Hello and welcome to the FleshFactor Net-Symposium.
This is Tom Sherman writing and I'll be the moderator for this year's on-line net-symposium. This year's focus will be the 'Fleshfactor', the position, status or condition of the individual within the technocultural information environment. This information environment is often described as our 'second nature'. As our 'natural environment' has changed, so has the individual.
Last year Ars Electronica hosted both a net- and live symposium called 'Memesis: the Future of Evolution'. The Memesis symposia developed ways of thinking about and discussing global technocultural evolution and the possibility of the emergence of a post-biological, cyberorganic evolutionary track--an eventual global intelligence based on universal binary codes, of which the first protozoans of such an evolution may have names like the Internet, the I-way and Cyberspace. The Memesis symposia elaborated on ideas stemming from reductionist scientific theories, specifically the concept of 'memes' (cultural genes) put forth by Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University-based Lecturer in Zoology.
Last year's Memesis Net-Symposium remains on the Ars Electronica server and is available at: www.aec.at/meme/symp This text database of the Memesis Net-Symposium provides an important information substrata for this year's FleshFactor discussion.
As a starting point for FleshFactor, Gerfried Stocker, the Director of Ars Electronica, has authored a first statement defining the conceptual territory of the FleshFactor Net- Symposium. Please read this text carefully, for this will be our point of departure. His FleshFactor text is published here in English and in its original German. To maximize global participation in this net-symposium, we respectfully request that all subsequent texts be submitted in English.
This year's net-symposium is an open affair. If you have opinions, questions or information about the position, status or condition of the individual in this world constructed of increasingly complex, rapidly evolving technocultural systems, we ask you to help us flesh out a new contemporary definition of the individual. Please share your thoughts, feelings, insights, information. This net-symposium will undoubtedly anticipate and prescribe the nature of the live discussions at the 1997 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz this September 8-13, 1997.
Send your opening and/or ongoing remarks on the FleshFactor to:
fleshfactor@aec.at
It will be assumed that messages sent to this 'fleshfactor' address are meant to be distributed via the Ars Electronica website--questions or comments not meant to be public should be addressed to me at: twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu We are looking forward to hearing from you. Thanking you in advance for your thoughtful and key participation, let us get started... There are many important things for us to discuss.
Sincerely, Tom Sherman, April 7, 1997
Net
Symposium