with Lucia Santaella and Stelarc, July 3rd 2010
A debate on the question of post-humanism, but from the standpoint of a non-anthropocentric humanism. Currently, a certain illusion circulates which holds that with the advent of biotechnology the “self” can finally be freed from the flesh, ignoring its material dimension. Science fiction apart, the priority now is to find ways to meet the challenges of the information era without losing sight of the condition of subjectivity and the human body.
Lucia Santaella is a researcher and professor at PUC/SP, where she earned her doctorate in literary theory and founded CS Games, a group for research into games and semiotics. She also serves as a professor at the School of Economics in São Paulo at Fundação Getulio Vargas (EESP/FGV), in the areas of new technologies and grammars for sound, relations between the verbal, visual and audio elements in multimedia, and the biocognitive foundations of communication.
Stelarc is an artist interested in the evolutionary architecture of the body and in possible ways of redesigning the human, enhanced by implants and exoskeletons. Head of the Department of Performance Art at Brunel University, England, he is an invited senior researcher at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.
