Etienne Balibar: "Europe as Borderland: models of transnational citizenship"
Recent debates aroused by the enlargement of the European Union, the project of adopting a "Constitution" for the new political entity, and the engaged or coming negociations with such countries as Turkey and Ukraine concerning their future admission as EU members, all this on the background of new steps taken in the process of globalization and a completely new conjuncture in International Relations, have brought to the fore once again the issue of Europe's identity, the nature of its power, and the meaning of its protection. Taking a distance from immediate electoral controversies, but keeping in mind the political constraints that overdetermine the project of creating a new polity in Europe, I want to discuss and compare two types of questions. One has to do with alternative models of "political spaces" (an expression borrowed from Carlo Galli) which compete in our analyses of contemporary transformations of the political : "Clash of Civilizations", "Global Network", "Center and Periphery", "Overlapping Territories", and their respective implications. The other has to do with the new figures of the Citizen and the Stranger that are at stake in the institutions of Border Control and the generalized regime of Translations, which calls for a renewed understanding of the basic relationship between languages and cultures.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi: "Freedom Flies: Throwing money at the problem of military solutions"
Since the Cold War, when the US government hijacked science and engineering as crucial instruments of national security, the US has deepened its own isolation through solipsistic technologies. New weapons systems and technologies create the impression of sterile, precise, and well-managed conflict, but that impression is necessarily one-sided, while the effects are manifold. Those in the right wing gravitate towards weapons systems and material power as a means of social change, from the geopolitical to the local, while those in the left rarely look to technical solutions. One such case is the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, favored by the military for political assignations and intelligence. These systems are also being embraced along the US / Mexican border by a variety of fascist anti-immigrant groups, in order to target undocumented migrants for arrest and harassment. Our research group is beginning a project to try and adapt UAV technologies for the role of assisting political and economic refugees, and document illegal activities of fascist militias. Called Freedom Flies, it is an extension of several technologies our research group has developed to increase transparency in America's reaction to terror.

Beatriz da Costa: "Narrating BioTerrorism: Framework, Responses, Counteraction?"
May 2004 was the starting date of a federal investigation into the activities of members and associates of the artist collective known as "Critical Art Ensemble (CAE)." Members of Critical Art Ensemble were under suspicion for allegedly conducting bio-terrorist activities out of the home environment. This allegation was largely based upon documented knowledge of the group's prior use of biological materials in their collaborative art practice. The bioterrorism charges have since been dropped, but the investigation is ongoing. Specifically targeting CAE founding member Steve Kurtz and molecular biologist Robert Ferrell, the case has subsequently been reframed as a violation of the "mail and wire fraud" statute. This accusation is based on the transfer of living organisms between the two collaborators. If found guilty, both parties face a maximum of twenty years in prison. As a former long-term collaborator of the collective I was a subject of the initial phase of this investigation and helped establishing the CAE Defense Fund, an organizational network aimed at publicizing the case and supporting the defense team working on behalf of CAE. In this presentation I would like to address some of the key questions that have arisen since the investigation was launched last May: What is the legal basis for the continuation of this investigation? On what grounds was it possible to frame CAE's work as a terrorist activity to begin with? How does the CAE case fit into the larger context of current post 9-11 US politics? How might a successful conviction impact bone fide research and creative cultural critique? And most importantly, what kind of counteraction could be taken in order to prevent governmental abuse of this kind in the future?

James Der Derian: "Defensive Terror and Model Threats: Virtual/Actual/Banal"
The modern conceptualization of defense is inseparable from the promulgation of terror and the modeling of threats. Terror, as Clausewitz said of war, 'originates with the defense'. Cold War defense depended on a 'balance of terror', in which a willingness and capacity to inflict mutually unacceptable harm provided a modicum of order to a bipolar system. With the end of the cold war came a new imbalance of terror, based on a mimetic fear and hatred in which both sides demonstrated an asymmetrical capacity to destroy the enemy without the formalities of war. Under the guise of justice and freedom, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has produced a bipolar disorder. 9/11 was the catalyst but not the cause for a change that doctrinally goes back to the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, which formally enunciated the transformation of US defensive strategy from deterring the enemy through nuclear superiority to destroying the enemy through 'full spectrum dominance' and preemptive attack. In 1998, Bin Laden's pseudo-fatwa, which decreed Christian and Jewish civilians legitimate targets of the jihad, was presented as a defensive measure. In a hypermediated environment, where the primary battlefield is the infosphere, defensive terror and the modeling of threats moves entropically from virtual to actual to banal.

Garnet Hertz: "The Animal-Machine: Biorobotics, War and Animalized Technologies"
Animals inspire the development of technological systems by providing clever solutions to embodied, complex environments. Biomimetic systems - technologies that mimic biology - are exploited in the context of war because they augment military force with animal-machine instinct, durability, and controllability without the risk of losing "life". The 20th Century has embraced the animal-machine within the context of war, with current American biorobotics research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) continuing and expanding this trend. This presentation will provide a visual survey of 20th Century animal-machine systems, focusing on mechanical-computational weapons that have been developed as animal-like entities. Critical and theoretical questions will be raised toward the basis of bio-inspired technological development within this context: between war and the media of animal-machine hybrids.

Eva Horn: "Black Box, Nets, and Swarms. Models of the Enemy in Secret Intelligence"
My paper will examine secret intelligence as a specific type of defensive knowledge. This knowledge is based on underlying models of the enemy, that give him a "Gestalt" (shape) which predetermines the way this enemy can be recognized, fought and defeated. The paper will outline the transformation of these models from Cold War to the new, post-9/11 intelligence community. The new intelligence rhetoric is marked by a seemingly "shapeless", rhizomatic type of enmity, that calls for new models, strategies and media of defense and control.

Natalie Jeremijenko: "Social Security"
Some experiments in open scripts of participation towards the demilitarization of interaction

Peter Krapp: "Secrecy about Secrecy: the specter of hacktivism"
To comprehend the precarious balance of secrecy and access in information policy, it is necessary to combine theoretical, technical, and psychological insight, as Claude Shannon already emphasized in his communications theory of secrecy. In various RAND memos, Paul Baran solicited a reconsideration of security concepts. Assertions that greater secrecy yields greater security are misguided, which becomes obvious in Freud's mythological reading of the self configured through access and secrecy.

Trevor Paglen: "Goatsucker"
Goatsucker is an experimental lecture presented in the form of an intelligence briefing. It is a virtual tour through the secret landscapes, invisible deaths, and conspiracies of silence surrounding military "stealth" programs since the mid 1970s. Presented as an experimental lecture in the form of an intelligence briefing, Goatsucker is a virtual tour through the killing fields of the stealth-fighter program.

Claus Pias: "The Defence of Cybernetics"
The new cybernetic discourse of the first two decades after World War II was not so much about computer science in our present sense but more about a hypothetical meta-theory of digital machines, living organisms, and social systems in terms of information, regulation, and feedback. For this reason cybernetics developed concepts for defending improbable order against probable disorder in homodynamic systems. A cybernetic system seems to be 'alive' just as long as its mechanisms of defense are employed. This paper argues, that the obvious aspect of targeting goals is overestimated in our historical view on cybernetics and that defense might be a more subtle concept for describing how cybernetics developed the prerequisites for our present 'societies of control'.

Mark Poster: "Who Controls Digital Culture?"
My presentation examines the impact of networked computing on pre-existing media institutions, in particular the music industry. I argue that modern society developed institutions to control culture on the assumption of fixed cultural objects (books, films, etc.) Digitization enables and promotes changeable cultural objects. I ask how this innovation will affect the culture industries. To carry out this analysis I examine the nature of the extension of copyright law in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the varieties of peer-to-peer networks for sharing music files, and the strategies of the music industry before the introduction digital networks and afterwards. The effects of the music industry's effort to eliminate file-sharing on censorship, privacy and surveillance is also discussed.

Laurence Rickels: "Schreber Guardian"
The intertextual frame of reference that I began assembling in 1997, which is comprised of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of the German Mourning Play, and Freud's Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), folds out from the gaps and overlaps between Benjamin's rereading of allegory and Freud's notion of endopsychic perception. In 2004 I added to this thought experiment the corpus of Philip K. Dick. For the Irvine conference on "Defense" I will follow out Dick's explicit response to Freud's study of Schreber's Memoirs in what can be considered his first "psy fi" novel: Time Out of Joint. In short order: the "One Happy World" government maintains a delusional system, in which the 1990s are displaced in regard to a retrofit with the 1950s, as its sole defense against missile attacks launched by colonists on the moon in the course of a civil war that counts only victims.

Stefan Rieger: "Techniques of Selfdefense and Selfpreservation"
Mostly the model of defense is used to define a certain form of communication. A corresponding theory describes communication as something taking place between different agencies, between transmitter and receiver. But defense is also a model to describe an important aspect of modern individualisation: not as a matter between different people and agencies, but as a process inside one single person. The paper is concerned with this type of self-techniques. Why and where are people busy with defending him- or herself against him- or herself?

Jens Schroeter: "3Defense: volumetric display and the localization of the other"
In the twentieth century, there is a steadily growing development and distribution of many different trans-flat 'space images' which convey more spatial information than conventional, perspectival images. The paper addresses the history and aesthetics of one little-known form - the volumetric display - and its origins in the retrieval of spatial information for military defense.

Felicity D. Scott: "Defense Against Environment"
In April 1970, the Ant Farm group staged "Air Emergency" on the UC Berkeley campus. Their inflatable "Clean Air Pod" (CAP 1500) was at once an Agitprop lesson in defense against the threat of environmental pollutants and part of an ongoing refusal of the disciplinary limits of architecture staged in the name of a turn to "environment." This paper will address aspects of this turn to "environment" from the late 1960s and early '70s as well as the practices of defending disciplinary boundaries and expertise it elicited.

Jennifer Terry: "Boosting Morale: Entertainment as an Art of War"
This presentation offers a comparative analysis of two entertainment forms - USO variety shows and interactive computer gaming - as they relate to a history of military concerns for boosting troop morale during wartime. In arguing that modern mass-marketed entertainment has come to be an art of war, I show how, in quite different ways, USO shows and computer-based battle simulation games link notions of pleasure to military imperatives of psychological fitness, battlefield might, and patriotic sentiments through an evolving discourse of morale. My analysis pays particular attention to the ways that masculinity and military rank (i.e. class) are configured through these two forms of entertainment. As practical strategies in the art of war, these forms have been aimed at lower-ranking infantry personnel in specific ways. I will unpack the significance of these strategies to show how the subjects of these forms are gendered, raced, and ranked in particular though changing ways.

Eugene Thacker: "Biology, Code, and War - The Biopolitics of U.S. Defense Policy"
This paper considers the 'biopolitical' aspects of recent US Defense policy. It argues that Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics' - particularly as developed in his lectures at the Collège de France - sets up a triangulated relationship between biology, code, and war that is at the heart of contemporary US Biodefense initiatives (such as Project BioShield or the Biosurveillance Project). This triangulation between biology, code, and war are in the process of redefining what Giorgio Agamben calls 'bare life' - life which is constituted in the permanent state of exception. It is in this grey zone that we see 'bare life' being re-articulated in novel ways as 'biological sovereignty' and as 'medical security' where bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases become increasingly inseparable.

Brigitte Weingart: "Unseen Threats: Viral representations in popular discourse"
AIDS, computer viruses, lately SARS: The recent circulation of more or less 'real' viruses enhanced the spread of the virus as a collective symbol which visualizes - paradoxically - scenarios of unseen threat. The paper looks at how the strategies of unperceived invasion, invisible activity and subversion attributed to the virus result in its representations - in both medical and popular discourse - as a particularly clever counterpart to the body's defense mechanism, the immune-system. As they draw heavily on military analogies, the paper addresses the effects of viral representations on the popular perception of national security, focusing on viruses as latent agents.