[csaa-forum] Perth events in the next two weeks

[Perdita Phillips]

Humanities Visiting Fellow Dr Colin Milburn

3-12 February 2010

We are pleased to announce the following talks, workshop and seminar  
associated with the Humanities Visiting Fellow Dr Colin Milburn.


Colin Milburn is a professor of English and a member of the Science &  
Technology Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. His  
research focuses on the cultural relations between literature,  
science, and technology. His interests include science fiction; gothic  
horror; the history of biology; the history of physics; comic books,  
film, gaming, virtual worlds and new media; nanotechnology; and  
posthumanism. Having been trained as a historian of science, a  
literary theorist, and a molecular biologist, he is particularly  
interested in the ways that laboratory research and popular media  
influence each other.  He has written about the social imagination of  
nanotechnology in his book Nanovision: Engineering the Future (Duke  
University Press, 2008).

Nanovision: Engineering the Future by Colin Milburn

"There has been so much hype and controversy surrounding nanotech that  
it has been hard to figure out what it really is or might become. This  
wonderful book spectacularly clarifies matters, providing the new  
field with its history and with a paradigm that allows us to judge its  
present situation and whatever future may emerge. That Colin Milburn  
is also often wickedly funny is much appreciated, and a very  
appropriate response to nanotech's constant evocations of paradise or  
apocalypse." Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy

He is currently completing a new book about the convergence of video  
games and the molecular sciences, entitled Mondo Nano: Fun and Games  
in the World of Digital Matter. Colin Milburn joined the UC Davis  
faculty in 2005. He is also affiliated with the programs in Cultural  
Studies, Film Studies, and Critical Theory.


Talks

Keynote: Tempest in a Teapot: Nanotechnology at Play

at the 'art in the age of nanotechnology' symposium 'strange futures:  
collaborations that make nano-art' -- This is a Must-See event for  
Perthites this Sunday.

Location: John Curtin Art Gallery, Curtin University

Date and time of symposium: 9:45 to 4:00 Sunday 7 February

RSVP: gallery at curtin.edu.au or call 9266 4155.

Please see further details at John Curtin Gallery events http://johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au/exhibitions/forums08.cfm


Popular mythology imagines the nano laboratory as a kind of island, an  
insular space in which dreams become reality. This talk will voyage  
between various nano labs both real and fictional (and a few somewhere  
in between) to show how the metaphorical shaping of laboratory space  
transforms the content of scientific research. By examining the  
proliferation of islands inside the nano lab (for example, in studies  
of “nano-island lithography” and “nano-island  dynamics”), we will  
begin to see how the long cultural history of scientific islands  
situates the laboratory experiment as a mode of play. In this manner,  
the idealized insularity of the laboratory becomes the very condition  
for productive exchanges between science and culture, experiment and  
fantasy …or indeed, nanotechnology and art.


Title: Molecular Toys

Location: School of Design and Art, Room 203:101 Curtin University

Date and time: 12:15 –1:15 Thursday 11 February

In the molecular sciences today, projects to design and engineer  
functional molecular machines have been widely characterized by  
playfulness, whimsy, and humorous tinkering. This talk will examine  
the history of toy culture in the molecular sciences, focusing on  
three case studies that illustrate the conceptual breakthroughs and  
futuristic visions newly animated by the hands-on construction of  
nanoscale playthings.


Title: Nanocity and the Globalisation of Speculative Science

Location: SymbioticA - The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts,  
Room 228, Level 2, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, The University  
of Western Australia

Date and time: 3:30 pm Friday 12 February

Talk details will be updated here: http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/friday_afternoons

In 2006, Sabeer Bhatia, the co-founder of the Hotmail Corporation,  
announced an ambitious plan to build a futuristic city on 11,000 acres  
of farmland in northern India. Dubbed “Nanocity,” the imagined urban  
centre would be a rationally designed infrastructure for the support  
and cultivation of cutting-edge technosciences: a massive, self- 
contained engine of high-tech knowledge production. As a kind of  
calculated improvement on Silicon Valley, which opened up the age of  
computation, Nanocity aspires to open up the age of nano. Just as  
silicon was the "substrate of the '60s," Bhatia says, the future now  
lies in nanotechnology: "Nanotechnology sits at the confluence of a  
number of areas of research, not just computing... It's material  
science, biotechnology, pharmaceutical research and nanotechnology  
itself." To be sure, Nanocity is a fiction, a dream—at least for the  
moment. For even though the groundwork is already underway for the  
multi-billion-dollar project, in every meaningful way Nanocity is  
built on nothing but the logic of scientific speculation. This talk  
will examine Nanocity as a speculative media object: a bundle of  
design diagrams, digital media, publicity statements, financial plans,  
research proposals, and scientific promises. In this way, the talk  
will take up a theoretical discussion of citizenship and everyday life  
in a time when speculative urbanism, speculative fiction, and  
speculative science converge and become indistinguishable—a mode of  
being in the world that we might call “nanopolitanism.”

Workshop:

Title: The Posthumanities: New Adventures in Interdisciplinarity

Location: School of Art and Design Room 202:117, Curtin University

Date and time: 2-4 pm Thursday 11 February

RSVP essential: Please contact P.Phillips at curtin.edu.au by 8 February  
to register your interest and for access to reading materials prior to  
the workshop.

This workshop will introduce the emerging field of the  
"posthumanities," presenting various ways in which the research  
methodologies of the humanities can be brought together with the  
natural sciences and the social sciences to address contemporary  
technoculture. Workshop participants will practice formulating  
research questions that productively cross-disciplinary boundaries,  
identifying specific methods or critical traditions relevant to  
postdisciplinary projects, and working collaboratively on short  
writing exercises that focus on communicating postdisciplinary  
research to diverse audiences.

Note: Background materials to be read beforehand will be distributed  
in advance of the workshop.


Dr Milburn will also be attending the forces/magnitudes hands-on  
Atomic Force Microscope workshop 3-5 February 2010 (booked out).




Updates:
Any updates and adjustments to these details will be posted at http://crash.curtin.edu.au/program/ 
. Please check prior to the events.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Dr Perdita Phillips
P.Phillips at curtin.edu.au
interdisciplinary artist

Research Administrator
Centre for Research in Art, Science and Humanity
http://crash.curtin.edu.au/
https://blogs.curtin.edu.au/crash/
http://www.perditaphillips.com/

School of Design and Art
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
GPO Box U 1987 Perth WA 6845

CRICOS Provider Code: 00301J (WA) 02637B (NSW)

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