Tecnologie del vivente (1)
Pier Luigi Capucci

Cercare di conoscere e di controllare la dimensione a venire, anche solo col pensiero e l’immaginazione, consente di “prepararsi al futuro”, di adottare o adeguare azioni, strategie e comportamenti ritenuti appropriati al modello di futuro che cerchiamo di immaginare. L’obiettivo di questa immaginazione non è solo il “successo”, inteso nel senso lato di affermazione di un’attitudine, ma anche il miglioramento dell’immediato presente e delle condizioni di esistenza del futuro più prossimo. In tal modo la dimensione simbolica consente di immaginare e vivere il futuro in anticipo, di creare e mettere alla prova ipotetici modelli venturi per prepararsi al confronto col reale a venire, ponendone le basi. Questa capacità simbolico-proiettiva, evolutasi nel volgere di milioni di anni, molto più sviluppata di quella degli altri esseri viventi, è lo strumento più efficace con cui l’umanità cerca di garantirsi il miglioramento della propria esistenza. Essa è ben più che una speranza proiettiva.

Over the RGB Rainbow
Are Flågan

So instead of crying out in feigned disbelief and outrage when ISPs shut down our Halloween monsters, like The Thing, and rat on our Robin Hood pirates, who download 600 songs in a day, we must come to terms with the fact that corporate and government apparatuses can, when desired, turn out the lights on our daring virtual oppositions and “free” digital lifestyles with the click of a switch or a mouse. A virtuality check, then, does not imply that we abandon the imagination in search for alternatives, that we take leave of our monsters and pirates, our digital multitudes and creative commons. It rather seeks to eventually empower them by first pointing out that both current and developing ICTs do not lend themselves to be hired for shared speculation on democracy without steep interests attached and monthly payments in cold, hard cash.

Constructing the Digital Commons. A venture into hybridisation
Eric Kluitenberg

Now, my purpose here is not to write an essay on political theory, but rather to prepare the grounds for a discussion of a concept that is closely aligned with these macro-political trends, and that has surfaced recently in a range of different discussions, and across a range of different disciplines and contexts: the notion of the “commons”. Interestingly the concept of the commons has popped up quite persistently in discussions about the social dimension of communication and networking technology, and the shaping of an emerging network society. What all these discussions and projects share is a concern that the potential of digital networking to create an open and democratic knowledge and communication space is squandered in favour of narrow short term economic interests. Interests, however, that are promoted by some of the most powerful economic and political players on the globe today.

The Premise of Recombinant Architecture: One
Benjamin H. Bratton

Recombinant architecture examines the deep cultural impact of biotechnologies, including genetic, genomic and transgenic engineering, on the architectural imagination. [...] Recombinant architecture explodes allegorical relationships between body and structure, incorporating biologic and architectural bodies into indiscrete and reversible interiors and exteriors including cyborgs and transgenic bodies, generative tissue textiles, body-architecture hybrids, replicating habitats and genetically engineered architectures and building materials. Recombinant architecture is multiple, and this essay considers it according to three interrelate indexes: (1) the conception of architectonic forms in the image of genetic, biomorphic corporeality [...], (2) the deliberate fashioning of recombinant bodily forms [...] and (3) the application of artificial biomaterials in the construction of the built environment [...] - from bodies to buildings and back again.

Quantum Finance. A new methodology for economics
Ian Dickson

Quantum Finance is a new field that seeks to resolve problems that are experienced with the Standard Model, (i.e. money is real, and takes the form of cash and assets). Interestingly the whole endeavour arose as a result of a discussion between a CERN experimental physicist and his private banker in Geneva. This lead to a collaboration between CERN and a select group of Swiss bankers, who between them created the discrete GW (Gnomes and Wizards) Forum, the papers of which this summary is based on. The motives of the CERN researchers was a combination of simple pure pursuit of knowledge, and the hope that a successfully predictive theory would solve their perennial funding problems. The Bankers were suffering from their twin emotions of fear and greed. Fear that they stood to lose if Quantum Finance worked, and they were ignorant of it, and greed in that they hoped for an edge.