King Ludd and the Resistance to Technology. 
	Virtual Sessions:  Saturday 9/23/95 at 
	IATH-MOO (hero.village.virginia.edu:8888)
	1-3 p.m. and 3:30-5:30 p.m.

Panelists:  

	N. Catherine Hayles (UCLA), Michael Joyce (Vassar Coll), Elizabeth 
	Kaplan (SUNY), Douglas Kellner (Univ Texas), David Kolb (Bates Coll), 
	Mark Poster (UC Irvine), John C. Rowe (UC Irvine), Allucquere Rosanne 
	Stone (Univ Texas), Gregory Ulmer (Univ Florida)

Moderators: Valerie Allen (USF), David Erben (USF)

With the increasing awareness, from the late eighteenth century onwards,
of the social changes brought about by industrialization, technology comes
to be defined as an agency in its own right.  And modern, "high"
technology, with its formal mathematical rationality and mechanical laws,
has extended its instrumental rationality to the human mind.  Machines
have invaded our personal space - filling in for organs and supplementing
our minds.  But have we tended to adapt to technology too uncritically? 
To hear some of its advocates, one would think that modern or high
technology has no past.  Since William Gibson introduced the term in
*Neuromancer* in 1984, "cyberspace" has become a catch-all term for our age. 
This perspective, however, ignores the possibility that cyberspace is a
consensual cliche, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about
space, subjectivity, and culture, that VR is just another representation 
and that the freedom promised by cyberspace is ultimately predicated on a 
hegemonic logic of displaced subjectivity.  How, then, do we, as 
individuals, relate to this technology?

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Session I 1:00 - 3:00 pm, EST.

Panelists:  Michael Joyce (Vassar Coll), David Kolb (Bates Coll), Mark
Poster (UC Irvine), John C. Rowe (UC Irvine)

Moderators: Valerie Allen (USF), David Erben (USF)

Topics:
The notion that virtual space has the possibility of being more 
democratic than "real life" democracies is a prevalent one.  What kind of 
"Democracy" is practiced in virtual space?

The history of technology is easy to narrate:  writing, the wheel, the 
gun, the factory, electricity, nuclear power, space-travel and so on.  
But how would we set about charting a history of the very concept of 
technology?

Schedule:

1pm - Opening statements by panelists
    - discussion/questions fr audience
    - Panelists respond to indiv questions
    - discussion/questions fr audience
3pm End

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Session II 3:30 - 5:30 pm, EST.

Panelists:  N. Catherine Hayles (UCLA), , Elizabeth Kaplan (SUNY),
Douglas Kellner (Univ Texas), Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Univ Texas), 
Gregory Ulmer (Univ Florida)

Moderators: Valerie Allen (USF), David Erben (USF)
Topics:

Instead of thinking about resistance to technology as some kind of 
allergy to computers, is it possible, or desirable, to conceive of our 
participation in computer literacy as a technology of resistance?

Is not forgetting about the body in VR the same old Cartesian trick which 
inevitably silences those upon whose labor the very act of forgetting the 
body is founded?

Schedule:
3:30 - Opening statements by panelists
     - Discussion/audience questions
     - Panelists respond to indiv questions
     - Discussion/audience questions
5:30 - End

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Pre-Conference Questions:

Prof Hayles:  Is there a relationship between the formal, mathematical 
foundation of virtual spaces and chaos theory?

Prof's Joyce and Kolb:  Do the technologies of representation offered by
computers offer an alternative to the mirror, to the limitations of
mimetic, causal realism? 

Prof Ulmer:  In what sense can intellectual and pedagogic exchange be 
understood as cyberspatial?  How does VR help us to (re)conceive the 
university?

Prof's Poster, Kellner and Rowe:  Have the body and matter as concepts
been rendered obsolete by V(irtual) R(eality) and what does such a
question imply for materialism (dialectical, cultural) and those
theoretical positions centered on gendered, ethnic, sexual bodies? 

Prof Kaplan:  VR and its technologies appear colonized from all sides by
white males, indeed, by patriarchy itself.  Is woman, then, the new
Luddite? 

Prof Stone:  Are the tools of networking essentially the same as they have 
been since the telephone, which was the first electronic network 
prosthesis, or, are computers arenas for social experimentation and 
dramatic interaction, a medium like public theatre?

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