Body, Mind, Method: Technology, Embodiment, Perception

Course goals

In this core research seminar, the students will engage in the critical analysis and evaluation of theories, concepts and current academic debates on the entanglement of emergent technologies, various types of embodiment and modes of perception.

• been introduced to various discourses about relationships between technologies, bodies, and modes of perceiving, experiencing, and thinking, and how these discourses have developed over time;
• gained further insight into the relationships between technological developments and transformations in media, art, and performance;
• increased their understanding of the relationship between transformations brought about by technology and the emergence of new objects of research as well as new objects of knowledge and the situatedness of knowledges;
• advanced their research skills, in particular, how to read difficult texts, and how to relate theoretical insights to current phenomena

Content

This course focuses on the entanglement of bodies and technologies as a critical question for media, art, and performance studies. In this course, we will trace histories of reflection about technology and the interaction between humans and technology. We will look at how this history brings out the performative and embodied character of processes of perception and cognition and their cultural and historical specificity. Technological developments foreground what media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen (Feed Forward) describes as the “ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world.” That is, they foreground that the ways I which bodies perceive, experience, and know “their” world is, to speak with Donna Haraway, “situated”: How the world comes to be experienced and known is a correlate of (organic and inorganic) bodies (including their technological extensions) involved in perceiving and understanding, and their social, cultural, technical, and other specificities.

This course builds on several themes introduced in State of the Art: Transformations in Media, Art and Performance Studies, namely that our contemporary culture and, as a consequence, society is, to a large extent, constituted by media rather than merely being represented by them. Furthermore, media technologies are not only co-constitutive of societies but also of our sense of self, our modes of experiencing, doing, knowing, thinking, and even what it means to be human.
 

Additional information

Only open for students in the RMA Media, Art and Performance Studies.

Career orientation:
Students gain experience with contributing research to artistic work-in-development.