Silicon Second Nature takes us on an expedition into an extraordinary world where nature is made of bits and bytes and life is born from sequences of zeroes and ones. Artificial Life is the brainchild of scientists who view self-replicating computer programs—such as computer viruses—as new forms of life. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's look at the social and simulated worlds of Artificial Life—primarily at the Santa Fe Institute, a well-known center for studies in the sciences of complexity—introduces readers to the people and programs connected with this unusual hybrid of computer science and biology. When biology becomes an information science, when DNA is downloaded into virtual reality, new ways of imagining "life" become possible. Through detailed dissections of the artifacts of Artifical Life, Helmreich explores how these novel visions of life are recombining with the most traditional tales told by Western culture. Because Artificial Life scientists tend to see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins exploring frontiers filled with primitive creatures, their programs reflect prevalent representations of gender, kinship, and race, and repeat origin stories most familiar from mythical and religious narratives. But Artificial Life does not, Helmreich says, simply reproduce old stories in new software. Much like contemporary activities of cloning, cryonics, and transgenics, the practice of simulating and synthesizing life in silico challenges and multiplies the very definition of vitality. Are these models, as some would claim, actually another form of the real thing? Silicon Second Nature takes Artifical Life as a symptom and source of our mutating visions of life itself.

Silicon Second Nature : Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World

Computers & Technology

Helmreich, Stefan

Computer Science

University of California Press

Silicon Second Nature takes us on an expedition into an extraordinary world where nature is made of bits and bytes and life is born from sequences of zeroes and ones. Artificial Life is the brainchild of scientists who view self-replicating computer programs―such as computer viruses―as new forms of life. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's look at the social and simulated worlds of Artificial Life―primarily at the Santa Fe Institute, a well-known center for studies in the sciences of complexity―introduces readers to the people and programs connected with this unusual hybrid of computer science and biology. When biology becomes an information science, when DNA is downloaded into virtual reality, new ways of imagining "life" become possible. Through detailed dissections of the artifacts of Artifical Life, Helmreich explores how these novel visions of life are recombining with the most traditional tales told by Western culture. Because Artificial Life scientists tend to see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins exploring frontiers filled with primitive creatures, their programs reflect prevalent representations of gender, kinship, and race, and repeat origin stories most familiar from mythical and religious narratives. But Artificial Life does not, Helmreich says, simply reproduce old stories in new software. Much like contemporary activities of cloning, cryonics, and transgenics, the practice of simulating and synthesizing life in silico challenges and multiplies the very definition of vitality. Are these models, as some would claim, actually another form of the real thing? Silicon Second Nature takes Artifical Life as a symptom and source of our mutating visions of life itself.

Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, Updated With a New Preface

Alien Ocean immerses readers in worlds being newly explored by marine biologists, worlds usually out of sight and reach: the deep sea, the microscopic realm, and oceans beyond national boundaries. Working alongside scientists at sea and in labs in Monterey Bay, Hawai'i, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Sargasso Sea and at undersea volcanoes in the eastern Pacific, Stefan Helmreich charts how revolutions in genomics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing have pressed marine biologists to see the sea as animated by its smallest inhabitants: marine microbes. Thriving in astonishingly extreme conditions, such microbes have become key figures in scientific and public debates about the origin of life, climate change, biotechnology, and even the possibility of life on other worlds.

Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Reference

What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists―biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers―are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual.
Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"―as investigating, fathoming, listening―to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis.
Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.

Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)

Princeton University Press

Electronic composer and sound artist Florian Hecker (born 1975) has made inventive use of contrasting and conflicting auditory illusions or chimeras--perhaps most famously on his recent acclaimed Mego album Acid in the Style of David Tudor, which brilliantly and bizarrely merged the two soundworlds of acid house and avant-garde electronics. Auditory chimeras have been previously explored in electroacoustic music, in particular by Alvin Lucier, but have never been as rigorously researched and exploited as by Hecker. This volume documents four sound pieces that dramatize auditory illusions, effectively composing within the relationship between our perception of pitch and the localization of sound, as we process the two in our auditory cortices. The pieces are partly transcribed using a form of notation called “typotranslation,” developed by Hecker at MIT.

Florian Hecker: Chimerizations

Arts & Photography

Negarestani, Reza

Hecker, Florian

History & Criticism

Primary Information

A Book of Waves (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)

In A Book of Waves Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves' materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wakes and breaks of social histories and futures.

Social Sciences

Duke University Press Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Helmreich, Stefan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Helmreich, Stefan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Helmreich, Stefan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Silicon Second Nature : Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World

Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, Updated With a New Preface

Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas

Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas

Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)

Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)

Florian Hecker: Chimerizations

A Book of Waves (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)

A Book of Waves (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)