Salut Valérie

je viens d'ajouter les liens qu'on devait inclure chaque semaine avec les commentaires des lectures, j'en avais oubliés quelque uns...voila.

Comments on week 11 readings

surveillance and capture are subjects quite interesting and popular these days. With the visible increase in technology everyday there are a considerable amount of people that start asking themselves questions about what it is that we are really useing and what it is that they really do. The computer, which many cannot live without anymore is the most important technology of our century. But this device can also be our enemy. As Phillip Agre mentions in his text " Two model of privacy" some elements of computers penetrate the privacy of our lives, like the web cookies. He also talks about issues like money transfers over the internet and how people were reticent at first. I learned that about 3 billions communications are monitored everyday by the Echelon watch report by the Echelon system looking for potential terrorists. I think that this mentality that the richest countries have, the mentality of being paranoiac all the time is part of a vicious circle they are in which is the reason why they would be subjects to terrorist attacks. everybody needs to calm down....look outside, the spring is coming.
back on tracks: I believe that we all deserve our privacy and that nothing should be monitored, but I have to be realistic and say that without SOME monitoring our world will be completly different today, maybe in a good way but the stakes at play are really too high to try. Like it was said in one of the article, surveillance can be useful for tracking gov money or dangerous substances, things that need to be watched over all the time but cannot physically be done. Electronic tracking can be useful then.

I read all the readings and i know exactly what they are talking about but I have a huge problem focusing and putting thoughts together and form correct and interesting sentences because the sun is shining on my face through the window and it has not happened in a long time...too long....hope you understand


link: http://reflexes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=14

references for oral presentation:


http://www.theexplorationplace.com/eforest/

http://www.enature.com/home/

http://www.tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/

http://www.envirolink.org/

Comments on week 10 readings

I believe Mr Wilson and I have a problem......he never manages to catch my attention. All he does is a quick overview of projects done or being done by artists around a main theme. Well the theme this week is transgenic art and artificial life, which I find extremely interesting, eventhough I do not approve of everything being done. I believe that there are some barriers that should not be crossed. To avoid unecessary blah blah on my side I will give an example of a project he mentionned that I like. Yves Amu Klein's "Octofungi" consists of a living sculpture that analyses the tranquility of its environment and will react by either fear or interest upon the different type and amplitude of change from the original environment. If a ball rolls on the floor away from him, he might be interested, but if a loud drum is being played consistently i guess he will be scared and hide. I thought that was a smart project which did not inplicate the desire to play God, or gene manipulation. The second article, "Transgenic Art" by Eduardo Kac, focuses on this science/art. he tells us that new technologies affect the way we see things today: like our body. We create cyber bodies when we use avatar, we compare our body to digital images displayed on the street, we accept more and more plastic surgery and neuroprosthesis. He says "Art needs to raise our awareness of what firmly remains beyond our visual reach but which, nonetheless, affects us directly". I personnaly believe that not seeing genes and not being able to control them will not affect us directly, it is as he says, our code of life, it has been working for a while and still is.....why do we feel we have to know everything? there will always be something new....we just create more problems by investigating all the time.
anyway...after giving a clear definition of transgenic art Kac comes back saying that he supports the initiative of artists to try and create new breeds of animals, because endangered species are becoming extinct. I wonder why........maybe because we investigated worlds that did not belong to us in the first place, just like we are doing now. Because of the human greed, we ran out of a "ressource", and now create new ones to start all over again, AND this simple fact of "creating" a new ressource for studies is one itself....on the long term, people will accept this and be thankful, pretty sad if you ask me. Kac even finishes his text by saying so, "To be human will mean that the human genome is, not a limitation, but our starting point". He does mention humans and not animals, but that implies even more the acceptance of such technologies in our everyday lives. I did a big jump here, let me go back a little. Before talking about human gene manipulation, he talks about his own project, GFP K-9: Green fluorescent protein (for) canine, which consists of creating a new breed of dogs that will be fluorescent green. I swear. He also gives examples of how gene manipulation is already part of our society, likes pigs that produce human protein, the catalina macaw who is man made, or the plant "Lafrance" made by Guillot in 1867.
After discussing quickly the difference between breeding and genetic engineering he explains how genes work. I am not a big fan of genetic engineering but I must admit that this part was quite interesting, he made it sound so simple.
After all this talk and making me feel that I he is a crazy God wannabee unconscious mad man, he did mention quickly before closing off that these animals should be loved and taken care of the way "older' breeds are, if not better. That issues such as adaptation and survival should not be taken lightly. He started gaining points in my book until he talked about future plantimals and animans......yes.....you read that right........Mixing animals and plants, and animals and humans.......my god.

link: http://www.wettropics.gov.au/pa/pa_glowing.html

Comments on week 9 readings....

This week's readings were Marek Wieczorek "The Smart Gene" and various articles from "Art Journal". The Marek Wieczorek reading was focusing on the apparition of the DNA technology. He discusses what it is, how it works and what is being done with now a days. A part that I felt what interesting was the section dedicated to Joe Davis and Dana Boyd in their 1989 "Microvenus Project" This project showed that genes could be used as info carriers and will adopt the name of infogene. It was funny to read the NASA censorship paragraph on the inage of the men and woman on the pioneer F Plaque. Marek tells us how the NASA showed an image of a man and woman well groom in the western world way, with barely any body hair. This image, which is meant to be a message reflecting our civilization to eventual extra-terrestrial forms of lives only represents a part of the human world.....I guess it is not the first time America demonstrates its egoestical attitude. Let's just hope that this "Voyager" machine does NOT run into an extremely dangerous and stupid form of life which will come to us and kill everything that does not look like the people on the picture, thinking they are not part of the intelligence that created the machine.