Figurations of posthuman bodies abound in – and beyond – the American
cultural imagination. This includes, most prominently, the cyborg, defined in
Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) as a transgressive creature that
signals a breaching of not only “the boundary between human and animal” (68)
but also “the boundary between animal/human (organism) and machine” (69) and,
by extension, “the boundary between physical and non-physical” (70). With
scholarship now distinguishing mostly between the strands of ‘transhumanist
posthumanism’ and ‘posthumanist posthumanism,’ the term of ‘the posthuman’ has
gained plural and conflicting meanings (see, e.g., Hayles, Braidotti,
Badmington) that we will extrapolate and discuss in the analysis of selected
examples drawn from the fields of dance, dance film, music videos, performance
art, and interactive art. This includes Merce Cunningham’s Hand Drawn Spaces
(1998), and Biped (1999), Boston Dynamics’ robot dance, and Stelarc’s
‘internet dance’ Ping Body (1996); ORA, a collaborative project
between choreographer José Navas and filmmaker Philippe Baylaucq; Janelle
Monáe’s Metropolis: The Chase Suite (2007) and The ArchAndroid
(2010); Rachel Rosenthal’s filename: FUTUREFAX (1992); and the
installation Genesis (1999) as well as the Time Capsule project
(1997) by Eduardo Kac.
We
will explore how these artistic practices and embodied performances frame and
stage intersections of technology and bodies in different ways and examine
their implications for relations to and notions of time and space, ranging from
concepts such as material space over constructions of communal space to the
seemingly endless ether or cyberspace. We will discuss the cultural functions
they fulfill beyond mere techno-utopian or -dystopian imaginings of the future.
Rather, they add to current debates about ‘biomedicalization’ (Estes and
Binney), especially as regards discourses of self-enhancement, longevity, and
immortality; dynamics of global ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson; Leroy and
Jenkins); ecologism and environmentalism; and claims of human exceptionalism in
the face of more-than-human worlds.