2024-25 Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology Colloquia Series
"In this view there are no essential differences between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals." –N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999)
The Ammerman Center’s 2024-2025 theme is an encounter with the ever-shifting ground of what it means to be human, non-human, or along the spectrum between. Scientific and technological advances affect bodies–as extensions, prostheses, centers of knowledge production, and beyond. This year’s theme seeks to read the human with and against the grain using art and technology as potent sites of inquiry.
“All Too Human” centers the Human and troubles its boundaries: it seeks definition into what is essential to the human, how humanness unites communities, yet also divides through xenophobia. It engages with the state of Humanism as a philosophy, and the challenges to it. How do technology and techno-optimism collide or collaborate with Humanism? How do we remain humanistic in the face of extreme strife, from war to automation? Who gets to decide what or who is human, and how are technological and representational systems implicated in this process?
“All Too Human” considers the Non-Human: it expresses the aspirations, anxieties and critical thought over the non-human as it becomes more powerful, autonomous, and generative. Is there a point at which technological agents could be considered human? What would other forms be that these agents could take that stretch or disrupt our understanding of what humanity is? As we grow more aware, through old and new ways of knowing, of the agency of non-humans from plants to animals to fungi, where are the lines drawn? And what is the role of art and technology in catalyzing and criticizing all of the above?
“All Too Human” is simultaneously strength and precarity; it gets at the heart of collective knowledge and collaboration as much as it considers radical individualism. To be human, all too human, is to be creative, generative, and in conversation with those around you and a larger, globalized experience.
Ioana Jucan
Monday, September 23, 2024
4:15-5:45, Oliva Hall, Cummings Art Center Reception to follow
A scholar and artist, Dr. Ioana B. Jucan works across the fields of theatre and performance studies, media studies, and philosophy. Informed by decolonial and feminist thought and practice, her current research follows several intersecting threads: the construction of the synthetic real and mechanisms of knowledge, affect, and value production in the age of "post-truth" and big data; and more just and sustainable alternatives to toxic capitalist models and mindsets as well as creative-critical practices that can help us imagine and enact such alternatives. She leads the Data Fluencies Theatre Project, which is a part of the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies Project. She is the author of Malicious Deceivers: Thinking Machine and Performative Objects (Stanford University Press, 2023). Jucan’s artistic work spans multimedia and devised performance, theatre directing, creative writing, and installation art and has been performed internationally. Several of her plays are collected in her book, Cosmology of Worlds Apart (NY: O Balthazar Press, 2017).
Fábio Duarte
Monday, November 18, 2024
4:15-5:45, Oliva Hall, Cummings Art Center Reception to follow
Fábio Duarte is a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Senseable City Lab and Sustainable Urbanization Lab. At MIT Senseable City Lab Duarte manages several research projects including Underworlds, Roboat, City Scanner, as well as the data visualization team. Duarte has a background in urban planning and a PhD in communication and technology from the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Duarte serves as a consultant in urban planning and mobility for the World Bank. His most recent books are Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space (MIT Press, 2021) and Unplugging the City: The Urban Phenomenon and its Sociotechnical Controversies (Routledge, 2018). More information at http://senseable.mit.edu.
