Last week, my new book ‘the Olympics’, written with Beatriz Garcia, was published by Routledge. As friends will know, Beatriz and I are married and we met through the Olympic movement, as postgrads at the International Olympic Academy. This book has been extra special for that reason, but it’s also a very special book professionally, especially for me, as I’ve spent so many years lecturing on the Olympics, but have not published a great deal beyond my special research focus.

This book includes everything I want to say about the Games, Movement and industry of the Olympics. It is also published in a fantastic book series, which was a really big selling point for me. The Routledge ‘Basics’ book series is one of their most successful from what I can see and covers everything from evolution to artificial intelligence. To bring Olympic studies to this kind of company signals, I think, a coming of age for the discipline, as most books in this area are published in sports or leisure catalogues.

It is really a bold move of Editor Andy Humphries to commission the book too. Clearly a decision taken building up to London 2012, but we already have interest for translations in Russia and Brazil – sites of the next Games.

One of the really pleasant aspects of this book is that it’s relatively cheap for an academic book, just £12 for a paperback, where most academic books are not less than £20. Hopefully, the people we wanted to ensure could by the book, will be able to afford it. It’s also a very nice compact size, so ideal for holiday reading. It may not be a page turning thriller, but nowhere else will you read a single book that covers such subjects as Wikileaks, Osama Bin Laden, global terrorism, human enhancement, social media and all in relation to the Olympics.

Here’s the film from my talk with Aubrey de Grey at Die Untoten in Hamburg last year.

Here’s the footage from my first talk at Die Untoten in Hamburg last year.

All publications are equal, but some are more equal than others and this is one such book for me given the other contributors. The book is published by the Spanish bank BBVA, as part of its OpenMind programme.

It is a beautiful hardback book and a fascinating collection of essays, considering our present times. Thus, its sections are

• Ethics in a Global World’
• Ethics in Science and Technology
• Ethics in Development, Poverty and Environment
• Ethics in Business
• Ethics in Finance

This may be the only critical academic book publication, published by a national bank,  to cover such subjects and the authors are excellent company. They consist of:

John R. Boatright, Joseph H. Carens, Thomas Clarke, Richard T. De George, R. Edward Freeman, Mervyn Frost, Francisco Gonzalez, Geert Hofstede, Bernardo Kliksberg, Peter Koslowski, Hans Kung, Andy Miah, Carl Mitcham, Mollie Painter-Morland, Reinhard H. Schimdt, Kristin Schrader-Frechette, Robert A. Schultz, Peter Singer, Charles Taylor, Mary Warnock.

My essay focuses on the Ethics of Human Enhancement, here’s the pdf.

On 23rd, I give a talk in Helsinki for a lecture series at Aalto University, thematically associated with the World Design Capital in 2012.

Here’s more info about the series, titled ‘Human Design or Evolution’, which includes Natasha Vita-More, Stelarc, Laura Beloff, Fiona Raby, James Auger & Jimmy Loizeau, Ritta Hari and Sissel Tomas (sadly not all at the same time).

Here’s my talk, titled ‘Design for Evolution’:

How should we imagine the future of humanity in order to permit the utilization of human enhancement technologies, while remaining mindful of the risks that could arise from tampering with evolutionary processes. How can humanity design for its evolution, taking into account the range of capacities that humans may require in the future and considering the kinds of lives people wish to lead in the present? This talk will address the interface of design and evolution, so as to approach a responsible approach to human enhancement.

After the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, the summary report acknowledged the growing volume of practice-based research outputs within the Communication, Cultural & Media Studies Unit of Assessment. It also emphasized the need for practice-based researchers to provide clearer detail on the research process underpinning their work, but questions remain about how any given output should be evaluated.

As well, while many departments expressed their investment into practice and theory, practice-based outputs constituted less than 5% of the total outputs submitted across all results. Given the increased use of practice-based methodologies within REF2014 UoA36, how should research outputs like exhibitions, documentary films, media art, or scriptwriting be evaluated by the peer review panels? And how should we account for interdisciplinary practice-based outputs, for example work at the intersections of media and performance or media and music?

This free event is hosted by the Creative Futures Research Centre at the University of the West of Scotland, and is co-funded by the MeCCSA Practice Section. It is designed to give peers an opportunity to inform the Research Excellence Framework 2014 in benchmarking quality for the future.

Where: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow When: March/April 2012 TBC

Follow: @CreativeFutur for updates

Last week, the new exhibition @FACT_Liverpool opened, bringing together a number of installations that are themed around the concept of space exploration and occupation.

There are some great articles and footage published about the work, including a specially commissioned short story and  really nice film about artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis in conversation with The Arts Catalyst curator, Rob La Frenais. There’s also a lovely photo of Ethan and I, taken by Brian Slater (above).

latest article for the Huffington Post focuses on the politics, philosophy and potential of bioart.

IN RECENT YEARS, a new breed of artists named bioartists have begun to infiltrate gallery spaces and scientific laboratories in pursuit of creative expression and new knowledge. Their number includes some of the world’s most adventurous avant-garde artists, whose core currency is the playful and sometimes political exploration of new media through which to create art that will change our way of seeing the world. One such artist in this field, Gina Czarnecki, is having her first UK retrospective opening on December 8^th at The Bluecoat in Liverpool. Yet, there is a great deal more at stake with this new form of creative practice.

In the past, the medium of such artists might have been oil paint, water colours, or in more recent years, film, video, or digital technology. Today, their medium is biology – our biology to be more precise, and that of other species. However, their work does not simply derive from our present, post-genomic era; it also foregrounds what comes next. They conduct sociologies of the future, shaping the ideas of science fiction writers, film makers, and the work of scientists. By envisioning new forms of biological transformation and utilization, their ideas become constitutive of our era, in the way that artists before them did.

To this end, bioartists also scrutinize contemporary bioethical issues and scientific practice, such as the utilization of embryonic stem cells, or the development of transgenic species. However, it is far from clear that the intention of such artists is to resist such processes. Indeed, some are seeking their development in order to make their art possible, such as Stelarc, the long-standing performance artist who regularly alters his body for his art.

Beginning with live body hook suspensions in the 1970s, Stelarc’s most recent enterprise involves creating an ear on his forearm, grown from a cell culture and sculptured over a period of six years. The next stage for this work is the utilization of stem cells to create the precise ridges of the ear that only nature has been capable of perfecting, so far.

If this were not evidence enough of how artists celebrate the transformative aesthetic potential of biotechnology, then consider the subsequent stage of Stelarc’s Extra Ear. The end goal of the project is to implant an auditory device within the ear and for it to be remotely connected to the Internet, so web browsers can hear what the ear hears creating a distributed auditory system.

Other artists, such as Ionat Zurr & Oron Catts from Australia are scrutinizing the need for us to farm animals, at a time when environmental activists point out the amount of energy needed to sustain one animal life – and indeed, the harmful gases generated by such life forms! As an alternative, they have developed something called victimless meat, grown from cell cultures, which has the neat consequence of also attending to animal rights concerns, since there is no sentient life to speak of that is harmed by the consumption of such products.

Biology has been a medium for artists for some time. Everything from saliva to human excrement has entered the play space of artists over the years. The difference in these new works is their experimentation with cutting edge scientific applications, such as stem cells, cosmetic surgery and biotechnology generally – technologies that are at the margins of human experience and about which there is considerable controversy.

The resulting works vary considerably and they range from the weird and wonderful, such as Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent, transgenic bunny, to the sublimely curious such as Julia Reodica’s designer hymens, a collection of synthetic hymens, which invite questions into the role of virginity and its loss in the 21^st century. Alternatively, Yann Marussich’s whole-body secretion of a blue dye in a piece of live art called ‘blue remix’ heralds a new era of performance..

These artists have varied intentions and, like all good work, their art invites numerous and sometimes contradictory responses. It would be a mistake to suggest that they are pursuing anti-scientific ideologies, since this would radically limit the willingness of scientists to open their doors to such practice. Instead, the emphasis is on collaboration and shared vision, about nurturing new ways of interrogating the end goals of science as the utopian visions of humanity.

However, one can read a deeper politics into such desires. Their gentle tip toeing into labs raises important questions about how we organize society and understand our own humanity. For instance, why do we privilege scientific knowledge over, say, aesthetic, as evidenced by the way in which funding is skewed in favour of the former? In short, the efforts of bioartists is doing nothing less than attempting to disrupt the global knowledge economy by reinstating art as the primary medium of developing insights on the, as yet, unstudied future.

In so doing, the work of bioartists also raises difficult ethical questions. For instance, it requires us to consider by what codes of ethics such work should be governed? This is often the initial response of critics who find such work disturbing, offensive or potentially illegal: how could one play with transgenic science simply to create a new aesthetic artifact? However, there are good reasons for refraining from such judgements and this is because the aesthetic content of such works is only one way of evaluating their worth.

The more relevant ethical view to take reveals itself when inquiring into some of the challenges that such artists have faced in the pursuit of their work. For instance, in 2004, US bioartist Steve Kurtz was pursued by the FBI under suspicion of bioterrorism, after petri dishes with biological matter inside them were found in his home.

Such artists would want us to see them as acting on our behalf to make science more accountable to a broader public and for their work to engage us more fully on its long term goals and aspirations.

So, the transgenic art of Eduardo Kac invites us to consider the limits of ‘Playing God’ and he is quick to point out that scientists have already undertaken such experiments, we just don’t hear very much about it, or it is cloaked in some remote chance that the experiment will lead to knowledge that will assist humanity in some specific way. In any case, if one wanted to read Kac’s fluorescent bunny as the next era of personalised pets, what should be our objection? Doesn’t our desire for pets necessarily commit us to their objectification and servitude, even though we might claim they are our companions?

In the end, if we are to experiment with creating new forms of life with synthetic biology, cloning and genetic modification, shouldn’t we just admit that it is for little more than our own amusement, whether that is the amusement of our own existence, or that which we find in witnessing great art?

Interview for Stephanie Pertuiset @AFP on the Yannick Noah headlines around doping, published by a range of French newspapers, including Liberation & Le Temps. Here are some of the quotes from the raw invu in English:

1) Former tennis champion Yannick Noah said he is in favor legalizing doping to stop hyprocrisy. In France, every one shot at him, saying basically that doping is a really bad thing leading to Circus Games. Do you think it is a taboo nowadays to say something like that ?   Why antidoping has such be legitimated ? 

Tomorrow – or later today if I find my password – I will publish this article on the Huffington Post, but here’s a sneak preview:

Professor Andy Miah considers why the UK Leveson Inquiry into Press Ethics should lead us to conclude that, while journalists shouldn’t be hacking our phones, we should be hacking theirs.

The UK’s Leveson Inquiry this week brings into focus the many debates that have taken place over the last two months about whether the British media’s ethical foundation needs a radical overhaul after the apparent transgressions that have occurred through the News of the World phone hacking controversy. Many of these debates have global implications, given the nature of news syndication today; News International being among the most obvious example.

Much of the moral debate on this subject has focused on the case of Milly Dowler’s family who are perhaps the most worthy victims in this situation. The knowledge of their daughter’s voicemail being hacked at such a crucial time in the investigation of their daughter’s disappearance amplified the trauma they experienced around Milly’s death.

However, among the most crucial aspects of this debate is the way that celebrities – notably Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan – have intervened to speak on behalf of a community for which many people are unlikely to find much sympathy – the rich and famous.

One of the challenges with celebrity witnesses in any legal environment is that their creative personas often intertwine with the public’s opinion about the merit of their concerns. Who didn’t watch Steve Coogan’s testimony and expert to hear a joke? And we got one or two. Upon noting that he saw journalists rummaging through his bins he noted that they did not look like tramps, adding “well almost”.

Equally, the reporting of celebrity testimonies occurs via the people who are the subjects of their criticisms – journalists. So, it is always risky when appealing to people with public profiles to establish the facts, especially when attempting to aid the public understanding of legal debates. In part, this is why many courts maintain a distance from media reporting, so as not to pollute the hearing with media opinion.

This isn’t the first time that celebrities have questioned the intrusion of the press – the Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones wedding photos debacle between Hello and Ok! Magazines or Earl Spencer’s pursuit of a European ruling on privacy are two of many more instances that have occurred over the years. Yet, the difference here is that the debate about the phone hacking case has focused more on the ethical rather than the legal changes that may be necessary to make. But, what ethical principles have been broken or which of them should more adequately be upheld?

One of the challenges in this case is that the difference between morality and ethics have been conflated. To be clear, journalists are governed by ethical codes but, in this case, it is the absence of a moral conscience that has caused more outrage, rather than just a transgression from an ethical framework. Codes of ethics compel rather than determine how people will act within a professional context. In contrast, moral convictions tend to prevail without the need for professional coercion.

This difference between morality and ethics is crucial when deciding what should be done. Journalists often operate by their own sense of morality when investigating stories and, at times, this may challenge their Editor’s own sense of morality. Sometimes, this is a good thing, especially when Editors become too powerful and a newspaper loses sight of its public obligation, as may be said of News of the World. However, when the Editors and the journalists lose any degree of commonality in their sense of what is in the public interest and worthy of reporting, then we find a situation like the present case.

The public interest and respect for privacy is the standard moral tensions within debates such as this one. Journalists have claimed that there is no better way to find the truth than to listen to somebody’s private messages, while the victims of hacking claim that privacy must still ensue despite their celebrity lifestyle.

There are a number of bad arguments that surround this case. It is inaccurate to claim that a person’s phone messages are any great insight into truth; they are fragments of conversations at best. Even if they were helpful in determining facts, embracing such modes of practice within journalism would lead to the end of all privacy claims for all kinds of people – perhaps everyone. This would include permitting access to how journalists obtain their stories through coercion or entrapment. We would find ourselves in a situation where homes are wire tapped at will and by a range of institutions on the basis of public interest. The absence of all privacy is unlikely to create a very trusting society, as previous countries that have taken government surveillance too far have found.

Yet, the public interest argument is also disingenuous. To claim public interest over the justification for publishing stories about the sex lives of celebrities is a huge stretch of the concept. In these cases, it is commercial interests rather than public that are served, where the primary beneficiaries are media organizations, not the general public. At most, a member of the public may choose to consume a different form of leisure experience upon learning of any perceived moral transgression of the key actors, but this is hardly a greater good than the harm that may ensue for the individuals concerned, not to mention their families.

Both Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan are right that their being celebrities does not, in itself, legitimate intrusion into their private lives. There is no ‘faustian pact’ – as Coogan puts it – even for the celebrities who court the media. There must always be a point at which they – indeed, we – can say no to journalists and expect our privacy to be respected. An obvious example of this is reporting on the children of celebrities. Were the concept of privacy completely dead, then we would tolerate many more intrusions than is presently the case. We don’t, because privacy still matters.

A second problem concerns whether or not the kind of journalists that are the focus of this conversation should be called journalists at all, as opposed to some other kind of media professional with a different code of ethics and different public expectations. Such a change in status would lead to a situation where the coverage of celebrities would occur via some form of contractual agreement, rather than free press. Importantly, this would not mean the demise of a free press, only that many of the periodicals whose work is primarily entertainment than news would lose these freedoms. I see no great loss in this regard, especially as most so-called news content derives from the work press officers and agents anyway.

There is one other further dimension to this debate that is rarely discussed, which is people’s reliance on the media in an era when content is open and available. Most of us don’t have time to follow proceedings in full, but today we have the opportunity to watch the full, unedited testimonies of the Leveson Inquiry witnesses without having to rely on a mediated interpretation. Today, public institutions have become news providers and our reliance on traditional media should be reduced considerably. In an era of pervasive media, we have also recreated an unmediated world.

So what is the answer to the question about how the press should be regulated? A number of ideas have been discussed from licenses for journalists to leaving things just as they are and making the present regulatory systems more effective. Some have argued that the system is perfectly fine – the journalists were caught by the system – and that any regulatory system will always be imperfect. As such, the possible loss of a free press that may ensue from tighter regulation would outweigh the possible infractions that evidently do occur within the present system.

The loss of a free press has such great implications for society that the anxieties of celebrity’s losing control of their private lives is unlikely to be of any great significance in the grand scale of things. However, public laws are put in place for all kinds of people and we are asked to imagine how they would affect not just celebrities but people from any walk of life who may find themselves in a position of vulnerability, as is true of the Dowler family.

On this basis, change is necessary. Self-regulation with independent auditing is a much better way to monitor ethical practice – it works quite well in hospitals with Institutional Review Boards, for example. The press needs a much stronger internal ethical structure than is presently in place. Such boards should benefit from independent consultation from media ethicists and lawyers, whom are able to critically scrutinize day-to-day practice.

Such a system may also include, for instance, journalists having their own communications recorded in the course of their work, so as to later scrutinize their methods. If call centres monitor the calls with clients, why shouldn’t journalists have their calls monitored ‘for training purposes’? Journalists shouldn’t be hacking our phones, we should be hacking theirs.