Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value

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An email to draw attention to a new book.


Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value
By Simon Biggs and James Leach

'Autopoeisis: novelty, meaning and value' addresses the value of novelty in
contemporary culture and is co-authored from the point of view of two
disciplines - fine art and anthropology. Sections of the text have been
authored jointly whilst other sections have been authored individually.
However, there has been a constant process of question and answer and
further joint revision, including regular instances where one author
corrects or annotates the text of the other. The result is a format where
texts weave around each other thematically, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes
in contrast.

Complementing the authored texts there are three other components. The
first, which initially might appear indistinct from the main textual body,
is an auto-generated text. This is a text written not by one of the authors,
nor by any other author, but by a machine - a computer programmed to take a
previous text by James Leach and to use it as a dictionary for the
auto-generation of a new text. The principle objective here is not to try
and find or create new meaning out of Leach's original text but rather to
explore, by example, the value of novelty when applied to such an extreme
that all that determines the nature of a particular text is that it is
different and unique, any sense of authorial intent having been removed.

Each of the authors has also contributed visual material related to their
primary practices. Leach has included a series of photographs taken in the
field when undertaking research in Papua New Guinea. A number of these
photographs accompanied the earlier text which Biggs has used as source
material for the auto-generated text and which Leach discusses here in
detail in order to reflect upon his own practice as an anthropologist.

Biggs has included a series of quad-tone lithographic images produced via
automatic methods (computer generated) from an earlier project Great Wall of
China. These images are derived from documentary photographs of various
architectural styles from a range of different cultures and historical
periods, organised by applying typographic rules to the composition of the
image.

Born in Australia, 1957, Simon Biggs moved to the UK in 1986.A visual and
inter-disciplinary artist, he places the computer and interactive systems at
the centre of a practice addressing issues around identity and reality as
social constructs. He is Research Professor in Digital Art at Sheffield
Hallam University and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of
Cambridge.

James Leach is Research Fellow at King