Interact or Die: There Is Drama In The Networks

The 1990s dream of cyberspace and its immaterial possibilities seems now to belong to the distant past: our future will be material for some time to come. And yet, modern biology has shown that matter is far from inert. It is "self-organizing," "epigenetic" and "transductive"--three terms that are explored in this collection of essays and artistic interventions. We all know that blueprints for the future have regularly been rendered obsolete, since nobody can predict or control processes like climate change or global flows of employment or information. This leaves us with the question of what sort of exploratory behavior we can come up with to create functioning networks, and to locate our role in the process of producing variation and selection. In Interact or Die!, the exploratory behavior of a selection of artists is combined with essays by prominent authors in the area of "networks-into-matter" and "matter-into-networks" theory.