Technosphärenklänge #6: Lectures and Talks

3 pm
Marco Donnarumma: The Restlessness of Hybridity
Lecture
Technologies such as prostheses and biosensors enable forms of hybrid embodiment: Such as the cyborg, whose diverse representations by artists and performers have infiltrated the societal normative regime. To talk about body politics is therefore to talk about the technologies the body incorporates, how they probe its alleged integrity. Yet, there is a tendency in performance theories and practices to frame AI and body technologies as either material extensions of one’s body or external objects. In his talk, Marco Donnarumma argues that such approaches support technocratic systems of beliefs by discarding immaterial and pre-conscious aspects of technological incorporation. Key to this argument is the notion of automaticity; a subjective form of psychic attunement with particular technical instruments. The performativity of certain bodily thresholds enables forms of human-machine codependence, where body and technology affect each other through discipline, training, and relational economies of desire. As a case study, Donnarumma offers an analysis of his own performance with an artificially intelligent body technology. This reveals an inherently hybrid and relational corporeality, which confounds the boundaries between human and technical, material and immaterial, perceptual and psychological, conscious and pre-conscious.
www.marcodonnarumma.com

4.30 pm
Discussion with Marco Donnarumma, Nunu Kong, and Lingling Chen, moderated by Jan Rohlf (CTM festival)

5 pm
Manfred Hild: Hearing and Feeling
Lecture
It is the body which makes a major difference when contrasting robots and AI from human beings. More important than the body’s shape are its senses, which define the boundary between the outer and the inner world. In his talk, Manfred Hild, head of the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory of the Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin, will elaborate on what is so special about hearing and feeling from the perspective of robotics, reaching from rather abstract and minimalistic kinetic sculptures to fully equipped humanoid robots.
www.neurorobotik.de