Laura Fantone
Graduate Student Researcher
Fall 2001 - Spring 2005
Laura Fantone is a fourth year student at GC Sociology and Women’s Studies Program, advanced to candidacy. She graduated in Political Science and Sociology from University of Bologna, in 1998 and received a Fulbright Fellowship to attend the CUNY GC Ph. D. program. Her main academic interests are: sociology of science, visual arts and technology, gender studies and migration. She lives between New York, a small village in Italy and cyberspace. She enjoys playing with machines - especially videogames and cyberpets.
Currently at the New Media Lab as a researcher to develop a project
on representations and redefinition of life mediated by new technologies:
from robotics to genetics. Her project investigates some cultural and
ontological effects of the ongoing technologization of the human body,
and the parallel humanisation of machines. Contemporary feminist and
science studies have increasingly dealt with both biotechnology and
digital technology as similar narrations: both are expansions to our
bodily limitations, both tend to open infinite combinations, and both
rely heavily on processing, arranging pieces of information. She examines
biotechnology as a representation (the uses of biological metaphors
and “living machines”), with important ethical implications
for race, gender and species.
The project attempts to develop a sensibility for machines and a recognition
for non-human intelligence, and to blur the distinction between information
systems and living systems.