Online-Symposium - Planetary Reversal

PLANETARY REVERSAL

Utopian Alternatives to Anthropocentrism

Online-Symposium / 12.06.2021

Utopian visions emerge from critique of the present situation and blossom into the imagination of a better world that can be expressed in many forms: not just fictions, but also critical theories, technological applications, artworks, architecture and design, social experiments, and activism.

The symposium invites guests (theorists, artists, and educators) to reverse entrenched ways of being-in-the-world and imagine or critically engage with utopian alternatives to anthropocentrism. Consolidated by certain political, cultural, social, and technological hegemonies, anthropocentrism is the sense of universal entitlement and privilege inherent in a specific image of the human. Together we will reflect on the human subject increasingly destabilized by digital media technologies, the challenge to its purported human exceptionalism among the species, and scrutiny of the social relations of power in which it is embedded.

How can a broad understanding of posthuman futures be achieved? Is it possible for humans to genuinely step out of a human perspective? How can critique transition into utopian visions without simply inheriting the “subject perspective” from the hegemonic discourses? What are the possibilities and limits for co-evolving and co-existing with non-human and artificial/technological beings, and for co-creating the future conditions of our planet?

Speakers:

Johanna Mehl (University of the Arts, Bremen) – Designing–With. Intro to Anthropocentrism through Design

Abida Malik (University of the Arts, Bremen) – The End of the Human as We Know It? Challenges of Trans- and Posthumanist Utopias

Janina Loh (University of Vienna) – Posthumanism and Ethics

Alan N. Shapiro (University of the Arts, Bremen) – Rethinking Asimov’s Laws of Robotics as Posthumanism

Anastasiia Raina (Rhode Island School of Design) – Posthuman Polymythology

N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University) – Liberal Philosophy Versus Ecological Reciprocity

---

12.06.2021, 10 am to 7 pm Uhr (Program below)
Online via MS Teams: https://tinyurl.com/t37ytsp8

or

via Live-Stream: https://digitalmedia-bremen.de/lectures/

(Be aware of that the lecture could be recorded and published later.)

---

Internal access to Teams:
Click Link - Like it is known via Hfk-Teamsaccount.

External access to Teams (just via Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer): Click Link - Click Option "Join via web/Stattdessen im Web teilnehmen" - set a name - mute microphone (right switcher/shifter in the window) - Click "Join Now/Jetzt teilnehmen" - Maybe: Waiting till moderation let you in

---

Typeface: Maxi Round Mono by Dinamo
Design: Johanna Mehl