Together with Alessandro Delfanti we have just finished writing a chapter on the forthcoming book “The Participatory Condition“, forthcoming on the University of Minnesota Press.

The chapter is titled: “Open Source Cancer. Brain Scans and the Rituality of Biodigital Data Sharing“, and it deals with La Cura project, which we created when Salvatore Iaconesi became diseased with brain cancer, and decided to turn the situation into a biopolitical performance interweaving hacking, society, anthropology and sciences.

From the chapter:

“While patient reclamation of the medicalized body is becoming a more common subject of discussion, by proposing the concept of the ritual we have here focused on the cultural significance of biodigital data: once liberated through hacking from their objectifying role in the context of medical institution, open source data provides a commons upon which new forms of digital solidarity can emerge.47 In doing so they can trigger public responses which enable collective reappropriations of the experience of cancer and other illnesses. Against techno-determinist ideologies, we also suggest that, by performing such rituals, members of digital countercultures—such as hackers—can turn to digital technologies, rather than only their bodies, as a battleground for the reconfiguration of social and political possibilities.”

The chapter will be featured in the forthcoming “The Participatory Condition“, a book resulting from the international dialogues originating from “#PCond. The Participatory Condition“, an International Colloquium held in Montreal at the Museum of Contemporary Art on November 15 and 16, 2013. The Colloquium’s main objective was to assess the role of media in the development of a principle whose expansion has become so large as to become the condition of our contemporaneity. The book is forthcoming and will be published in 2016.

The chapter, in an early, pre-release version, can be accessed at: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0744f82b#

You can cite the chapter as:

Delfanti, A. and Iaconesi, S., “Open Source Cancer. Brain Scans and the Rituality of Biodigital Data Sharing,” in Barney, D., Coleman, G., Ross, C., Sterne, J. and Tembeck, T. (eds): The Participatory Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming).