TECHNOFILE

ARTIFICE AND INTELLIGENCE

The trouble with cyber-theory is, to put it politely, its signal-to-noise ratio. Although I'm loath to chuck the baby out with the bathwater, I'm not going to fritter bandwidth on discussions about why the notion of bathwater should be deconstructed. Next time somebody asks me why I take this line, I'll point them to Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism (edited by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J Cassidy, Routledge, pounds 45hbk and pounds 14.99pbk), a collection of essays compiled from conference papers given at Warwick University, and imbued with the spirit of the local presiding genius, Sadie Plant. If the shout on the cover from Sue Golding doesn't do the trick, or the list of contributors, featuring one who describes himself as an "ex-human writer of noise", there are the papers themselves. Apart from a slice of punk-rot-etc cyberfiction from Australian cyberfeminists VNS Matrix, they all pose as theory. Just one, by Manuel de Landa, appears to be both about something and to know what it is talking about.

Although the prevailing style makes a fetish of playfulness, the humour is largely unintentional. My favourite is David Porush's assertion, in "Telepathy: Alphabetic Consciousness and the Age of Cyborg Illiteracy", that our ancestors began walking on two legs 35,000 years ago. Porush reflects that this development "is just as easy to talk about metaphysically or teleologically as in terms of some deterministic chaotic evolution". This is actually true, since his date is two zeroes short, his belief that tool use and brain expansion accompanied it is wrong, deterministic chaos is an oxymoron, and frankly even an illiterate cyborg would make more sense.

'Consider this rule of thumb: to the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong'

Biologist Edward O Wilson in 'Back From Chaos' an essay which goes from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and beyond. Available in its entirety on the Atlantic Monthly site

NOT BRAIN SURGERY, AFTER ALL

Hey, it's Brain Awareness Week! And being aware of our brains is what makes us human, right? But being human doesn't always have to be hard work, and if you want to be kind to your cortex, you could try limbering up on the Neuroscience for Kids (NFK)website. You'll need bottle caps, jelly and food colouring, because this is a site where software means Play-Doh. If you choose your ingredients right, you can have your neural model and eat it too.

BRAIN IN A BAG

A recipe from the Pacific Science Center and the Group Health Co-operative, via NFK: Materials: 1.5 cups (360ml) instant potato flakes, 2.5 cups (600ml) hot water, 2 cups (480ml) clean sand, 1 gallon ziplock bag. Instructions: Combine the ingredients in the ziplock bag and mix thoroughly. It should weigh about 3lbs (1.35kg) and have the consistency of a real brain.

METAPHOR LORRY SHEDS LOAD; EXPECT DELAYS

'Virtual Futures cyberotics vividly carves out in big, thick "drink me, eat me, use me" letters, the punk-rot psychosis of the information age. Here the disfigured/re-figured body, skin, genitals, genders, saliva, tears, automobiles and out-of-pocket imaginations rub up against the (not so innocent) mutilations of postmodernism itself. As the cows go to slaughter, nothing is sacred in this acid-take-all revolution'

Sue Golding, author of 'The Eight Technologies of Otherness'

DIGITAL ACORNS

Tamagotchi would never have caught on if they had been marketed as parasites. But that's what they are, unlike the classic species of artificial life, which have some ability to look after themselves. The Internet has become a seedbank for early varieties, most of which are cute little programs from the pre-Cambrian era of floppy disks and 200-kilobyte applications. These primitive organisms typically resemble a sort of self-propelled Tetris, and thrive when downloaded into modern computer environments.

We should perhaps regard them as more than novelties. In his introduction to Artificial Life: The Tufts Symposium (Oxford University Press, Win/Mac, pounds 99 + VAT), the philosopher Daniel Dennett declares that we are "really just the descendants of robots". The original robots were single cells replicating in the primordial soup: maybe pixels replicating on PC screens will turn out to be the ancestors of artificial life forms that humans will have to take seriously.

In the meantime, there's plenty more food for thought on the CD-ROM, which comprises a selection of video clips and transcripts from the Symposium. The debate is conducted at a level that absolute novices would find frustrating to follow, however, even if the disk were priced at a level an individual would sensibly pay. Alternatively, you could just download some electronic bacteria and contemplate them for free.

TECHNOTIP

Alta Vista is a fast search engine, but to get there even faster, move your mouse to the little map on the top of the screen, and click to choose a regional subsidiary in a hemisphere near you. Or if you really want to think global, choose one in a part of the world where normal people are asleep.