HYBRIDS: Symposium

In September, I took part in a symposium, Hybrids: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narrative, as part of the Futures Photography Festival. You can watch it online here.

PANEL: The Digitally Mediated Body

Thursday (16 Sept.), 2PM to 3.45PM

How we experience the ‘everyday’ is increasingly shaped by the crumbling boundaries between our physical and digital realities. Our digital embodiment is regulated and represented through performance, self-curation, avatars, algorithmic processes, and online micro-communities. In an emerging hybrid sociocultural environment, which threatens to collapse self, identity, community, and ability, how might our digital and physical bodies be reconciled? How are the narratives of our bodies adapted as an online presence, and what processes are complicit in creating these adaptations? This panel will convene to discuss the intricacies of understanding the embodied ‘self’ in simulated reality, focusing on the roles our digitally embodied subjectivities play within these simulated cultural landscapes—and within collective digital cultures which progressively demand more authenticity and ‘truth’ in visual and discursive renderings of self-identity and experience.

For this panel, we invited Emily Graham (Futures artist), Jan Berger (artist), Bogomir Doringer (artist, curator and head of Education and Research at NXT Museum), Ugo Woatzi (Futures artist) and Aurélie Bayad (Futures artist). The panel will be moderated by Sarah Trottier (external PhD Candidate in Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University).