What is Biomedia?

Body (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., Cyberspace / Cyberbodies / Cyberpunk (London: Sage, 1995); Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Hacking the Future (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). On the questionable “newness” of new media, see Friedrich Kittler, “What’s New about the New Media?” in Mutations, ed. Rem Koolaas et al. (New York: Actar Editorial, 2001), pp. 58–69. Free Downloads, Costly Uploads Virtual bodies, cyberbodies, cyborgs, avatars, hypertext bodies, and a host of other “incurably informed” corporealities continue to populate the ongoing discourses surrounding cyberculture and new media (which, as Friedrich Kittler reminds us, are not so new).1 At the core of these and other formulations is a concern for the ways in which a medium associated with immateriality and disembodiment will affect our views of having bodies and being bodies (and becoming bodies . . . ). In this almost mythic encounter, an assumedly preinformatic body confronts a set of techniques and technologies whose central aim is to render everything as information—not only can everything be understood as information, but information is everything, in that every thing has a “source code.” While some perspectives see this as an emancipatory promise of the posthuman, other, more critical perspectives have questioned the hidden theology masked by the technical speak of pattern, emergence, and code.