“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.”

Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction [1]

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:02:00 -0700 http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl/is-an-ephemeral-image-a-moment-in-a-streaming-video-a http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you resort to a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expression, signaling cascades, and mitotic cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.” You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.”
This charge reflects… ]]> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:48:39 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873004/ According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every possible dodge to get their genetic payload inside the host cell. In an early, RNA-protein world, there would not be enzymes to degrade DNA, so a virus encoded by DNA would have a big survival advantage. This suggests a scenario in which a clever parasite brings along DNA plus the means of copying DNA-- a different parasite at least for bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes-- and hijacks the cell's existing interpretation equipment.… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:32:46 -0700 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873004/ http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/article_detail.asp?id=570&css=print It’s true that the code, as it was understood at the height of the genomic era, had some grounding in material reality. Each of the four different letters stands for one of the four nucleotide bases constituting the DNA sequence. And each group of three successive letters (referred to as a “codon”) potentially represents an amino acid, a constituent of protein. The idea was that the bases in a protein-coding DNA sequence, or gene, led to the synthesis of the corresponding sequence of amino acids in a protein. And proteins, folded into innumerable shapes, play a decisive role in virtually… ]]> Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:17:00 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/article_detail.asp?id=570&css=print http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100714/full/news.2010.353.html In the latest exploration into the universe of organisms inhabiting our bodies, microbiologists have discovered new viral genes in faeces. They find that the composition of virus populations inhabiting the tail ends of healthy intestines (as represented in our stools) is unique to each individual and stable over time. Even identical twins — who share many of the same intestinal bacteria — differed in their gut's viral make-up.

More than 80% of the viral genetic sequences found, which included sequences characteristic of both animal and bacterial viruses, have never been reported previously. "This is a largely unexplored… ]]> Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:49:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100714/full/news.2010.353.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100506/full/news.2010.225.html The genomes of most modern humans are 1–4% Neanderthal — a result of interbreeding with the close relatives that went extinct 30,000 years ago, according to work by an international group of researchers.

The team, led by Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is reporting only 60% of the Neanderthal genome. But sequencing even this much of the genome was thought to be impossible just a decade ago.

"This will change our view of humanity," says John Hardy, a neuroscientist at University College London who was… ]]> Sun, 09 May 2010 06:53:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100506/full/news.2010.225.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100505/full/465016a.html One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy table, to encode the 20 standard amino acids that combine to form a protein.

But between DNA and proteins comes RNA, and an expanding realm of complexity. RNA is a shape-shifter, sometimes carrying genetic messages and sometimes regulating them, adopting a multitude of structures that can affect its function. In a paper published in this issue (see page 53), a team of researchers led by Benjamin Blencowe and Brendan… ]]> Fri, 07 May 2010 02:12:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100505/full/465016a.html http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-hominin-species For much of the past five million to seven million years over which humans have been evolving, multiple species of our forebears co-existed. But eventually the other lineages went extinct, leaving only our own, Homo sapiens, to rule Earth. Scientists long thought that by 40,000 years ago H. sapiens shared the planet with only one other human species, or hominin: the Neandertals. In recent years, however, evidence of a more happening hominin scene at that time has emerged. Indications that H. erectus might have persisted on the Indonesian island of Java until 25,000 years ago have surfaced. And then there's… ]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 06:07:00 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-hominin-species http://www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative. The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert… ]]> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:58:00 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-08/ff_primordial_yeast The dish contains a variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known in culinary circles as baker's or brewer's yeast. But Cano didn't get this from Whole Foods. Back in 1995, he extracted it from a 45 million-year-old fossil. The microorganisms had lain dormant since the Eocene epoch, a time when Australia split off from Antarctica and modern mammals first appeared. Then Cano brought the yeast back to life. This reanimation of an ancient life form was a breakthrough, a discovery so shocking that the scientific community initially refused to believe it. It changed our understanding of what microorganisms are capable of. It… ]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:01:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-08/ff_primordial_yeast http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/science/29mouse.html People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language. The gene, FOXP2, was identified in 1998 as the cause of a subtle speech defect in a large London family, half of whose members have difficulties with articulation and grammar. All those affected inherited a disrupted version of the gene from one… ]]> Fri, 29 May 2009 06:51:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/science/29mouse.html