Jussi Parikka

Media Studies
Humboldt University, Berlin
juspar@utu.fi

 

They are everywhere you look, bodiless brains breathing down your neck and controlling your desires. Where do they come from, how do they replicate, how can I get one, why do they look human?
 
–Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Living Blog”
 
 

 

Introduction: Cinematics of Biodigital Life

 

From the nineteenth century sciences of life have had a special relationship with imaging techniques. The cinematic eye as a specific mode of knowledge opened up a new moving microworld that coupled biological entities with the world. During the 1880s and 1890s, the cinema of astonishment was elementally connected to the “bacteriological revolution.” Later Walter Benjamin valorized the new world of technological photographic vision as especially fit to dig into biological life; the vision of the camera is more relevant to cellular tissue than to landscapes or human portraits (Benjamin; Ostherr; Landecker). Early on, it seems, biological life became visually organized.

 
Since the 1990s, a new mode of networked databases has emerged with public digital archives. For instance, The Visible Human Project proposes easy-access to the human body and a view of the high-tech imaging of bodily functions. The project is defined as a complete archive of detailed, three-dimensional images of “normal” male and female human bodies. “The long-term goal of the Visible Human Project is to produce a system of knowledge structures that will transparently link visual knowledge forms to symbolic knowledge formats such as the names of body parts.” Genomic databases such as Genbank (USA), EMBL (Europe), and the DNA Database (Japan) also function as peculiar kinds of distributions of information on life. The current archival logic of the network age–contact a remote server and search/browse with a search engine–is traversing not only the human body, but also increasingly the information entities of which life is often seen to consist. Such projects offer an interesting and concrete mode of intertwining biology with technology in the form of software applications that organize and distribute genomic data (Thacker, “Redefining Bioinformatics”).¹ These archives, which all have some direct practical use, are continuously refashioned on a popular cultural level by the production of images and animations that take us inside cells. The recently awarded Biomedical Image Awards of 2006 show how microbiology work produces visually alluring images. Similarly The Inner Life of a Cell (<multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html>), designed for the Harvard University Molecular and Cellular Biology program, is a good example of a glamorous animation of microbiological life. These “Biovisions”–a “computer-based learning environment for undergraduate students that will allow them to delve into the science of cellular study with more depth and opportunities to enhance their understanding” (see XVIVO Scientific Animation)–represent and fashion the biological sphere with attractive animations and graphics and kitschy sublime-leaning soundtracks of synthetic classical music.
 

Figures of life and technological vision are similarly entangled in a complex biosoftware assemblage in the film Teknolust (2002) by media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. In this article, I propose Teknolust as an assemblage of art, science, and technology that addresses the creation of digital culture as a visual artifact. In Teknolust, the high-tech and high-profile science of biodigitality is rescaled because of concern about human-machine interactions, and because the human stance towards technology seems to rely either on fear, suspicion, or on the capitalist need for profit. Instead of (re)producing sublimated images of genetic technology, Teknolust translates technology into kinds of intimacy, desire, and sexuality beyond the human condition. Here visuality is a tool for complexification (instead of purely functional tool of scientific or commercial visualization apparent in much of contemporary biodigitality). In this work gender and sexuality are connected to science and technology; the artistic cinematics of life is a multiplication of the complexity inherent in the “bodiless brains” of network and biodigital life. In this discussion, I aim to intermingle technological issues (such as logics of databases and archives) with for example sexuality in order to resist reductive accounts of technological assemblages and to underline the continuous articulation of discursive issues with non-discursive practices. Instead of trying to determine the essence of digital culture or biodigitality in for example temporal processes of calculation, I ask how non-spatial calculational processes are continuously translated as visual figurations. Teknolust self-consciously alludes to and quotes film history, but it also alludes to alternative media that cinema might produce as it visualizes science, medicine, and sexuality.²
 

The narrative of the film is quite straightforward. The film presents three self-reproducing automata (SRA) sisters named Ruby, Marine, and Olive (all played by Tilda Swinton). They live in a cartoonish virtual world reminiscent perhaps of an insect habitat seen through a peephole. The automata break free from the control of their creator, the bio-scientist Rosetta (also Tilda Swinton), and embark on a life of their own, trespassing the boundaries between their computer-generated habitat and the world outside computers. The repetitious need of the SRAs to acquire the male Y chromosome (from fresh male spermatozoa) to sustain themselves turns, however, into something like existential questioning. Why are we deemed to live in this restricted ecology of a digital habitat? Why can’t we interact with humans? Why are we seen as a threat to human life? What is the qualitative difference between biodigital life and human life? Ruby, who is responsible for acquiring the sperm samples, is especially interested in life beyond the sisters’ restricted computer world. While her “sample collecting copulations” infect the male partners with a strange viruslike disease (at the same time infecting their computers), Ruby finds love with Sandy (Jeremy Davies), a shy copy clerk who lives with his mother.
 

The SRAs are out of bounds, perhaps even defiant in a juvenile manner, expressing a personified mode of technological agency very different from forms of artificial intelligence found in earlier cinema. Their autonomy does not lead to sublime imaginings of machines taking control, but instead involves a curious probing of how technologies and organic forms might interact and cohabit in social reality. For Hershman Leeson, writing on the Teknolust website,

 

TEKNOLUST is a coming of age story, not only for the characters but also of our society's relationship to technology. The 21st centuries technologies--genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics have opened a Pandora's box that will affect the destiny of the entire human race. Our relationship to computer based virtual life forms that are autonomous and self replicating will shape the fate of our species.

 
For Ruby, Marine, and Olive, it seems to be hard to live in a man’s world where technology and women are inert, functional, and compliant. Again quoting Hershman Leeson from the movie website: “unlike Mary Shelley’s monstrous creature in FRANKENSTEIN, or Fritz Lang’s conflicted evil robot in METROPOLIS, all the characters in TEKNOLUST thrive on affection, and ultimately, reproduction.”
 

Such “affections” seem removed from everyday human emotions, and suggest a much broader understanding of interaction, reproduction, and sexuality where human affections are merely superficial expressions of more fundamental ontological ties. The names Ruby, Marine, and Olive designate colors through which we can perceive the three protagonists of the film as intensities: force fields of potentiality. These are not proper names of individual persons, but modes of biodigital agency. The bodies of the SRAs might be anthropomorphic, and are perhaps emphatically feminine, but still their modes of operation are not constrained by the phenomenological world of humans. Hence the three SRAs in Teknolust are not to be read in terms of merely human emotions, but expressing a weird affectivity, something akin perhaps to animal or insect affects in their metamorphic ability to move from mathematical platforms to human worlds. This metamorphic status marks a liminal space separate from, but approaching, the human world. The digital robots are agents of a particular logic, or more accurately, a potential of affects: a potentiality to be related to various kinds of organic and inorganic bodies, corporeal and non-corporeal. In this sense, I propose to approach the SRAs as antennae for a potential mode of sexuality that stretches between things and substances of various natures. I argue that despite their human form, they continuously overlap non-human contexts in computing, biodigital techniques, and for example insect models of behavior.
 

It is easy to see Teknolust as a probe for future sexualities given the narrative of the film. Hence, my focus is not merely on the question of sexuality, but on how Teknolust complexifies the scientific questions of biodigital creation as part of a consideration of gender and sexuality but also of capitalism. My main concern is the way calculational, scientific processes translate into a wider cultural field on which biodigitality acts. Here the “coding” of life in informatic units does not result in a geometrical data structure as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but in an imaginative view of biodigital creatures as affective, interacting, folding in with various cultural forces. Teknolust can be read as an expression of this distribution of technological affects across a field where biology, technology, and culture form an assemblage. In Teknolust sexuality connects organic life with technology and technology with novel kinds of models detached, or deterritorialized, from biology.³ In order to approach this level of non-human but not entirely technological affects, I use the conceptual figure of the “insect” and the term “insect sexuality” which refers to a range of sexualities from heterosexual human-to-human reproduction to much more distributed non-human sexuality. Insect sexuality is, as such, one potential path to the affect world of biotechnology and network creatures.

 
The first section of the article shows the intertwining of Ruby and the other SRAs with Turing’s universe and explains other examples of machines of intelligent repetition. It then looks at the recent turn towards swarm agency (where the theme of the insect emerges). This is followed by an analysis of how technological genealogy moves from technics to erotics, that is, addresses the themes of biodigital remodulations of gender and sexuality. This essay approaches cinematic remodulation in parallel with the ideas of abstract sex (Luciana Parisi) and of the multiplication of sexuality (Elizabeth Grosz). The article then returns to the theme of visuality and to the cinematic production of digital culture, underlining the importance in contemporary media of calculation of artistic imagination as a kind of counter-memory.
 

Remediating Sex or Copy Machines

 
Copying is a constant theme in Teknolust. It reproduces not merely Tilda Swinton in quadruple form, but takes the very process of reproduction, virality, and sexuality across various media as its main focus. Teknolust presents an interesting take on artificial life and on what could be called a multiplication of forms of as-if-life.⁴ Even though clearly situated within the field of biocomputing (it was released in 2002, the year before Dolly the sheep died of premature aging), the film can be read as part of the genealogies of artificial agents, interactive computer systems and modulations of desire beyond the human form. Biogenetics in recent decades has moved from an analysis of genetic processes to genetic engineering (via the design of recombinant DNA techniques in the 1970s) and more recently to the bioinformatic phase as a concrete intertwining of computers with genetic research and manipulation. This move, as Thacker notes, demonstrates a shift towards emphasizing the role of supercomputers, databases and programming languages in the metaphorical task of “cracking the code” (Biomedia 38).⁵ Teknolust exhibits the impact dry computer lab tools have in the biological field earlier dominated by wet-labs. Such images of biology and computer code seem to put a face on processes otherwise deemed obscure. This move toward increasing visibility goes against the simultaneous becoming-invisible of code and of algorithmic processes common to graphic user interfaces.⁶

 
Hershman Leeson’s works have consistently addressed the changes new technologies of archiving, processing, and communication of information have made to subjectivity. Discussing the coupling of software and genetic modulation, Teknolust is anchored to the agenda of the last turn of the millennium. In this, it can be seen as an example of the new modes of production inherent in copying, or more accurately in cloning. This is evident in the narrative–the cloned SRAs are nearly exact replicas of the Rosetta Stone, alluding to the cipher discovered in 1799 which helped unravel key traits of Egyptian hieroglyphs–and in its production mechanisms, where digital filming and editing techniques are used to create Tilda Swinton in quadruple form in one place. In Teknolust, there are various levels of copies, a hierarchy perhaps: the male protagonist Sandy is a copy clerk, burdened by repetitious copy work with Xerox machines. In contrast, Rosetta makes high-tech machines where copying is not mere repetition, but repetition with a difference: self-mutating machines.

 

Figure 1: Ruby “Gathering” Image used with permission of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

 
Doubles are everywhere, but in a more humorous manner than in the earlier Doppelganger genres. Now the double is associated with twin helical strands of DNA, a recurring visual motive of Teknolust. In addition, copying is as much a technique the SRAs (especially Ruby) use in their adaptation to the human world. The film reads as an ironic version of classical Hollywood love stories (and incidentally, the SRAs are addicted to such television narratives) where artificial life automata gain subjectivity through their ability to perform female mannerisms. The film’s computer-generated subjectivities remediate older media forms such as television in their performative becoming.⁷ Dialogue from television (“motivational tapes” as they are called) become pick-up lines, and part and parcel of the routines by which the SRAs try to adjust to the contours of modern human life in their quest to obtain spermatozoa. The phrase “You’re looking good, Frankie, you’ve got a natural rhythm,” borrowed from a 1950s movie (The Last Time I Saw Paris, 1954), turns into a protocol that helps transport Ruby into the human world of copulation (picking up men in bars). In themselves such phrases reveal the absurdity of heterosexual rites of romance and the machine-like copy character of Ruby the SRA. Such copying of human behavior recalls the Turing test (see below), or ELIZA the computer program shrink from the 1960s, or Ruby’s own Internet portal. These all demonstrate the rise of intelligent agents as key figures of network culture, inhabited not only by humans, but by software bots of various kinds. Hence the remediating abilities of the three digital sisters have a concrete diagrammatic basis in both DNA cultivation techniques and in computer science. Alan Turing formulated in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” the famous imitation test, where the original goal was to decipher whether an anonymous person responding to questions was a man or a woman.⁸ The digital version asked whether the responses were given a machine or by a human being. This mind game leads us to question the ability of computers to replace human functions: “The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.”⁹ This is done by transforming (or coding) human performed operations into instruction tables. In other words, the functions are programmed into algorithmic form: “To ‘programme a machine to carry out the operation A’ means to put the appropriate instruction table into the machine so that it will do A,” as Turing expresses it.

 
In a practical and parodic manner, Joseph Weizenbaum programmed his ELIZA-program in the mid-1960s to simulate a psychoanalyst. ELIZA was an early experiment in interactive computing (in the MAC time-sharing system at MIT), showing how machines could respond to human input and how to produce responses to input that would seem human (or at least as convincing as possible). For Weizenbaum, a typical conversation could proceed as follows:

 

Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED (36)

 

ELIZA is a software program that consists of a database of keywords and transformative rules governing their use depending on input. Fundamental questions include the following: how to identify the most important keywords expected to occur in a conversation, how to place such keywords depending on context, how to choose the right rules and responses in case no keyword is given. The program was restricted by the size of its database and by the vastness of the archive of potential keywords and responses it could handle. Technically Weizenbaum identifies the functioning of the ELIZA program as formed around two pieces: decomposition of data strings it received, and reassembly into an output. So when Ruby uses keywords (or passwords) to activate social situations, she is part of a certain genealogy of imitation. The question for Ruby–as it was for Turing–is how such programs or artificial entities entwine into a complex web of interaction, or an ecology of networks that does not consist merely of technological or biological parts. This is not a question of thinking, or of intelligence in the human sense, but of how to cope sensitively and responsively as part of an information environment. Yet the SRAs are not predetermined pieces of code either, but exemplify code as “affect,” a mode of contact with an outside that is determined only by the SRAs’ encounters with other pieces of code and other environmental factors. This anticipates the shift from intelligence-centered AI to artificial life and to new AI in which dumb interacting agents take advantage of their surroundings to complete tasks. On one level, the challenge to produce intelligence is then an interface problem solved by programming: how to develop sufficiently responsive and sensitive feedback routines that can “react” to the user’s input in a fashion that gives the impression of interface-level intelligence. Reactions signify information processing: identifying input, classifying it, and fetching a proper response from a database. On another level, the challenge of programminng intelligence is to couple the algorithmic procedures, the code level, with an environment. The software program, although composed of algorithmic code strings, must constantly stretch beyond its computer habitat.
 
Transportation is a constant theme in Teknolust: Rosetta’s kitchen opens up to a world of digital micro-organisms, the SRAs wander in the human world, boundaries are crossed and traversed using flexible protocols that allow a passage from organic to inorganic bodies.¹⁰ At first, it seems that Teknolust may be an ironic example of Butlerian ideas of performativity. Gender is not a substance but is performed and mediated, always becoming. Gestures, speech, and postures mark the process of becoming woman where social codes inscribe themselves on the flesh. As apt as this mode of analysis might be, there is no flesh in our case where the inscription might take place. All we have are biodigital lifeforms, SRAs. That’s what the witty sisters themselves continuously underline: they are not humans (even though they have to feed on human affection). Hence, perhaps, instead of leaning towards a human-centered analysis, we might emphasize the anonymity of the forces at play. Ruby and the other SRAs are entwined in technological forces expressed in the genealogy from Turing to ELIZA and beyond and in the “molecular biological revolution” where the figure of genetic code infiltrates modes of subjectification.¹¹

 
For the SRAs, language too becomes a code that can be executed in order to achieve desired results. Ruby’s power to act is grounded in the folds of self-replicating software and operating systems supporting it, and also in the genetic code channeled as part of that assemblage of biodigital nature. The use of language in the imitational sense also marks the curious double status of the SRAs. In the early scenes of the film, when Ruby is fed “motivational tapes,” projected film surfaces not merely on the wall but also on Ruby’s face. The two faces, the woman on the film and Ruby asleep, form a common surface: the images and speech fold into Ruby’s dream. This is not, however, “a meaningful implementation” in a hermeneutical sense, but an affective folding at the limits of language.¹² As with ELIZA, the question is how to fold alternative modes of rationality. The becoming-calculational of language and speech in the mid-twentieth century relates both to the desire for artificial intelligence and more contextually to the ways such programs function in environments and handle tasks (Larsson 10). In this the SRAs and ELIZA recall the original Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion (1916), in whose case the powers of psychophysiology and the modeling of cultural techniques such as speech can be reduced to technological modulation.[13]

 

Figure 2: Ruby Sleeping Image used with permission of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

 
The SRAs resemble their “older sister” ELIZA in their mechanical responses to stimuli. This mode of subjectification expressed by the SRAs inherently depends on the role of archives as databases. Lev Manovich argues for the centrality of the database mode of culture in his Language of New Media, proposing that meaningful narratives are not (anymore) the basic means of organizing data. For him, non-linear databases form the fundamental organizing code of new media culture. This is how life is archived in the biodigital age: as data structures and algorithms (as with the genomic on-line banks), or as computer software that imitate the linguistic life of ELIZA and Ruby. Whereas digital databases present themselves in biodigital network culture as a priori levels for articulating what is living (and what is meaningful action, as in the software versions of intelligent copy machines), they also multiply organisms. The archive entities of life in networked, search-engine accessible digital databases represent one such novel class of uncanny objects. Teknolust shows in a fictional form how the movements and relations of such objects can be visualized. Rosetta Stone is multiplied and folded into novel, non-human worlds, and the SRAs are reciprocally folded into human worlds of organic emotions and social norms. I return to this point concerning multiplication and metamorphosis later.

 
It is interesting to note that Lynn Hershman uses the idea of database identity and the mimicking of intelligence in the 1970s. Her four-year Roberta Breitmore performance (1974-78) introduces the idea that one could construct an artificial person with the help of statistical behavioral and psychological data. Hershman adopts the position of a database-defined person, Roberta, and many of Roberta’s routines are repeated later in Teknolust, such as collecting various “souvenirs,” including photographs, of the people she encounters. Hershman also evokes multiplication in the last performance of the work, when several women played Roberta.

 
Like Roberta, Ruby is not one. She moves between medial scales and remediates her imitational behavior in a Web portal in the film and also on the Internet. Agent Ruby’s E-dream Portal (<http://www.agentruby.net/>) imitates the movie and the genealogy of calculational conversation. “Hello there User, type to me. Let’s connect,” invites the screen. However, Ruby’s responses are very mechanical. What is interesting about this program is not how convincing it and similar programs are (Ruby’s portal does not function very smoothly in terms of human communication), but what kind of powers and affects this mode of mediality and technological agenthood expresses, and from what kind of elements they are made.¹⁴ In order to further emphasize the non-human nature of such assemblages, the agents or bodies need not be thought in human terms but as forms of an individuation that applies also to micro-relations between agents such as bacteria or certain software formations.
 

Insect Worlds

 
The SRAs recall swarms, insect robots and other “dumb AI” creatures. Since the late 1980s, a new form of AI- and A-Life research has patched together old theories of cognitive artificial intelligence. Whereas the “Old AI” research of the 1950s was keen to develop intelligent units that are cognitively able to cope in their environment (whether physical or computational), the new agenda is interested in both connectionist neural net-inspired systems, and in distributed systems with multiagent interaction (see Johnston). In other words, the goal is not to build an intelligent unit of action that has a representation of the external world in which it should act, but a distributed system of “dumb agents” that resemble for example insects (ants, bees, cockroaches) and their social interactions. Local insect interactions have large-scale repercussions–emergent intelligence. Often these phases of AI research are seen as distinct, but as argued above, the early database applications of responsive programs such as ELIZA can be seen to be already based on a folding. Even though their mode of operation was rigid, they coupled programs with their environment.
 

Rodney Brooks’s robotic creations in the late 1980s are exemplary in this context. Brooks follows Francisco Varela’s critique of a model of the mind premised on rule-based manipulation of symbols (the computational model) and of the mind as self-organizing neural networks (the biological model). The alternative model suggested the structural coupling of organisms and environments, or folding the outside with the inside (Johnston 487). Brooks was occupied with insect-like robots after he designed “mobots” to take care of simple tasks. This “subsumption architecture” grounded the agent’s operational intelligence in the liminal zone of interaction with its outside. The mobots’ “cockroach-like behavior” was based on three simple functions (or affects): to move, to avoid obstacles, and to collect small objects (489). Similar models of distributed agents closer to insects than to humans were slowly gaining popularity both in physical robot research and in software network design, whether agents were named “bacterial” or “viral” (See Parisi 149, Parikka).
 

Brooks uses the term “perceptual world” to characterize the interactive relationship AI programs can have with their environment, adapting the concept from ethology. As Johnston notes, the term stems from Jacob von Uexküll’s term Merkwelt, which designates the way perceptual worlds define the affective relationships in which animals are embedded. These perceptional worlds are “constrained by each animal’s unique sensory apparatus, morphology, and capacity to move” (491). Deleuze and Guattari use Von Uexküll’s discussion of the tick to demonstrate the potential of ethology in a surface-orientated analysis of affects. According to Deleuze and Guattari, we do not have to start with the complex affect world (or Merkwelt) of the human being when deciphering the powers of affect–a simple example from the insect world suffices. The tick is characterized not by its genus or species but by its orientation towards light, its smell of mammals, and its perception of skin topology. For Deleuze and Guattari, ethology provides the perfect example of the Spinozan quest to map body potentials (257). This ethological perspective focuses on tendencies to act and to receive action, that is, on the interactions of bodies with other bodies (environment). Bodies are defined by the connections they make or tend to make. Instead of starting the ethological mapping of affects from individuals or any any other transcendent forms of organization, one starts at a plane of immanence that does not recognize fundamental differences between nature and artifice, subject and object.
 

So the move from models of intelligence based on human imitation to models based on more insect-like worlds is well founded: we are not seeking predefined forms, but potentials for action, hybrid creatures of biology and digital technology. It is a mistake to see the SRAs’ interaction in merely human terms, as a postulate of human behavior. We are not dealing with humans per se, but with software agents that try to incorporate human patterns of habituation. Here the analysis could work on an affectual level that encompasses imitation not as a human-social phenomenon but as a marker of a more radical social behavior that characterizes non-human interaction.

 

Figure 3: Marine Image used with permission of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

 

What the SRAs exhibit are non-human affects (potentials for action and interaction). Humans have a different horizon, or a mode of orientation with the world.

 

Marine: Humans are so different from us. They can't repair themselves, they age, they die, they live . . . they hurt each other, they even kill each other. I don't understand their engines, we are such an improvement: why aren't there more of us? We are supposed to be self-replicating, she has erased our code for that. I want to hear the ticking of my biological clock! Ruby: Stop it. When you sound defensive and aggressive, you sound completely human. That is a recessive trait, you remember?

 

Imitation is a process of crossing borders, and is not restricted to humans, according to Teknolust. In the late nineteenth century, Gabriel Tarde analyzed imitation as one of the key operations in the formation of societies (which would not have to be defined a priorias human societies.) Some decades later, in 1933, Walter Benjamin saw imitation as pertinent to diverse natural phenomena, though he thought the human being has a special faculty for mimesis. Nature produces likeness, but the human being has the greatest capacity for mimicry due to language.

 
Roger Caillois, the French surrealist and entomologist who in 1935 published his famous article “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” suggests a more interesting approach to mimicry. Caillois’s analysis of insect mimicry shows how one can theorize the SRAs’ capacity for non-human affect and for imitation. Caillois defines mimicry as a profound and diverse natural phenomenon:

 

We know how far the mimicry of mantises can go: their legs simulate petals or are curved into corollas and resemble flowers, imitating by a slight instinctive swaying the action of the wind on these latter. The Cilix compressa resembles bird droppings; the Cerodeylus laceratus of Borneo with its leafy excrescences, light olive-green in color, a stick covered with moss. Everyone knows the Phyllia, or leaf insects, so similar to leaves, from which it is only a step to the perfect homomorphy represented by certain butterflies: first the Oxydia, which places itself at the end of a branch at right angles to its direction, the front wings held in such a position as to present the appearance of a terminal leaf, an appearance accentuated by a thin dark line extending crosswise over the four wings in such a way as to simulate the leaf's principal veins. (20)

 
Caillois proposes that mimicry is not fundamentally a functional phenomenon, neither defensive nor aggressive. It is not only to be analyzed as a beneficial pattern of adaptation and evolution, but as a luxury that expresses key characteristics of space and of organisms. Mimicry is a way of inhabiting space and folding as part of the surroundings. Caillois remediates mimicry to encompass a mode of depersonalization that blurs the boundaries of inside and outside, and of actual and virtual space. Hence Caillois moves smoothly from insect worlds and ethology to medial spaces and spatial experience. For Caillois, the insect theme is connected on the one hand to Pierre Janet’s nineteenth-century writings on psychasthenia (a mode of psychic disorder), and on the other to the physical conceptions of space espoused by Finsler, Fermat, Riemann, and Christoffel. Even though Caillois does not fully explicate what he means by the link between physics and psychical disorders, he refers to new conceptions of non-Euclidean space embraced since the nineteenth century. These topological spaces replaced space, geometrically controlled by global compass points, with the surface of a figure. Riemann took up the new study of surfaces in the mid-nineteenth century with his problematics of N-dimensional surfaces. What is interesting here is the idea of surface space as a local multiplicity that is continuous, but is not restricted by any notion of unity. Curving multidimensional topological surfaces are spaces of variable dimensions, which are analyzed without the need to contain them in a higher dimensional space (DeLanda 10-12). This notion of continuous multiplicity (continuous discontinuity) is relevant to medial spaces, and to this reading of Teknolust. Heterogeneous spaces connect in a local neighborhood where, for example, the human phenomenological “real” space can be topologically connected to computer space. Instead of inhabiting an overarching geometrical landscape that dominates the visualization of cyberspace as a Cartesian grid (Gibson’s cyberspace again the key example), objects are locally connected in affect(ionate) relationships, where the whole is formed only a posteriori by the movement of entities in space. In Caillois’s analysis (28-30), the discourses of psychastenia and of non-Euclidean space coalesce on the question of mimicry, exemplified by uncanny topologies that are experienced as devouring the subject (at least in the psychastenic mode).

 
Modes of spatiality that characterize insect life (and in our case technological life) are labeled disorders in human contexts. This leads us to analyze ordinary media as psychasthenic media intent on mixing actual and virtual space. Medial space, “the so-called-representation,” is not removed in Teknolust from the space outside the screen: both are part of the same multiplicity of reality. Teknolust also blurs other kinds of space. The recurring theme of the Möbius strip characterizes the smooth non-Euclidean spaces. The SRAs are at home with fluctuating scales and spaces: the “space” (only in a metaphorical sense, and more exactly a time-critical process) of computer organisms which can be easily switched for the biophysical spatiality of human organisms where Ruby searches for spermatozoa. Ruby’s coital interaction results in a viral epidemic that is not restricted to the organic bodies of her partners, but curiously also infects their computers.

 
Teknolust was partially shot in digital format, which provided the opportunity to use Tilda Swinton in fourfold form. Just as the narrative of Teknolust relies on the insectoid theme of various co-existing spaces, the film connects the actual space of filmed sequences and the kino-brush space of the digital cinema, where cinema becomes (according to Manovich) a specific kind of painting in time (307-08). Here the screen itself represents psychasthenia when computer-generated sequences are attached to real actors. A precursor of such “dipping into the machine” was Disney’s Tron (1982) with its ecology of computer organisms living inside the machine. Since the end of the 1990s, this mode of production has become common in cinema hits such as the Matrix trilogy or George Lucas’s Star Wars sequels.

 
Digital filming along with non-linear editing (that grants easy access to any frame) and specialized 3D computer graphics and modeling software (like Maya) enables the representation of new classes of cinematic organism. Teknolust visualizes new digital organisms as a form of archive of otherwise non-visual modes of software and biodigitality. Hershman Leeson is a cartographer of a kind, a cinematic mapmaker of the affects of biodigital creatures. I read Teknolust‘s co-medial scenes as a Latourian kind of network mapping of elements non-human connected via pathways and nodes to the human world. Besides asking questions about reproductive control (as opposed to uncontrolled external replication) and human form (the SRAs do look human in this audiovisual archiving of the societal contexts of biodigitality), Teknolust addresses new modes of affectivity, of “bodiless brains” as Hershman Leeson writes in her blog, “The Living Blog.” Such incorporeal brains are increasingly what networks consist of: condensation points, or nodes, which are not perhaps human but display in concert with each other human-like traits of action. Such networks include AI programs such as ELIZA or Ruby, and the self-reproducing software viruses and bacteria used for various network tasks.
 

Multiplication: A Thousand Sexes

 

Daisy, Daisy.
Give me your answer do.
I am half crazy.
All for the love of you. –Ruby’s song at her e-portal, repeating the words of HAL breaking down in 2001: A Space Odyssey

 
Despite its technological genealogy, Teknolust is not merely about technology. The SRAs, and especially Ruby, who desires interaction with humans, turn biodigital organisms into learning machines. Art, spirituality, and love are seen as markers of sensitivity that gradually differentiate the complex biodigital SRAs from older mechanical technologies. This also gives Hershman Leeson the opportunity to metamorphose technological agencies into modes of feminist agency. The SRAs are continually troubled by their vague status as not-human (although partially constructed of Rosetta’s DNA), not-machine (in the sense of mechanical machines that merely perform predefined actions), but metamorphosing and falling between categories, trying to grasp a new mode of agency that exceeds cultural definitions.
 
There is a connection between the assemblage software+biodigital creatures+cinematic cartographyand feminist theories of sexual difference.¹⁵ It is no coincidence that Hershman Leeson, who is keenly interested in figurations of the feminine and of the body in her other works, sees SRAs as female characters.¹⁶ For example, her first full length film Conceiving Ada (1997) focused on Ada Lovelace, an early female character of computing. Hershman Leeson writes on her website “Conceiving Conceiving Ada“: “The duality of her existence as mother/visionary, lover/fiercely independent thinker, wife/schemer is acknowledged in the film by weaving a narrative that references the dual strands of the DNA molecule.” Ada, like the SRAs, is a figure in movement, between identities; such liminality is a narrative theme that is again doubled on the media technological a priori level. Hershman Leeson explains: “I felt it important to use the technology Ada pioneered. Virtual sets and digital sound became the vehicle through which her story could be told. They provided environments in which she moves freely through time, becomes liberated and, ultimately, moves into visibility.”
 

In Conceiving Ada, another software animal figure–the birdlike computer agent Charlene (very reminiscent of Karl Sims’s software creatures from the early 1990s)–is trained to roam in computer space but also to act as an intermediary to the past. The software animal figure programmed by the artificial life scientist Emmy Coer (Francesca Faridany) traverses not only vectorized computer space, but time as well. The surface of Conceiving Ada is filled with screens that figure as portals to another dimension, implying that the computer is a time machine–much as the cinematographic apparatus has been imagined since its early development. But the computer time machine, guided by animal software figures, does not perhaps only penetrate passed time, but time-as-it-could-be, that is, virtual time: the time of becoming, of open-ended possibilities, which in the film is connected to a feminist micropolitics of becoming. Movement, becoming, imitation, and the mixing of actual and virtual space/time are not metaphors but are also enacted on the technological level, which then becomes an accomplice in a feminist micropolitics of metamorphosis. Here the technological itself becomes a participant in the happening of the screen, instead of residing in the “excluded third” of relationships established in Hershman Leeson’s works.
 

In other words, media technologies (represented by the SRAs) extend toward levels of politics and aesthetics. Arguing for worlds of insect and animal affectivity, Grosz sees a politics of sexual difference in terms of the multiplication of sex. Beyond heteronormative reproduction, sex is more open and a more fundamental mode of becoming. To desire is to open oneself to a movement of co-animation that engenders new encounters, new bodily zones, new affects:

 

It is in this sense that we make love to worlds: the universe of an other is that which opens up to and produces our own intensities . . . . The other need not be human or even animal: the fetishist enters a universe of the animated, intensified object as rich and complex as any sexual relation (perhaps more so than). The point is that both a world and a body are opened up for redistribution, dis-organization, transformation. (Space, Time, and Perversion 200)

 
Grosz’s analysis here is related to her reading of Caillois’s theories of insects. Grosz sees Caillois promoting notions of the feminine and of insects as vampiric and parasitic entities of the femme fatale genre. This theme is used in Teknolust‘s figuration of Ruby as a mantis-like femme fatale who almost kills her mating partners. Caillois’s praying mantises figure feminine sexuality uncannily as devouring (decapitating the male) and as a machine-like automaton, “a fucking machine” (Space, Time, and Perversion 193). Such an emphasis is found directly in Caillois’s article “The Praying Mantis” (1937). He writes:
 

Indeed, the assimilation of the mantis to an automaton--that is, in view of its anthropomorphism, to a female android--seems to me to be a consequence of the same affective theme: the conception of an artificial, mechanical, inanimate, and unconscious machine-woman incommensurable with man and other living creatures derives from a particular way of envisioning the relation between love and death, and, more precisely, from an ambivalent premonition of finding the one within the other, which is something I have every reason to believe. (Qtd in Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion 193)¹⁸

The praying mantis in this excerpt from Caillois seems excessive in relation to a stable male-female cosmos. Caillois already affirms an articulation of sexuality, machines, and insects. Teknolust‘s SRAs, with their insect-like modes of affectivity, find their grounds in technological contexts, which provide them with the technologicala prioriof their sexual behavior–a kind of a remediation of insect sex. As the relationship between insects and technology is much too vast to be addressed here,¹⁹ I instead focus on the idea of the remediation and multiplication of sex in the biodigital context, something that Luciana Parisi has tackled in her cyberfeminist philosophy.

 
Parisi has called the transformation of sexuality in biodigital culture “abstract sex” that is decoupled from reproduction. Instead of taking sides in the long ongoing debate between advocates of “fleshy bodies” and those of “disembodied information,” her “cybersex” points towards a new formation of biodigital sexuality that captures the flows of bacterial sex (surpassing human desires) and constitutes something that can be called “symbiotic sex.” This emphasis on symbiosis as an ontogenetic force stems from Lynn Margulis’s work on endosymbiosis which in Parisi’s take is extended in order to grasp not merely sexuality or reproduction in novel terms, but also information, understood as an affective event that takes place between bodies.²⁰

 
Parisi’s position on the “mutations of desire” in the age of bio-technology approaches sex and sexuality as a kind of a layering. In her tripartite conception, sex has gone through three levels of stratification: the biophysical stratification of bacterial and meiotic sex (3,900 million years ago), the biocultural stratification that focused on heterosexual reproduction and so-called-human sex (nineteenth century), and finally the age of cloning and recombinant desire, which is not simply a completely new level but a capturing of the earlier tendencies and their folding with contemporary biodigitality. According to Parisi, if disciplinary societies were keen on controlling sexuality and reproduction and channeling sexual flows via strict procedures of power (e.g., spatially), then control societies, or the informatic modulation of desire, are more akin to the turbulent space modeled by complexity theorists. Parisi sees bioinformatics as a mode of multiplication that accelerates turbulences and deterritorialization. It “feeds on the proliferation of turbulent recombinations by modulating (i.e., capturing, producing, and multiplying) rather than repressing (i.e., excluding) the emergent variations. It marks the real subsumption of the body-sex unfolding the autonomy of the variables of recombination from organic sex and entropic pleasure” (138). In short, turbulence and metastability become engines of creativity and variation. Bioinformatics taps into the intensive qualities of matter and turns them into a process of production.

 
Following Parisi’s stratifications of sex, in Teknolust the SRAs can be seen to express a layering of (at least) three modes of sexuality: they 1) imitate human forms of coupling (human sex), but 2) function as high-tech machines built from software and DNA (molecular sex), and 3) then act as bioinformatic creations that tap into biophysical modes of cellular trading (called meiotic sex). Biodigital creatures like the SRAs are not without histories, but are part of an archaeological stratification where biodigital modulations capture earlier flows. As noted above, biogenetic modulation relies on a 3,900 million-year-old mode of bacterial sex that was an early way of transmitting and reproducing information (Parisi 61). This was, according to Parisi, Lynn Margulis, and Dorian Sagan’s work, a form of genetic engineering. Such a stance comes from seeing evolution as a symbiotic event: reproduction happens as a network of interactions and involves the co-evolution of microbial actors. SRAs’ mode of being is then also a network, or an assemblage, that draws its being from phylogenetic remediations and ontogenetic connections (with their biodigital environment.) The SRAs’ human form is not a comic element but expresses the nineteenth-century stratification of sexuality as heterosexual reproduction that is usually taken to be normative sexuality. As the film suggests, software needs a bit of intimacy and cuddling. In Teknolust, however, heterosexual coupling remains a phylogenetic memory of an earlier stratification (but something not left behind). The need for spermatozoa cannot, then, be reduced to a mode of sexuality where “boy meets girl,” but is perhaps a channel for biodigital sex, or for an insect sexuality of crossing borders (mixing actual and virtual, digital spaces and various phenomenological levels from human to insect affects). Like viruses, which have been used as biotechnological vehicles for transmitting DNA between cells since the 1970s, figures like the SRAs can be used to question the very basics of what sexuality is and to which scales it pertains (is sexuality only between humans? does it pertain to all animals? is the term right for molecular interactions?).

 
Multiplication is part of the medial drive of biogenetic creatures, and is also conditioned on the networks in which it is formed. These networks include material infrastructures and other networks of various scales, as noted in a conversation between Rosetta and a male laboratory scientist:

 

Rosetta: It takes only one cell to make a living thing human.
Scientist: Well, what about synthetic human cell?
Then you would have to patent it.
R: Why?
S: Because it makes it legal, financially viable, proprietorial.
R: How do you patent life?
S: Well that my dear, is a very profound question.

 

Here Teknolust emphasizes that networks of reproduction and multiplication are not merely about physical or local material connections, but also depend on incorporeal actions. Patenting, financial backup, consumerization are incorporeal acts that “breathe life” into material beings (in a contemporary capitalist version of the hylomorphic schema). As the scientist of the film notes, Iceland is patenting its citizens’ genetic codes, multinational corporations are pirating and collecting trees in the Amazon and poisonous spiders in China for medicines. These are examples of how geographically and conceptually stretched the biodigital networks that tap into nature’s material flows can get.²¹ Such networks present a curious kind of corporeal flows (flows of matter-energy) that are intensified by incorporeal events: the potential of biogenetic modulation is not an artificial invention of high technology, but is already part of the virtual sphere of nature. Yet it is tapped by the deterritorializing machinations of capitalism and by biodigital techniques of power that move this potential to new contexts, including the surveillance of citizens and productions of new medications. This kind of “nurturing nature” takes advantage of the abstract processes of cellular sex.
 
According to Parisi, this multiplication of sex is also at the heart of microfeminist warfare. Abstract sex, sex as a mode of endosymbiosis operating on various scales, from bacterial to biodigital, is also about multiplying the possibilities to think feminine desire. Resisting identity politics as molar already-defined formations, feminine micropolitics attaches itself to the molecular compositions that form the molar (as the secondary capture of creative potential). Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-woman is important in Parisi’s take on biodigitality, which affirms the powers of mutating bodies beyond pleasure (as a stabilization of affects) and beyond man-woman binarism. In a parallel move, Parisi’s philosophy is doubled in Teknolust where the viral behavior of the SRAs is dubbed “biogender warfare”–a bioterrorism that attacks only males and their machines, infecting them with a bar code. It is as if Teknolust is saying, it’s the men who worry about the modulations of sexuality brought about by biodigital modes of reproduction, we women already know all about non-phallic sexuality. It is not a question of attacking “men,” but rather a certain form of organization of heterosexual mating. In the medical examinations, the bodies of men show signs that they are prone to reject new forms of sexuality that turn into biological threats. Such a mode of warfare is to be understood as a micropolitics that moves at the level of molecular flows, not of the molar forms of organization (male, female); it is a molecular movement that follows the “tendencies of mutation of a body rather than focusing on stable levels of difference” (Parisi 197). This means that modes of sexuality multiply beyond the one difference-model: sexuality spreads across scales.

 
These constructions of sex, multiplication, and sexual difference are powerful metaphors, used as philosophical concepts, which can also be taken as concrete modes of creation. For instance Teknolust can be seen as a multiplication machine of “a thousand tiny sexes” that promotes new perspectives on humans, machines, love, sexuality and biogenetics. Its cinematic creations are not “only fiction,” in the traditional sense of the word as something opposed to the real. Rather, the film attempts to make us see something new (to visualize the virtual, in a way). That is a micropolitics of audiovisuality, of creating new cuts, not just in between, but into taken-for-granted modes of perception (where perception/aesthetics equals politics).

 

Figure 4: Ruby in the Corbin Car Image used with permission of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

 
In addition to biogender warfare, or the micropolitics of desire, I want to emphasize in the context of this article the issue of becoming-animal. As argued above, the modes of affectivity in Teknolust, and across various other expressions of digital culture, feed on the “conceptual figures” of the animal and the insect. In Teknolust, they act as force-fields of weird affectivities, reminiscent of the alternative modes of sex and superfolds that pierce the human form. They also act as vectors (like viruses transmitting DNA) that interface with affective worlds in the context of digital technology and software. Here the micropolitics of mutating desire meets the worlds of bacteria, insects, and animals in a circuitous relation of force-fields to create new becomings. These relations are always composite: not merely imitating some animal, nor becoming an insect or a technological organism, but assemblages of insects, animals, technologies, sexuality (see Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes” 1457).²² Here the force of becoming-woman is composite and appears in relation to other forces, those technological and bestial, for example. I see these forces as interconnected in assemblages of heterogeneous nature: insectoid-woman-technology.²³
 

Cinematic Production of (Bio)Digital Culture

 
In this article, I have tried to follow a mode of analysis that moves from representation towards an ethological mapping of the affects of uncanny digital objects. In other words, even though Teknolust could be justifiably said to represent sexuality in “cybertypes” (Nakamura), or as a humorous depiction of the dangers of “non-controlled software,” I do not want to take the film merely as an object of cultural analysis. It can be a companion and a tool for thought that effectively harnesses certain intensities as cinematographic ethology. Just as early photographic and cinematic techniques of vision interfaced bacterial and molecular life as part of technological assemblages, Teknolust can be seen to create a cut, an opening, into the question of bodies digital (software), biological (DNA) and conceptual (viral, bacterial, or “insect” life) in the age of digital cinema. Here the techniques of digital film and of (non-linear) editing feedback directly into the assemblage and open the film to biodigital life: modulating bodies as code entities that are not, however, reducible to their original code, but are continuously overflowing, in excess. The film’s modus operandi is to connect audiovisions to a field of calculation (digitality), and in the same way it rearticulates the archival logic of digital culture in its narrative. In addition, the visualizations of Teknolust connect digital technologies with sexuality, gender with databases, insects with women, in its attempt to further complexify the position biodigital technologies inhabit not merely in laboratory life, but as cultural themes traversing our media culture. Teknolust spreads and multiplies scientific themes across the social field and steals them away from laboratories, just as the SRAs break laboratory boundaries, and objects such as clones and software viruses and worms spread across terrain unfamiliar to them.

 
What are these creatures that roam the networks? Hershman Leeson’s questioning of the “bodiless brains” paradigm is relevant to an analysis of the creatures of biogenetics networks, and traverses both biogenetics and digital culture. Teknolust is not the visual analog of theories of biodigitality such as Parisi’s, nor does it represent scientific trends such as DNA research: rather it functions as an audiovisual doubling (and perhaps “troubling” in the sense of wanting to question certain key traits) of various themes. Teknolust is also interesting in its visualization of code (which is otherwise non-spatial and non-temporal, as Wolfgang Ernst and others have argued²⁴). It presents an archive of the folds of contemporary subjectification, an archive of audiovisuality (a key mode of production of knowledge in modernity, according to Foucault), but coupled with a mode of calculation and digitally created worlds.

 
As I have noted above, there has not been a lack of archiving and visualizing the body and of life. Biological databases and genomic maps show how the power of definition (in linguistic, visual, and calculational senses) entangles with the power of institutions and technologies and with other non-discursive ways of summoning objects. The Visible Human Project uses in its technical form still-image formats (.jpg, .tiff, etc.) and moving images (.avi, Quicktime, etc.), but this mode of cinematization is still very different from Teknolust. The practice of visualizing genetic objects is employed routinely in medical and biological laboratories and network databases. The fact that Teknolust does this in a different context (alternative film productions and media art) and mode of distribution (narrative fiction film) does not reduce its importance in regarding the concrete bioinformatic archiving, modulating and appropriation of DNA-become-software entities of life. Archiving in this context is a cinematic counter-archive to the traditional scientific appropriation of genomic information: doubling social issues in an alternative audiovisual format, making a new serialization of objects, multiplying them into new forms, deterritorializing them from the presumed and all-too-familiar contexts and making us think new things with them. In Teknolust, this is done by transforming high-tech biodigital production (a topic that usually brings to mind clean laboratories, official representatives, and sublimation) into a curiously small-scale narrative about intimacy between technologies and organic entities, love, and cuddling.

 
Such new digital objects are perhaps more accurately painted or programmed than merely “visualized,” as Manovich suggests of digital cinema, which he defines as “a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements” (302). This means a new kind of remediation of older practices of animation in cinema, a new kind of manual construction of cinematic objects that are created digitally. The editing computer, as Manovich notes, can synthetize images gathered through photographic lenses, digital paint programs, or 3-D animation tools as long as they all can be manipulated in pixels (300). The new computer-based objects are hinged between digital creations and filmed sequences of organic actors and analog worlds. Hence, the cinematic objects themselves are “biodigital” hybrids, although on a different scale from those of the visuals produced for scientific archives and from the hybrid objects increasingly common in cinematic networks.²⁵

 
The cinematic production of high tech addresses a political sphere of digital culture, cinematic production of futures in terms of collectivities (what kind of actors there are), the material circuits of these collectivities (the new habitats of silicon and biotechnologies), and the new commodification of molecular flows (capitalism being able to capture more fleeting flows) (see Rodowick 203-34). As I have argued, cinematic and other cultural multiplications and mutations of code and artificial life entities are distributed across various media and are not restricted to biotechnology. They offer mappings and imaginings of new political, material, and social hybrid entities.

 
Through such cinematic mappings, we can better grasp the various networks and affects of biodigital creatures, from insects to viruses, from bacteria to humans. Teknolust is a mapping, not a tracing: it does not divide the real into essence and its representation, but joins them on a Möbius strip, exposing networks that connect things corporeal and incorporeal.²⁶ Such movements are experiments. As animals and insects proceed by various experimentations, orientations, with their environment, so such practices as Teknolust‘s negotiate critically and creatively passages towards futures unthought.

 

Notes

 

The author would like to thank the two anonymous referees and Milla Tiainen for their valuable input and comments when writing this article. Also thanks to Sian Sampson for her help with copyediting.

 

1. See also EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (<www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/index.html>). “Visualization” is also a specific bioinformatic tool; see Thacker, Biomedia 36.

 

2. Elsaesser has referred to the (re)creation of novel histories of cinema in terms of its S/M-perversions, that is, seeing cinema as part of the visualizations of science and medicine, surveillance and the military, and sensory-motor coordination.

 

3. Here, sexuality is understood in terms of affects and interactions and is not subordinate to a reproduction of the human species. In the wake of Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality can be seen as a process of heterogenesis, a war machine that distributes across various spheres irrespective of the Oedipal recoding of desire (278).

 

4. Artificial life research pioneer Chris Langton said the task of such research was not to focus only on carbon-based life, but on “life as it could be” (2).

 

5. See Kay for an analysis of the earlier phases of genetic research and the metaphorics of “code.”

 

6. This theme of the curious mix of visuality and computer programming is analyzed by Chun in “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge.”

 

7. Remediation is a term adopted from Remediation: Understanding New Media. Bolter and Grusin argue that new media is characterized by its particular style of remediating, or reusing, old media. Here I approach remediation as a tactic the SRAs express in their adaptation to the contours of human life–an adaptation that takes place via media forms like television. In addition, remediation becomes a mode of repetition with a difference, connected in this text to multiplication as a mode of creating difference. Here every repetitious act (for example, cloning) is never a clear-cut repetition but summons a new constellation and potential shift in the tension of forces. In Teknolust, repetition, multiplication, and remediation do not merely produce more of the same, but also bring with them a qualitative change in concepts such as subjectivity.

 

8. Other early AI programs include Simon and Newell’s “The Logic Theorist” (1956) and “The General Problem Solver” (1957). The Manchester University Love Letter Generator (1953-54) is an interesting example of automated confessions of love (see Link).

 

9. Thacker underlines the differences between Turing’s mind-centered mode of intelligence and the networked intelligence inherent in biomedia computing (Biomedia, 103-07).

 

10. As Thacker explains in Biomedia, transmission, transportation, and transformation are key themes in bioinformatics, whether we are talking about protocols for encoding, decoding, or recoding (72). For example, hybrid entities such as the BioMEMS device are used inside the body for diagnosis, sensoring, and engineering. It can be seen as a vector of transmission across different scales: DNA, micropumps, RNA, electrical circuits, amino acids, silicon substrates, polypeptide chains and computer software.

 

11. There are new forces operating, something that can be called superfolds. In his book on Foucault, Deleuze notes that forms are “compound[s] of relations between forces,” or foldings between potentials of the inside with the outside (124). According to Deleuze, we should approach our era in terms of the superfold that forms in the pressure of cybernetic information technology, molecular biology, and a new understanding of language. In other words, the superfold is “borne out by the foldings proper to the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature ‘merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity'” (131). Subjectification happens via a folding of the inside with its outside, which leads us to think of Ruby’s repetitious behavior as a marker of her status in the contours of the superfold. In Herbert Simon’s famous example from the 1960s, the system-theoretical ant is only as intelligent as its environment, and similarly an SRA is only as intelligent as its ecological habitat, its milieu (24-25).

 

12. Ruby’s folding with language proceeds more in line with “Mallarmé’s book, Péguy’s repetitions, Artaud’s breaths, the agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as well as Roussel’s proliferations, Brisset’s derivations, Dada collage, and so on” (Deleuze, Foucault 131).

 

13. “In 1900 speaking and hearing, writing and reading were put to the test as isolated functions, without any subject or thought as their shadowy support,” writes Kittler, referring to the psychophysics of for instance Hermann Ebbinghaus, Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke, who analyzed cultural practices to their minuscule constituent parts (214).

 

14. On “medial will to power,” see Fuller 62-70.

 

15. The film can also be seen to provide explicit intertextual hints to feminist media theories of later decades from Allucquêre Rosanne Stone to Donna Haraway and Sherry Turkle (Kinder 177-78).

 

16. Hershman Leeson’s works have been circulating similar themes for decades. As noted above, the Roberta Breitmore performance from the mid-1970s can be seen as a key precursor to Teknolust. For an overview of Hershman Leeson’s work, see Tromble.

 

17. Worlds consist of sex, if by sex we mean a mode of “surface contact” that works by transformations and becomings (Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion 204). A creation of sexual zones on the surface of the body is the co-creation of the territories themselves, of topological formation where insides touch the outsides. Sexuality itself produces, acts as a motor of creation (cf. Deleuze, Logic of Sense 226).

 

18. The praying mantis was of special interest to the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Caillois was active in these circles. The theme of “devouring woman as a praying mantis” can be found in the works of various artists, from Picasso to Dali, and in Georges Bataille’s philosophical themes of the intimacy of sex and death. See Markus, Pressly.

 

19. This text relates to a larger research project on “The Insect Theory of Media” that examines figurations of insects as specific intensive figures of media since the late nineteenth century.

 

20. As Parisi notes in her analysis of bacterial sex, foldings happen as perceptions between bodies: “As an act of selection, perception entails a collision of bodies that unfolds the virtual action of the environment on the body, affecting the capacity of reception and action of a body in the environment” (178).

 

21. Statistically, bioinformatics is experiencing a steady belief in the future of the market, which is predicted to experience a 15% growth, reaching 3 billion by 2010. The main markets are expected to be the United States, Europe, and Japan (see “Bioinformatics Market Update”).

 

22. Deleuze and Guattari write:

 

Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relations of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animal's natural food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with other animals (you can become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus or prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle for reindeer, etc.), or something that does not even have localizable relation to the animal in question. (274)

 

23. Grosz warns of the dangers of thinking in terms of “progression” in becomings (1461). Becoming-woman is easily thought of as the first step, followed by becoming-human, deterritorialized by becoming-animal, and so forth. We must argue against such “great chains of becoming.”

 

24. For recent writings on code as an entity that stretches across the social field, see Chun, Control and Freedom, and Mackenzie.

 

25. As scientific objects were disseminated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in various visual forms in cinema, arcades, panoramas, and exhibitions, digital culture’s variations on the theme of “a thousand tiny actors” of biodigitality spread in audiovisual ecologies. Clark notes an increase in such “hyper-aestheticized” forms of life, and the emergence of a digital version of “life under glass.” In addition to such projects as the Biosphere II greenhouse in southern Arizona, which is sustained in various mediated ways, using sensors and feedback mechanisms, we can refer to computational ecologies such as Thomas Ray’s Tierra system of the 1990s. Ray’s vision was to build a simulated ecology on a digital network platform, which was intended not only as a laboratory experiment but as an open visual platform: “the objective is to consign the organisms to the public domain, so that any other Net user could observe the proceedings, or even extract promising creatures for whatever application they might desire” (Clark 89). Another example of such digital ecologies spreading in audiovisual format is SimEarth (1990), which brought evolutionary patterns to home screens in popular game format. In SimEarth, the computer screen is inhabited by various primitive forms of life such as insects, while in Jurassic Park (1993) a more bestial approach to cinematic ecologies is offered.

 

26. On mapping and cultural analysis, see Deleuze and Guattari 12.

 

 

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