Adam Bencard

Some more ramblings inspired by How We Became Posthuman (other post is here). The interface that was to transform us turned out not to be the human/machine coupling, but instead the human/biology coupling, in which the transformation of biological life inside and outside of us is the key. The Technicolor wonder of the man-as-machine has […]

Part of my summer reading has been N. Katherine Hayles very interesting and stimulating book, How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The book details the rise of the informational logic of life from the rise of the cybernetic paradigm in the late 1940s and onwards. Hayles writes the book […]

I have had a paper accepted for the annual joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy. Here is the abstract: Molecular being – philosophy between genes and proteins In this paper, I will attempt to connect the sparking wires of post-genomic molecular biology and new materialist philosophy, particularly the […]

The annual joint conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy (SEP/FEP) is coming up soon. The call for papers (available here) was held under the title “Philosophy & …” and urged contributors to submit contributions that explore the limits of what can be placed together with, and within, the category […]

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish […]

Perhaps the recent surge towards objects and materiality is connected to a deep restructuring of our collective unconsciousness tied to a sense of ‘waking up inside an object’, as philosopher and blogger Timothy Morton writes about here? Humans no longer live in a “world” or in an “environment,” and certainly not in “nature.” Global warming […]

For those who are interested in new materialist and object-oriented philosophy, the fledgling journal Speculations is a great source for state of the art experimental writing in the speculative realist vein. The second volume has just been released and can be found here. Here is a snippet from the editors introduction, which gives an idea […]

In the introduction New Materialisms – Ontology, Agency, and Politics, another of the recent anthologies on materialism (you can read about some of the other here and here), editors Diana Coole and Samantha Frost discuss the notion of a ‘critical materialism’. Building on social constructionist arguments, they work to integrate the critical approach of post-structuralists […]

The deluge of publications on the material turn and the new materialism continues. I wrote about two anthologies last week, and now Oxford University Press have a new anthology out, The Oxford Companion to Material Studies. The introductory chapter can be read here. Interestingly, the editors Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, take a somewhat […]

Hot on the heels of Museum Materialities comes another new anthology on museums studies, objects and materiality. It is entitled The Thing About Museums – Objects and Experience, Representations and Contestations and is available for pre-order on Amazon with a publishing date in September. The table of contents looks very promising and can be seen […]

In the process of selecting objects for a new exhibition, I (re)discovered this room: It is located beneath the roof of the museum, and contains, as the picture shows, literally hundreds of small glass vials with various chemical labels. Most are empty, but a few still has the original contents. Aside from being a treasure […]

The University of Copenhagen, and specifically the Faculty for Health Sciences, is in the midst of a huge scandal. The details of the case about wrongdoings of the fallen star brain researcher Milena Penkowa are too many (and juicy) to recount here, but suffice it to say that it has put more science in the […]