Title: Radio Free Valis and Phytopsyche: Two Books on the Discursive Effectives of the Concepts and Practices of Information

During my fellowship, I will be composing two books on the discursive effects of the concepts and practices of information. Radio Free Valis: The Informatic Visions of Philip K. Dick explores writer Philip K. Dick's The Exegesis, a nearly 9000 page, mostly handwritten text inquiring into PKD's experience of being “nailed by information” now hosted on a Penn State server at Zebrapedia.psu.edu. The book excavates and explicates PKD's informatic interpretation of “nonduality” - a mode of awareness dubbed by Dick “ultra metacognition” wherein the subject perceives themselves as essentially and not accidentally as a being composed not of matter but of pure consciousness capable of being modeled by and as information. The second, Phytopsyche: Close Encounters with the Science of Plant Intelligence,explores the effects of informatic techniques and paradigms on the science of botany, where researchers have turned to the language of “plant intelligence” to articulate the networks of informational complexity they have observed using the tools of genomics and molecular biology.