Bealites,
Bob Logan and I met Katherine Hayles in Mexico City at the MEA conference. We proposed to bring her to Toronto in a speaking event as a first step in establishing a relationship between Dr. Hayles and the Beal Institute. Please don't miss this chance to hear an unparalleled scholar of humanism and science, speaking about the future of dataspace. --Greg

Katherine Hayles presents "RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments"

6:30pm, Wednesday October 3, 2007
OCAD Auditorium

Abstract:
From the beginning, RFID technology has been entangled with politics. Now that RFID tags are so small and cheap they can be spread pervasively in the environment, surveillance is an urgent concern. Also at issue, however, are the effects of RFID in creating an animate environment with agential and communicative powers. This talk will explore the epistemological and ontological issues raised by RFID in the context of two fictional scenarios of an RFID-embedded worlds, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

N. Katherine Hayles is the John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Disginguished Professor in the Departments of English and Design/Media Arts at University of California, Los Angeles. She writes and teaches on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics won the René Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her latest book is My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, and her forthcoming book, out in February 2008 from the University of Notre Dame Press, is Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She is currently at work on a book exploring the complex ecologies of narrative and data.
Hayles presents RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments