Paper short abstract:

Can a new thinking of human identity and agency derive from the technological expansion of the senses, that connect us with the environment? In my talk I will look at experimental design examples that built hybrid environments, experience spaces that confront us with crisis and alien forms of life.

Paper long abstract:

In scaling, scripting, merging our bodily experience of nonhuman entities, and interconnecting us with other spheres (such as the hydrosphere), nonhuman agents and novel objects, the human self can be experienced as world-involving, as a trans-species identity. In my presentation I want to look at artistic and design examples, that tackle the break-down of obsolete dichotomies between human an environment, in highlighting the flesh as the area of interconnection, of interfacing with the nonhuman Other and the inhuman in ourselves. The flesh, understood in the way as Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, connects us with the world and becomes a space for negotiating identity and scopes for action.

In looking at examples from environmental, experimental architectural design, that use novel materials with emergent properties or computation in order to open up new interactions with our environment, I want to take a look on the ways the human body is brought back into the discourse around the Anthropocene, new technologies and posthuman identities - not as a mere tool but as the initial source of experience. I will also point out to what extend conventional hierarchies are re-inscribed into the phenomenal experience spaces that are created, and in what ways issues of non-human agency, inter-object-relations, and autonomous systems are taken into account