Both in the arts as in the sciences, contemporary society has been witnessing a growing closeness between body and technology. Writers such as Donna Haraway (The Cyborg Manifesto), artists (e.g. Stelarc, whose work includes the integration of technological devices in his own body), philosophers as Don Ihde (Bodies in Technology), or scientists like Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Intelligent Machines, 1990, and The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999) have explored in several fields of thinking and acting intersections that increasingly suppress the frontier between natural processes and scientific progress.
From this standpoint, the conference BODY, TECHNOLOGY AND TIME invites to a discussion of the relationship between the body, human development and technological advancement in the course of time. It is known that life, be it on its biological or social stance, unfolds within a setting of multiple and mutual influences, which accounts for the fact that any change occurring in a given environment causes impact on all the others in the vicinity. Therefore, the concept of body must be understood in its broadest sense so that it includes the environments that affect and are affected by changes in it – the house, the school, the workplace, leisure places, planet Earth. In this line of thought, the conference suggests a reflection on multi and interdisciplinary studies, from the natural setting to academic, social, artistic and scientific domains, from which derive, in its full complexity, human life.
Organization
CHAM Açores
