LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry examines nature, cognition and society as an interwoven tapestry across disciplinary boundaries. This volume explores how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems, acknowledging an integrative account of media as environments and technologies.

The aim of the collection is a fuller and richer account of everyday life through a spectrum of insights from internationally known scholars of the natural sciences (physical and life sciences), social sciences and the arts.

How or should life be defined? If life is a medium, how is it mediated? Viewed as interactions, transactions and contexts of ecosystems, life can be recognized through patterns across the sciences, including metabolisms, habitats and lifeworlds. The book also integrates discussions of embodiment, ecological values, literacies and critiques, with bioinspired, synthetic and historical design approaches to envision what could constitute artful living in an ever-evolving, interdependent world.

The volume foregrounds systemic approaches to life, drawing on a wide range of disciplines and fields, including architecture, art, biology, bioengineering, chemistry, cinema studies, communication, computer science, conservation, cultural studies, design, ecology, environmental studies, information science, landscape architecture, geography, journalism, materials science, media archaeology, media studies, philosophy, physics, plant signalling and development, political economy, sociology and system dynamics.

This is the second volume in the Media-Life-Universe trilogy. It follows and builds upon the 2021 collection MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry.

Jeremy Swartz is the founder of Metamedia @ UofO, curator and co-director of the What is...? series, courtesy research associate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon, and adjunct assistant professor in Communication at Southern Oregon University. He is co-editor of MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry (Intellect/University of Chicago Press 2021) with Janet Wasko.

Janet Wasko is a professor in Media Studies and Knight Chair in Communication Research, Emeritus at the University of Oregon. She is the author or editor of 23 books including MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry (Intellect/University of Chicago Press 2021) with Jeremy Swartz, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, 2nd ed. (Polity 2020).

Preface to a Trilogy ix

Jeremy Swartz and Janet Wasko

Introduction 1

Jeremy Swartz and Janet Wasko

PART I: GENEALOGY 25

1. Life, Nature and Systems 27

Fritjof Capra

2. What is Life? 42

Mark A. Bedau

3. Why Life Cannot Be Defined 62

Carol E. Cleland

PART II: INFORMATION AND ECOLOGIES 79

4. Propagating Organization: An Enquiry 81

Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and Ilya Shmulevich

5. Friends, Neighbours and Enemies: An Overview of the Communal and Social Biology of Plants 102

Roza D. Bilas, Amanda Bretman and Tom Bennett

6. The Conceptual Ecology of the Human Microbiome 139

Nicolae Morar and Brendan J. M. Bohannan

PART III: ENACTIONS AND VALUES 183

7. From Life to Mind 185

Mark L. Johnson

8. Metabolism and Drift 209

Thomas Nail

9. From ALife to No Life: On Mediatic Contexts of Life and Death 222

Jussi Parikka

PART IV: ECOMEDIATIONS AND EDUCATION 233

10. Media and Information Literacies for a Living World: Engaging with a Cyberist Era 235

Divina Frau-Meigs

11. Journalistic Learning and Intentional Teaching with Technologies: STEM and Rural Communities 257

Ed Madison

12. Dirtying Ecocinema Studies 270

Salma Monani and Stephen Rust

PART V: SYNTHESES AND BIODESIGNING 287

13. System Dynamics, Machine Learning and Structural Validation 289

William A. Schoenberg and Jeremy Swartz

14. Life from the Edge of Synthetic Biology 309

Pier Luigi Luisi

15. Templating Life: DNA as Nature's Hard Drive, Version 2.0 323

Mél Hogan and Tessa J. Brown

PART VI: ARTFUL LIVES AND METALIVING 341

16. Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Being 343

Brook Muller

17. Satoyama and the Art of Rural Regeneration 361

Diane Durston

18. Metaliving 379

Jeremy Swartz

Appendix: Exhibition . Experience . Nature 415

Notes on Contributors 437

Index 447