• Biggs, Simon

Abstract

Biggs, Simon & Leach, James (2005) Autopoeisis: Novelty, Meaning and Value, Artwords, London. This book, co-authored with renowned British anthropologist James Leach, was a significant output from a period of research undertaken at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory from 2002-2003 when Biggs held a prestigious Arts Council England/Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Fellowship. The book reports on research into the potential of novel smart materials, elastomeric polymers, and their potential application in interactive sculpture and architectural environments. It includes texts written by the authors and also generated by a computer program authored by Biggs, raising questions concerning human and technological agency and individual and collective human and non-human authorship. The texts are written from three points of view – an anthropologist discussing the role of creativity in communities he has studied on the Rai Coast of New Guinea, an artist considering creativity as a distributed property of socio-technical systems and a computer program, generating its own texts, based on the words used by the two human authors. The book was discussed in Creating Selves: Intellectual property and the Narration of Culture, by Johanna Gibson, Ashgate, London, 2006.

Topics

• polymer