Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
“Post-Human Art and Biotech Activism: a Case of Contamination”
Gabriela Méndez Cota
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
This proposal draws from previous doctoral research on Mexican civil resistance to the
transnational biotech industry and its governmental allies. Whereas the transgenic
‘contamination’ of Mexican native maize has been widely addressed and publicised by the
social sciences in Europe, North America and Mexico itself, my own approach to it draws
from the critical post-humanities including deconstruction, technoscience feminism and
post-Marxism. After earning my PhD at Goldsmiths University of London in February, 2014,
I am currently in the process of finishing the manuscript of my first book, titled Disrupting
Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2016). The book critically addresses narratives of human identity in the face of
threats posed to Mexican biodiversity and culture by the commercial release of genetically
modified maize into the Mexican countryside. For the interdisciplinary seminar
“Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human” my proposal is to analyse the emergence of posthumanist strands in Mexican activism against the biotech industry, mainly in the realm of
contemporary art. The fundamental question I want to pose is: have artistic practices in
Mexico managed at all to disrupt the humanistic moralism of the more traditional activist
discourses that can be found in journalism, scientific advocacy and grassroots organisations
(and if so, how)?
Bio
Gabriela Méndez Cota is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana (campus Cuajimalpa) in Mexico City. After doing a Humanities BA at
Universidad de las Américas, Puebla (Mexico), she obtained an MA on Digital Media:
Technology and Cultural Form (2006) and a PhD on Media and Communications (2014),
both from Goldsmiths University of London. Gabriela’s PhD thesis was titled The Genetic
Contamination of Mexican Nationalism: Biotechnology and Cultural Politics, and it was
supervised by Dr. Joanna Zylinska and Dr. Sarah Kember. Since 2009, Gabriela has taught a
variety of undergraduate courses with a transdisciplinary orientation, both in Mexico and in
the UK. In 2013 she served as the academic coordinator of TransitioMX_05, an international
festival of new media art on the topic of Biomediations. Since 2014 she serves as one of the
editors of Culture Machine.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Evolving the Ecocritical Aesthetic: Disrupting Human Supremacy through the
Arts and Media
Ronald Milland
Queens College, New York City
The humanist notions that place human beings above all other creatures can be blamed for
the destruction or deterioration of most of the world’s major ecosystems. Early explorers to
the “New World” deemed the natural abundance they found to be boundless and without
limit. They believed they could hunt, kill, till and plunder, essentially, forever. The fate of
the passenger pigeon – poignantly eulogized in a recent art exhibit – proves that exploitation
can indeed end: at the moment of species demise.
This deleterious effect of human hubris has been magnified by industrialization.
Technological advances have, unfortunately, not been accompanied by a parallel evolution
in human ethics. We have thusly trapped ourselves in a very limited perspective of human
progress – which mandates that our survival depends on “development” (the “expand or
expire” notion) and the domestication of the natural world.
In this system, animals have effectively become “things” to be tamed, eaten, distantly
sequestered, or killed. And since we kill what we fear or do not understand – or what we do
not even acknowledge as existing, like much sea life – we kill quite a lot indeed.
Recent art works have endeavored to reconfigure the non-human creatively. One recent
exhibit at the Monterey Aquarium in California included the works of several artists who
used plastic debris collected from the Pacific Ocean to sculpt sea animals: a dolphin made
entirely out of white plastic spoons, for instance. Other such exhibits – as well as media
works and documentary film – can be cited. This paper will examine how these works of
ecocriticism are essential in inspiring viewers to think critically about their place in the
world. This planet is inhabited by an extraordinary variety of life – which can flourish if we
don’t let the fallacy of human superiority endanger or destroy every species, including
Homo Sapiens.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Unborn – At the Border of Humanity
Tatiana Novikova,
St Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University
The great development of digital technologies not only demands the rethinking of the
concept of Human, but also actualizes the problem of the borders of human life.
Traditionally the initial point of humans’ being is his/her birth, which is thought as the first
meeting with reality. The life of a person from its very beginning and even from the idea of
this life supposes the being of the Other. Traditionally this otherness of infants accumulated
in the meeting of parents’ expectations, images and thoughts with the reality of new life. So
infants are perceived as the “Aliens of Nonbeing” (A. Demichev – ‘desantniki nebitija’). But
today the life is monitored and portrayed from the very beginning of the embryonic stage of
development using different digital technologies. Unborn are integrated into the routine of
everyday life. They are perceived as the real members of society, especially for their parents.
So the beginning of human life moves from the traditional start point to the virtual birth. But
does this existence mean the real life? Can we determinate this Unborn as Human or is this
pre-born is the “disembodied ‘Who,’ existing only in the form of question . . . somebody
who is alien to all, who looks from a distance, and only later on will come to us and will Be”
(Epstein, 2003, 51-52).
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Living dead non-humans
Marjut Puhakka
University of Oulu
In real life when a person dies, we don’t expect him/her to come back. At the books and
movies it isn’t so certain that dead stay dead. The living dead monsters are now as popular
as ever: zombies and vampires have taken over not to mention other re-animated corpses,
such as doctor Frankenstein’s creation.
At my thesis I am studying living dead monsters at Richard Matheson’s book I am Legend
(1954) and the four film adaptations made out of it. I am Legend is a story of a last man on
earth. The main character, Neville, lives in a post-apocalyptic world, where everyone else
has turned into zombie-vampires.
What does death take away that important that vampires, zombies and other undead
characters are not humans anymore? Living dead monsters look and in some cases also
sound and act like humans. Still there is something so very wrong with them that we seem
to be both fascinated and terrified of them.
At my study I’m approaching the theme of human/non-human through philosophical and
psychoanalytical theories, such as Alain Badiou and Slavoij Žižek. As it comes to zombie I
am interested on what are the boundaries of humanity – how it is defined. The living dead
creatures are no longer men. Dead takes something away, the essence of humanity is lost
when a man crosses the border of life and death. From this point of view living dead are
excellent material to be studied when trying to figure out what makes us humans.
Bio
The writer is doing her PhD at Oulu University, department of literature.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Playing the Non-Human
Jonne Arjoranta
University of Jyväskylä
What is it like to play a non-human? In a classic philosophical article, Thomas Nagel (1974)
argues that we are fundamentally unable to imagine what it is like to be a bat. Because our
senses and cognition are structured in a certain way, imagining what it would be like to be
other is difficult, if not impossible (cf. Barsalou 2008). Yet, in media genres from fantasy to
science-fiction, we are routinely shown what it is like to be something else or asked to
imagine it. Games, both digital and analogue, use multiple media to convey ideas and
experiences of human and non-human alike. I’ve played characters ranging from cyborgs
(trans- rather than non-human) to aliens, vampires and elves, all embedded in physical,
social and experiential surroundings that reflect what it is like to be them (Lankoski 2011) or
what their perspective on the world is (Allison 2015).
This paper examines how games portray the experience of being non-human by comparing
the techniques, tropes and narratives that portray non-humanity to the portrayal of human
experience. It is shown that while most games treat the non-human as an exotic collection of
traits that disguises the fundamental humanity of the experiences portrayed, some games go
to great lengths to represent the non-human, including showing what it is like to be a bat
(Cutajar and Brincat 2014).
References
Allison, Fraser. 2015. “Whose Mind Is the Signal ? Focalization in Video Game Narratives.”
In DiGRA 2015: Diversity of Play. Lüneburg: DiGRA.
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2008. “Grounded Cognition.” Annual Review of Psychology 59
(January): 617–45. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17705682.
Cutajar, Simon, and Bernard Brincat. 2014. “Echo.” Malta: Global Game Jam.
http://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/echo-0.
Lankoski, Petri. 2011. “Player Character Engagement in Computer Games.” Games and
Culture 6 (4) (June): 291–311. doi:10.1177/1555412010391088.
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1555412010391088http://gac.sagepub.com/cont
ent/6/4/291.abstract.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914.
Bio
Jonne Arjoranta, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
His main research interests are playful politics and the structures of meaning found in
games.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Journeys in Intensity ― Human and Non-human Co-agency in Video Games
Marleena Huuhka
University of Tampere
My presentation looks at video games as material performances that come into being
through the co-operation of non-human and human agents. Human agents include for
example human players, human audiences and the humans responsible for creation – design
and code – of the game in question. Non-human agents include, to mention some,
computers, pixels, electricity, code, virtual avatars and virtual environments.
My aim is to deconstruct the subject/object dichotomies that divide agents to human and
non-human. In video games non-human agents participate and create together with the
human agents, here most prominently the player. The avatar and its movements are the
product of the co-operation of the human and non-human agents. Although the game play,
the visual manifestation, happens through the commands of the human agent, the visual
result is constructed through the work of various diverse but equally indispensable
elements. My claim is that in this co-production the human agent becomes a part of a greater
non-human agency.
My presentation focuses on the material co-agency of the physical body of the player and
the physical bodies of the non-human agents in video games. My theoretical framework are
the materialist philosophies of Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari and Baruch
Spinoza, who all argue that subjectivity and agency are shared and relation-based. In
addition all emphasize the common physical substance forming all things and beings,
including humans. This perspective posits the non-human agencies parallel with the human
agencies thus opening up new possibilities for analysis.
Bio
Marleena Huuhka is a PhD student in The School of Communication, Media and Theatre in
the University of Tampere. She holds a MA in Theatre and Drama Research. Her PhD thesis
examines video games as a material, mimetic, virtual, nomadic and anarchistic performance
rhizomes and a locations of becoming-something created in cooperation with human and
non-human agencies.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
The Mundane Posthuman
Poppy Wilde
Coventry University
As Tufekci argues ‘we were always posthuman’ (2012: 34) and in acknowledging this we
must also acknowledge the posthuman not as a utopian or dystopian figure, but one that
incorporates all aspects of experience, resisting ‘both the fatal attraction of nostalgia and the
fantasy of transhumanist and other techno-utopias’ (Braidotti 2013: 90). In my
autoethnographic research on the MMORPG gamer as one embodiment of posthuman
subjectivity, my field notes focus on moments of affect, embodiment, empathy and
performance, exploring the close relationship between avatar and gamer and how this is
experienced subjectively. The boundaries between Etyme, my avatar, and myself
demonstrate the constant flux between non-human and human; we are an entity ‘whose
boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (Hayles 1999: 3) through
the game as we share bodies, responses, reactions and goals. She is not experienced as
wholly separate from me but still retains a “something” of herself, some quality of her own
as together we become the posthuman subject, ‘an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous
components, a material-informational entity’ (ibid.). However, this fantastical melding of
self and other, human and non-human, is not only one of highly emotive and affective
moments. As such this paper will explore the relationship between gamer and avatar not
only through aspects of empathic, performative and embodied feelings, but also moments of
the mundane, such as boredom, indifference and ambivalence, making posthuman
subjectivity as complex a construction as any other.
Bio
Poppy Wilde is a third year PhD student in the School of Media and Performing Arts at
Coventry University, UK. Her background is in performance studies and drama and her
autoethnographic PhD project explores the lived experience of MMORPG gaming with
particular focus on the gamer as one embodiment of posthuman subjectivity. Her research
interests are posthumanism, digital cultures, embodiment, performance in online contexts
and the lived experience in research methods.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Creating anthropomorphic animal characters to identify with
Tanja Välisalo
University of Jyväskylä
Anthropomorphic animal characters have been present in Western culture from Aesopian
fables to early modern literature and on to George Orwell’s Animal Farm as well as political
cartoons, animated movies and digital games. A fan culture, called furry fandom, formed
around these characters during the 1980s and 1990s and has grown especially through
online communities during the 21st century.
The significance of animal characters in furry fandom is manifested through fursonas. Most
members of the fandom have a fursona (the term combines furry and persona), an
anthropomorphic animal character that they have created and that they use to represent
themselves. Fursonas are present in the fandom through nicknames used both online and in
meetings and conventions, avatars used in virtual environments, costumes (fursuits) used in
meetings and conventions and art created and distributed mostly online. The species of the
animal is usually one that the person identifies with (Gerbasi 2008, 214, 220) and is a
representation of their (fan) identity.
In this paper, I examine how members of the furry fandom create their fursonas,
anthropomorphic animal characters, and how they negotiate characteristics and features
attached to certain species in popular culture with personal factors, such as their physical
appearance and self-perception as a whole. I do this by combining interviews conducted
with members of the fandom and visual analysis of their fursonas. I will also argue, that the
emphasis on visual material in the fandom, in comics and cartoons specifically, strongly
affects the aforementioned negotiations and thus, the process of identification.
References
Gerbasi, K., Paolone, N., Higner, J., Scaletta, L. L., Bernstein, P. P., Conway, S. & Privitera, A.
(2008). Furries from A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism). Society & Animals, 16,
197–222.
Kalof, L. and Montgomery, G. M., eds. (2012). Animal Turn. Making Animal Meaning. East
Lansing, MI, USA: Michigan State University Press.
McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
“When I cite, I excise, I mutilate, I extract”: Citational writing and gender in
Caroline Bergvall’s poetry
Brooke Boland
University of New South Wales
For contemporary poet Caroline Bergvall, the question of originality is inseparable from the
inscription of the self that occurs in and through language. Her citational poetics deconstruct
originality and questions its positions as a marker of writing identity politics. Instead she
posits unoriginality and citation as a way of writing through identity as socially constructed.
This paper will analyse the citational poetics of Caroline Bergvall’s poetry within recent
debates on post-humanism. It identifies a connection between post-humanist theory and
recent discussions of authorship and originality in world literature. This paper repositions
these debates within a long tradition of writing by women that participates in undoing the
ideological underpinnings of language and writing that uphold the writing subject as
masculine, including work in feminist literary theory that examines the relational
positioning of the female subject in language. I argue that citation, operating within the task
of ‘rewriting’ classical texts, is a moment where traditional humanism becomes unstuck,
making way for a reconfiguration of the human in creative discourse as uncreative and
unoriginal. In addition, this paper finds that the copy/original dialectic citational writing
disturbs operates as a gendered discourse when we remember that the gendered subject of
literature is masculine and consider, in light of this, how women writers’ and other
minorities have traditionally held a fraught relationship to authorship.
Bio
Brooke Boland is a postgraduate student at The University of New South Wales, School of
the Arts and Media. She is currently writing her PhD on the subject of women’s writing,
gender and world literature.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood: Neoliberalism, biotechnology and
woman as post-human animal
Jennifer Victoria Bowes
Leeds Beckett University
This paper will argue that the second novel of Margaret Atwood’s speculative
‘MaddAddam’ trilogy, The Year of the Flood (2009) has not always been fairly treated by
reviewers and critics, who view it’s satirical tone as somewhat shallow and comedic. I argue
that the novel actually does much to question the relationship between ecology, finance,
animal rights and the female body within a speculative North American society, and within
our own – using satire to emphasize what Melinda Cooper calls the ‘delirious’ nature of late
capitalism. In addition to this, recent work has often glossed over the symbiotic nature of the
novel’s eco criticism, critique of capitalism and imagining of the future bio-economy with
the trauma-memory narrative of the her main protagonists; women whose voices had not
yet been heard in the male narrated Oryx and Crake (2003). I will also argue that there is a
distinct difference in subject matter between male and female academic critique and review,
and that while the former have preferred to read the novel from a solely political or
traditionally theoretical standpoint, the latter are much more engaged with the notion of a
speculative post-humanism and how Atwood’s examination of biogenetic tampering,
animal consciousness and sexuality mirror the issues and struggles not only of her female
protagonists, but of contemporary women. In questioning the thematic difference in
criticism, and through analysis of the text itself, I hope to emphasize the importance of a
post human reading of the novel as this concept relates to trauma and control, suffered and
experienced by the planet, its animal denizens and a future female population. Lastly, I will
argue for the importance of contemporary women’s speculative literature as a vehicle for the
interrogation of the concept of post-humanity, both cautiously through a depiction of biocapitalism, and also with hope for a future that transcends the white-western-male
authoritarianism of a pure humanism which has contributed to a view of planet, animal life
and minority human as expendable resource in the eyes of capitalism.
Bio
I am a graduate student just finishing the third year of a part-time PhD where I am
investigating the popularity of contemporary women’s speculative, apocalyptic and
dystopian writing. I concentrating on the works of Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, but
also have a particular interest in young adult fiction of the same sub-genre, and written by
women. I recently presented a paper on the social imaginary and it’s relation to this
literature at the Arts in Society conference at the University of Sapienza, Rome, this year and
a further piece theorising Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor at Brighton University’s
Experimental Literatures conference last November.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
‘Non-human Humans’ and the Politics of Representation
Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
North Eastern Hill University, Shillong
Postcolonial Feminist literary practices have attempted at decoding the unrepresentablity of
the human/non divide in fictional and non-fictional genres. In the construction of oriental
categories such as natives, tribal and subaltern the political project of imperialism was to
dehumanize the human. Inspired by the Western Humanistic tradition the ‘axiomatics of
imperialism’ involved primarily the securing and legitimizing of the notion of the ‘human’
so that anything that came close to its opposite- the non-human could be subverted and
subordinated. The paper proposes to theorize the politics of the representation of
quintessential dehumanized characters such as Caliban and Bertha Mason- “The
Madwoman in the Attic” in Western texts and discuss the question of agency whereby a
subaltern transforms her identity from a dehumanized mute subject to a speaking subject.
What is significant in such a transformation is the changing definition of the ‘human’ in its
cultural and political essence which itself is a ‘writing back’ to the prescriptive epistemic
domain of Western Humanistic tradition.
In India Postcolonial feminist discourse has been engaged in locating the transformative
characteristics of stereotyped categories of human and the non-human reflected in various
pedagogies of the oppressed such as subaltern women with their added burden of caste and
ethnic markers. It may be useful to mention Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition which
presents us with the generic features of being human-human power and human limit. My
paper would contextualize the limits of categorization of the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’
drawing on the Indian activist writer Mahasweta Devi’s fictional writings. Gayatri Spivak, in
her reading of Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” shows how bonded laborers and
bonded prostitutes are both "humans turned into slaves...by the force of loans" Spivak
argues that by having to sell her own body, “she is twice alienated from capital: first, she
does not control the price of her "goods", and second, she produces no good to begin with.
The first move strips her of her right to be considered a worker. The second strips her of her
right to be a human subject, since her the value of her sexuality (her subjectivity) is precisely
that which has been determined for her by others.” The paper would highlight such
readings of Devi’s other texts.
Bio
Designation: Professor, Department of English, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong,
Meghalaya, India.
Specialization: Postcolonial Theory and Gender Studies.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Bodies of Others: Representations of Xenophobia in South African Fiction
Lara Buxbaum
University of the Witwatersrand
The brutal outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa in 2008 and again in 2015
shocked the world and unravelled the “rainbow nation” narrative of post-apartheid South
Africa. This paper proposes to explore the depiction of migration and migrants in recent
South African novels to determine whether these narratives offer ways of re-imagining
relations with others, specifically as a result of encounters with the bodies of those
dehumanized by xenophobic discourse.
Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas argue that “it is through the figure of the ‘stranger’ ... that
we can find ethical postcolonial ways of writing about others’ embodied experiences”
(Lewis “Scripted Bodies” 2011: 198). Furthermore, Margrit Shildrick maintains that “a
radical undoing of the very notion of embodied being as something secure and distinct” is
necessary in order to contemplate ethical encounters with others (“Becoming Vulnerable”
2000: 226).
With reference to these theories, this paper will discuss the portrayal of xenophobia, the
non-human and embodied subjectivity in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010), Eben Venter’s
Wolf, Wolf (2013) and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013). It will consider whether
empathy with others is expressed via the medium of bodies as well as the ways in which
animals figure in these texts.
Bio
Lara Buxbaum is an NRF Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Literature,
Language and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her PhD thesis (2014)
considered bodies and intimate relations in the fiction of Marlene van Niekerk. She has
published three peer-reviewed articles on Van Niekerk’s fiction (see Buxbaum 2011, 2012,
2013) and is contributing a chapter to a new collection on “Hospitalities”, scheduled for
2016. She is an associate editor for the journal English Studies in Africa and the winner of the
2013 Thomas Pringle Award. Lara is interested in South African literature, theories of
embodied subjectivity, intimacy and trauma studies.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Unveiling the Transhuman: Exploring Ethical Possibilities
Prasenjit Biswas
North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong
The immaterial simulacra of human knowledge can engage itself with this new question of
rights of nonhuman species to orient itself towards moral claims from nonhuman species.
Gruen argued that moral claims of nonhuman specie are like ‘showing up on a moral radar
screen’. It is part of ‘alterity relations’ that the humans establish with and beyond the
toolness of machines and plantness of plants. Relationship with embedded machines,
practice of radical plasticity, enhancement tools like iPhone, apps, drones or surveillance
gadgets, prosthetically and autopoeitically constructed bodies and future selves unveils a
new moral relationship between the human and the larger technospace leading to
ontological significance to ‘organic and techonological flesh’ of non-human lives, plants and
machines. This unveiling results into distinctive modes of thinking such as plant-thinking,
or, machine thinking, which is not just ascribing ethical capacities and functions to plants
and machines but also making them a part of the ethical ecosystem that gives them the place
of an ethical subject. As described by Michael Marder, plant-soul(s) bears an ethical quality
of forming a rhizome with the other, while radical plasticity of humans enhanced by
bioengineering give rise to ‘delegation’ of the power to speak on behalf of plants and
machines. As far as machine life is concerned, as Derrida, Deleuze, Catherine Malabou and
others have argued, it is an extended network of the relation between body and self that not
only does a prosthetics of life and death but implements it in an extensive system of
relations. Post and trans-humanization of these relations has assumed a variety of images,
such as brain screen, neuro-image, digital schizophrenia and other such complex data
histories. The paper explores the possibility of fusing together such post-vegetal and posttechnological conditions of being and ‘being outside oneself’ in the discursive formation of
ethics of care and reciprocity (such as einkinaesthetics, parrhesia etc.) that explores layers of
non-violent forms of transhuman relations between beings of all kinds.
References
2010 Declaration of the Rights of Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins” accessed from
www.cetaceanrights.org on 22.10.2014.
L.Gruen, ‘The Moral Status of Animals” in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Ed.
E.N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win 2012/entries/moral animal. accessed
on 4th March, 2015.
Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Indianapolis and
Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1990.
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008,
p.12.
Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Columbia University Press,
New York, 2013, p.185.
Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzean Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2012, p.221.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Bio
Prasenjit Biswas (b.1969) is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at North-Eastern
Hill University, Shillong, India. His major published works are The Postmodern
Controversy: Understanding Richrd Rorty, Jacques Derrida nd Jurgen Habermas (Rawat,
New Delhi, 2005); Ethnic Life-Worlds in Northeast India (SAGE, New Delhi, 2008); co-edited
Construction of Evil in North-East India (SAGE, New Delhi, 2012). He has published many
papers in the area of phenomenology and continental philosophy, consciousness studies and
other field of Philosophy.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
What Animals Teach Us: Animal Fables as Narcissistic Mirrors
Bo Pettersson
University of Helsinki
One of the most enduring literary genres is the animal fable, that is, stories about humanlike animals. They usually include some kind of moral lesson. From the ancient Indian
collection the Panćatantra to disneyfied films and stories to David Sedaris’s and Mo Yan’s
recent postmodern animal stories and novels, the animal fable teaches a moral, by a pointer
before, after or inside the story. In fact, from Aesop and the Panćatantra to La Fontaine and
Charles Perrault, the history of the moral in the animal fable is quite evident: it goes from an
explicit moral to more implicit, relative and ambiguous ones.
But animal fables are so much more than just moral stories. They make rich use of character
and plot as well, often at the service of commenting on contemporary politics (as in Geoffrey
Chaucer’s “The Parliament of Fowls” and George Orwell’s Animal Farm) or religion (Farid
ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of Birds). In stories of star-crossed love across time there are
often metamorphoses of humans into animals and plants, which show the breadth and
depth of love as a motif. In short, in a number of ways animal fables mirror human life and
teach us what we are. Paradoxically, then, one reason it has taken us such a long time to
recognize animal rights is because animal fables have made us see animals as mere
narcissistic mirrors of ourselves and not as creatures in their own right.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
The Mouldering Museum: Taxidermy and the Deconstruction of Animality in
Novels by Martel, Mosse, Millet, and York
Sarah Bezan
University of Alberta
A crumbling menagerie of taxidermic specimens populate the pages of contemporary novels
by Yann Martel, Kate Mosse, Lydia Millet, and Alissa York. Beyond merely an allegory of
the Holocaust, Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil (2010) and its titular taxidermic specimens (a
donkey and a monkey) deconstruct what it means to become dehumanized, stuffed, and
made into a preserved relic of loss. Similarly, Mosse’s gothic tale, The Taxidermist’s
Daughter (2014) features a collection of avian specimens that darkly portray the depths of
human depravation, and York’s historical fiction, Effigy (2007), negotiates human memory
and privation through the creation and collection of dead and stuffed wildlife. Finally, as a
robust meditation on endangered and extinct species, dead lovers and a reclaimed natural
history collection of fossils, bones, and taxidermy animals, Lydia Millet’s Magnificence
(2013) dwells upon the lively persistence of the already dead in an increasingly perilous age
of environmental collapse and devastation. Ruminating on the significance of being a “final”
animal, or the last of one’s kind, and interpreting the intersection of the human and
nonhuman animal through these mouldering collections of taxidermic specimens, I argue
that these novels exhort their readers to interpret the deaths of others as a foreshadowing of
the collapse of one’s own species and way of life on the earth, and ultimately of the collapse
of the human itself.
In my reading of these novels by Martel, Mosse, Millet, and York, I elaborate on the work of
Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari in order to explore
posthumanism’s concerns with survival, dehumanization, materiality, and embodiment.
Furthermore, my paper will consider how the return to organic matter (as a culmination of
the death drive) might inspire new possibilities for thinking through the durability of postmortem remains and the politics of their persistence in literary representations of taxidermy.
Bio
Sarah Bezan is a doctoral candidate at The University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada. Her dissertation, “Post-Mortem Proximities: The Human and Animal Carcass in
Contemporary Literature, Film, and Taxidermic Art,” is funded by an Izaak Walton Killam
Doctoral Scholarship and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. She is a contributor to
Mosaic, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Criterion, and the Journal of the African
Literature Association.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
On the Possibility of Posthuman(ist) Literature
Carole Guesse
Université de Liège
When asked what novels he would call “posthuman”, Stephan Herbrechter answered that
he had not found any posthumanist literature yet, that “it would be literature written by
stones [...] or based on animal traces”. He might have been puzzled because he understood
the posthuman as non-human; how could, therefore, a novel be written without human
agency? This paper investigates the very possibility of a posthuman(ist) literature and the
way writers seek to deal with this presumable dead-end. It considers various novels whose
characters are non-human but focuses more particularly on Michel Houellebecq’s The
Possibility of an Island, which can be seen as an example of both posthuman and
posthumanist literature because the presence of genetically engineered clones as narrators
(and possibly narratees) seems to affect the form and structure of the novel.
Drawing upon narratology, critical posthumanism and theories of the posthuman, this
paper seeks to establish if a posthuman(ist) perspective has an actual influence on
storytelling and form – whether it be language or layout. Lastly, after a review of the
concepts of posthumanism, the posthuman and transhumanism, and an attempt at settling
the recurrent confusions around them, it concludes questioning the (im)possibility of a
posthuman(ist) literature.
References
Stephen Herbrechter gave a speech at the conference: « Approaching Posthumanism and the
Posthuman » at the University of Geneva in June 2015, which I attended.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
“And all we could think of was ‘Differential regional dysfunction of the
hippocampal formation among elderly with memory decline and Alzheimer’s
disease.’” – From postmodernist to posthuman prose
Laura Piippo
University of Jyväskylä
Neuromaani (2012), a Finnish experimental novel by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas, is quite a handful.
Its non-linear narrative and nonexistent plot combined with vast amount of pages, motives,
(pseudo)references, characters and intertexts create a rather complex structure. Neuromaani
is indeed a book of excess, and resembling human brain the book seems to both re- and
deconstruct this very metaphor and definition of humanity.
Our contemporary world seems to be the one of excess as well – too much material,
production, pollution, poverty, et cetera. Frederic Jameson has linked the changes in
capitalism to the current aesthetic or literary dominant. Following Félix Guattari the current
phase or state of things can be described as semiocapitalistic, and it is characterized by
constant circulation of quantifable and reinvested exchanges that produces further
exchanges. Along these lines the cultural and economic drift into semiocapitalism can also
be linked to a shift from postmodernism to posthumanism, and this very shift I aim to
contextualize and analyze in this paper.
Neuromaani shares many traits and characteristic of postmodernism: metafictional
elements, textual playfulness, questions of fact and fiction, and ontological dilemmas. There
is, however, more to the story. Whereas postmodernist theories and texts are still heavily
entwined with linguistics, posthumanist theories take a more materialist approach – as
Karen Barad puts it, discursive is always already material. This materialistic undertone can
be seen in i.e. the usage of the tropes of concrete prose, book’s various material quirks and
oddities and most significantly in the fragmentation of not only the characters and the text
but also the reader. The main question here is: what is, indeed, posthumanist prose, and
what are its connections to previous postmodernism and the current semiocapitalism.
Bio
Laura Piippo, MA, Ph.D Student, Academy of Finland, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Piippo is currently writing her doctoral thesis “Indefinitely identifiable. Repetitive Poetics of
Experimentalism in Neuromaani (2012)”. In her research she focuses on the
experimentalism, poetics and politics of a prominent Finnish novel by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas
(b. 1976), mainly through the concepts of repetition and assemblage. Piippo has also teached
undergraduate courses in Finnish and Comparative literature and literary theory. She is a
part of a Finnish research group “Literary in Life”, and active in several literary and cultural
organizations.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
A Poetic of the Non-Human: Geology and Environment in Max Frisch ́s Man in
the Holocene
Oliver Völker
Goethe-University Frankfurt
Max Frisch ́s late work Man in the Holocene (1979) tries to achieve a poetics of the nonhuman. Both, by its content and aesthetic quality the narrative destabilizes any neat
distinction between its protagonist and his environment.
Holocene depicts the aging protagonist Geiser, who spends the summer in an isolated valley
in the alps. Due to an ongoing period of rain, the only existing road is closed and Geiser,
who is struck by fear of an imminent and unnamed catastrophe, turns to his own book-shelf.
Bored by novels, he manically pages through works of local-history, biology, geology, and
encyclopedias, thereby trying to grasp his environment.
One peculiar feature of Holocene lies in its extensive use of non-literary texts and images.
The reader is not only told about Geiser's eclectic studies, but finds himself confronted with
a confusing variety of notes, images, and text-fragments inserted as facsimiles on the page.
The evolving discontinuity is mirrored by a narrative language, that is dominated by
parataxis and montage.
The multiplicity of textual fragments tends to undermine conventional definitions of
narrative: instead of a linear succession in time, it rather takes the spatial shape of a network.
Consequently, the reader shifts his attention from the plot to the material appearance of the
text. This increased importance of the material features of text, corresponds to the novel ́s
focus on non-human forms of nature and and geology. Frisch ́s narrative thereby reflects its
protagonist's scorn for conventional literature and tries to establish a poetic of the
environment, that subverts the borders between culture and environment, background and
foreground. Drawing on ecocritical positions such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, I
argue that Frisch ́s text shows an astonishing resemblance to contemporary discourses on
the Anthropocene.
Bio
Oliver studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature in Frankfurt and Fribourg
(Switzerland) and received his MA from the Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2011. Since 2012
he is working at the Department for General and Comparative Literature at the GoetheUniversity Frankfurt. Currently he is writing a dissertation on the motif of environmental
destruction in contemporary English, American, and German literature. His research
interests focus on the relationship between literature and nature.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Meeting the machine halfway: Towards a semio- political approach of
computational action
Cléo Collomb
Sorbonne Universités & Université de Technologie de Compiègne
&
Samuel Goyet
Sorbonne Universités
In On the mode of existence of technical objects, french philosopher and engineer Simondon
wrote: “Culture behaves towards the technical object much in the same way as a man caught
up in primitive xenophobia behaves towards a stranger. This kind of misoneism directed
against machines does not so much represent a hatred of the new as a refusal to come to
terms with an unfamiliar reality.” As Simondon suggests, it is only too easy to repudiate
technical objects. Either – in a surge of anthropocentric enthusiasm – by reducing them to
the status of simple tools entirely subservient to the needs of men; or to the contrary, in an
inconsiderate infatuation with technology, by projecting anthropological qualities on them
and elevating them to the status of sacred objects to which we delegate all our dreams of
power. In both cases (anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism), technical objects are being
seen through human eyes. Is it then possible to think and to represent them – in particular
computational machines such as computers – without subjecting them to a human figure,
without forcing them to fit a human order? In other words, can there be a technology that is
not anthropology?
Feminist studies, animal studies and STS (Haraway, Barad, Despret, Stengers, Latour) have
recently drawn attention to the way alternative and marginal modes of expression are or are
not taken into account. We wish to argue that computers are also to be considered as a
marginal form of expression. In line with “French media studies” (Jeanneret, Souchier,
Bachimont), we think ways of considering the machine are necessarily constructed
through meaningful visual organizations. Therefore, what do texts and images tell us about
our relation to machines? How does one constructs or deprives computational machines an
aptitude to express themselves in a language of their own? In particular and more concrete
terms, are today’s web pages – the ones that make our ordinary (Perec) Internet navigations
– giving visibility to a proper machinic action? “12.000.000 results in 0.55 seconds”, “Deep
Dream” images, Google Earth’s glitches... all of these signs are making us see the computer
and its action. But is the machinic action made visible according to its own mode of
expression, or according to a human point of view?
On a semiotic level, the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic perceptions of technical
objects (the twin attitudes we have criticized in the introduction) are expressed under two
different modes: that of concealment and that of exhibition. When concealed, signs of a
proper computational action are put in the margins, treated as bugs; when exhibited,
computer’s action is seen as a technical prowess. Is it then possible to qualify machinic
action, and more precisely computational action, as such– without falling into the trap of
technical fetishism (Chun) but as an attempt to think the computer beyond the realm of
humanist conceptions? Yes – on condition of understanding computer’s execution as a
process (Chun). This implies that:
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
i) on one hand, execution is to be understood as multi-layered, meaning that interactions
between layers could give birth to unexpected elements (which are mistaken elements only
from an anthropocentric point of view), such as bugs;
ii) on the other hand, execution as process is to be understood as a temporal phenomenon:
it’s the systematic – and exhaustive –exploration of a vast but finite domain of possibilities
(Bachimont).
Our proposition is thus an enquiry on the mode of existence of the computational machine
which combines a semiotic method with eco-political concerns. It aims at understanding
how machinic action is expressed and constructed through Internet’s texts and images.
References
Bachimont B., (2000). Intelligence artificielle et écriture dynamique: de la raison graphique à
la raison computationnelle. In J. Petitot & P. Fabbri (Eds.), Au nom du sens, Paris, Grasset,
pp. 290-319.
Bachimont B., (2010). Le sens de la technique: le numérique et le calcul. Paris, Editions Les
Belles Lettres.
Barad K., (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham, Duke University Press.
Chun W., (2008). On «Sourcery», or Code as Fetish. Configurations, vol. 16, n°3, pp. 299-324.
Despret V., (2012). Que diraient les animaux, si... on leur posait les bonnes questions? Paris,
Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Haraway D., (1990). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge,
First Thus edition.
Jeanneret Y., (2014). Critique de la trivialité. Les médiations de la communication: un enjeu
de pouvoir. Paris, Editions Non Standard.
Jeanneret Y. & Souchier E. (1999).Pour une poétique de l’écrit d’écran. Xoana, n°6, pp. 97107.
Latour B., (2007). Reasssembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Perec G., (1989). Approches de quoi? L’infraordinaire, Paris, Le Seuil, pp. 9-33.
Simondon G., (1958). Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris, Aubier.
Souchier E. (1996), L’écrit d’écran, pratiques d’écriture et nformatique. Communication &
Langages, n°107, pp. 105-119.
Souchier E. (1998). L’image du texte. Pour une théorie de l’énonciation éditoriale. Cahiers de
médiologie, n°6, pp. 137-145.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Stengers I., (2006). La Vierge et le neutrino: les scientifiques dans la tourmente. Paris, Les
Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Stengers I., (2003). Cosmopolitiques II. Paris, La Découverte.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
On The Depictions of Artificial Intelligence: A Needed Embodied Assessment
Raffi Aintablian
York University, Toronto
One of computer science’s most prominent figures, Alan Turing, famously declared that the
question, “Can Machines think?” was “too meaningless to deserve discussion”. But, when
considering contemporary depictions of artificial intelligence within advancements in
technology, economics, pedagogy, literature, or portrayals in film and images, today,
Turing’s assessment would have strikingly been the converse. This paper seeks to
investigate the cultural representation pertaining to the relation between human and nonhuman embodiments, specifically, in the depiction of artificial intelligence. Firstly, it will use
portrayals within recent motion pictures (e.g. Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina), in the service of
constructing an interdisciplinary analysis drawing from conceptual developments found in
philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence. In doing so, I will shed light on the
significance of embodiment and why the Turing Test, as portrayed in Ex-Machina, is not
sufficient to deduce sentience. Secondly, Evan Thompson’s deep continuity of life and mind
thesis is used, so to demonstrate that the necessary features of the organism, in other words,
life, prefigures mind and that mind, belongs to life. Thompson proposes that life and mind
share basic organizational properties that are distinctive of mind, and are enriched versions
of those necessary for life. Since the properties of life are dynamic, self-organizing, selfproducing and purposeful, they are in principle, incomputable by Turing-models. The
continuity of life and mind is used to show that mindedness is not merely organizational,
functional or behavioral, but significantly phenomenological and existential. These
rudimentary features extend even to the simplest forms of life, and I will argue that
organismic processes are necessary features of sentience, and that this criterion creates a
distinction between living, sentient organisms, and those, which are simulated. This
distinction will help further the relation between the human and the non-human boundaries
within our shared world.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
The Uncanny Subject as/is Object: Performance, Ethics, and Anxiety in The
Uncanny Valley
Carrie J. Cole
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Each significant advance in the robotics field has led to a readily identifiable parallel
development in studies of their ethical implications. As notions of the post-humanism
became more and more culturally prominent at the beginning of the 21st century, scientists
and scholars in robotics and artificial intelligence began to move the discussions of the
ethical and philosophical implications of artificial autonomous agents from science fiction to
science fact. From J. Storrs Hall’s 2001 article “Ethics for Machines,” to David Gunkel’s
recent The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics, a complex
discussion of the moral agency of machines has been engaged.
An equally compelling parallelism can be found in the rise of the topic as for live
performance. In the fall of 2014 alone, theatres across the US premiered or performed plays
exploring humanity’s relationship with Artificial Intelligence: Bella Poynton’s The Aurora
Projectin Chicago, Crystal Jackson’s The Singularity at in Boston, and two distinct New York
productions titled Uncanny Valley. All negotiated the philosophical and sociological
implications of Himma’s idea of agency as “being capable of doing something that counts as
an act or action”. This concept of agency both complements and confronts traditional and
more recent performance theory exploring the intersections of live and mediated
performance—and opens the discussion to other perspectives on performed technology.
This paper seeks to further critical exploration of the intersection of performance studies and
humanoid robot ethics through a critical case study of distinctly different theatrical
performances of two plays, both titled Uncanny Valley. Specifically, this essay will focus on
how technological displacement creates a subject (performer) and its uncanny-ed object
(mediated/mechanical performer).
References
Kenneth Einar Himma, “Artificial Agency, Consciousness, and the Criteria for Moral
Agency...” (19-20)
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Fairies in Humanlike Forms
Verda Bingol
Istanbul Technical University
Though an old and important aspect of English oral tradition, it is in the 19th century that we
are able to learn about certain characteristics of fairies, thanks to written words of folklorists
and poets such as Alfred Nutt, Jane Wilde and William Butler Yeats. Through their nonfictional writings of oral stories, we encounter fairies in many, usually ugly, shapes, ages;
having different types; dwelling in nature; and doing odd jobs like helping out in the
kitchen, protecting the kettle and playing pranks on the villagers. In literature too, we read
about them in 16th and 17th century English verse; especially in Shakespeare’s plays, where
some central fairy characters have mischievous qualities, similar to natural fairies of oral
tradition; while others can feel wrath, jealousy, sorrow and are ambitious - just like humans.
19th century also sees the emergence of a new genre of painting: Fairy Painting. With this
genre, fairies are mostly stripped from their original qualities specified by oral tradition, and
are turned into pretty, winged, etherial, female creatures, a type which has since stuck in the
minds of the western gazer. It is at this point that this article discusses the intertwined
relationship between fairy painting, British oral tradition, Shakespeare’s plays and theatre.
By analyzing various texts and examples of fairy painting, we have come to the conclusion
that the answer lies in the production of Shakespeare’s plays in 19th century English theatre.
Through Shakespeare’s plays comes a breaking point, where the perception of fairies in oral
tradition changes to have humanlike qualities. However, it is the 19th century English
theatre, when Shakespeare’s plays are popularized two centuries later, that lies the basis for
fairy painting, and our perception of fairies today; with its use of children and female actors
as fairies andthe advancement of stage technology and costume design. Thanks to the genre
of fairy painting, we chronologically see how different artistic imaginations: oral, literal and
consequently theatrical, has melted in one single branch of art.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Of Hobbits and Dragons: The Lore of Racial Determinism and the Intelligent
Non-Humans of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
Nicholas Wanberg
University of Tampere
The intelligent non-humans of J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium are subject to a strict form of
racial determinism, one which changes in nature over the process of writing, paralleling
changing beliefs in the real world regarding supposed human variations. The stories range
from the early 1930's, when racial beliefs had only just begun to be questioned, and across
the dramatic upheavals in popular perception of racism that accompanied the rise of Nazism
to power in Germany and its successive downfall at the end of World War II (along with the
discovery of the full range of atrocities that had been justified with such ideologies).
Building on observations made by past researchers, this paper delves deeper into another
aspect of that evolution, examining in particular two types of intelligent non-humans first
presented in The Hobbit. Dragons and Hobbits are unique in the works as being subject to
explicit “lores” (“dragon lore” and “hobbit lore” respectively) which characters can study to
determine the actions of individuals of that type in various situations, merely by comparing
stories known and facts uncovered about those individuals' relatives and ancestors. Gandalf
uses his “hobbit lore” to learn a great deal about and successfully predict many of the traits
and actions of the story's hero, Bilbo Baggins, while Bilbo and the dwarves occasionally do,
and elsewhere are said to ought to have been able to, predict the behaviors of Smaug based
on dragon lore. The paper discusses the way this predictive capacity was typical of
contemporary and preceding racial beliefs. It also looks at the ways in which the use of
hobbit lore in The Lord of the Rings (dragons do not appear in that story), much of which
was written during WWII, is altered to have a diminished capacity to predict individual
action.
Bio
Nicholas Wanberg is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Tampere's Department
of Language, Translation and Literary Studies. His current research focuses on the use of
popular beliefs, particularly racists beliefs, in shaping he presentation of non-human
creatures in the most commercially successful works of Anglophone speculative fiction, and
as the way this use is revealing of the role of genre conventions in determining the success of
popular fiction.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Creating non-humanity through cultural loans – the evolution of monsters in
fantastic fiction
Mika Loponen
University of Helsinki
Fantastic fiction is among the most consumed forms of fictional texts regardless of media. In
many cases, fantastic fiction describes humanity through its interactions with non-human
Others – elves, orcs, goblins, and other aliens. As such, fantastic fiction has the ability to
define and examine the borders of humanity through the lens of what humanity is in
comparison to these Others, in many cases borrowing abject features from the real-world
cultural semiosphere in its description of the Others. When borrowing features from existing
cultures and cultural minorities to the Others, fantastic texts thus force segments of realworld cultures outside the borders of humanity.
In this paper, I will explore the mechanics of this semiospheric containment and the creation
of the abject other through the classic example of orcs in fantastic texts, describing the
evolution, development, and subsequent humanization of orcs and orcish societies as
irrealia in the fantastic arts. In their earliest appearance as the modern irrealia in Tolkien’s
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, orcs were very much the product of colonial imagery
of the monstrous other: In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s descriptives about orcs match the
stereotypized, abjectified representations of Africans in colonialist literature.
Though the use of orcs as pure abjects continued for decades (and is still a strong trend in
stock fantasy), strains of humanization started creeping in since the 1980’s, with authors
directly tackling the border of non-humanization, portraying orcs as proud warriors, victims
of racism and intolerance, or rebels that attain spiritual growth through their own means
have become part of the commonly accepted fantasy canon through literature and games.
I will trace the evolution of the irrealia of orcs and especially orcish societies within the arts
of the fantastic through a semiotic framework provided by Lotman’s cultural semiotics,
Tarasti’s theory of the subject, and my model of the development of fantastic elements
within the semiospheres of genre arts. I will portray the partially overlapping stages of
evolution of the irrealia, each discussing the evolution of the portrayal of the monstrous
Other as an abject.
Bio
Mika Loponen (MA) is a doctoral post-graduate student at the Department of English in the
University of Helsinki. His main field of interest is in the translation of culture specific
metaphors. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis, which will concentrate on the
semiotic issues of translating and domesticating cultural concepts, artifacts and irrealia in
fantasy and science fiction literature.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Riding the Horse, Fearing the Wolf: Animal Symbolism in Soviet Political Cartoons
Reeta Kangas
University of Turku
Dog’s life, crocodile’s tears, lion’s share – political language is full of animal metaphors.
These verbal metaphors turn into visual metaphors when used in visual propaganda, and
they further the division of the world into “us,” the humans, and “them,” the animals. Such
visual descriptions of the enemy as an animal have been widely used in the Russian cultural
sphere. This paper examines the functions and origins of animal symbolism in visual
propaganda. More specifically, I look at how the Kukryniksy trio used animal symbols in
their political cartoons, published in Pravda during 1965–1982, in order to construct
ideological world views. At a more general level, with a careful examination of animal
symbolism in propaganda, the destructive structures that are used to dehumanise others,
become clearer.
The cartoons’ animal symbols in use vary from animals with cultural symbolic values — the
evil snake, the obedient dog — to caricatured national emblems such as the British lion. My
thesis is that the functions and the values attached to different animals in the political
cartoons depend on the proximity and use of these animals to the human sphere of living.
Thus, animals that are useful to humans and live as a part of the human sphere, the so called
“domesticated” animals, have fewer negative connotations than the so called “wild
animals,” which pose a possible threat to humans and their domesticated animals, and live
outside of the human sphere. This is related to the familiarity of the animal to the humans,
i.e., the unfamiliar creates a more negative impression than the familiar. Furthermore, these
animal symbols were used to attach the negative attributes of these animals within their
cultural context to the enemies of the Soviet Union.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Ducks, Mice or Humans? Disney Comics Characters Balancing between Their
Identities
Katja Kontturi
University of Jyväskylä
In Disney comics, ducks walk among humans and no one makes fuzz about it. They talk,
they work, they pay taxes, and they wear clothes. Depending on the artist, there are also
mice like Mickey and Minnie, dogs like Goofy, cows, hens and horses. As a matter of fact, all
the Disney comic characters have animal-like features: black button noses, dog-like ears or
pig’s snouts.
The Disney comics are typical representations of the funny animal comics genre. Both Walt
Disney Company and Warner Brothers were firstly producing animations and later,
beginning on the 1930s decided to expand the products of their companies to the field of
comics thus forming the genre we know today.
Funny animal comics use behavioral patterns unwelcomed in humans and place them in
anthropomorphic characters. The disliked personality traits become more easily tolerated in
the context of animal characters and humorous situations.
What makes Disney comics characters such an interesting subject of research, is their
ambiguous nature. Should they be treated as human representations hiding behind animal
traits, or are they just animal characters with human traits? What makes this question more
difficult is the fact that different Disney comic artists and writers employ the characters in
various ways. Goofy is a dog-like character, but there is Pluto who’s definitely a real dog.
Clarabelle Cow, like the name suggests, is a cow, yet there are regular cows that Grandma
Duck keeps in her farm. And would it be a form of cannibalism if the ducks have turkey for
Christmas supper?
This paper deals with above-mentioned questions and takes a look how different artists use
the characters of the Disney universe. Are they humans or something else?
Bio
Katja Kontturi has a PhD on Contemporary Culture Studies. Currently, she’s is working as a
postdoctoral researcher in University of Jyväskylä. Her doctoral dissertation (2014) dealt
with Don Rosa’s Disney comics as postmodern fantasy. Kontturi’s research interests lie in
comics, speculative fiction, postmodernism and Disney. Her most recent publication is
called “Shades of Conan Doyle! A lost world!” Fantasy and Intertextuality in Don Rosa’s
“Escape from Forbidden Valley” in Comics and Power. Representing and Questioning
Culture, Subjects and Communities. Kontturi is a member of NNCORE (Nordic Network for
Comics Research), board member of FINFAR (The Finnish Society for Science Fiction and
Fantasy Research) and one of the editors of peer reviewed Scandinavian Journal of Comic
Art.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
How dogs make us human? Animals in Polish TV series of the 70's
Magdalena Dąbrowska
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University
In powerful essay Emmanuel Levinas recalls memories from a concentration camp, where
prisonerswere deprived of humanity. Only Bobby, a dog, did not have doubts that they
were humans and greeted them every day with barking and tail waging. Animals make us
human. Taking Levinas story as a starting point I analyse two popular Polish television
series: Four tankmen and a dog (1966-70) and Adventures of dog Cywil (1970). Both were
very popular in Poland during communism and have been shown in several countries of
Central- Eastern Europe. Despite being embedded in historical context, they provide
universal truths on human- animal relationships and destabilised hierarchies.
Four Tankmen and a dog [Czterej pancerni I pies, director: Konrad Nałęcki] is an idealised
war story about tank crew accompanied by a dog. The dog is presented as equal to man (all
of them are soldiers). At the same time the dog is different, as he seems to preserve values,
emotions and dignity that elsewhere are destroyed by war. At some point human- animal
relations are turned upside-down: the dog mediates and expresses emotions lost by humans
and teaches them how to be men when the war is over.
Adventures of dog Cywil [Przygody psa Cywila, director: Krzysztof Szmagier] is a story of
police dog. Cywil have courage to disobey and be independent, what is contrasted with his
caretaker's sloppiness. Man and his dog may be interpreted as political metaphors of
citizenship and masculinity under communism, providing gender and political perspective
to study human-animal relationships.
Bio
Magdalena Dąbrowska (PhD)- assistant prefessor at Institute of Culture Studies, University
of Maria Curie- Skłodowska in Lublin. In 2009 received PhD in Culture Studies at University
of Maria Curie- Skłodowska for dissertation on gender in Polish political discourse. Worked
as a researcher for European Commission's project „QUING” (Quality in Gender + Equality
Policies) at Centre for Policy Studies at CEU. Co-editor of e-book “Masculinity as cultural
category. Practices of masculinity” [in Polish] and “Animals and gender in Polish popular
and visual culture” [in Polish]. Author of several articles published in Poland and abroad.
Recent research interests: human- animal relationships in gender perspective, especially dog
shows.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Systemic Mind and Narrative Representation: Peter Watts’s Blindsight
Merja Polvinen
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
The human mind has in the various branches of cognitive science been described both as an
emergent feature of the dynamical networks of neuronal activity and as a phenomenon that
is inherently dependent on narrative structures. These two models present
incommensurable yet fruitfully interacting views of mental function, and they seem to do
their best work by focusing on, respectively, the low-level neuronal and the high-level
cognitive action of the mind. But is such a division of labour the best option we have?
After a brief overview of both the narrative view of the mind and the dynamical systems
approaches to cognition, I will examine an alternative solution to this question by analysing
Peter Watts’s science fiction novel Blindsight (2006), which builds its storyline of alien
encounter on the dynamical systems approach to the brain and mind. In addition to
presenting an alien whose mind is intelligent yet not conscious, Watts’s novel also gives
narrative agency to a character whose sentience and selfhood is put into question by the
events of the storyline—and indeed by the narrator himself.
What Blindsight does in attempting to represent systemic mind through a fictional narrative
is create an opportunity for readers to go through a cognitive process not otherwise
available to them, and in this it partakes in one of the shared roles of all fictional narratives.
What is unusual about it is its attempt to use the general toolbox of fiction to give its readers
access to the levels of non-conscious cognitive processing—to evoke the systemic
interactions that we otherwise find difficult to make sense of. Thus, while the narrative and
emergence models of the mind may both have their separate roles to play in our
descriptions of the higher and lower levels of mental action, I also wish to briefly examine
the possibilities that the mind has for making its own systemic elements present for the
reflective, narrative consciousness.
Bio
Dr Merja Polvinen is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her
work focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to literature, both literature and the natural
sciences (Reading the Texture of Reality: Chaos Theory, Literature and the Humanist
Perspective, 2008), and more recently, cognitive approaches to literary representation. She is
co-editor of Rethinking Mimesis (2012), and has recently published articles in The Journal of
Literary Semantics and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. Polvinen is also a member of the
network Narrative and Complex Systems (University of York), board member in the Finnish
Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, and organiser of the Cognitive Futures in
the Humanities conference in Helsinki in June 2016.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Contaminated by a Hyperobject. Ecological Experience in Jeff VanderMeer’s
Southern Reach trilogy
Kaisa Kortekallio
University of Helsinki
Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, consisting of three novels all published in 2014,
rewrite relationsbetween the nonhuman environment and the knowing subject. Somewhere
along the Gulf of Mexico coastline there is an area that has undergone an uncanny
transformation. All people and their technology have vanished, leaving behind only
“pristine wilderness” – a marshland occupied by a diversity of plants and animals. A
governmental organisation called Southern Reach sends scientific expeditions to investigate
the area, which is simply called ”Area X”. But Area X resists scientific investigation: it
permeates and contaminates the investigators, transmuting their sense of reality and self.
Many reviewers and critics have already noted the interconnections between Southern
Reach and Timothy Morton’s philosophy. The novels can be read as imaginative
manifestations of dark ecology, a mode of thought that emphasizes the ironic, uncertain and
toxic aspects of environmental thinking. Area X can be considered as a hyperobject – an
object, such as the biosphere or global warming, that is so widely distributed in time and
place that it transcends the limits of human understanding. In Morton’s view, humans
cannot access hyperobjects – instead, humans are accessed by them, becoming “litmus tests
for hyperobjects”.
In this presentation, I address the ways VanderMeer’s fiction evokes the sense of being
accessed and transmuted by an environmental phenomenon. I wish to discuss how this
experience, and this fiction, could be of use in modeling for posthumanist subjectivities. My
reading combines approaches from cognitive literary studies, science fiction studies, and
posthumanist thinking.
Bio
Kaisa Kortekallio is currently working on a doctoral dissertation in the field of literary
research. Thedissertation examines how relations of selves, bodies and nonhuman life are reimagined in contemporary English-language science fiction and in posthumanist
philosophy. Kortekallio is interested in the ways narrative structures, such as viewpoint and
character, take part in the formation and transformation of subjectivities. She hopes to
contribute to the development of "ecology after Nature". Kortekallio also teaches courses on
contemporary science fiction and actively participates in The Finnish Society for Science
Fiction and Fantasy Research (FINFAR).
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Emergence and “Narrative” Agency: Refining the Concept of Storied Matter
Juha Raipola
University of Tampere
My presentation is concerned with the concept of “storied matter” recently introduced to
ecocritical theory by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Following in the footsteps of
the new materialist paradigm in social sciences, Iovino and Oppermann argue for the
inherent creativity of matter. Material ecocriticism, as Iovino and Oppermann understand it,
“posits that all constituents of nature from the subatomic to the higher levels of existence
possess agency, creativity, expression, and enduring connections that can be interpreted as a
mélange of stories”. In fact, they go as far as claiming that this “storied” matter is full of
“narrative agencies”: nonhuman entities performing their own stories. Seen this way,
narrative becomes intrinsic to matter, expressed in the world’s creative expressions.
Humans, trees, hurricanes, human cells, bacteria, pollutants, synthetic chemicals, machines
and innumerable others are interpreted as mutually entangled agencies with their own
narrative trajectories and unfolding stories.
In my presentation, I will take a critical look at this purported “narrative” dimension of
matter. While respecting the creative and agentic potential of matter, I argue against the
rather metaphoric notion of material agencies as nonhuman “storytellers” and the idea of
inherent narrativity of matter. My intention is not to undermine the non-anthropocentric
stance taken by material ecocriticism, but rather to focus on the limits of narrative in
describing matter’s creative tendencies. By focusing my attention on the so called
“emergent” phenomena in different material domains, I aim to highlight the difference
between interpreting different nonhuman forces, vitalities and dynamisms as stories and the
supposed narrating capability of nonhuman material agencies.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Is There Anything Specifically Human? E. T. A. Hoffmann Deconstructing the
Notion of Subjectivity
Jukka Sarjala
University of Turku
Over the past fifteen years it has become obvious that Romanticism, seen as a cultural
reservoir inherited from the early decades of the nineteenth century, contains at the very
least some germs of those intellectual developments which are known today as new
materialism and posthumanism. German thinkers of the early nineteenth century were
strongly interested in the activity of matter, that is, the Bildung of nature discovered by the
natural scientists of the era. Then there were those like author, composer, critic, and lawyer
E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), who took a critical and parodic stance towards the subjectoriented philosophy of many post-Kantian thinkers.
As a fantasy author and a famous flâneur during his mature years in Berlin, Hoffmann was
fond of urban heterogeneity, unknown and horrifying things, and he liked to puzzle his
readers by means of ambiguous characters and details and plots ending up with enigmas.
His literary characters include animals, insects, puppets, and doppelgangers. My
presentation deals with Hoffmann’s conception of life, incorporated in an atheoretical
manner in his literary output, as something which does not follow predefined rules,
principles, and models. On the contrary, for Hoffmann life is something asubjective, which
consists of multiple activities and impersonal processes of individuation. I argue that
Hoffmann had serious doubts about whether there was anything indisputably ”human” in
human beings.
Bio
Jukka Sarjala works as Adjunct Professor (Docent) and TIAS Collegium Researcher in School
of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
The adult as posthuman? – The hairy adult body in children’s literature
Vanessa Joosen
Tilburg University & University of Antwerp
The distinction between childhood and adulthood is often drawn on the basis of bodily
features: its size, (lack of) pubic features, and other age markers help us determine whether a
person is a child or an adult. The meaning we attach to certain bodily features, is culturally
determined: Terence Turner calls them our “social skin.” The child’s body is now a recurrent
topic in studies of children’s literature (its gender, race and weight in particular), yet less
attention goes to the adult body that is also constructed in these books, often in contrast to
the child. In this paper, I will analyze a selection of picture books by the British illustrators
Babette Cole and Anthony Browne, narrated by or focalized through a child character. They
will illustrate the ambivalent stance towards the adult body in children’s literature. On the
one hand, adult bodies are cast as powerful, admirable and comforting because of their size
and strength. On the other hand, especially when it comes to secondary pubic features and
features of ageing, the adult body is loathed and mocked. This becomes particularly clear
with regard to the adult’s body hair, which child characters repeatedly describe with disgust
and which illustrators mock and exaggerate in their images. The animals that the picture
books under discussion also stage, play in an important role in the interpretation of human
hair – in fact, the adult, hairy humans themselves are compared to animals, while the
hairless child is thus staged as a purer human being. This is striking, given that these
narratives are created by adults, who thus engage in the debasement of their own bodies for
readers who will one day grow into adults in their own right. I will interpret the fictional
child’s depreciative descriptions of the adult body from different angles, including carnival
theory, age studies and body studies, considering the implications for the books’ dual
readership and adult authorship.
Bio
Vanessa Joosen is a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University, where she studies the
construction of adulthood in children’s literature, and a professor of English literature and
children’s literature at the University of Antwerp. She is the author of Critical and Creative
Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and
Postmodern Retellings (2011, Choice Award) and “Second Childhoods and
Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can
Supplement Each Other” (Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 2015).
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Cutting Ourselves Apart: Learning the Human via the Pig
Brad Bolman
Harvard University
Since the earliest developments of the biological sciences, as far back as the first textbook of
anatomy at Salerno, the notion that humans and pigs are anatomically, physiologically, or
biologically similar has seemed anything but exemplary. Reading transversally between the
history of biomedical pigs and the work of New York artist Miru Kim, the pictorial worlds
of anatomical games, and contemporary science fiction, I suggest that perception of this
“similarity” is itself the product of a long history of cultural-scientific attempts and failures
to make the “pig” into a consistent, normalized model. At stake, in other words, was the
construction of a simulacral pig through which our own bodies and behaviors could be read.
And yet all of this had as much to do with the growth of industrial agriculture, Cold War
nuclear research, and the commodity status of laboratory animals as it did with a “natural,”
pre-existing likeness. I will explore two historical cases that have emerged from my larger
research project focused on the human-pig divide: the emergence of “fetal pigs” as a
marketable laboratory device at the dawn of the 20th century for high school and college
pedagogy, and the construction of white, humanoid pigs in which to simulate poor human
dietary and dental practices. In both cases, the clarity of comparing “natural” pigs to
“regular” humans falls away into statistical aggregates and biomarkers that drew (and
continue to draw) upon racist and anthropocentric notions of species boundaries that have
driven broader interest in xenotransplantation and bioengineering. I read Zygmunt Bauman,
Donna Haraway and Jean Baudrillard in order to suggest a televisual-ludic conscription of
pigs exists alongside the scientific-representational attempts to determine what pigs are –
and every one of these portrayals is also, intentionally or not, an attempt to stabilize the
impossible category of the “human.”
References
Miru Kim, “The Pig That Therefore I Am,”
http://www.mirukim.com/statementThePigThatThereforeIAm.php.
Zygmunt Bauman, Practices of Selfhood (New York: Polity, 2015).
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 2006).
Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012).
Bio
Brad Bolman is a Researcher in the History of Science and the Science, Religion, and Culture
program at Harvard University. His work covers animals, technology, and the biosciences.
His in-progress book, Brother Swine, follows the development of porcine biomedical models
across the 20th and 21st centuries and explores the cultural significance of scientific sacrifice.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
The Cochlear Implant Between Restoring and Transcending Humanness
Markus Spöhrer
University of Konstanz
When looking at recent technologies in the field of medicine, the cochlear implant (CI)
system is a crucial example that shapes and reshapes in a remarkable way the discussions
about therapy, enhancement and concepts of humanness. Originally designed as a
prosthesis that is capable of restoring hearing in deaf or hard of hearing patients, it has been
subject to a range of controversies: On the one hand, medical experts praised the CI as a
technological “miracle” that “cures” disabled people and thus (re)enables communication
and participation in everyday social life (cf. Sparrow 2005). From this point of view being
deaf is an inhumane, unnormal or imperfect state of being, which demands for technological
enhancement. On the other hand, certain members of Deaf communities dismissed the
assumption that deafness is a “disability” that needs technological cure. According to the
“deaf perspective”, deafness is not only a specific ethnicity or a way of life, but also is by no
way a “communicationless” or even “inhumane” state of being. Rather, enforcing the
implantation of this technical device on perfectly functioning deaf persons lead to the
criticism, that the cochlear implant is a “dehumanizing” instrument of power by which Deaf
people are “normalized” and assimilated to a majority of hearing people (cf. Niparko 2000:
338). Apart from the controversies surrounding the re-humanizing enhancing effect and the
dehumanizing agenda of hearing collectives, self-proclaimed Cyborgs or “CI-Borgs”
(“cochlear implant borgs”) like philosopher Michael Chorost (2007) and software
programmer Enno Park (2014) discuss the socio-technological symbiosis with the CI as a
possibility to transcend the physical and perceptive borders of the human body and also to
question and revise (humanist) concepts of what it means to be “human”.
In my speech I will address these issues: I will first focus on a collective construction of the
CI as a demonized cyborg instrument of power, forcing stigmatized deaf people into a
dehumanizing “hearing normality”. In the second part I will consider the discourse on the
CI as a technological “blessing” that, by fixing deafness, enables (re-)humanization. Finally,
in the last part, I will talk about the CI as a device to put into practice post- and
transhumanist utopias and the corresponding media practices related to this
“cyborgisation”.
References
Chorost, Michael. Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. London:
Souvenir Press, 2007.
Niparko, John A.: "The Cultural Implications of Cochlear Implantation." Cochlear Implants.
Principles and Practices. Ed. John A. Niparko. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams &
Wilkins, 2000, pp. 335-342.
Park, E.: „Ethical Issues in Cyborg Technology: Diversity and Inclusion”. In: NanoEthics,
8(3), 2014, pp. 303-306.
Sparrow, Robert (2005): "Defending Deaf Culture. The Case of Cochlear Implants." The
Journal of Political Philosophy 13(2), 2005, pp. 135-152.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Connecting difference: a human/animal/technology assemblage in Deleuzian
perspective
Hana Porkertová
Masaryk University
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with a blind girl named Eva, and using
the Deleuzian theory of assemblage, this paper will examine the distinctions between
human, animal and technology. In the humanist perspective, these distinctions draw on
human superiority and are built on negative dialectics based on identity, opposition,
analogy and resemblance. In his philosophy, Gilles Deleuze challenges this notion and offers
an affirmative perception of difference that is actualized in assemblages.
An assemblage is created through dynamic mutual processes with no beginning and no end,
and neither sole leaders nor followers. From this perspective, the body is not a medium
through which processes pass; it is an assemblage in itself. Although assemblages are
territorialized and hereby stable, they are never closed and their stability can be always
challenged and disrupted; each component of an assemblage can connect with anything else
and change the character of the assemblage. Thus, Eva’s connections with her iPhone,
iWatch and her guide dog Nessie can be conceived in a nonhierarchical way that is not
embedded in the humanistic perspective. Every part of the assemblage is equally important.
I will present this through the example of “guiding,” in which Eva uses her internetconnected gadgets to collect information about the path, and consequently gives orders to
Nessie to be able to guide them. Thus, new media create connections not only with human,
but with non-human as well. Moreover, Nessie remains to some extent independent, with
her own decisions that Eva must rely on. Therefore, it is not orders or information, but trust
that binds this assemblage. And neither the human, nor the technology or the animal is
primary.
Bio
Hana Porkertová is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University.
Her dissertation is focused on the experience of blind people through the perspective of the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Her aim is to redefine the difference
between able/disabled and related differences such as human/animal, subject/object or
interior/exterior by examing them as assamblages.
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
Bamboo Whisper: a cyborganic wearable interface
Patricia Flanagan
Hong Kong Baptist University
&
Raune Frankjaer
Trier University of Applied Sciences
Bamboo Whisper is a traditionally crafted, electronically controlled, body-worn device, that
explores humanistic experience in the form of a pair of cyborganic immersive sculptures.
The systems transform bio-data into a kinaesthetic experience between participants, as
language is converted into objectified spatial patterns of chattering bamboo sticks in a brim
above the wearers eyes and body movements into vibrational patterns, resembling touch,
mapped onto different areas of the other wearers neck. The organic environment of wooden
sticks and reeds, which surrounds the head, provides an isolated immersive experience.
When in motion, the cyborganic sculpture, comprised of the device and its wearer,
seemingly speaks in an ancient language akin to the wind in the trees, provoking an innate
emotional response, as millennia of human experience has taught us to respond to
surrounding environmental cues. The haptic stimulation of sensing another body’s rhythms
creates a paradoxically intimate and yet at the same time estranged relationship between
participants. Likewise, inter-human haptic stimulation is usually experienced in close
physical relationships. The feeling of touch can comfort, but also easily disturb. Similarly,
body-worn technologies tend to feel too artificial and futuristic, and are generally met with
considerable resistance. The fear of The Machine, taking over our humanness has been part
of our cultural narrative since the advent of the first assembly line. Applying ancient crafting
techniques, such as basketry, weaving and felting, creates an organic augmentation, which is
not alien to the human but integral, safe and trusted, due to its deep cultural and historical
intertwinement. In this way this project explores the concept of a flat ontology between
objects and human actants. The research is a physical manifestation of the evolution of
objects within the discourse of the ‘Internet of Things’ and expresses the interconnectedness
between us and between objects and materials in the world.
Bio
Dr. Patricia Flanagan’s artwork is represented in collections in Australia, Ireland, Germany,
Italy and China. She is the winner of four CASP funded Public Art commissions and
recipient of awards including an Australian Postgraduate Scholarship. Flanagan established
the Wearables Lab at Hong Kong Baptist University where she works as Assistant Professor.
She serves on the programming committee for Design, User Experience and Usability in the
context of Human Computer Interaction International, where she chairs sessions on Haptic
Interfaces and Wearables. She is the founded of on-going experimental research initiatives:
the Peripatetic Institute for Praxiology and Anthropology and Haptic InterFace.
With a background in architecture and photography Raune Frankjaer was a self-employed
artisan for several years before becoming involved with new media. She holds a Masters
Degree in Intermedia and Communication Design, specializing in tangible and interactive,
embedded and embodied technologies. Currently she is teaching Spatial Communication
and Physical Computing at the Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Raune’s
work and research is carried by strong ethical concerns and the belief that by mediating
between digital media and physical and social environments it is possible to develop new
Reconfiguring Human and Non-Human: Texts, Images and Beyond
29–30th October 2015, University of Jyväskylä
ways of interacting with and through technology that can facilitate and support ecologically
based social models of sustainable and engaged communities.