| Spring 2005 |
Editors: Glenn Gear, Susan Lord, Dorit Naaman, Matt Soar and Miriam Verburg
The twenty-five contributors to this issue represent the majority of the participants in the Digital Politics and Poetics Summer Institute, held at Queen’s University in August 2004. The combined booklet/DVD/Website Digipopo that comprise this special issue provide responses to issues such as pirating or copyright infringement, the commodity-cluttered and ephemeral space of the web, unequal access and development, as well as the political economies and aesthetic vocabularies of technologically driven cultural forms.
Kirsty Robertson, “How to Knit an Academic Paper”:
“[Row 7: K16A, K2B, K46A]
Recently, scientists at Manchester University developed a printer able to produce human
skin. Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, skin cells are taken from a patient’s
body, multiplied, then printed out, creating a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to
the body. The wound’s dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit
(Camber, website). Still in the early stages of development, it is not known how the
printed skin will react to that other sense of skin – touch. Printed skin might look right,
but feel wrong, or not feel at all. It might be, in other words, a trick, from the French word
tricoter to knit or knot together, and thus deceive or riddle (Connor, 46-47).
[Row 8: P45A, P3B, P16A]
With the epidermal layer printable on an inkjet, the question might be what isn’t
manufacturable, what isn’t commodity, and when the body is deconstructed through bioand
nanotechnology, through prosthetic limbs and silicone features, through hair dye
and braces, the mapping of the human genome, the patenting of human genes and the
collapse of the body into so many tradable components, what isn’t a trick? What doesn’t
fall into a space of deceit, consumption, riddling, elusive reality?” (3-4)
$15