Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory

Cybernetics and hacker culture in the 80s, the ‘network society’ in the 90s, the dot-com bubble around 2000 and the ‘long tail’ of the metadata of Web 2.0 marked the evolution of the digital phylum. In the last decade, a different conurbation of forces—climate change and energy crisis, ‘pop genetics’ and protests against GMOs, bioterrorism hysteria and bioethical crusades—started to sediment a new episteme concerned with the living. This affected the technological discourse too. If, according to Michel Foucault, modern biopolitics was about the management of populations and corporeal discipline, then since WWII a new interest has emerged around the microscopic scale of the bios—around the cell as the unit of life. Cultural mediators have been gathering in the interstice of this shift, developing the missing theoretical tissue between digital code and genetic code, between media art and a new controversial bioart.