Linking back to the Winter School 2013 and the theme of posthumanism, I’d like to invite those of you working on human-animal and human-machine relations and intersections between the humanities, medicine and technoscience more broadly, to consider participating in this international conference and doctoral workshop. Further info: link

When: 4-6 June, 2015
Where: Geneva (t.b.c.), Switzerland
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 September, 2014

Guest speakers:
Jeffrey Cohen (Medieval and Early Modern Studies)
Stefan Herbrechter (Cultural Studies, Englit)
Margrit Shildrick (Gender Studies, Bioethics)
Cary Wolfe (Animal Studies, EngLit)

World of Matter is multimedia project providing an open access archive on the global ecologies of resource exploitation and circulation. It comprises visual practitioners and theorists conducting long-term research on material geographies, who engage ideas and practices from art, spatial culture, urbanism, anthropology, art history, cultural theory, photojournalism, activism, publishing, curating and education.
Its main initiator is Swiss artist Ursula Biemann whom some of you know from the conference Art With(out) Borders that Winter School participants Tanja Klankert and Erin Rice organized last year.
Project website: http://www.worldofmatter.net

Hi all

Just to let you know that I am off to Finland in September for an interdisciplinary research workshop to ecology and deep time in the subArctic tundra organised by the Finnish Society of Bioart. Here is the project blog FYI: http://bioartsociety.fi/deep_time/ I will be checking out the rock art up there to see what is growing.

Hope you are all well.

Tarsh

Stefan Herbrechter’s book on posthumanism has just been published: more

A shot from the pulpit – watch guest lecturer Rosi Braidotti from Utrecht University answering the question why matter matters

Haunted by specters – watch guest lecturer Stefan Herbrechter from Coventry University explaining why he distrusts matter

Mapping Rice - watch Elaine Gan from the University of California at Santa Cruz talking about multispecies temporalities

Living on the edge of time – PhD candidate Anna McFarlane of the University of St. Andrews suggests a utopian novel

“A time must come when there will be a science of the future, just like there is a science of the past – and when by virtue of this science the noblest humans calculate for the future as well as for themselves,” writes German philosopher and theologist Johann Gottfried Herder in his 1797 essay On Knowing and Not-Knowing the Future.

In my talk, I will discuss Herder’s and other concepts of futurity that were advanced around the year 1800. Thereby, an epistemological TransFormation par excellence will be observed – the one to bridge knowledge about the future with a general futurization of knowledge.

Read more