"Human and animal bodies are permeated by technologies. As Donna Haraway has shown, former dichotomies such as nature–culture merged into a continuum in the figure of the so-called cyborg. These hybridizations give rise to structures that—for philosophers from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to Rosi Braidotti—reveal posthuman states of a life beyond the human. Numerous body modifications can be found in the visual arts as early as the beginning of the 20th century. Techniques such as collage and assemblage, accelerated by the First World War, produced techno-aesthetical representations of human-machine constructs. After the Second World War, especially from the 1960s onwards, artists began to intervene directly in the somatic body or to explore technological entanglements using blood, cells, or genomes. Since the end of the 20th century, digital bodies have become increasingly integrated into our social systems, and we experience interdependencies between online and offline states on a daily basis. In art, these are marked, for example, by the deliberate use of glitches, which have been investigated in recent years by Legacy Russell, among others. These overlaps are accompanied by diverse forms of expression, novel perspectives, and imagined realities that challenge traditional (bodily) perceptions.
The symposium at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich is dedicated to theoretical and artistic explorations of hybrid bodies situated between somatic, mechanical, and digital materializations (e.g., alter egos, avatars, and algorithmically generated figures). It aims to open up critical perspectives on the negotiation of gender, power, and visibility in contemporary art. The symposium “From Cyborg to Glitch. On the Materiality of Techno-Aesthetic Bodies” addresses these tensions and invites participants to examine the relationship between the body and technology.
The languages of the presentations are German and English.
The symposium is open to the public. Please register by emailing