulgars, still others for the Rhenish, &c.  They made identity choices before capitalism and before (for the most part) media.

What I mean is, have new media altered group identity?  Or, as with every other human process, made it more molecular?  It happens at a lower level.  We are told to identify at a lower level, at a constant level.  We are asked (we ask each others, we ask ourselves) to “update” our “statuses,” our identities, our consciousnesses, for all to see.

We are returning to an era of public consciousness, it is true.  But we are also moving into a new era of constant identity.  Identities can shift radically, so long as they are public.  The new media make this individuation of the identity both easy and “exciting,” meaning subtly mandatory; it is now odd (has the tinge of failed coup, failed elitist gambit, or counter-gambit) to deny real-synchronous “updating” in some format.

This leads to constant marketing—but constantly shifting marketing.  Marketing was always a step behind, in the old days, because it couldn’t necessarily get to you when you were open to being marketed to.  Now, as soon as you send an email about a pet dog, BOOM, marketing about dog food.  But you’re also more likely to have moved on, mentally, and the next word triggers the next BOOM, and the short bursts of marketing lag a step each behind the short bursts of your consciousness.

Again, more molecular—evenly so.  Capitalists and consumer–producers have the same set of tools.  We, in fact, now have the advantage in that we can be exposed to a limitless pool of stimuli, each of which drags in its wake a limitless but always insufficiently filtered (insufficiently supplying) market.

Again, the critic must know this and know it better than the capitalist.  She must abandon a politics that is limited to traditional markets.  Whether or not Badiou’s fears about the limits of liberal thought within capital are true, we have arrived at a new plateau and are not going backward.  Each person IS in fact a market.  The new and old media alike will attempt to make this work for their financiers.  (Are you a New Yorker kind of person?  Or more of a Vice?)

The critic must make a new, human politics out of the fact that the consumer, the artist, and the democrat have these same tools, so that new media is no more or less inherently evil or commodifying than old.  The critic must find the intersections between the media, old and new, the markets of the individual, and the individual’s sense of herself as a human.

And, finally, “old” but actually quite Modern fears of the public will be—must be, but will be—abandoned, and politics must reattach to art and media and life, so that we do not operate unconditionally, as robots in a world of provided roles, but as humans, who choose and discard identities and resist markets and, yes, probably, create markets all the time.  We must return to a public, political (“city,” lit.) world, and to a world of choice.  We return to Time itself—this time, armed with camera phones.

“Obscure” means “covered over,” as in scutum (shield), and sky. Something is there, but you can’t see it. It implies darkness, indistinctness. Yet it is not ambiguous, vague, invisible, necessarily malicious, or even secret.

A seditious secret implies betrayal; something obscure can be merely not-known, or not-seen. The best place to hide information, after all, is in the open (“The Purloined Letter”).

So our Society traces back not to charlatans, mystagogues, and oracles, but to those most openly, outwardly seeking the obscure, turning the shields of nature and time over to inspect what lies beneath.

Openness in this way becomes itself obscure. Our great mystery is not that we are open and prone to opening, but that we are not couching our openness in conformity, on the one hand, or in mystery and religion, on the other.

Our obscurity is a shield, a badge. Those with us recognize it, a fellow-pilgrim’s staff digging into a weary road.

***

From The Correct & Truthsome History of the Hollow Earth Geographers’ Guild & Subsequent Operations Thereupon Founded:

The Society must look back to at best always-murky origins in the geometric horses and bulls of Lascaux, in the bull-jumping of Kreta, the proto-scientific astral rites of Lagash and Ur, and of the Maya ziggurats, and of a thousand hillsides lighted by a thousand fires…