BOOKCLUB-broods everyWARE

In Octavia Butler's book, Lilith's Brood, (of course in a human led apocalypse) the survivors must "choose" to adapt to their new circumstances and environments and merge with an alien species, the Oankali, or face extinction. As the original title suggests, Xenogenesis is an origin story, about a completely new beginning for humanity in which essentialist conceptions of identity are immediately put into play with alienness. In the last part, the character Jodahs's body drastically responds and adapts to its environments wishes and is no longer be alien to anything. The body can choose to truly inhabit any other body, any environment and therefore is a transformation of the understanding between subject/object. Humans are drawn to its appearance, which morphs to align with their own desires. Ultimately Jodas is the interface where increased chance of survival is coupled with the fulfillment of deep inner desires, as its own body can shift to become whatever another longs for, transcending and commanding categories of definition such as sex, race and form. Humans are given the chance for something they themselves have agency to help define and construct and live symbolically with.

Similarly yet closer to our realms of recognition, in Adam Greenfield's book Everyware, the Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, we are looking for this interface that keeps "face." His book is broken down into 81 thesis(s), one being "Everyware is information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life." The point of the Inhabitable Organism is part of this embedded info processing. It is the matter of the data that is rendered visable or just "digetstable" (no pun intended) to its users. An important facet that I would like to exploit out of this is that the Everyware is also the user not just the used, and the "users" are also the used. The dialog between those increases while in flux.

While discussing this book for the class I have with Benjamin Bratton, I realized what is necessary for the InhabOrg to actually work::RIGIDITY! Aka conflict is structure. (Bits vrs atoms or bits and atoms ) This new form of building/growing can not exist as a democratic system. So thus it has to have the scaffolding to grow and and repeal against. The interface of the the Inhaborg has to to be embedded and interlaced with other interfaces... it is not just fungus growing on a wall, it is fungus growing on a lattice structure with a copper battery and led and sensors that then shift and shock the new "skin/muscle" to react to what it senses (people/animals/things/environment/etc)