INTERFACE
2006-2007 John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar

Read more about the Fellows and their research here.

Co-convened by Timothy Lenoir and Priscilla Wald

About the Topic:

A powerful desire shaping contemporary culture for more than a decade has been fusing the digital and the physical. Many fields are being vastly transformed as digital dreams are being sutured to physical reality. Architecture and surgery are just two among the many domains being transformed by the integration of robotics, virtual reality, modeling and simulation, so that problems of surgery, for instance, are increasingly being redefined as interface problems. Even museums, the solid repositories for the real, are being reformatted as mobile interactive sites through the introduction of powerful GPS-enabled handheld systems that remove the museum walls and link layers of data on the history and culture of a particular physical site. Soon with the introduction of radio frequency id-tagging and next-generation smart design materials, the possibilities of interfacing digitally with the physical world will be extended by the added capability of being able to “surf reality” with a web browser.

This is the beginning of the era of the “posthuman” where digital information takes precedence over material instantiation and the body becomes a prosthesis we learn to manipulate and extend through the integration of cybernetic components. As physical embodiment fuses with digital simulation, the distinction between biological organism and programmed artifact, human and non-human, starts to blur. In this technological transformation of physicality, the fabric of sociality is raised into question. Formations of nation, community, family, and culture are both affected by, and affect the digitalizing of biology across the globe. What is allowed or encouraged in one setting may be resisted or outlawed—whether by custom, ethics, religion, state policy—in another. This is also an age, however, of transnational traffic and global migrations of multiple kinds where bodies and technologies are constantly crossing borders. Inspiring transnational social movements but also global organ trade, this new era of the “posthuman” must be investigated from a wide range of perspectives including capitalism, culture, gender, and race.

The FHI seminar for 2006-07 will explore the interfaces and cultural relays attempting to join the domains at work in this so-called era of the posthuman. Our goal in the seminar is to engage these new interfaces, experiment with them, and imagine ways in which they are shaping (or could) the humanities and may be harnessed to promote humanistic objectives. The seminar will be organized in terms of three thematic threads: gaming environments and game-based learning; prospects for new narratives; and explorations of new interfaces of the future—machine/brain interfaces and neuroaesthetics. We intend to combine practical experience and application with theoretical engagement and to consider, in the process, the implications for humanistic inquiry of this new terrain.

The project of combining practical and theoretical will include collaboration with Duke's Visualization Lab which will offer an opportunity for humanists and social scientists to work with computer scientists in developing new methods, applications, and software for 3-D sensor spaces and virtual reality environments, both for on-going research projects and as experiments in future pedagogical applications. We are especially seeking off-site HASTAC partners for a range of distance collaborations, experiments, and interactions to be developed over the course of the next year. We hope to publish our papers on the HASTAC website and plan to submit at least one project for consideration to Vectors.

About the Co-Conveners:

Timothy Lenoir

Tim Lenoir is the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society at Duke University. He has published several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present. His more recent work has focused on the introduction of computers into biomedical research from the early 1960s to the present, particularly the development of computer graphics, medical visualization technology, the development of virtual reality and its applications in surgery and other fields. Lenoir has also been engaged in constructing online digital libraries for a number of projects, including an archive on the history of Silicon Valley. Two recent projects include a web documentary project to document the history of bioinformatics funded by the Bern Dibner and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and “How They Got Game,” a history of interactive simulation and video games. With economists Nathan Rosenberg, Henry Rowen, and Brent Goldfarb he has just completed a collaborative study for Stanford University on Stanford's historical relationship to Silicon Valley entitled, Inventing the Entrepreneurial Region: Stanford and the Co-Evolution of Silicon Valley. In support of these projects, Lenoir has developed software tools for interactive web-based collaboration. In this connection he is currently engaged with colleagues at UC Santa Barbara in developing the NSF-supported Center for Nanotechnology in Society, where he contributes to the effort to document the history, societal, and ethical implications of bionanotechnology.

Priscilla Wald

Priscilla Wald is Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University. She teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries. She specializes in questions involving the intersections among the law, literature, science and medicine. Her current book-length projects address global health, social justice and the concept of “emerging infections” and genomics and the idea of human diversity. She is interested in how collaborations among scholars from science, medicine, and literature can facilitate a greater understanding of all three fields. Wald has been active in developing working groups and curricula that bring the humanities, sciences, and social sciences into conversation to study contemporary issues of common concern. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke University Press, 1995) and Contagion: Cultures, Carriers, and the Epidemiology of Belonging (forthcoming, Duke University Press). She is also associate editor of American Literature as well as on the Advisory Committee of the PMLA and the editorial board of Literature and Medicine.

Arts and Sciences Fellows:

Anne Allison, Professor and Chair, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English
Güven Güzeldere, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and of Neurobiology
Andrew Janiak, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Robert Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English
Kristine Stiles, Professor of Art and Art History

Library Fellow:

Paolo Mangiafico, Digital Projects Consultant, Academic Technology and Instructional Services, Duke University Libraries

Research Fellows:

Marilyn Lombardi, Consultant, Administration-Infrastructure System, Office of Information Technology
Rachael Brady, Research Scientist, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mark Olson, Director, New Media and Information Technologies, John Hope Franklin Center

Postdoctoral Fellow:

Orit Halpern, Ph.D. ( History of Science), Harvard University, 2006

Graduate Fellows:

David Un-Hsien Liu, Religion
Jennifer Rhee, Literature
Mitali Routh, Art, Art History, and Visual Studies

 

Interface Seminar Fellows at work (from left to right: Robert Mitchell, Jennifer Rhee, Mitali Routh, and David Liu).