Laura Fantone / Sociology and Women’s Studies

Graduate Student Researcher
2001 – 2005lfantone@gradcenter.cuny.edu

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.