International Conference
Activist Media and Biopolitics: Critical Media Interventions in the Age of Biopower
University of Innsbruck, Austria
12-13 November, 2010
Submission of abstracts due (max. 500 words) 15 July 2010
Following the decline of tactical media as a guiding concept in media of resistance, many of the
key concerns articulated in tactical media seem to have migrated to the intersection of
informatics and the life sciences. Paralleling a shift of interest from hard/software to “wetware” in information technology, and from territorial to biopolitical regimes, activists, artists and scientists began developing networks of collaboration across disciplines, institutional settings, and economic frameworks, questioning the workings of biopower by introducing discontinuities in a new hegemony of knowledge.
This conference brings together theoreticians, practitioners and activists whose work focuses on challenges to the hegemonic biopolitical discourse, and on developing tools for a critical understanding of biopower.
Visit: http://www.uibk.ac.at/medien/amab2010/

The Body, Art and Bioethics
Friday 6 August 2010
A symposium exploring the culture and ethics of the use and ownership of living material, from the cell to the whole body, in art, science, law and philosophy.

The body is increasingly being transformed into commodity and media, put on display, fragmented, manipulated, preserved and rearranged. Scientists, artists, lawyers, historians and social scientists will come together to trace the radical shifts in our understanding of the body –  and life itself – and investigate how these emergent realities influence our notion of being human while simultaneously challenging the relationship to the ‘Other’ that is living or semi-living. Speakers include:
Dr Catherine Waldby, University of Sydney, whose research includes the Feminist-Marxist critique of the distribution and use of parts of bodies whether classified as “gift” or “waste”
Dr Luigi Palombi, Australian National University, an expert on biotechnology patents in Australia, the European Union and the United States of America. Elizabeth Costello,writer, who discusses the hypocrisy of complex relations between the treatment of  animals, Dr Ethan Blue, UWA – a historian whose research involves the prison system and relations between medicos and inmates; Kathy High, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: an artist who explores the Other animal and interspecies intimate relations Dr Ionat Zurr, UWA – the Semi-Living point of view. Dr Stuart Hodgetts, UWA – a research scientist’s experience working with animals and artists in the labs  Dr Darren Jorgensen, UWA – surveys the use of the body within art history.Oron Catts SymbioticA Director will investigate the bioethics inherent within a number of biological art projects researched and developed within SymbioticA.
To register interest email: sym@symbiotica.uwa.edu.au
Website to come:  http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/conferences <https://mail.anhb.uwa.edu.au/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/conferences>
Symposium Graphic Design by Paul Rayment