Rolf Hughes

Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science, and New Media Rolf Hughes

Publisher Marketing: With the practices of art, science and technology increasingly converging, the concepts of origins and originality raise some of the most pressing questions in contemporary research, including issues of agency and accountability, hybridity and identity, intellectual property and oeuvre, intention and authority. These, and a constellation of related philosophical, economic, aesthetic, legislative and political concerns, are today subject to rapid reconfiguration due to the current pace of technological and theoretical change. Second Nature accordingly brings into a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue scholars working at the intersections of art, science and technology. Contributions explore how technologies of reproduction alter the meaning of concepts such as origin and originality, and how the borders between what we think of as "authentic" and "fake," "natural" and "artificial," are under constant negotiation and transformation. Interdisciplinary - and transdisciplinary - research demands rethinking our existing discursive and methodological orthodoxies. Second Nature arrives as a timely response, illuminating contemporary debates concerning digital and biological reproduction, nature and technology, art and authenticity, criticality and hybridity. Contributor Bio:  Sunden, Jenny Jenny Sunden is a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary Department of Communication Studies at Linkoping University in Sweden. She was a visiting scholar in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley in 1998-1999, and is now teaching in the field of media and cultural studies. Her dissertation focuses on various aspects of embodiment and textuality in MUDs (text-based online worlds).