******************* Ars Electronica Center ******************* Ars Electronica 99 Life Science 4.-9.9.99 Linz, Austria http://www.aec.at/lifescience ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ars Electronica 99 - Net Symposium ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Once again, Ars Electronica is hosting a net-symposium as an introduction and complement to this year's Festival symposium which will focus on the subject of Life Science and will be held on September 5 and 6, 1999 in Linz, Austria. Once again, Ars Electronica is hosting a net-symposium as an introduction and complement to this year's Festival symposium which will focus on the subject of Life Science and will be held on September 5 and 6, 1999 in Linz, Austria. The net-symposium consists of a mailing list which starts today, April 20, 1999 and is moderated by Dr. Birgit Richard, professor of New Media at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitaet in Frankfurt. It also features an online magazine on the Life Science site conceived by Oliver Frommel. You are invited to subscribe to the mailing list by sending mail to majordomo@aec.at with the line "subscribe lifescience-en your.email@domain.com" for the English language version. For the German language version write "subscribe lifescience-dt your.email@domain.com" to majordomo@aec.at. You may also use an online form to subscribe to the mailing list (http://www.aec.at/lifescience/magazine/subscribe.html). For your convenience, you may send all contributions - German and English - to lifescience@aec.at. Please send a short introduction of yourself to the moderator of the list (to lifescience@aec.at) describing your areas of interest (in connection with Life Science) and some biographical notes. Over the course of the net-symposium, we will make the best submissions to the mailing list available as permanent resources in the magazine. Please find below the first statement to the discussion from Gerfried Stocker, director of Ars Electronica. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Life Science You don't need to consult a trend researcher to find out which issue is currently dominating the public discussion of progress and the future. Following the Industrial and Digital Revolutions-from the steam engine to the atom bomb to the Internet-the Biological Revolution is now being proclaimed. Spurred on by the success stories of information and computer technologies and the fabulous stock market profits reaped by their promoters, reports from fields of science, research and technology have achieved headline status as dispatches from the "world of wonders" and attained a sensational impact equaling those of natural catastrophes and major sports events-tantalizing prospects that correspond so very closely to our high-performance society's dreams of a life that is healthy, beautiful and long. The internationally prognosticated developments make the option of doing without these achievements seem a hardly realistic one, and-in light of hunger and disease-many observers go as far as calling it a moral imperative to deploy every technological means possible to alleviate these problems. And thus it is not without justification that life science-the term which subsumes modern genetic and biological technologies-has emerged as leading contender to become the key technology of the coming decades. Molecular biologists and genetic engineers equipped with the tools of information technology made available by the Computer Age have opened up doors whose thresholds have, in many instances, marked the limits and taboos of our culture, though it is the traversal of precisely these boundaries upon which our civilization has increasingly pinned its expectations and hopes for continued prosperity. Beyond any doubt is the social-political and cultural potential of these developments. What can well be foreseen are the efforts going beyond those of scientists and scholars-economic and industrial enterprises on a scale on which we have heretofore gone about the task of mastering, harnessing and exploiting our physical environment that will now be concentrated upon life itself and its constituent elements. The very idea of having the capability of forming life (including human life) beyond the morphological level of the body and designing its predispositions and talents makes it incumbent upon us to assume new perspectives on the limits of this life and its social and metaphysical constitution. To an extent unmatched by other sciences, genetics and biology have also been used as tools of ideology and instruments enhancing claims to political power, and they bear the historical burdens of the interpretations of their findings and results. Moreover, in the case of biological and genetic technologies, we find ourselves confronted by a lofty domain in which authoritative experts are few and far between-a fact which, in light of the lasting consequences of the social and political decisions looming on the horizon, will also become a touchstone of the democratic political process. Between the arrogance of businessmen and the ignorance of politicians, the human being remains alone to face this dilemma-enticed by the hopes of healing all illnesses and deeply troubled by the fears of a biological Armageddon (legitimate fears in the wake of Bhopal, Chernobyl, BSE ...). This is a situation in which we require a Wissenschaftskultur (the way science is done and promulgated) and a critique of science that dispense with the myth of neutral facts and findings. The experiences and methods of media art can help us go about this. What we need are interdisciplinary collaboration in a modern, pluralistic society, and artistic intervention that gets beyond moralizing political correctness to actively engage in the social discourse concerning progress and innovation. With this year's Festival, Ars Electronica begins to focus on issues in the field of modern biotechnology. This constitutes a reorientation, as well as the continuation of a practice with a long history of success: namely, turning attention to those areas where conflicts develop in the sphere of tension and interplay at the nexus of technology and society, and bringing art into play as an interface and catalyst for the interaction involving science and the general public. Gerfried Stocker, director Ars Electronica ******************************************************************************** ROLUX h0444wol@rz.hu-berlin.de http://www2.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wol/rolux/