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Chimera identifies the characteristics of the "Expanded Body", here defined as a meeting point between science, technology, art, and design in their trans-disciplinary investigation of the human body in dialogue with its surrounding environment.
Methodologically, the book investigates how the bio-mechanical, sensory, and cognitive expansions of our soma, provided in XX and XXI century by techno-science and studied by art, design and philosophy, can contribute to model a new natural-artificial body able to activate "entangled" relationships with both human and non-human elements that inhabit the environment in which we are immersed. Chimera highlights and systematizes common features and affinities in the works of artists and designers working with tools of techno-science - Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Marco Donnarumma, Sputniko!, Margherita Pevere, Neil Harbisson, Anouk Wipprecht among others - who place the relationship between us and context around us at the center of their poetics.
Drawing on researches of the 20th century and placing them in dialogue with the latest developments in the fields of neuroscience, biotechnology, prosthetics, and body hacking, this book is the first research that, through a radical systematization of the main currents of posthuman thought, identifies the boundaries between art and design capable of suggesting an alternative to transhuman nightmares, anthropocentric dystopias, and hypermedia-driven drifts of our bodies. Opening, in an original and courageous way, to new fluid, queer, and non-hierarchical relational dimensions between us and the more-than-human environment in which we are immersed.
Introduction
PART 1 - An Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Human Body
Chapter 1. The Body and Technological-Scientific Research
Companies, institutes and research centres
The investigation of soma: Biotechnology, bodyhacking and nanotechnology
Between senses and the brain: Neuroscience, neural interfaces and artificial intelligence
Chapter 2. The Body in Design, between Organic and Artificial
Embodiment and phenomenology of interaction
Wearable and prosthetic technologies
Bio-inspired design
Chapter 3. The Extended Body of Art
The mechanised human being
Body art between expansions and technoperformance
The post-organic subject
Chapter 4. Between Art, Design, Technology and Science
In the dialogue between disciplines
The contemporary debate
An interrelated and anti-disciplinary vision
Conclusions to Part I
PART 2 - Toward Entangled Thinking: The Body in Dialogue with Context
Chapter 5. From the Human Phenomenon to the Posthuman
The redemption of different: Cyborgs, monsters, companion species and queer bodies
Matter vitalism: Non-human agency between ANT and New Materialism
Causality in the making: New ecologies between Realism and OOO
Chapter 6. Comparing Theories in Technoscience
Manipulation of the living
Design of bodies
Cognitive extension
Chapter 7. The Expanded Body
Morphological, sensory and cognitive properties
The relationship with the context
Aesthetic, design and cultural elements
Conclusions to Part 2
PART 3 - The Expanded Body in the Contemporary Art Scene
Chapter 8. A Multifaceted Scenario
Experimentation and production between art and design
Major international exhibitions and events
Art Industries and production networks
Chapter 9. Media Lab and Hybrid Forms of Knowledge
Interdisciplinary collaborative practices
Shared knowledge and practices
Citizen Lab and community platforms
Chapter 10. Chimera: Practices, Aesthetics and Imaginaries
Frontier artists and designers
Points of contact and divergence for common practice
The Expanded Body for a New Ecosophy of the Arts
Conclusions to Part 3
Acknowledgements
Bibliography