Living Systems
By Erik Davis

Why a conference that explores the interplay between human experience, new media and deep ecology?

The reason we wanted to make a conference that interwove the environment, new media, and human experience is because we were all very galvanized in different ways by the situation with the environment; recognizing as many people do, just pay attention, that there are some really serious problems, very serious problems. Yet, there has been a tendency in the environmental movement, and a very understandable tendency, to demonize technology in many ways, to really see technology as part of the sign of all of the horrible processes that have led us to this stage. In many ways it's a reasonable assumption, but we were also struck with the idea that, for one thing, information technology is a different kind of thing.

It opens up different kinds of possibilities, and in fact, the more you look at the way information systems work, the way computers work, there's ways of looking at them that seem as if they're actually expressing similar kinds of things that living systems do.

Information technology is not the same as an industrial infrastructure. It opens up different kinds of possibilities, and in fact, the more you look at the way information systems work, the way computers work, there's ways of looking at them that seem as if they're actually expressing similar kinds of things that living systems do. So, we're like, well there's some connection here and even more to the point, it's that this is going to be the medium that we're going to communicate to people not just the general ideas, but actual data information, and ways of communicating with one another about the environment.

If you look at the way the WTO events not only galvanized the activist community, but also presented a different idea about the role that information technology can play in 21st century activism, you can see that it's the same kind of thing we're interested in; and recognize the value of the kind of deep ecology critique of technology, but to also say, look there are some radical possibilities coming up on many, many fronts. We really just need to get the conversation going. We didn't have any particular agenda, we didn't know which way, what story was going to be predominant, but we just knew we had to get people in a room cross-talking and weaving from that.

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