CFP 28.10.2016

Session at AAH 2017 (Loughborough, 6-8 Apr 17)

Loughborough University, 06.–08.04.2017
Eingabeschluss : 07.11.2016

Ming Turner

Visualising the Post-human, Cyborgs and Cybersexuality in Contemporary Art

Convenor:

Ming Turner, National Cheng Kung University, mingturnermail.ncku.edu.tw

Post-human as an academic term has been debated widely since the late 1970s. Ihab Hassan’s Prometheus as performer: Toward a posthuman culture? (1977), contends that technology both influences medical science and governs our daily consumer culture. Meanwhile, Steve Nichols’s Post-human Manifesto (1988), maintains that people today are already living in a post-human condition. The phenomenon of the post-human reveals a state of anxiety and uncertainty resulting from the condition of being somewhere between human and inhuman. The post-human takes the shape of our bodies, but exists as a hybrid of our biological forms and technology, including in the form of the cyborg, which, according to feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, is ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (1991: 69).

Haraway’s concept of the cyborg addresses how the post-human demonstrates a form of tension and indecision between the human and the non-human, allied to the idea of the phenomenon of combining the human body with technology. A cyborg as an individual transcends gender duality in the material world, and by rejecting gender duality, cyborgs further deconstruct gender identification and re-present the bodily symbols of post-humanist desire. It is now evident that technology has realised many of the ideas previously only imagined in the realms of science fiction and fairytales.

This session welcomes papers from academics, curators, theorists and artists wishing to address the issues and discourses that explore the visualisation of the ideas of the post-human, cyborgs and cybersexuality through the lens of contemporary art practice, with particular emphasis on the perspectives of art and science.

Please email 250-word paper proposals, including your name, affiliation
and email, to the convenor by 7 Nov 2016. Full proposal guidelines at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2017/session38

Quellennachweis:
CFP: Session at AAH 2017 (Loughborough, 6-8 Apr 17). In: ArtHist.net, 28.10.2016. Letzter Zugriff 28.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/14059>.

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