The article traces several core concepts that have driven media archaeological inquiry – such as regression and play – and considers how these terms have been deployed, while the closely related concept of childhood has been excluded. Material engagement with optical toys in this distinct disciplinary space brings new critical and methodological issues surrounding objects such as nineteenth-century optical toys to the surface. From the perspective of childhood, historical media such as optical toys are linked to alternate intellectual genealogies than those that might be expected within the film and media studies classroom. This article explores the study of pre-cinematic toys and media within the context of a multidisciplinary childhood studies department, arguing that childhood studies and media archaeology share a number of critical preoccupations, analytical approaches, and possibilities for hands-on engagement with historical and contemporary media. This raises the issue of the relationship between stabilisations through epistemic tools and ontological continuity and robustness in dense technological environments. The interdependence of technological standards and the increasing amount of information handled are joining cultural assemblages to question the objectives of preservation in artificial environments, urging the question of what we are preserving. The aim is to explore how standards are involved in defining preservation strategies and the shortcomings of their systematic implementation in this regard. This paper will discuss the role of standards in defining safety conditions for endangered bird species in urban environments and in designing closed environments for polio patients during the 1950s, the infamous iron lungs, which are still rarely used today. The threshold setting process defines the environment in which the standards are meaningful to a given community and the conditions of vulnerability implied by their absence. Standards are linked to specifications about scaling, safety, feasibility and suitability. In the end, my argument advances an experimental reading of the history of philosophy. My position does not entail that an experiment such as Kant’s conforms to what a scientific experiment is, although their histories could be narrated using a similar conceptual framework. This common origin allows me to advance a narrative that portrays that event as an experiment, following Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s philosophy of experimentation. Despite the controversies between the different interpretations, they all are follow ups and reinventions of the single philosophical event named the Copernican turn. In this paper, I gather and review some of these interpretations, especially those that have appeared since the beginning of the twentieth century, to show the many disparate and often contradictory stances that the Copernican turn has elicited. The analogy that Kant depicts between his own proposal and Copernicus’s has received many and varied interpretations that focus either on Copernicus’s heliocentrism and scientific procedure or on the experimental character of Kant’s endeavor. Kant’s Copernican turn has been the subject of intense philosophical debate because of the central role it plays in his transcendental philosophy. This article zooms in on a specific case study, namely the research project Building a Synthetic Cell (BaS圜) and its mission to create a synthetic cell–like entity, as autonomous as possible, focusing on the properties that differentiate organic from synthetic cells. We conclude that, much as technologies that enabled reproduction corroded the aura of original artworks (as Benjamin argued), so too will the aura of life be under siege in the era of synthetic lifeforms. By extrapolating from Walter Benjamin’s account of how technological reproducibility affects the aura of art, we embark upon an exploratory inquiry that seeks to fathom how the technological reproducibility of life itself may influence our experience and understanding of the living. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our phenomenological experience of) the living world.
Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things.
Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology.
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