The Tympanic Eclipse (www.tympaniceclipse.org)

The Tympanic Eclipse is an audio podcast that brings cultural theory out of its stuffy scholarly tomes, and puts it into your ears! Together with established thinkers and makers, it explores wide ranging issues we’re facing in the 21st century. Without using academic jargon or relying on journalistic sensationalism, The Tympanic Eclipse points out theory’s relevance to everyday life. This project received the IdeasTap Innovator’s Award and is produced by Britt Wray (www.brittwray.com). Please find the real website for the podcast (not the PodOMatic site) at www.tympaniceclipse.org

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Episodes

Making Life – exploring the philosophical implications of research that aims to create it from scratch

How do different fields try to get at the nitty gritty of what living systems require in order to fit the definition of “alive”? How have researchers from the areas of artificial life and synthetic biology assumed certain ontologies of life, or, ways of being that life must adhere to, in their research programs? What is top down versus bottom up creation of life? What are protocells? What on earth are emergent properties? And how do these questions depend on if the world a closed or open-ended s...

Jan 23, 2013•20 min

THE TYMPANIC ECLIPSE//Bioartcamp – biologists, artists, philosophers, and the wilderness

What do you get when you bring biologists, artists, philosophers and filmmakers out into the Canadian Rocky Mountains on a 2 week research-creation summit? Why, Bioartcamp of course! Created by Dr. Jennifer Willet, the accomplished bioartist and director of Incubator Hybrid Laboratory, working at the intersection of art, science, and ecology, Bioartcamp was an adventurous expedition in art making and social research that took place at the Banff Centre in Alberta, as well as in tents, made for bi...

Jan 23, 2013•29 min

THE TYMPANIC ECLIPSE//Cybernetics Shows Us A World That Modern Science Can’t - What Stuff is Really Like

What is capital M Modern science? How have humans cooked it up? What is cybernetics? And how are they different? Dr. Andy Pickering ties together western traditions of binary thinking with modern science and discusses them in comparison with cybernetics and its complimentary, pluralistic eastern philosophies that he argues allow for a more true account of what the world is really like. Cybernetics reveals the world as it changes through time rather than fits it to a formula that humans make for ...

Jan 23, 2013•22 min

It’s hard to be critical these days! Academia and Activism.

Our university departments are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary where people from different backgrounds come together to keep each other in check while tackling large issues that have a lot at stake. One place this is happening is in synthetic biology, where computer scientists, engineers, biologists, ethicists, sociologists and artists “hold hands” in the lab as they develop new approaches to genetic engineering. Dr. Hilary Rose gets real on the promise of interdisciplinarity, and explai...

Jan 23, 2013•14 min

THE TYMPANIC ECLIPSE // My house is recording me, my house is selling me?

Smart phones, smart boards, smart homes…. every technology is apparently so darn smart, but how are we keeping up with these gadgets ourselves? Smart technologies are referred to as such because they seem intelligent enough to know about our personal needs, desires, and curiosities and they cater their computational functions to better serve us as individuals. They know us through the data we generate about our lives and appetites, but of course, that means they’re left with a database of info o...

Jan 23, 2013•9 min

THE TYMPANIC ECLIPSE // Working to protect people we’ll never meet

What would the future be like if there were governmentally appointed people alive today who worked to protect the basic qualities of life for people who have not yet been born? Should the not-yet-existent people of the world be represented across time? Could a group of Guardians of the Future help to reverse some of our dire and dystopian practices that hurt the Earth and its people in the process? Britt digs into the idea on a visit to Norwich, England, where she meets the philosopher and Green...

Jan 23, 2013•13 min

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