Track 10
Body-politics of the machines:
Troubles WITH/IN/OUT art, body, perception, politics, and technology.

Track chair Ingrid Cogne, Patrícia J. Reis

Within the cross-disciplinary research field art – science – technology, it has been widely remarked how the proliferation of new technologies affects human and non-human bodies in multiple ways—including perceptually, intellectually, culturally, socially, environmentally, ecologically, ethically, and politically.

Evidence can be found for example in the ways in which humans have been adjusting their bodies and behaviors to automatic workflows or in the development of genetic engineering to modify species that can cope with the current standards of living.

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, artificial emotion, human-robotics interfaces, and genetics, points to the idea of expanding the body to a facilitated and re-empowered artificial existence. Technologies of emersion—such as VR, AR, and brain interfaces—promise the alienation of reality and call for the transcendence of the body and immaterial existence. Both scenarios persist on thinking future technology in an anthropocentric way and call for the necessity of rethinking the body.

Body-politics of the machines aims at re-creating a space wherein troublematic relationship with/in/out art, body, perception, politics, and technology can be articulated and inviting papers and artistic research projects that observe, question or speculate on aesthetics, im/materiality, and politics of future techno-body scenarios.

The tracked topics include – and are not limited to:

• Situating troubles: Intersectionality and bodily relationalities.
• Machines and automatic systems of demystification.
• Machines as bodies and bodies as machines.
• Innovative interfaces of body affection and sensorial adjustment.  
• Relational interfaces – between the self, one’s body, and the body of spectators.
• Thinking the body: emancipation strategies and speculative methodologies.
• Power of machines in periods of conflict: VR, AR systems and other immersion technologies aligned with body and politics.
• Disembodiment, obliteration, and technological development.