A report from EASST 2006, University of Lausanne

Frankenstein was born in Lausanne, some say. Beached on the stone shore of the lake, before the feet of Mary Shelley, he whispered of a techno-organic creation, a monster of spark and flesh. Lausanne is an apt place for stories of the techno-organic dead, a hybrid morbidity for which practioners and dilettantes of Science and Technology Studies have a particular penchant. The Reviewing [of] Humanness: Bodies, Technologies and Spaces was, for me, a story sewn together from monsters, hybrids, bodies and cadavers…

I travelled EAS[S]T, towards the rising summer sun; train flickering over the high-speed plains and grass seas of France and Switzerland. I remember arriving into a glaze of hot blue sunlight that had long since faded the distant mountain-sides and sunflower fields; the land was failing with the season. The glory of those stark mountain peaks, far beyond the lake, was no longer spring-crisp but ethereal, even, dare I say it, Olympic. I often sat on those boulders/sculptures outside the glass walls of the university (a natural-cultural landscape, it must here be noted) and watched those mountains fading, dying in the sun-mist air.

The hybrid morbidity began with the skull of a child, a 19th Century phantasmagoria of the inside of a brain; the desire to un-stitch the flesh and see the electricity of thought within. This was the story told by Michael Hagner, perhaps inspired by the whisperings of Frankenstein nearby. The technologically-infected carcasses began to pile high when John Law marked and re-marked the line between life and death for cattle and sheep during the UK Foot & Mouth epidemic. His was a gagging story of pyres of animals burned by database – “carnage by computer”. Above these Rachel Prentice then threw the digitally-thin cadavers of the US National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Male and Visible Human Female. Two dead bodies that were neatly sliced and then categorised into the appropriate sectors of a set of CDROMs; death transmuted into living digital bits. Two bodies that had conveniently died by lethal injection on death-row so that there would be no scar, no visible sign of death to mark the visible body. Two immortal bodies; dead monsters, some might say, made undead.

And then there was the most terrible techno-organic death of all: that of story itself, killed by DVD. Michael Christie (and the ghost of Helen Verran) spoke passionately of a software salvation project. For the Yolngu in Northern Australia, story and landscape are alive, ongoing, unfinished. To capture a story of the landscape and burn it alive on DVD is a killing act. The land lives as a local performance; it dies by global database. Yet, Michael told of how performance and partiality can be woven into the digital memory of landscape and story. For this was, ultimately, a tale of hope not death, of how to tell landscapes and stories without killing them, how to locally nurture an inseparability of living software, living flesh, and living place. It reminded me that some immutable mobiles die when they are cut off from their roots, and are abandoned unloved in the world. As Bruno Latour chastises the developers of Aramis in his own dreams of Victor Frankenstein: “your crime is that you abandoned your creation”.[1] Some things are close relations, you have to stay with them and let their roots tap down into a particular place for them to truly live; you have to attend to a growing, unpredictable, creative story. Perhaps it is, as Annemarie Mol finally reminded me in her thoughts on healthcare, a matter of tinkering, a matter of care, even in death.

And so, as with all old stories, the sun fell into darkness over Lausanne. I travelled home westwards, into twilight and night, and into tomorrow. But the midden of uprooted techno-bodies was left to haunt me, to tell me stories, as Frankenstein’s muse once did. For tomorrow’s possibilities belong as much to those whose flesh has rotted into text and textiles, as to the living. Futures are always made, in part, by those who form the stratigraphy for archaeologists, geologists and archivists. It is often their bodies, their techno-organic remains, who inspire the stories to come…

Notes

1 Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the Love of Technology, London, Harvard University Press, pp 248.