Sublime and impossible bodies (panel)

Abstract

Bodies loom large when we configure the potential of digital media and cyberspace. Bodies extended, connected, sublime, erased, implanted, deformed, defaced, empowered, degendered, buffooned, grotesque are the stuff, the background story, and the metaphors of animation, cyberspace, net chat. The ability to transcend and engage with identities centered in human bodies as experiential, social, and biological "real worlds" has fueled much creative and intellectual fantasy and engagement within cyber culture. Bioengineering and artificial life have allowed further possibilities, anxieties, and impossibilities to emerge in most recent times. Flesh-eating diseases, viruses on screen and off, and millennial ecstasy renew expectations and fear about our bodies within digital and popular culture. The panel also considers the sublime, a resonant cultural paradigm of the modern West. Is the body and its nature as "exalted, awe-inspiring" made so through the interventions of human repression and ordering?This panel features artists, architects, animators, out-of-thebox experts, and scientists. It draws on case studies, artists' works, small games, popular culture concerns and practice, as well as engineering and architecture to open up questions of identity, anxiety, and the physical. It includes anime, systems that link the physical and cyber worlds, data body configurations, and AL programming.