Coded Bodies – Per/forming Critique (Block Seminar / 4 SWS)
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Michelle Christensen
Language: English
Dates: 07.10. - 11.10.2024, 10:00-17:00
Registration: Please register by email by the 01.05.2024 with your name, field of study and matriculation number to michelle.christensen@tu-berlin.de
Participants: Max. 15 participants
Room: Berlin Open Lab (UdK Berlin / TU Berlin), Universität der Künste Berlin, Einsteinufer 43, 10587 Berlin
Description:
Bodies have always been in a constant state of material and discursive transition. From medical to DIY body augmentation, from meticulous self-tracking to life-mining mass-quantification of (bio)data, and from intimate lived reality to mythical metaphor, the body currently exists as a hyper-connected site of contestation and power plays. It can be understood as something that gets updated, altered, needs maintenance and sometimes breaks down and gets rebooted. As something that is not fixed, something collective and transforming, always in flux – as a site of negotiation.
Donna Haraway’s well-known feminist allegory of the ‘cyborg’ from 1985 already inserted an oppositional consciousness at the heart of the debate on new technological bodies and societies, questioning power relations and the making of ethical and political resistance in the age of an informatics of domination. In the ambiguity of the natural and artificial, self-developing and externally designed, Haraway proposes the potential of strategically confusing identities. We are all chimeras, she argued, fabricated hybrids of machine and organism – and should take pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.
In this block-seminar we will discover and debate the topic of per/forming bodies as a site of confusion, negotiation and of critique. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the politics and technologies of bodies with a focus on ‘automation’ versus ‘autonomy’, we will discover real-world phenomena and engage personally with the technological systems in which we are embedded and embodied. Drawing on approaches of critical making and designing, as well as feminist and queer theory – we will (ad hoc) prototype concepts for performing bodies differently (no prior experience with design or technology necessary).
– Haraway, D. (2003). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge.
– Braidotti, R. (2013). ‘The Posthuman’. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Modules:
• BA-Studiengänge Kultur und Technik Freier Wahlbereich
• MA Geistes- und bildungswissenschaftliche Masterstudiengänge Freier Wahlbereich
• Lehrveranstaltungen für alle Studierenden der Fakultät
• This studio class is open to students of all all disciplines and levels at all Berlin universities in the framework of a free elective
31319201 FG Open Science
10:00 - 17:00, Mo. 07.10 - 11.10.24, täglich
0min/0min
Fachübergreifendes Studium Geschlechterverhältnis und TechnikFachübergreifendes Studium Kultur und TechnikFachübergreifendes Studium Mensch und MaschineFachübergreifendes Studium Politik und TechnikBlockveranstaltung