Plant - Bio Becoming Positive (Excerpt) (Ars Electronica 1997)

http://www.aec.at/www‑ars/plant.html 25 captures 5 Aug 97 ‑ 9 Jul 06 Biography Sadie Plant is the director of the Cybernetic Culture Unit of the University of Warwick, UK. Her first book "The Most Radical Gesture. The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age" was published in 1992 by Routledge. Her second book "Zeros and Ones" will be published this year by Fourth Estate (London) and Doubleday (New York). Quotes Sadie Plant Becoming Positive "What does virus do wherever it can dissolve a hole and find traction? ‐ It starts eating. And what does it do with what it eats? ‐ It makes exact copies of itself that start eating to make more copies that start eating to make more copies that start eating..." (William S. Burroughs, Nova Express). (...) Not until the emergence of CIV did the guardians of the straight white world really begin to appreciate that cultures are complexities by no means confined to some distinctly human sphere in which they could, for example, decide whether or not there were such things as memes and viruses. CIV made it clear that this was already a network of cultures, not a list of separate things to be put or kept in order by some man or God. (...) "Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus’ is the deep cover scrambler which rewrites the most basic programs of cultural control. Even now, and like all the retroviruses it retrospectively interconnects, it can only be seen in the effects it leaves behind ‐ the antibodies produced by its hosts, and the havoc it plays with them." FEB MA 1 2003 20