Stefan Helmreich, "Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology"
b'This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution\\u2019s three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Stefan Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses \\u2014 scientific, everyday, and anthropological \\u2014 of embodied sonic presence.\\n\\nStefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of \\u201clife\\u201d as an analytical category for contemporary biology.'