Engineering Nature

This is the third book in a series drawing on papers presented at annual Consciousness Reframed conferences.  In addition to focusing on the 2003 conference, it also includes papers published in the journal Technoetic Arts.  With some 45 contributors, each chapter presents current issues arising in the context of art, technology and consciousness.

Roy Ascott is Director of the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth and Visiting Professor in Design/Media Arts, University of California, Los Angeles.  His previous publications include Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003)

Preface
 Introduction
 
1. The Mind1.1 Towards a Conscious Art
Robert Pepperell1.2 Effing the Ineffable: An Engineering Approach to Consciousness
Steve Grand1.3 (Re)Constructing (Non)Dualism
Andrea Gaugusch1.4 Another View from the Blender
Michael Punt1.5 Bio–electromagnetism: Discrete Interpretations
Nina Czegledy1.6 MEDIATE: Steps Towards a Self–Organising Interface
Paul Newland, Chris Creed and Maestro Ron Geesin1.7 Facts about P–E–M (Psycho–Enhanced Memberships) you must know
Armando Montilla1.8 Happenstances
Evgenija Demnievska1.9 Ontological Engineering: Connectivity in the Nanofield
Roy Ascott 
2. The Body
2.1 Are the Semi–Living Semi–good or Semi–evil?
Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts2.2 Absent Body Project
Yacov Sharir2.3 Our Body as Primary Knowledge Base
Kjell Yngve Petersen2.4 Electronic Cruelty
Gordana Novakovic2.5 Design Against Nature
Anthony Crabbe2.6 Why Look at Artificial Animals?
Geoff Cox and Adrian Ward2.7 Biopoetry
Eduardo Kac 
3. The Place3.1 Real Virtuality: Authenticity in Electronic and Non–electronic Environments
Eril Baily3.2 Sharing Virtual Reality Environments across the International Grid (iGrid)
Margaret Dolinsky3.3 Interactive, Responsive Environments: a Broader Artistic Context
Garth Paine3.4 Towards Defining the ‘Atmosphere’ and Spatial Meaning of Virtual Environments
Ioanna Spanou and Dimitris Charitos3.5 Symbiotic Interactivity in Multisensory Environments
Stahl Stenslie3.6 Aesthetics Within Ego Shooter Games
Maia Engeli3.7 Creative Communities in Networked Hybrid Spaces
Mauro Cavalletti3.8 From Multiuser Environments as Space to Space as a Multiuser Environment: Cell Phones in Art and Public Spaces
Adriana de Souza e Silva3.9 Arch–OS v1.1 (Architecture Operating Systems), Software for Buildings
Mike Phillips and Chris Speed3.10 (an)Architecture, Eros, Memory: the Naxsmash Project
Christina McPhee3.11 Who Plays the Nightingale?
Claudia Westermann3.12 Breeding, Feeding, Leeching
Shaun Murray 
4. The Text
4.1 The Potential of Electronic Textuality
Dene Grigar4.2 Art and Information
David Topping4.3 Metaphorical Vestiges on Info–Viz Trails
Donna Cox4.4 Interstellar Messaging, Xenolinguistics, and Consciousness: LiveGlide Meets the SETI Enterprise
Diana Reed Slattery and Charles René Mathis4.5 Art and HCI: A Creative Collaboration
Ernest Edmonds, Linda Candy, Mark Fell and Alastair Weakly 
5. The Art5.1 The Idea Becomes a Machine: AI and A–Life in Early British Computer Arts
Paul Brown5.2 The Interactivity of the Moving Document as the Diegetic Space of Consciousness
Clive Myer5.3 Assimilating Consciousness: Strategies in Photographic Practice
Jane Tormey5.4 Simultaneity, Theatre and Consciousness
Daniel Meyer–Dinkgräfe5.5 Cinematic Soteriology: Darshanic Effects in the Tamil Bakthi Films
Niranjan Rajah5.6 Search For Utopia: Human Consciousness and Desire
Julia Rice5.7 Super Interactivity: Art, Consciousness, and the Dawn of the Participatory Age
Alex Shalom Kohav5.8 Pete and Repeat were Sitting on a Fence: Iteration, Interactive Cognition and an Interactive Design Method
Ron Wakkary5.9 Visual Art as an Earning Process: The New Economics of Art
Nicholas Tresilian5.10 Culture, Ecology and the Real
Paul O’Brien5.11 The Immersive Experience of Osmose and Ephémère: An Audience Study
Hal Thwaites5.12 On Making Music with Artificial Life Models
Eduardo Reck Miranda5.13 Artistic Strategies for Using the Arts as an Agent through the Creation of Hyper–Reality Situations
Karin Søndergaard 
6. The Future6.1 The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of Fact and Fiction in the Construction of a New Science
Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna 
Contributor Biographies