SymbioticA’s Agency in Movement Symposium

Friday 21st June 2013 9am-5pm
The University of Western Australia G06 Moot Court
Free registration (RSVP essential to christopher.cobilis@uwa.edu.au)
The Agency in Movement symposium employs a variety of disciplines to explore the complex relations between movement and vitality.
Motion is observed by attaching a frame of reference to a “body” and measuring its change in position relative to another reference frame. Therefore, movement is relative, means ever changing and is perceived as visceral and “alive”. The Symposium will include invited speakers from diverse disciplines (art, performance, biology, biophysics, biomechanics, and philosophy) who will explore and interrogate the conceptual and technical relations between life (biological or artificial), movement and perceptions of “vitality”, with the hope that some interesting meeting points and/or negations will emerge.
The symposium stems from an Australian Research Council project exploring the use of skeletal muscle tissue which is grown, stimulated and activated in a techno-scientific surrogate “body”. This moving twitching (semi) living material evokes, makes unease, and asks, in sensorial and theoretical means about issues of aliveness and agency. The project is concerned with onto-ethico-epistemological (Barad 2010) questions about life and the affect created through the phenomenon of movement.
Speakers include: Monika Bakke, Andrew Pelling, Elizabeth Stephens, Jonas Rubenson, Stuart Hodgetts, Chris Salter, Jennifer Johung, Oron Catts, Miranda Grounds and Ionat Zurr
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/symposiums