Mutamorphosis: Tribute to Uncertainty. Prague 6-8/12/12
International conference on mutant futures of arts, sciences, technologies, design and society brings together over 100 presenters from all over the world to share ideas and discuss various projects and initiatives that cut across disciplines in order to challenge emerging technologies and their impact on us. Among the themes, there are “bacterial sublime”, “nomadic citizen science” or “future of art/science education”. Organized by CIANT | International Centre for Art and New Technologies.
 
Nanotechnology: Instability in an Unpredictable Milieu
By Paul Thomas & Edward A. Shanken & Mike Phillips & Frederik De Wilde
Keywords: Nanotechnology; Art; Science; Materiality; Measurement.
 

and :

The End of Things.

Mike Phillips and Gianni Corino.

Abstract:  Just as the ‘thing’ gets its own Internet its significance as a foci of knowledge within a variety of disciplines is dissolving. This dissolution can be clearly seen in microbiology where there has been a steady shift of focus from solitary bacterium to an understanding of quorum-sensing in bacterial communities. At a larger scale, a fly is no longer recognised as a ‘body’ but through an analysis of its DNA and a human more clearly understood as a constituent of a crowd, a demographic or an entry in a National Health Service database. Architecture collapses in importance in the context of the complexity of the urban environment, whether it is the connecting temporal tendrils of traffic flow or an underlying web of a sewage system.

 ‘The End of Things’ explores a set of technologies and processes being developed by i-DAT that offer strategies for understanding these trans-scalar shifts. Framed as ‘Operating Systems’ they embrace social, biological, architectural and ecological data harvesting and manifestation. These OS’s recognise a cultural shift where suddenly a rose by any other name is less significant than the complex temporal.