Pierre Lévy in conversation with Scott Lash and Robert Zimmer :: January 29, 2008; 5.30-7.30 pm :: Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths College, New Cross :: To reserve a place, please email graduateschool [at] gold.ac.uk.

Pierre Lévy is a philosopher who has devoted his professional life to the understanding of the cultural and cognitive impacts of the digital technologies and to promote their best social uses. His work is focused around the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies, and he is a world-leading thinker on “cyberculture”. His recent works focus on the development of an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) based on semiotic concepts. IEML is designed to provide a semantic coordinate system for the addressing of concepts on the Internet.

Lévy is one of the major philosophers working on the implications of cyberspace and digital communications. As early as 1990 he published a book about the merge of digital networks and hypertextual communication. Lévy’s 1995 book, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel (Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age) develops philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s conception of “the virtual” as a dimension of reality that subsists with the actual but is irreducible to it.

Scott Lash is author of Sociology of Postmodernism, Another Modernity, A Different Rationality and Critique of Information. He is co-author of Global Culture Industry: the Mediation of Things, The End of Organized Capitalism, Economies of Signs and Spaces and Reflexive Modernization. His books have been translated into eleven languages. Lash is currently principal investigator for Risk Cultures in China: An Economic Sociology. He is currently working on a book on intensive culture and has been involved with Theory, Culture and Society for the past fifteen years.

Robert Zimmer has carried out research related to computing in relation to art and design. This involves: a return to thoughts of abstraction, connecting painting and computing; systems for reasoning about archiving contemporary art with Tate Modern; large-scale public artworks; a web-based artwork centred on brain function and development; systems for making interactive digital films with BT, Cambridge University, the BBC and others; and digital access to art and artefacts. He is currently writing a book on the Machine and Human Haptics for MIT Press.