Aesthetics and Embodiment in the Age of Artificiality

This seminar will examine how notions of embodiment and aesthetic experience have been reshaped with the development of artificial intelligence since the 1950s. Our focus will be on the shifting political claims made about the entanglement of bodies and machines. Topics will include mechanical models of perception, machinic metaphors for experience, notions of dispersed intelligence, decentered subjects, embodied minds, cyborgs, surrogates, avatars, and affectivity. Our inquiry will be interdisciplinary and comparative, with an emphasis on how agency, experience, and meaning come to be understood at the intersection of technology and subjectivity.