Search

The search found 29 results in 0.302 seconds.

Search results

1. Hold the Door: Companion Prosthetics in Game of Thrones

   Despite its many flaws, the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones could be seen as attempting to resist what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have identified as narrative prosthesis, in which disabled characters are oversimplified and utilized primarily as a kind of catalyst for normate characters in their foregrounded narrative arcs.

   Characters in the series can arguably be seen as more complex at times, while also evoking other stereotypes of disability, from Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, who is referred to as a “dwarf” and has congenitally restricted growth, to Bran Stark, who is paralyzed after being thrown out of a window, and Hodor, who only ever utters the word that has become his name.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 13:37

2. Reading in the Anthropocene

   The cultural use of the concept of the Anthropocene usually includes the problem that the climate, unlike the weather, is not organized in an event-like manner and not directly perceptible, so the human imagination is facing a serious challenge when it tries to think about climate change.

   This problem most often leads to questions that ask about the possibilities and performances of the art (what kind of works of art can adequately mediate the hard-to-conceive era of the Anthropocene?), which questions are complemented in this article by the question of the reception, especially reading. This addition is motivated by the recognition that the understanding of our world is traditionally associated with its “readability,” but such a metaphor of reading — precisely in the absence of perceptibility and eventuality — may no longer be able to describe our relationship to the culture and the world.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 13:41

3. Playing posthumanism? NieR: Automata and the inescapable human

   How do videogames imagine diegetic and extradiegetic posthuman agents? In a sense, videogame play is already posthuman. The player of a videogame is redistributed in an interrelational assemblage of human and non-human agents (Braidotti 2013); of physical world, player, technology, player character, and virtual environment (Taylor 2009).

   Thus, videogames, by their very “nature” should allow us to play out versions of breaking away from anthropocentric idealism and experience what new modes of subjectivity and agency might entail. 

   One such attempt is found in the 2017 videogame NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames 2017), lauded as a work of existential nihilism and post-humanity (as “after-human” as well as “beyond-“ or “more-than-human”). NieR: Automata is a role-playing action adventure videogame set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where androids and machines are caught in an eternal war. The player “controls” the android 2B, and later other androids and drone companions, to fight machines on behalf of humanity.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:01

4. Identifying, Deceiving, Protecting and Hunting: What Fictional Machines and Humans Do with Machine Vision Technologies

   This presentation explores the cultural imaginaries of machine vision as it is portrayed in contemporary science fiction, digital art and videogames. How are the relationships between humans and machines imagined in fictional situations and aesthetic contexts where machine vision technologies occur?

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:07

5. ‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound

   “He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.

   Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11

6. Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism

   Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar of science fiction, writes that “Native slipstream,” a subgenre of speculative fiction, “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like a navigable stream.” The immense possibilities inherent to this genre, she continues, allow “authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures.” 

   Biidaaban (Dawn Comes) (2018), a short stop-motion film by Vancouver-based Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong, illustrates the political possibilities of Indigenous slipstream, and Indigenous science fiction more broadly, to envision liberatory futures in the face of forces that naturalize the current destructive, capitalist, and colonial order.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:21

7. "the flows, the systems...the field of flesh": posthuman poetics, material assemblages, and networked cartographies in contemporay irish poetry

   This presentation examines a selection of poems by contemporary Irish poets at the intersections of technology, ecology, and literary aesthetics. I argue that the discussed poems, published during the past 30 years, anticipate or comment on the emerging posthumanist paradigm, what Rosi Braidotti describes as a system of “discursive objects of exchange” within a community of “transversal ‘assemblages’ […] that involves non-human actors and technological media”. 

   The work of poets described as “neo-modernists” has been, from the 1990s onwards in particular, closely attuned to changes in technology, environment, and the media. The work of Randolph Healy draws on his background in mathematical sciences. Trevor Joyce’s career as a Business Systems Analyst at Apple has informed his approach to language as structured, fragmented, and networked transmission of data.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:32

8. Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest

   It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

   Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

   In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36

9. Catherine Malabou, Anne Carson, and the Plasticity of Inheritance

   Catherine Malabou has pursued her philosophy of plasticity across a number of recent works, published over several decades. In books such as The Future of Hegel, The New Wounded, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Before Tomorrow, and Morphing Intelligence, she has explored the intimate connections between brain plasticity and temporality as pertaining to key figures in the modern philosophical tradition: Hegel, Kant, Freud, Bergson, Derrida, and others.

   One might think of her corpus as composed of a series of adventurous and bold philosophical retracings, where motifs such as doublings, short circuits, metamorphoses, and wormholes through time feature prominently. She is a preeminent contemporary philosopher, but her work importantly interfaces with neuroscience, cognitive sciences, and the history of artificial intelligence too. Likewise, as I wish to argue in my conference presentation, her work has important implications for literary studies. I want to discuss implications and possible styles of practical application by bringing Malabou together with the contemporary poet Anne Carson.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:39

Pages