Course 11: Human Reasons Between Post-Contemporary Occultism and Artificial Intelligence
by Keti Chukhrov
11 – 14 August, 2021
1 ECTS
Application deadline: July 16, 2021.
Application deadline: July 16, 2021.
Course Description
The course will dwell on the social, technical and epistemological motives of trans and post-humanisms, which acquired considerable visibility in the recent 20 years in the humanities, natural sciences, technologies, art and culture. The contemporary preoccupation with trans and post-humanism is departing from denouncing anthropocentrism for its colonial, gender and ecological violations, for which humans are inscribed in deep history as the agents of the Anthropocene condition. Contemporary theories of acceleration and of Artificial Intelligence added to this a conjecture, according to which what made the human mind, consciousness and intelligence hegemonic – is either reproducible or even surpassed by machinic intelligence and neural networks. In this context it is important to redefine what human is from the philosophic, social, anthropological and cultural viewpoints, and reconsider what makes it so inevitable to abolish the human condition. The course will approach the problem of the post-human from the angle it is rarely discussed: not the authority of the human, but her phylogenetic and environmental disability (neoteny), the standpoint that enables to reinstitute the neo-ethics of the human.
Biography
Keti Chukhrov is ScD in philosophy, an associate professor at the Department of Сultural Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. Currently she is a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow in UK, Wolverhampton Un-ty. She has authored numerous texts on art theory, culture, politics and philosophy. Her full-length books include: To Be—To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (Spb: European Un-ty, 2011), and Pound &£ (Logos, 1999) and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010) and War of Quantities (2003). Her research interests and publications deal with: 1. The impact of socialist political economy on the epistemes of historical socialism, 2. Philosophy of performativity, 3. Art-systems and 4. Neo-humanism in the conditions of post-human theories. Her forthcoming book deals with the communist epistemologies in the Soviet Marxist philosophy and culture of 1960s and 1970s. With her video-play “Love-machines” she participated at the Bergen Assembly (2013) and “Specters of Communism” (James Gallery, CUNY, NY, 2015). Her Latest video-play “Communion” was at the Ljubljana Triennial U-3 “Beyond the Globe (2016, cur. B. Groys).
Participation
10 participants will be selected to participate in this course. Eligible participants must read the Terms, fill out the application form, upload the required documents and submit the application form. Incomplete applications will not be considered.
Scholarships are available for participants from Kosovo.
A limited number of scholarships, that cover the participation fee, are available for international participants.