ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The digital is perhaps the defining “other” of the human body in the late 20th century. We invite papers and/or performances that seek to investigate the informatic relationship between the animal and the machine, as Norbert Wiener phrased it in the subtitle of his Cybernetics. The relation of the carnal to the mathematical, or physical to digital, is a pressing contemporary concern for artists, theorists and writers. We would like to frame this question quite broadly as possible, in historical terms, inviting scholars specializing in all periods and areas up to the present, from the Baroque, the 19th Century and the early 20th to to the present. Our aim is to consider the relation of physicality and digitality, with a cast of conceptual personae that will include thinking machines, automata, robots, cyborgs, posthumans, and other hybrid monsters.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with the journal Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics.

Friday, March 24

Daryl Lee, SUNY Institute of Technology Utica/Rome
“Digital Corporeality and the Ecstasy of Statistical Bodies”
Emma Johnson (co-author: Robert Lecusay), UC San Diego
“In Space, NASA Can Hear You Scream”
Nilima Rabl, SUNY Binghamton
“deComposing Bodies – A Performative Exploration into Political Dimensions of Aesthetics and Subjectivity in the Digital Era”
Paul Benzon, Rutgers University
“Bugging Warhol: Tape, Type, and the Dissonance of Mediated Authorship”

Saturday, March 25

Elizabeth Lathrop, Georgia Perimeter College
“An Orchid in the Land of Technology: The Aura of the Human in the Age of Digital Cinema”
Benjamin Widiss, Princeton University
“Bad Medicine: Cinema under Siege in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and La Jetée”
Richard Garner, SUNY Buffalo
“The Other Side of the Screen: Jonathan Coe’s The Winshaw Legacy and the Question of Simulation”
Bjorn Ekeberg, University of Victoria, Canada
“Towards a Vortical Reality: Narratives of Virtuality Beyond Embodiment.”

Sunday, March 26

Steve Luber, CUNY, Graduate Center
“Organ Donors: The Digital Body without Organs”
Natalia Lizama, University of Western Australia
“Thanatodigitality: Human Corporeality, Digital flesh, and the Body of Medical Imaging”
Cherie Chitse Wang, University of Warwick, UK
“A Cyborg in Rosas’ Woud – A Construction of a New Body”
Gauti Sigthorsson, University of Greenwich, UK
“Platform, Protocol, Subject.”