[Discussion] CFP: The Body in the Digital (11/30/05; ACLA, 3/23/06-3/26/06)

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

From: "G. Sigthorsson" <gauti.work@gmail.com>

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting:
The Human and its Others
Princeton University
March 23-26, 2006

Seminar: "The Body in the Digital"

The digital is perhaps the defining "other" of the human body in the late 20th
century. Papers and/or performances are invited that seek to investigate the 
informatic relationship between the animal and the machine, as Norbert Wiener
put 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. Therefore this question will be framed as
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. This seminar will consider the relation of
physicality and digitality, with a cast of conceptual personae that include
thinking machines, automata, robots, cyborgs, posthumans, and other hybrid
monsters.

Topics may include (in no particular order):
Immanence
Transcendence  (e.g., overcoming the body through technology,
"downloading" the  mind)
Spinoza
Descartes
Leibniz
Hobbes
Dualisms (of mind/body,  software/hardware, human/machine, etc.)
Cybernetics
Media and the human  body
Histories of computing
Thinking machines
Norbert Wiener and his  contemporaries
Deleuze
Actor-Network Theory (Latour et  al.)
Virtual/Real
Analogue/Digital
Philosophies of the  interface
Digital practices
Performing the body online (e.g., blogging,  chat, webcams)
The physicality of the Internet
Digital desire
Techno-fetishes
The faces of digital technology
Death and the  digital

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

Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Deadline for submissions is
30 November. Please submit abstracts of 250 words online at:
http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4

Feel free to address any questions or suggestions to the seminar organizer,
Gauti Sigthorsson (g.sigthorsson@gre.ac.uk). All abstracts must be submitted via
the ACLA website.

For more information on the conference, its location and format, please see:
http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/

----------
Gauti Sigthorsson, lecturer
Dept. of Creative, Critical and Communication Studies
University of Greenwich, School of Humanities
Old Royal Naval College, Park Row
London SE10 9LS, United Kingdom

g.sigthorsson@gre.ac.uk
+44 20 8331 8942 / 8800

http://www.gre.ac.uk/~sg12/




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