Bøger af Stefan Helmreich

Die Frage "What Is Life?" verfolgt die Lebenswissenschaften, seit Gottfried Treviranus und Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 1802 zeitgleich den Begriff der "Biologie" prägten. Zahllose Artikel und Bücher sind dazu seither erschienen, genannt seien stellvertretend nur Erwin Schrödinger (1944) oder Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan (1995). Der Band präsentiert eine bewusst spekulative Auswahl an Aufmacherseiten von Texten der letzten 200 Jahre, die diese Frage im Titel tragen. Die Antworten zielen auf nicht weniger ab als den Wesenskern der Biologie: von "Summe der Funktionen, die sich gegen den Tod zur Wehr setzen" über "Fähigkeit, gegen den Strom der Zeit zu schwimmen" und "Bioinformationssystem" bis zu "essbar, liebenswert, tödlich". Mit unkonventionellen Einwürfen fördert die biogroop die Feinheiten der Frage und ihrer Antworten zutage - und hebt sie damit aus den Angeln.--"What Is Life?" is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Gottfried Treviranus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck independently coined the word "biology" in 1802. The query has titled scores of articles and books, with Erwin Schrödinger's in 1944 and Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan's in 1995 being only the most prominent ones. In this book, biogroop curate and speculate upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829-2020 containing "What Is Life?" in their titles. Replies to the question-and, by extension, the object of biology-have transformed since its first enunciation, from "the sum of the functions that resist death" to "a bioinformation system" to "edible, lovable, lethal." Interleaved are frame-shifting interruptions reflecting on how the question has been posed, answered, and may yet be unasked.

"Wenn der Klang die Geburt und die Stille der Tod ist, kann das sich endlos fortpflanzende Echo einzig die Erfahrung des Lebens, die Quelle des Erzählens und ein Muster für die Geschichte bilden." Ausgehend von Louis Chude­ Sokeis metaphorischer, politischer und technopoeti­scher Sondierung experimentiert der Band, wie das Echo vergangener Vorstellungen von Leben und Form die Technologien und Lebens­weisen unserer heutigen Welt hervorgebracht hat. Es entsteht ein Bild vielfältiger Techno­logien, ihrer Geschichten und Zukünfte. --"If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history." Drawing on Louis Chude­Sokei's metaphorical, political, and technopoetic investigations, this volume experiments with how the echo of past ideas of life and form has brought forth the technolo­gies and lifestyles that our contemporary world is based on. The essays, conversations, and artist contributions delineate a varie­gated array of technologies, creating an image of their past and their future potentials.

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 "e;sounding"e;-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.

Artificial Life is the brainchild of scientists who view self-replicating computer programs - such as computer viruses - as new forms of life. This book looks 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.

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.