Keynote speakers
Liminal desires: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera
Stelarc
Brunel University London, UK
University of Western Sydney, AU
Brunel University London, UK
University of Western Sydney, AU
Friday, November 16
DAY 1: Technological Matter and the New State of the Living
Stelarc (Australia). Extra Ear: Ear on Arm, 2006, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne. 2006 Photo by Nina Sellars
The body is an evolutionary architecture that operates and becomes aware in the world. To alter its architecture is to adjust its awareness. We certainly need to undermine the simplistic idea of agency and the individual. The body has always been a prosthetic body, one augmented, amplified and equally exposed by its instruments and machines. There has always been a danger of the body behaving involuntarily and of being conditioned automatically. A Zombie is a body that performs involuntarily, which does not have a mind of its own. A Cyborg is a human-machine system that becomes increasingly automated. There has always been a fear of the involuntary and an anxiety of the automated. Of the Zombie and the Cyborg. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become. To be an intelligent agent one has to be both adequately embodied and intimately embedded in the world. But why not see the body itself as a mobile, monitoring and transmitting system that can be logged onto (and yes, hacked into) and accessed physiologically and phenomenologically?
Biography
The body is an evolutionary architecture that operates and becomes aware in the world. To alter its architecture is to adjust its awareness. We certainly need to undermine the simplistic idea of agency and the individual. The body has always been a prosthetic body, one augmented, amplified and equally exposed by its instruments and machines. There has always been a danger of the body behaving involuntarily and of being conditioned automatically. A Zombie is a body that performs involuntarily, which does not have a mind of its own. A Cyborg is a human-machine system that becomes increasingly automated. There has always been a fear of the involuntary and an anxiety of the automated. Of the Zombie and the Cyborg. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become. To be an intelligent agent one has to be both adequately embodied and intimately embedded in the world. But why not see the body itself as a mobile, monitoring and transmitting system that can be logged onto (and yes, hacked into) and accessed physiologically and phenomenologically?
