[rohrpost] Konferenz "Abwehr: Modelle, Strategien, Medien"

[Claus Pias]

Announcing an International Conference on

DEFENSE: MODELS, STRATEGIES, MEDIA
UC Irvine, March 7-9, 2005

How does bio-defense policy fertilize art? Does national security dogma
find representation in current culture? Can the immune system teach us
something about media? To what extent do computer games draw on military
training? - This conference will focus on defensive modeling and
critical thinking on defensive modes: investigating the relevance, for
contemporary culture, of concepts and metaphors ranging from military
tactics and security policy to the analysis of social, biological,
psychological, technological, and other forms of protection against
stimuli.

Conference topics will include representations of immunization,
exclusion, projection, denial, prevention, prophylaxis, control,
isolation, etc. in public policy and media politics; paranoia as a
control fantasy and a symptom of the networked society; bioengineering
and critical art practice; information warfare and info-peace; the
epistemology of secret intelligence (and counter-intelligence); the
visualization of biotechnology; the psychoanalytical registers of
conceptualizing ego defense; cybernetics and computer science in their
process of institutionalization; the media metaphorology of viral
infection; anthrax and other (real and imaginary) threats of
bio-terrorism; volumetric display as a technology of localizing the
opponent in military technology; bio-robotics; the cultural cold war;
alternative cartography focusing on the "secret" military bases in the
Southern California desert; and technological and political defenses
against crimes of identity theft.

Speakers include Etienne Balibar (UCI), Wendy Hui Kyung Chun (Brown),
Beatriz da Costa (UCI), James Der Derian (Brown), Garnet Hertz (UCI),
Eva Horn (Frankfurt/Oder), Natalie Jeremijenko (Yale/UCSD), Julian Klein
(Berlin), Peter Krapp (UCI), Trevor Paglen (Berkeley), Claus Pias
(Essen), Mark Poster (UCI), Laurence Rickels (UCSB), Philipp Sarasin
(Zurich), Felicity Scott (UCI), Jens Schroeter (Siegen), Jennifer Terry
(UCI), Eugene Thacker (Georgia Tech), Brigitte Weingart (Cologne).

Save the date: March 7-9, 2005, University of California, Irvine, HIB
135. Conference details will be available online later this month.

Supported by the Humanities Center, the Office of the Dean of
Humanities, the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT),
the Critical Theory Institute (CTI), the University of California
Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), and the Department of Visual
Studies, as well as by the German Foundation Junge Akademie.

Please circulate this announcement widely, thank you very much in
advance.