REVIEW OF BOOKSArt and Science,On Speaking TermsSigns of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, edited byEduardo Kac, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2007;;399 pages, $34.95.The Prosthetic Impulse: From a PosthumanPresent to a Biocultural Future, edited hyMarquard Smith and Joanne Moira, Cambridge,Mass., MIT Press, 2006; 340 pages, $34.95.Genesis Redux: Essays in the History andPhilosophy of Artificial life, edited by JessicaUiskin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007;389 pages, $25.Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images,by Barbara Maria Stafford, Chicago, University ofCliicago Press. 2007; 281 pages, $45.Scnsoriuni: Embodied Experience, Technoiogy,and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones,Canibridgp, Mass., MIT Press, 2006; 268 pages, $30.The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art andScience, by Cretien van Campen, Cambridge, Mass.,MIT Press, 2007; 208 pages, $29.95.

BY NANCY PRINCENTHAL

S if/IIS of Life: Bio Art and Beyond is co-pub-lished by the Leonardo Society, which alsopublishes a magazine that, like its books, addressesthe intersection of art and science. The society'snamesake made contributions of equal moment tothe fields of mechanical engineering, anatomy andvisual representation; for the contributors to thishook, and to the other five reviewed here (amongdozens in a very crowded field), that's not reallya viable option. Artists and scientists freely scouteach other's work for ideas and data, butgiventhe specialization of knowledge in our timenoone can he expected to engage in botb practiceswith equal commitment or sophistication.

Nonetheless, interdisciplinary dialogue nowabounds, and it is cause for cheeror, at the veryleast, careful notice. Not since the virtual realitycraze of the early '90s, when wildly infiated claimswere made for the impact that a new kind of digitalequipment would have on human perceptual expe-rience, have so many artists been so involved withthe promises and threats of cutting-edge scientificresearch. This time around, the preponderance ofconcern is with biology rather than digital-imag-ing technology (or, as in the first part of the 20t,hcentury, quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis).Genetics has attracted the lion's share of atten-tion, though studies of brain and mind are stilldrawing a great deal of interest, and there are newdevelopments in prosthetics and robotics that havenatural appeal for technophilic artists. But evenfor those examining the implications of new workin psychology and neuroscience, the trajectory ofexjjlorationwith speculation invariably acceler-ating as it proceedsleads outward from the self,finding increasing porosity in borders separatingindividuals from one another, one species from thenext and even the biological from the artificial.

Along with avid interest, there is a great deal ofentrenched fear and anger in artists' and theorists'

responses to new scientific developments in thesefields (particularly to genetic manipulation)-again, an attitude alien to the leading figures ofthe Renaissance but so common in modern visualand literary culture that it is often left unexam-ined. There is also a tendency, among artists, tolook to the explosion of new technology for strayevidence of other worldsa paradoxically mysti-cal response characteristic as well of the late 19thcentury, a period with its own explosive growthof new technologies. (Both the wariness and thesupernaturaiism are approaches to science morereadily associated with fundamentalist religionthan advanced art, which may or may not be rel-evant to cultural prodnction under the woridmdeshadow of extremist theology.)

But a sea change seems under way. The post-modern suspicion that hard science is a pillar ofthe patriarchy survives (here, citation of Foncaultis .still inevitable). For some intrepid souls, though,this anathema has broken down under the pres-sure of evidence that relativism, lately the provinceof cultural theory, has been newly associated withscience (where, after all, it is not altogether unfa-miliar; witness physics's uncertainty principle andtheories of relativity, beloved by early modernists).In the 20-plus years since Donna Haraway's "Mani-festo for Cyborgs," roboticists, biologists and fan-tasists have come to share a body of truth-blurringimageiy, at once outlandish and real. That manyartists overstate their "discoveries" in science andmistake some of what they see there goes withoutsaying. No matter. Exaggeration is as well-provena rhetorical choice as science's own distinctivelybureaucratic, neologism-laden idiom.

In fact, for al! the virtues of, for instance,genetically modified sculptures, the most fruitfulhybrid to emerge from the new science and the layresponse it has generated may well be linguistic: apolyglot vocabulary that draws equally on biology,technology and art. Such a lexical shift would be anenormous boon, but it won't be easy to forge. Whilethe many rich metaphors derived from science byartists and writers elicit understandable resistancefrom researchers, there are surprising reserves ofconservatism on both sides. Irrespective of theirday jobs, language preservationiststhose whobalk at the most strenuous metaphoric stretchesand heaviest theoretical exertionstend to bepeople who benefit from the new technologies intangible ways; those most venturesome in theirtheoretical excursions tend, a little paradoxically,to be most leery of science (and likeliest to citesuch hoaiy figures as Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan,Derrida, Deleuze and so on), What seems sharedis an assumption of humankind's creeping dis-embodiment. Reproduction without sex, fetish-ism without eroticism, minds without wetware,fatal damage without death: in describing this newstate of affairs, observers from every discipline findthemselves at a loss for wordswhich the authorsof these several books are eager to supply.

Eduardo Kac, editor oi Signs of Life (and,with Avital Ronell, of the just published LifeExtreme; Kac also wrote the essays collected inTelepresence & Bio Art, 2005), is an artist respon-

sible for perhaps the best-knovm example of the"bio art" that is the curreni book's subject: thegenetically modified rabbit. Alba, that he commis-sioned a French lab to create in 2000; it glowed afiuorescent green (when exposed to a certain kindof light) with the help of DNA borrowed from natu-rally phosphorescent fish. Right from the outset ofthe book, Kac establishes an antagonistic relation-ship to the science in question. "It is not clearwhat are the henefits, if any, to the consumer." hesays of genetically modified foods on the introduc-tion's first page, refiecting an aversion rife amongwealthy Western consumersnot those likeliest tobenefit from the new, hardier crops. But his wide-ranging selection of essays, most of them recentand many newly commissioned, is more judicious,and occasionally inspired.

Among the book's 30-odd contributors, the onlyscientist is Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), whowon a Nobel Prize in 1945 for the discovery of peni-cillin and is represented by a charming one-pagemanual on making paintings from living coloniesof moid; the images thus produced are pronounced"useful for... museum and teaching purposes." Noother contributor is quite so circumspect about theimplications of taking biology in hand for estheticpurposes. In the book's first, theoretical section,written mainly by cultural critics and philosophers,there is considerable hyperventilating about mon-strous hybrids, designer bodies and subject/objectconfusion in the brave new world of cloned sheepand crossbred lamh/goats. Theoretician BernardAndrieu wonders whether the new, geneticallyengineered "chimera [is] a trial to initiate humansto the dark side of creation" and further muses, "Isnot the wish to end the castration imposed by ourgenetic identity an acknowledgement of our spe-cies' self-loathing, or tbe evidence of our forgetful-ness ofthe genetic mutations infiicted on the chil-dren of Chernobyl and Hiroshima?" This last goesto the postwar heart of lingering biotechnophobia,the same bleak area artist Louis Bee visits whenhe warns of a new breed of electro-digital-genetic"technoteratogens."

More optimistic observers include RichardDoyle, a professor of P^ nglish and one of the few tonote that while the new biology may have promisedtriumph over death or at least a new understand-ing of life, "its deliveiy has been rendered morein anxiety than gnosis." Like many others, he callsattention to the long reach of genetic manipula-tion, which is as old as agriculture and the domes-tication of animals. But Doyle'.s particular sub-ject is the cultivation of marijuana, which (as hedescribes it, with some sympathy) involves fiend-ishly complicated genetic modifications; moreovergetting high, he observes, and playing with thehuman genome "botb hack into our agency ashumans," a perspective that administers tonicdoses of both humility and humor.

Sigm of Life'ti next section, on bioethics,includes a compelling if slightly digressive legalperspective on animal rights (on which ground,among others, Kac's own work has been chal-lenged). Also under this heading, philosopherDominique Lestel observes that neither the drivetoward expressiveand even decorativebehav-

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ior nor the willingness to go out of species to satisiyit is an exclusively human prerogative; as evidence,he cites spider crabs that make "garlands" fortheir shells from algae and small sponges. Regard-ing genetically modified organisms, Lestel sensi-bly writes that "the existence of GMOs (alreadyinvented by nature millions of years ago) is lessproblematic than the privatization of living organ-isms, accomplished by means of patents owned bya select number of multinational companie.s."

The book's largest set^ tion is devoted to examplesof bio art as Kac defines itthat is, work involvingactual living matter, not simply its representa-tionand I.S written by that work's creators, someof whom began playing with DNA molecules notlong after they first became widely available in theearly 1980s. By 2002, when the first complexly func-tional synthetic genome was made (these datesare courtesy Joe Davis's essay), artists were busyinterpreting and exploiting its implications. (Col-laborating artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr cite19H) as the year that living tissue from complexorganisms was first cultured; they note that H.G.Wells's prophetic Island of Dr. Moreau followedsoon thereafter.) Some of the bio art surveyedis fairly benign: Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey exploit analogies between photosynthesis andphotography to make pictures with chlorophyll,developing them in fields of grass. George Ges-sert breeds plants, and notes rather enigmaticallythat evolution is smarter than we are; the "DNAharmonic," he says, is not in our range, But thenagain, Gessert says, art uses mental energies thatother disciplineslike sciencereject, "and iswidely recognized as everyone's business," whichputs it in a useful position to promote science'sadvances.

Equally benevolently, Marta de Menezes manip-ulates the spots on butterfly wings through cross-breeding, documenting her efforts, and BrandonBallengee has produced stunning photos of thefrogs he has bred by pairing like with like, in aquixotic attempt to "resurface" lost traits. Onthe other hand, Paul Perry makes art with can-cer cells. Catts and Zurr's indisputably creepy"semi-living sculptures" involve live tissue culturegrown around various symbolic objects, such asa glass flgurine shaped like a bomb. Two artists,Paul Vanouse and Regina TVinidade, seem to havearrived independently at the idea of using gelclectrophoresis, a process used in forensics toproduce "DNA fingerprints." Like Alexander Flem-ing before him, davJdkremers makes paintingsfrom microorganisms, though those that form hismediumbacteria^have been artificially col-ored and genetically altered. Immodest even bythis book's rather lax standards, davidkremersmuses that "what once was a role played by a godis today just somebody's job." By contrast, NatalieJeremyenko humbly propo.ses that artificially bredhybrids be contextualized, as nature always is, bythe conditions of nurture: the project she docu-ments here, a model of simplicity, involves planting1.000 genetically identical trees in hundreds ofdifferent placeswith, inevitably, widely varyingoutcomes, Along with Marc Quinn, Jeremyenko isone of the better-known of the contributing artists;Quinn i.s represented by a rather uninspiring por-trait of a British scientist in the form of a colony

of bacteria cloned from his DNA, presented in aframed rectangle of agar jelly.

A concluding historical miscellany contains thefascinating story of Edward Steichen's lovinglyhred delphiniums, exhibited in 1936 at the Muse-um of Modern Art, where he was chair of the advi-sory committee on photography. As art historianRonald Gedrim points out, Steichen's one-weekflower show followed (by two years) the museum's"Machine Art" exhibition, which featured functional and decorative objects both industrial anddomestic, a lineage in which the fancy d^cor-suit-able blossoms might be said to belong. For his part,Steichen sounded a great deal like his 21st-centurydescendants when he wrote, in a 1949 article fora horticultural magazine, "The science of hereditywhen applied to plant breeding, which has as itsultimate purpose the aesthetic appeal of beauty,is a creative art. Instead of words or pigment ortone the plant breeder works and struggles withfactors and forces that have been locked up . . . fortens of thousands of years." (In 1999, DelphiniumSteichen Strain was still available from Burpee,at $2.95 a seed packet, but the current catalogueseems to have dropped it. Will old packets nowevolve into art?)

Some of the artists left out of Kac's survey, pre-sumably because they picture rather than imple-ment genetic research, include Suzanne Anker,Dennis Ashbaugh, Wim Deivoye, Ifiigo Manglano-Ovalle and Patricia Piccinini. Al.so omitted are thenow dormant hut lately headline-grabbing CriticalArt Ensemble (one of whose members, Steve Kurtz,has been prosecuted as a suspected terrorist forhis role in producing the group's "biotech" proj-ects). Though Kac's criteria for inclusion are per-fectly sound, it seems a shame to have overlookedthe insightsand powerful worksthat theseartists offer.

E lectro-mechanical simulations of humanlife and its constituent parts, in the formof robotics and prosthetics, are theoreticalgoldmines hardly less rich than genetics. TheProsthetic Impulse: From a Poslhuman Presentto a Biocuitural Future establishes its ambi-tions in its mouthful of a title, and with essaysthat go all over the map. It is especially clearfrom this book's range that the gravest alarm isexpressedand widest poetic license takenbythose who are whole and healthy; those livingwith prostheses have an entirely different per-spective on the artificial parts' theoretical impli-cationsand, on the whole, a vigorous resistanceto metaphorical usage (as would likely be true ofany future patient to benefit from not-yet-provengenetic therapies),

In an introduction written jointly by the book'seditors, Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra,approving attention is drawn (as in several essaysthat follow) to the term "metaphorical opportun-ism," a two-word critique of heedless analogizingcredited to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder,who coined it for the introduction to the book theyedited in 1097 on IHscourses of Disability. Smithand Morra go on to express skepticism about the"frenzied" warning issued in 1993 by Jean Baudril-lard, who wrote, "the point when prostheses areintroduced at a deeper level, when they are so

The path of explorationleads outward from theself, finding increasingporosity in bordersbetween one species andthe next and evenbetween the biologicaland the artificial.

completely internalized that they infiltrate theanonymous and the micro molecular core of thebody . . . : this point meant the end of the body,the end of its history," Rejecting Baudrillard's"overexcited fear" of cybernetic prostheses. Smithand Morra offer (or so their book's subtitle sug-gests) a "biocuitural future" in which, as definedby contributing writer Lennard Davis, "the study ofthe scientificized and medicalized body in history,culture and polillcs" will supplant outdated frame-works for social and cultural analysis.

In fact, especially in the latter half of the book(which has a dozen essays by cultural theoristsof various stripes), intellectual caution is oftenthrown to the wind, as when it is claimed thatby externalizing the mind, photography and filmconstitute forms of prosthesis, and that "turntab-lism"that is, being a disc jockey in the mannerof Paul Miller, aka DJ Spookj'represents "aninstance of media as technological extension/pros-thetic," But along the way, there are more nuancedobservations by writers closely involved with late-model artificial limbs and other body parts. "Expe-rience of any kind requires both bodies and lan-guage for its expression," writes Vivian Sobchack,a film historian who relies on an artificial leg,While arguing for attention to the literal and mate-rial ground for using pro.sthetics as a metaphor,she also notes that "metaphor is, by tropologicalnature, a displacement" of a kind not unrelated tothe displacement of physical function from livingflesh to artificial substitute.

In his own essay, co-editor Smith elaborates onthe media life of athlete, actress and model AinieeMuUins (Sobchack discusses her, too), A doublebelow-the-knee amputee, Mullins had a lively pres-ence as a successful contender again,st able-bodiedtrack and field stars, and also as "an eroticizedCyborgian sex kitten" in fashion magazines andother popular print media, even before she landeda starring role in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3.Wary, too, of "opportunistic" language use. Smithgoes on to question whether Mullins's wide appealmight not suggest ways of thinking ahout "perver-sion and fetishism , . . that are resoundingly notsexual at all." Though his logic is less than water-tight. Smith's discussion opens intriguing terri-toryand leaves, oddly, altogether unexplored thehighly provocative prostheses Bamey fashioned forhimself throughout the Cremaster cycle.

In the course of a very interesting essay thatconsiders genetic therapies as themselves forms ofprosthesis, Lennard Davis (who teaches English,disability studies and medical educationsurelya culturally symptomatic job description) offersa wonderfully succinct summary of genes, DNA

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and chromosomes and what is now known of theirfunction (not as much as you might think). But thebook's paj;c-turner is an essay by Lisa CartwTightand Brian Goldfarb describing the latest in pros-thetic technology, in which manufactured partsare wired (literally) to the living body's intactner\-e systt^ ni (this medical technology was also thesubject of "Muscle Memory," a July 30, 2007, NewYorker article); in one experimental device, a cam-era mounted on a pair of eyeglasses communicateswith an electrode array in the subject's visual cor-tex, enhancing control over the user's "virtual arm"and prompting the authors to wonder whether it isnot as much a visual as a motor prosthetic. Indeed,artificial vision for the blind (and, though notdescribed here, hearing for the deaf) are in devel-opment; one researcher has produced an "electri-cal sensor that interfaces with the tongue andtransmits visual iuformalion," ostensibly as an aidto firefighters, rescue divers and others workingin low visibility conditions. Sounding remarkablylike E.H. Gonibrich, the scientist who created it is(juoted as saving, "you don't see with your eyes, you.see with yciur brain,"

If Foucault is the dark angel of theorizing aboutgenetics, novelist William Gibson, whose fictionaluniverse is permeated by digitally controlled hard-ware, serves the same role for prosthetics. On theevidence of this book, he has no real counterpartamong visual artists. Apart from the film and pho-tography referred to in the essays mentioned above,and Rauschenberg's transfer drawings, which areIhe subject of a sense-stretching concluding essay,little actual artwork is discussed. Oddly, no one inTiie ProRthetic Impulse addresses what are prob-ably the most prominent visual representationsof prosthesesthose in paintings, drawings andcollages by Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfieldand other Neue Sachlichkeit artists working inthe wake of World War I. The American Civil Waris referred to often because its unprecedentedcasualty rate created urgent need for artificiallimbs and helped launch a (minor) industiy Butthe even greater carnage of the First World War,and the widespread perception that it was foughtin part, hy and for hea\y industry, more forcefullyreshaped the understanding of its most visiblydamaged casualties, who were pictured in art andthe popular imagination as ominous new hybrids oftechnology and tiesh.

That many physically disabled war survivors(now as then) suffer emotional iiyury as well, andthus serve as living symbols of the manifold costsof mechanized violence, surely continues to influ-ence the perception of prosthetics and those whowear them a^ subject not discussed. Nor do theauthors mention that the many American soldierswho have come home from Iraq as amputees havemotivated considerable new research in this area.These oversights are indicative of a lurking inclina-tion, in all these hook.s, to .scant current politicalreality in favor of an innocently geeky dispositionthat is equal parts horror and fa.scination.

While its connection to contemporary art is fairlyindirect. Genesi-s Redu.r: Essays in Ih^ History andPhilosophy of Artificial Life offers exceptionallysatLsfving food for thought. Telling one stranger-than-fiction tale after another ahout artificial beings,the beliefs that framed their creation and the faith

they've inspired, the book begins with the hydrau-lic animated figures of the ancient Greeks and pro-ceeds to medieval alchemy and various automatadating from the Renaissance forward hefore con-cluding with 21st-century robots. Editor JessicaRiskin writes in her introduction that by the late18th century, automata and the speculation theyprovoked were sufficiently widespread that a satiri-cal story was penned with the title "Humans AreMachines ofthe Angels."

One fascinating essay looks at Shakespeare's AWinter's Tale (and others of his plays) in light ofElizabethan automata, and Descartes's deus exmachina in light of Shakespeare's, tracing a lineageof ghost-in-machine solutions to problems bothtrivial and profound. Jacques Vaucaason's famouslyintricate 18th-century mechanical figures, amongthem a music-making flutist and an animated duck,are compared to contemporary work in anatomy inparticular the flayed, preserved and artfully posedcorpses that publicized pioneering physiologicalexplorations then under way The species, race andgender of remarkably capable but patently soullesscolonial-era automata (more often representingwomen, animals and Africans than European men,for reasons that are fairly obvious) are consideredin a historical context.

Cultural frameworks are provided for more recentdevelopments as well, and the most familiar coin-ages glossed, from Norbert Weiner's "cybernetics"of the 1940s to Katherine Hayles's definition of"posthuman," in a If)9!) book which contends thatconsciousness is a distributed phenomenon seam-lessly uniting humans and intelligent machines (thisusage is borrowed for Tlir Prosthetic ImpuLse'fi sub-title; the term posthuman gained art-world visibilitywith Jeffrey Deitch's 1992 exhibition and catalogueof that name). Among the distinguished academicscontributing essays to Genesis Rednx is a lone art-ist, Elizabeth King, whose own work, in figurativesculpture and \ideo, led to a deepening investigationof historical automata. Her essay here is on a 16th-century "praying machine" in the form of a IG-inch-high mechanical monk that walks (remarkably, itremains in working order) around the perimeter ofan imaginary cloister, periodically turning its head,raising its rosary to its lips and striking its breast.King explains the figure's connection to Phillip IIof Spain's dying son, who, legend says, was savedby the miraculous posthumous intervention of alocally revered monk; the king promised another"miracle" in exchange for the prince's recovery, andcommissioned the mechanical animation (said tobe the local monk's likene.ss) in partial fulfillmentof his vow. Along the way. King delicately traces theseveral registers of faithin reason, in the fruitsof devotion and in resurrectionthat fueled theautomaton's creation.

Also taking the long view, Barbara Stafford, anart historian who contributed to both Signsof Life and Semorium (see below) and is theauthor of several previous hooks on various inter-sections between science and visual art., has mostrecently released Echo Objects: The CognitiveWork of Images. Not for the acrophobe, her soar-ing flights of speculation lead from William Blaketo Thomas Struth, touching many unfamiliar fig-ures in between. References are made to areas in

One scientist has createda sensor that transmitsvisual information viathe tongue. Soundingremarkably like E.H.Gombrich, he says, "youdon't see with your eyes,you see with your brain."

the brain broadly associated with one or anotherbasic function (and to the scientists who studythem), in the course of which Stafford draws somerather untethered conclusions, e.g., "The powerfulimpact exerted by a Hat background together witha clear composition made up of figures arrangedin strongly polarized poses demonstrates thatsuch summary forms can bypass focal attentionto strike the amygdale directly." ("Demonstrates"is the problem word there.) Awkward questionsarise, such as "what is the material and ontologi-cal coimplication of animals, plants, rocks?" Andvertiginous leaps are taken, as when the husinessof making and viewing complex visual patterns islikened to the "binding problem" in scientific andphilosophical studies of mind, which concerns thequestion of how an integrated sense of selfi.e.,consciousnessis derived from the many parallelprograms running in the brain and its neurologicalbranches. Throughout, Stafford deploys metaphoras final analysis, which results in prose as lush as itis impenetrable. But her reach is formidable, andthe sheer range of both visual and textual materialshe has commandeered for this richly illustratedbook recommends it as a resource.

Two conflicting lines of development can betraced in Sensorium.: Embodied Erperienre, Tech-nology, and Contemporary Art, the catalogue,edited hy ait historian Caroline Jones, for a 2007exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center. One linefollows technology's support, for ever more isolatedperceptual (and emotional) experiencefor soli-tary listeners and viewers, hooked up to their ownlittle iPods and laptops as if to cultural drip-feeds.The other line followed, in such collective phe-nomena as the Internet's pan-connectedness andthe hive minds and raves it permits, is the first'smirror image. This is the one favored in Jones'sessay, "The Mediated Sensorium," which describesa crucial shift, in the production and understandingof visual art, toward inclusive ness with respect tosensory modalities other than sight, and perceptualsystems other than the ones we're hom with. Sound,smell and touch are welcomed, as are technologicalenhancements. "Distributed intelligence and collec-tive knowledge is the new name of the gan\e, withinbodies as well as between them," she writes.

An oddly anachronistic focus on high modern-ism as a regime of sensoiy inhibitionand, evenmore surprising, on the evil stewardship of thatregime by Clement Greenbergis demystified inan endnote explaining that Jones's essay is a revi-sion of the last chapter of her 2005 book. EyesightAlone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and theBureaucratization qf the Senses. But her text iswell-argued and plenty germane to the subject at

Art in America 49

hand, and it is augmented not only with essays byco-curators Hill Arning, .lane Far\'er, Yuko Hasega-wa and Maijorj'Jacobson (which concern the oddlychosen group of artists in the show; they includeJanet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Bruce Nau-man and Anri Sala), but also by a lively "ahece-darius" where, in fashionably arbitraiy order (thatis, alphabetically), a wide variety of contributorsfrom the arts and social sciences address topicsthat range from "air" to "zoon." Prosthetics androbotics, synesthesia and nanofacture are all here,along with Barbara Stafford (as writer), AimeeMuiiins (as subject), and other familiar figures,Donna Haraway reflects on animals fitted withvideocams for producing nature films under theheading "compounding." William J. Mitchell's entryon "networked eyes" considers the tiny cameras incell phones, which he says are helping build a "newpanopticon"; writing on "ocularity," Martin Jayexplores photography's dubious truths. JonathanGrary's entry on "spectral" is in fact a fascinatinglittle text on a sunstnick painting by Turner.

Under the heading '"godscan,'' Peter Lunenfeldexpresses skepticism about the uses to which thesnazzy photos produced by advanced brain-imag-ing technology have been put by laypeople andresearchers alike, an issue also addressed in anentiy on "mental image" by cognitive psychologistStephen Kosslyn, the book's sole research scientist.The ahecedarius's penultimate entry, on "yuck fac-tor," is illustrated with a photo of a hairless mousehearing, as a graft on its back, a "hai^estable"baby-size human ear grown from human cartilagecells; in the discussion that follows, Caroline Bas-

sett urges caution about assuming that revulsion atsuch experiments is hoth instinctive and inherentlymoral. Similarly, Mark Doty, writing on "artificial,"muses that whatever we may have learned fromthe back-to-the-land ethos of the '60s, "the desireto return to nature is inevitably the pastoral maskworn by a conservative agenda; it presupposes theauthority to tell us what 'natural' is, a power cheer-fully seized by preacher, lawmaker, and judge."

As much as anything else, the wildly diverseapproaches to these admittedly incompatible sub-jects suggest both the enormous promise, andthe Babel-like challenge, of sustaining dialoguebetween the humanities and sciences. The Hid-den Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science, bysocial scientist Cretien van Campen, is a straight-forward, readable account of a perceptual condi-tion in which sensory modalities are crossedforinstance, when music and other sounds are expe-rienced as colors, Though the author says it maybe a neurological syndrome"brain scans" areintroduced to support its neural hasis-he alsowrites that all newborns perceive their world asa unified sensoiy continuum. While "most inter-modal connections are eliminated in the first sixmonths," and such links are gone for good by age11, some people never lose the tendencythe gift,in van Campen's viewfor synesthesia. Many art-ists, he argues, have benefited from it, includingKandinsky, Klee and Nabokov (van Campen's evi-dence is in both the work and the artists' own com-mentar>'). But he concludes by affirming a beliefthat everyone has a propensity for synesthesia, andcan enhance it with concentrated effort.

There is a lurkinginclination, in all thesebooks, to scant currentpolitical reality in favorof an innocently geekydisposition that isequal parts horrorand fascination.

Though it is written clearly and with passion,van Campen's book lacks the intellectual energy ofthe edited volumes, which are invigorated by theirmessier shapes and dissonant voices. Ungainly andblurry at its borders, the subject at hand through-outroughly, how current science shapes humanexperience and its expression, insinuating itselfinto the very fabric of our beings^is not reallyamenable to linear narrative or simple logic. Infact, perhaps the best way to distinguish humanbeings from their next of kin, whether animal,chemical or digital, would be to dispense with met-aphor in favor of perfect taut.ology. In The Open:Man and Animal, philosopher Giorgio Agambenwrites, "Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearlydefined species nor a substance; it is, rather, amachine or device for producing the recognitionof the human." An unabashedly circular state-ment, it puts people and technology into a dizzyingorbit that may be emblematic of current relationsbetween science and art. Q

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