David Roden: The Posthuman Challenge to Art

Series 2.1: POST-CONTEMPORARY Contemporary art, as the name says, is the art of its time: it belongs to the present in which it takes place. Moreover, that present is not just a moment of time but a (now global) societal organisation that art draws from and engages with. However, this limitation of contemporary art to the present-day means that art has lost the traction on futurity that historically typified the avant-gardes of modernism. In this, contemporary art deprives the present of having any direction at all. The overall directionlessness of contemporary art today - its multifariousness - is one index of this destruction of futurity. Yet finance capitalism, the energy sector, the military, social media, artificial intelligence and big data, bioengineering and speculative theory are all now increasingly shaping the present by operationalising a relation to the future and its uncertainties. These institutional configurations can be called post-contemporary: they are - they will be - shaping the very forms of societal organisation that contemporary art claims to work from and which it claims to address. If contemporary art remains bound to the time of its making it misses - will miss - the changing futural dynamics of the present. The post-contemporary is happening now. In order to remain contemporary, contemporary art must then become post-contemporary. This series of lectures will examine how futurity can be deployed to that end. 1 FEB - DAVID RODEN: THE POSTHUMAN CHALLENGE TO ART In this talk I discuss two ways in which artists might respond to the disturbing possibility that future technological agents (cyborgs, artificial intelligences, augmented humans, etc.) could "disconnect" from human life and society: generating "posthuman" forms of existence that have little in common with our own. The first is a “sublime” or “weird” realism that explores the limits of human existence from our side of the disconnection. The second responds more closely to the challenge of an “out-of-control” technological culture by allowing us to sample posthuman possibility (to become posthuman in effect). Bio: David Roden has worked a Lecturer and Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. He is author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge 2014). His research has addressed posthumanism, philosophical naturalism, cyberculture, deconstruction, the metaphysics of computer music and new realism. Roden blogs at www.enemyindustry.net/blog.