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This summer I am going to Cardiff where I will chair a panel on Post-humanity at the Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk conference at Cardiff University. I look forward to this because Charlie Gere is going to be there and I have not seen him for quite a while now and it would be great to catch up. He is a great scholar and I have always appreciated his work.

The panel is structured as a sketch of the future visions for Post-humanity. When I was in Manchester for the Futuresonic Festival and Conference, the concepts of geoengineering, presented by Jamais Cascio, and terraforming, a NASA memory from my personal past, came back into the fore. The panel in Cardiff will sketch some ideas on the evolutionary trajectory of the body but also look into the complex matrix of aesthetic cultural perceptions that have developed since the encounter of the Futurists with the machine.

Panel Title: Sketching the Future of Post-humanity

The concept of crisis and transformation is reflected in the aesthetic choices of the visual arts which, like a barometer, signal and identify the shifts within society. The panel will address the theoretical underpinning of these transformation and the modalities of their representations in contemporary art practices focusing on the possible relation between crisis and escapism in Post-humanity.

Paper 1: Curating Post-humanity? Art in Between Utopia and Dystopia
Lanfranco Aceti, Sabanci University, Istanbul

The paper will discuss the vision of a future that has moved from the optimistic approach of the Futurists, in which a technologically based utopic world would represent the panacea to the problems of humanity, to one of a contemporary dystopic vision in which the ‘maimed’ post-human body represent a temporary hybrid response to the cataclysmic events of a humanity in a world in crisis.

The visual representation of the new aestheticized crises, both in film and fine arts, is one that still concentrates on technology as the suitable response. This is a technological response to crises that, in the contemporary dystopic visions, can only ensure a temporary survival, before collapsing humanity in a worse crisis than the one technology originally attempted to solve. Technological solutions are presented as delayed failures that only ensure the final collapse through a technological betrayal of human hopes.

The new technological hybrid-body, in the dystopic vision, is something that needs to be constantly curated as a consequence of humanity’s departure from the perfected image bestowed by the creator – homo est clausura mirabilium dei (man is the closing point of the marvels of the universe) in Paul Virilio, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, 21.

The paper will conclude by arguing that the curatorial role in presenting these visions of the human body is not one based on utopia or dystopia, nor based on the perfect existence of an original image of the body to which one should adhere or that should be ‘curated’ of its sinful acquired imperfection. The vision of the post-human body is that of an evolutionary process within which failure in a crisis is only but one of many different possible outcomes. 

Paper 2: The Aesthetic Beauty of the Artificial: When Prosthetic Bodies Become an Art Expression of Empowering Design Technologies
Sessa Valentina, Birkbeck College, London

Technology is so predominant in the construction and visions of future modern worlds that the cyborg has become an expression of a technological invasion of the body for its preservation. The oxymoron of a technological transformation of the body for its preservation is reflected in the concept of hyper technology as the only viable escape from the consequences of a human and planetary crisis. 

In the artististic practice of Stelarc, the cyborg is a posthuman technological entity adapted to live and survive in a new space determined by recurrent planetary crises. The human body becomes a site where technology as prosthetics may absolve both the aesthetic as well as functional goals. The merging of technological aesthetics and human body, particularly in the work of Stelarc, appears to realize the Futurists’ vision of a new world inhabited by a machine and human hybrid. 

Based on interviews with patients of the Limb Fitting Centre at the Charing Cross Hospital in London, who really live the condition of having a prosthesis implanted in their body, the paper will investigate the perception of prosthetics as physical reconstruction of the body and aesthetic enactments of Stelarc’s and the Futurists’ aesthetic vision.

The paper will conclude by discussing whether the possibility of a future “merger between human and mechanical,” as carried out by Stelarc in his aesthetic vision, can only be considered an unconventional and unachievable flimsy or if it is a phenomenon that can already be observed in action to overcome the current crises of the body.
 

Paper 3: Human Avatars in Posthumanity: Using Technology To Reach A Peer-to-Peer Mind Sharing in Immersive Reality
Emrah Kavlak, Sabanci University, Istanbul

The paper will present a possible future vision of a transhumanistic technology through which humans would be able to communicate with each other in space by remotely sharing minds via brain signals. Unlike the avatars in metaverses, where the freedom of control and the level of immersion is limited by the computer interface, this is the vision of a person that would have the chance of experiencing someone else’s body and his/her senses in the real world. 

This ideal system would provide an environment with shared perception for a unique peer-to-peer immersive reality and mind sharing experience.

The motivation for the emergence of such technology could be rooted in the crisis of the body and the planet. This crisis could necessitate the use of the human brain as a transferable and sharable medium. The human brain is already ‘installed’ in the human body and its capabilities are advanced with a device able to redistribute knowledge and preserve biological information.
Mind sharing technology would allow in a time of crisis the ubiquitous presence of knowledge and create a common media, that of the brain sharing technology, able to ensure a powerful interface between individuals. The user, as a human who uses his / her own body as an interface, would use the body and its senses as a natural interface allowing an exchange of data with no artificial screens, in-between devices or technological interfaces needed.

The paper will conclude by analyzing if the vision of mind sharing is a possible response to crisis or if it represents a form of technological escapism in an era of dystopia. 

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