Special Lectures:
Reconsidering the Body in the Post-Media Era

We are pleased to have a special lecture by Mike Featherstone (Professor, Goldsmiths College, University of London) and Tomoko Tamari (Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London). These two lectures will reconsider the body in relation to society, technology, and capitalism in the age of ‘post-media’. All welcome.

Date: June 14 (Tue), 2022, 18:00-19:30
Venue: Lecture Room 1, Senju Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts
[access: http://ga-beta.geidai.ac.jp/access/]

Guest Lecturers：
Professor Mike Featherstone (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
https://www.gold.ac.uk/icce/staff/featherstone/
Dr. Tomoko Tamari (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
https://www.gold.ac.uk/icce/staff/tamari/

Chair: Professor Yoshitaka Mori (Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts)

＊No reservation required. Admission free.
＊The lecture will be given in English.

Lecture 1: Rethinking the Body beyond Consumer Culture
Mike Featherstone
Goldsmiths, University of London

The body is accorded a central status within consumer culture through a constant flow of images of youth, fitness and beauty.  The general ‘if you look good you feel good’ philosophy combined with the advocacy of instrumental body transformation regimes, contrasts with a second view of the body ‘the body without image,’ the body in motion, the affective body which operates in everyday life.  This presentation seeks to update the discussion by addressing three further orientations to the body which can be seen as salient today:  the digital data body;  Anthropocene bodies;  and interdependent bodies (our wider transspecies and planetary bodily relations).  

Lecture 2:  Embodied intelligence and digital information technology: AI and the body materiality
Tomoko Tamari
Goldsmiths, University of London

Digital information technologies, such as computer programmes with artificial intelligence are becoming ubiquitous. This situation could suggest not just changes existing social systems, but also influencing the fundamental human-machine (technical object) relations. The paper attempts to explore the probable consequences of the notion of ‘the body as data’ and elaborate the significance of body materiality in the field of the computer science. The paper also discusses risks of losing skills, knowledge and experience about technical objects which could be replaced by mechanical automated production processes in the course of technological development. Drawing on Simondon’s concept of ‘concretization’ and Stiegler’s noton of ‘symbolic misery’, the paper proposes a need to work on the question of the potential practice of bio-social concretization to consider the ever-changing relationship between humans and technical objects.

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Organized by: Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Post Media Research Network (http://postmedia-research.net/)

This seminar is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 17H02587