Frontier Bodies: Aesthetics and Politics in Post-Modernism :: Directed by Jaime del Val, REVERSO with seminars, presentations and performances by: Stelarc, Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, Daniel Schorno (STEIM), Donald Glowinski (InfoMus Lab), Rudolfo Quintas (Swap Project) & André Gonçalves, Roberta Bosco, Laura Cañete, Juan Carlos Olmos & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Jaime del Val & Olinto (REVERSO) :: December 17-23, 2007 :: La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain :: Call for Applications: Deadline: December 10, 2007.

Amplified Bodies? … Body, Art and Technology: reviewing Crossroads and Emergent Territories in Late Capitalism; Critical intersections of art, technology and the body

Keywords: biopolitics, politics of the body, queer theory and politics, posthuman, performativity, postperformativity, metaformativity, post-postporn, postcolonial, cyberfeminism, poststructuralism, media culture, transdisciplinary, performance, dance & technology, interface design, HCI, life electroacoustics, virtual architechture, political economy, obsolete bodies, posttrassexual manifesto, war of desire and technology, electrosintrumental, gesture recognition, astral body, videodance, bodies in the net.

Introduction: The workshop will attempt to generate a transdisciplinary platform of exchange for a multidisciplinary group of participants, both professionals, students and wider public, addressing:

- arts disciplines in the context of new media including performance arts, dance and technology, visual arts, music and sound based arts, architecture and space arts, and text based arts.
- critical theory discourses including gender and sexuality studies, media studies, postcolonial and cultural studies, cyberfeminism, ecology, and other fields; as well as their relation to the political.
- technology, instrument making, and in particular, technological development in the context of HCI (Human Computer Interaction), movement analysis, gestural control, etc.

The workshop will attempt to specifically challenge the phalogocentric technopositivist approach to technology and communication that permeates media culture, and reflect on the possibilities to produce technological and communicative frameworks that break away from standardised models of imitations of reality, into open and yet specific forms of reality and corporeality in media arts, dealing with a broad landscape of issues, from gender, sexuality and media to ecology.

Questions will be raised as: What specific biopolitical forms of control emerge in the context of standardised interfaces and communication technologies? How do these affect gender and sexuality constructions and embodiment processes? What new forms of corporeality and communication can be articulated from a diversity of non-verbal, non-logocentric practices, as in some of the arts, and how can this affect the development of new technological and communication models? How do traditional accounts of politics need to be reviewed in our context of global standardisation of bodies through technology? How is technology, for instance software, to be understood in terms of its textual and culturally construed character? What kinds of body does technology produce? How does it deal/not deal with corporeality, specificity and difference? What kinds of embodied technology can be articulated starting from non-textual practices? How to articulate sustainable technologies of the body and the territory?

Arts, technology, critical theory and the body_ through a series of both practice oriented and theory oriented seminars, presentations, debates and performances that will explore the hot points of this intersection. A unique rendez vous with some of the most significant actors that work in this crossroads, from Europe, the US and Australia, who will be present throughout the whole week in the workshop.

From interactive dance and performance to videodance and net-art, from life electroacoustics to virtual architechture, from HCI, software and hardware to musical instruments, from posthuman theory and cyberfeminism to queer (gay, lesbian, transgender, intersexual) theory, from cyberculture to ecology…

Introductions to several technologies will be done, more specifically to the EyesWeb platform of InfoMus Lab, to software ‘JunXion’ y ‘LiSa’ de STEIM, as well as an introduction to Max-MSP-jitter. During the course Juan Carlos Olmos and a technician from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra will continuously assist for the use of the 3D motion capture system.

The workshop will include open platforms of interaction, ranging from movement improvisation to presentations of the participants’ projects, as well as discussions of the texts proposed for reading.