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International Metabody Forum
IMF 2015 – New York
17-20 April – New York
www.metabody.eu/imf-2015/#usa2015
www.metabody.eu
www.metabodyforum.eu
www.imf2015.eu
Friday 17th April 6-8 p.m.
at NYIT Manhattan: 1855 Broadway, New York, NY 10023
Symposium: “Metabody: Technologies, Cultures and Movement”
Jaime del Val – Reverso Institute, Madrid
METABODY – Embodied media as response to global surveillance culture
Metabody is a European project that attempts to redefine the body in Media in less simplistic ways than is usual in current
information technologies, thus counteracting technology’s increasing tendency to dampen differences by reducing bodies and
movements to prescribed forms. Our proposal is a reversal of cybernetics that highlights the ndeterminacy of embodied
expressions as a key factor for a sustainable society. This foregrounds the need for a new ethics, which we may call
metamedia and biomedia ethics.
Jaime del Val is Metabody project coordinator, metamedia metaformance artist and metahumanist philosopher, director of
Reverso Institute of Metahuman Technologies.
Kevin LaGrandeur, Ph.D.
Emotional Robots, Personhood, and Extended Ideas of Embodiment
Kevin will discuss his recent work in connection with Metabody, including his research on the idea of building emotions and
ethics into robots; his research on the ethical treatment of non-human persons—which expands notions of personhood
beyond anthropocentric models; and finally, his research on notions of distributed cognition and its implicit expansion of our
ideas of embodiment beyond traditional boundaries. These projects all have in common the critique of current technology use
or, in the case of the last two projects, the expansion of normal boundaries in our traditional relation to technology. Such
expansions of boundaries are exploratory interventions in traditional human-technology interaction.
Dr. Kevin LaGrandeur is a Professor at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), and a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and
Emerging Technology, an international think tank. He explores the intersections between digital technology, culture,
philosophy, and English studies. Dr. LaGrandeur has written many articles and conference presentations on these topics,
which have appeared in journals such as Computers & Texts, Computers and the Humanities , and Science Fiction Studies; in
books such as Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media and Beyond Artificial Intelligence: The Disappearing
Human-Machine Divide, which contains his most recent essay, ‘Emotion, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics.’ His writing has
also appeared in popular publications such as United Press International (UPI) news agency, where he recently published an
Op-Ed piece titled “The Mars Landing and Artificial Intelligence,” which discusses future ethical protocols for developing AI. His
new book titled Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2013) is about the
premodern cultural history of Artificial Intelligence, and it was Awarded a 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies
Prize. He is one of the founders of the NY Posthuman Research Group, and also recently founded the Visual Pathways
Consortium, a collection of academic researchers, non-profit groups, and corporations which collaborate to develop adaptive
technology for the blind.
With the support of the Culture Programme of the EU
With the support
Organized
Francesca Ferrando, Ph.D.
Glamorous MetaBodies, the Politics of Amorphogenesis and the Will to Global Surveillance
We are... glamorous metabodies in amorphogenetic processes of constant becomings. The desire for surveillance is an attempt
to re-constitute the order of things, a panopticon googlemap interactive picture of hyperrealities, in the anthropocentric
enealogy of the will to master. In tune with New Materialisms, Deleuze and Guattari, yoga, rainbows and herstories, metabodies
are: multiversal, passages from nowhere to everywhere (and vice versa), embodied narratives and im/pure potential. In this
talk, we will explore the significance of loosing the body and accessing post-biological embodiments as intra-acting ecologies
of relations, diffractions and absolute emptiness.
Dr. Francesca Ferrando, Ph.D in Philosophy, M.A. in Gender Studies, is a philosopher of the posthuman. She teaches Philosophy
at NYU, as an Adjunct Faculty Member at the Program of Liberal Studies. Dr. Ferrando has published extensively on the topic
of Posthumanism; in 2014 she was awarded the Philosophical Prize "Vittorio Sainati" with the Acknowledgment of the
President of the Italian Republic. In the history of TED talks, Dr. Ferrando was the first TED Speaker giving a talk on the subject
of the posthuman. Actively involved in the international debate as a visionary thinker and organizer, she is one the founders of
the NY Posthuman Research Group. Info: www.theposthuman.org
Yunus Tuncel, Ph.D.
Metaformance and the Problem of Spectacle/Spectator Divide
My short talk will be a reflection on one of Jaime del Val’s projects, namely metaformance, based on my personal experience
in Lesbos, Greece, in September 2011. Jaime del Val’s metaformance operates in a space that sets forces in motion and
projects them towards a re-generation of new forms, as it breaks down stereotypes based on identity-formations, mind-body
and subject-object dualisms, and rigid constructs of sexuality. This is a calligrammatic operation where we have a live
performance and an immediate projection of that performance onto a screen: two simulacra, two media, the medium of the
bodily performance is integrated with the medium of digital projection. Neither is the origin of the other; they do not resemble
one another, theirs is at most a relationship of similitude. The series, or rather the matrix, which is established through sound,
since the sound permeates all media and belongs to both, opens itself up to the audience. This is why it is better to refer to this
spectacle as a matrix where there are many open ends, instead of two ends as in a series, into which a spectator can insert
himself/herself as yet another simulacrum. In this way, the metaformer plays with the active-passive roles of the spectator, as
he projects and receives an active participation from his audience and as spectators themselves become spectacle. Through
technologies of becoming and the fluidity of media, such a performance presents movement against identity and metabody
against our ordinary conceptions of the isolated, unitarian body. Out of this spectacular process, new affects are formed, as
the performance echoes in and becomes one with its audience, as in Dionysian rituals.
Yunus Tuncel, Ph.D., is a co-founder of the Nietzsche Circle based in New York City and serves on its Board of Directors and
the Editorial Board of its electronic journal, The Agonist. He is one of the organizers of the NY Posthuman Research Group and
is an advisor to Metabody. Yunus Tuncel has been teaching philosophy at the New School since 1999 and NYU’s Liberal Studies
Program since 2001. In addition to typical philosophy classes, he teaches inter-disciplinary topical classes on power, taboo &
transgression, gai saber & the troubadours, crime & punishment, and spectacle. He organizes textual workshops to read
philosophical texts closely. In addition to Nietzsche and history of philosophy, he is interested in the twentieth century French
thought and recent artistic, philosophical, and cultural movements, including trans-humanism and post-humanism. His
primary areas of research are art, culture, myth, sports, and spectacle. He is interested in the fusion of art (all forms of art) and
philosophy in various cultural formations. In recent times he has undertaken a project called Philomobile to explore, with
interested searchers, the works and lives of philosophers on location within their historical context. His recent book, Agon in
Nietzsche, was published in 2013 by Marquette University Press. His most recent and on-going work explores Nietzsche’s
relationship to trans- and posthumanism.
With the support of the Culture Programme of the EU
With the support
Organized