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CALLFOR POSTER SESSION – ‘Black Mirrors: What Our Screens Reflect’ Tobe held as part of a one-day conference dedicated to ‘Deconstructing Anthropocentrism. Our Extended Bodies,Ourselves’ – March 27th, 2020. University of Lorraine, Metz. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Inour times of accelerated technological development and growing environmentalawareness, we are constantly made to reassess the precedence of humanity andhuman affairs in our understanding of the world. This critical decentering ofthe category of the human is of particular relevance to humanities and humansciences, who have played a crucial role in the critique of anthropocentrismsince the middle of the 20th century, but also owe their veryexistence to the definition and status of what ‘human’ might be. Beyond thesedisciplines, however, the issue has proven crucial to the work of engineers andscientists, whose research pushes back the limits of our human condition, butalso asserts the continued relevance of human values in our technologicalworld, and calls for renewed research on ‘how to be human in the age of themachine’ (Fry).&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; OnMarch 27th, the one-day conference ‘Deconstructing Anthropocentrism. Our Extended Bodies, Ourselves’will explore changes in the definition of our human condition as our bodiesbecome ever more entwined with the machines we build. Through a dialoguebetween researchers in the humanities and engineers, designers and scientists,it will explore the historical trajectory of our companionship with technology,and examine futuristic understandings of a condition ‘beyond’ our embodied existenceas humans. Within this framework, we welcome proposals from students at Masterand Doctorate level, for a poster session to be held around the theme ‘BlackMirrors: What Our Screens Reflect’.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Borrowingfrom the title of Charlie Brooker’s running series, we aim todedicate this session to young researchers’ reflections on the profound impactthat our digital companions have had on the way we define ourselves and liveour lives as human beings. The title refers to the omnipresence of screens andtheir crucial role in our lives, whether contemplating such basic needs askeeping ourselves fed, safe, and healthy, or considering more elaborate socialpractices such as travelling, meeting and communicating with others, orconsuming culture. The phrase ‘black mirror’ also reminds us that within thedigital turn our screens have become a new locus of self-fashioning: our‘black’ reflection, a distorted negative of the images we capture daily inmirrors and through our digital cameras, haunts the moments that we spenddistractedly gazing at our devices. From new forms of narcissism in theInstagram era to the invisible presence of algorithms in our lives, and theconstant elabration of new technologies that reshape the way we read, write andinteract with others, we will welcome proposals on a very broad range oftopics.&#160;&#160;&#160; The posters will bepresented in a 90-min open session, during which they will be available forconference speakers and attendees to look at and read. Throughout the session,the authors of the posters will be present to answer questions from theiraudience and generally interact with them on the contents of their research.The preferred format for the posters is A0.Proposals for posters, in the form of 300-word abstracts, should besent to Diane Leblond (diane.leblond@univ-lorraine.fr) and Jérôme Chemin (jerome.chemin@univ-lorraine.fr) by February 7th, 2020. Confirmation of selection will begiven by February 10th, 2020. ---Deconstructing Anthropocentrism: Humanities afterHumans?&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Day 1. Deconstructing Anthropocentrism. Our Extended Bodies,Ourselves&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; [Scroll down for Day 1]‘Deconstructing Anthropocentrism: Humanities afterHumans?’ is a project in collaboration between Sarah Gould (INHA), DianeLeblond (Université de Lorraine) and Estelle Murail (Institut Catholique deParis)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; In our times of accelerated technological development andgrowing environmental awareness, we are constantly made to reassess theprecedence of humanity and human affairs in our understanding of the world.With notions of ‘transhumanism’ and ‘posthumanism’ now making their way intopublic awareness, it looks as if the critical reappraisal of the tenets of liberalhumanism has become rooted in the collective psyche, providing the basis forrenewed, non-anthrocentric forms of thinking. Such an epistemic turn is ofparticular relevance to the realm of humanities and human sciences: thesedisciplines have played a crucial role in the critique of anthropocentrismsince the middle of the 20th century. Yet their specific interest inthe workings of societies and cultures binds their very existence to thedefinition and status of what ‘human’ might be. As the category finds itselfpushed from a central to a marginal position, as the boundaries that separateit from its technological or natural counterparts become porous, the fields ofstudy previously mapped onto that category must be reconfigured. In the age ofthe ‘anthropocene’, when one concept both acknowledges the major influence ofhumanity on its surroundings and identifies this influence as the main sourceof existential risk for our species, what can be the use for academicdisciplines devoted to all things human?This project proposesto answer such questions by facilitating conversations across the humanitiesand between human and exact and natural sciences. Three different avenues willbe envisaged for their role in the deconstruction of anthropocentrism. For eachangle of approach, a one-day conference will take place at one of the academicinstitutions involved in the project&#160;:Day 1. ‘Our Extended Bodies, Ourselves’. University ofLorraine, Metz. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; On March 27th, we will kick off byinvestigating changes in the definition of our human condition as our bodiesbecome ever more entwined with the machines we build. That first day willexplore the historical trajectory of our companionship with technology, andexamine futuristic understandings of a condition ‘beyond’ our embodiedexistence as humans. It will also open up a dialogue with engineers, designersand scientists who assert the continued relevance of human values in ourtechnological world, and call for renewed research on ‘how to be human in theage of the machine’ (Fry). This event will be supported by IDEA, the researchteam investigating Interdisciplinarity in Anglophone Studies at the Universityof Lorraine, as well as the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (UFR ALL) in Metz,and the École doctorale Humanités Nouvelles/Fernand Braudel.Day 2. ‘Humans as Footnotes in Time and Space?’ InstitutCatholique de Paris.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The second phase of our work will considerchanges in understanding of space and time that challenge traditional ways ofsituating ourselves as humans at the centre of our own world. Since thenineteenth century, scientific explorations have implied for us to envisagescales of space and time that do not cohere with our own embodied experience.Our inability to conceive of conditions of existence so remote from our ownphenomenological makeup has called for creative strategies to repositionourselves in a world that can no longer be intellectually encompassed. Thisstudy day will look at how writers, artists and scholars have worked with andaround this incommensurability to rethink the place of the human within thecosmos.Day 3. ‘Anthrodecentric Materialism and the Politics ofMatter’. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Inthe wake of what in the 1990s came to be known as the “the material turn,”scholars have increasingly attended to physicality as a locus of theorization.Such studies of materiality—of objects, unbounded matter, paint, and so on—seemto herald the decentering of the human being. Yet the same movement towardmatter that dethrones the human is too-often seen as a movement away frompolitical questions. This one-day conference will draw on the recent tendencyof material studies, such as feminist materialism and what art historianJennifer Roberts has called “the ecological horizon” of material studies, toretheorize the politics of matter. It will explore how material studies canhold together the question of materiality with renewed attention to thequestions of post-enlightenment human subjectivity. In doing so it will considerthe politics inherent in the urgent reevaluation of our place as earthlings, ina continuum of organic life now globally threatened by destructive humanpractices of occupying space and consuming its resources. Drawing back from theaporetic potential of ‘post’human thinking, we will investigate new ways forhumans to be ‘com-post’ (Haraway): to exist withtheir organic counterparts, sharing distinctive but overlapping ecosystems.This conference will open its questions out of the field of art history withthe aim of creating a relevant forum for scholars theorizing the issue ofmatter in adjacent disciplines.Day 1. Our Extended Bodies, Ourselves – Metz, March27th, 2020.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Whetherthey promise ever brighter tomorrows or warn against impending doom andcollective extinction, contemporary representations of technology tend to lookforward, asking or predicting what future it may bring. But our understandingof and relationship with technical objects has shaped our history as a species.For centuries, humanity’s unique ability to build machines has informed itsattempts at making sense of itself, whether through fictional or theoreticalnarratives. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Inthat respect, it seems apt that Mark O’Connell’s Being a Machine (2017), an anthropological investigation intotranshumanist projects for the enhancement of human beings and the finalovercoming of death, should open with a reference to Prometheus’s hubristicgift of fire to mankind. At the core of what seem like the most future-orientedventures, the same age-old myths lie dormant. Epimetheus’s original oversightin endowing men with natural skills or attributes, which precipitated hisbrother’s decision to steal arts and crafts from the gods to correct hismistake, also provides a crucial basis for any philosophical understanding ofour use of technology. This explains how Epimetheus became the anti-hero forBernard Stiegler’s analysis of the role that technics plays in the continuousprocess of anthropogenesis (La Fauted’Epiméthée, 1994). &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Ingrainedin the story of Epimetheus and Prometheus’s interventions into human destiniesis the sense that arts and craftmanship work as compensation for anunacceptably limited condition – that of an animal not naturally equipped tosurvive. For contemporary researchers in humanities and human sciences, thisparadox still provides a crucial angle under which to apprehend ourrelationship with technology: the machines we build both define the singularityof our condition as technological beings, and point to our resolve inovercoming the need and vulnerability inherent in that condition. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Whiletechnological advances consistently aim to make the limitations of embodimentproblems of the past, how do we redefine what it is to be human? Such questionsplay a structural role in the fast expanding fields of transhumanist orposthumanist thinking. But they are also commonly presented to generalaudiences via literature and the arts. Such is the case, for instance, whenculture explores the role that technology plays as our ‘black mirror.’ Thetitle of Charlie Brooker’s running series suggests that within the digital turnour screens have become a new locus of unwitting, paradoxically un-self-awareself-fashioning. Our ‘black’ reflection, a distorted negative of the images wecapture daily in mirrors and through our digital cameras, haunts the momentsthat we spend distractedly gazing at our devices. In its alienating quality,this new mirror stage points to some of the inner contradictions of ourcondition, which our interactions with machines help conceptualise. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Onesuch tension lies in our quality as practitioners of mimesis. The centrality ofimitation in processes of human onto- and phylogenesis (Susan Hurley and NickChater, Perspectives on Imitation,2005) partly explains the extent to which the issue of mimesis has shaped ourrelationship with machines, as we try to define ourselves with and as opposedto them. Trajectories of affect can be traced here, in the history of fictionaldepictions of our technological doubles. Since its inception for instance,sci-fi has paid particular attention to the fascination and fear elicited byuncanny encounters with machines that are all-too-human in their appearance andbehaviour. In the recent context of increasing interest in artificialintelligence, the sense of unnerving proximity seems compounded by a newunderstanding of our own compulsion to anthropomorphise and project humanqualities onto machines, thereby missing their absolute difference. In seriessuch as LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (2019) orWestworld (2016-), the anxiety ofbeing made redundant of marginalised by our own creations taps into narrativesthat no longer showcase robots or androids as aspiring humans, but rather pointto humans themselves as deludedly and unsuccessfully working to turn themselvesinto what they are not. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Inthe worlds haunted by the impossibility to distinguish between human beings andtheir perfect copies, from Asimov and Philip K. Dick’s works to the multiplefictions and adaptations they inspired, bodies of laws could be produced thatwould preserve social order and guarantee the exclusivity of human rights. Themost famous, influential and enduring of those might be identified as Asimov’slaws of robotics. In a context where humans no longer hold any real interestfor independent machines both superior in intelligence and strength, fiction isnot so much troubled by the best laws to give to robots, as by the verypossibility of enforcing any laws at all. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Thoughthe perspective of artificial intelligence taking over is, as yet, the stuff offiction, the concerns that it raises sheds light on very real developments inthe way we conceive of the ethics and politics inherent in the production ofmachines. Technologies do not emerge in a realm of existence detached from lawsand moral laws, self-reflection and self-doubt. In our daily lives we find themat every turn – at the core of our medicine, our politics, our justice systemand our policing strategies, but also behind our consumption habits and ourability to move around and to communicate with others, including friends andlovers. Day after day, technologies cause upheavals in our world, test ourphysical and cognitive limits, and call into question the very boundaries ofour humanity. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Inthinking of our technological others, we constantly redefine who and what we areas a species, and who and what we might become. Our ability to devise and buildmachines, in other words, must hinge on our ability to analyse and interpretthe impact that those machines will have on human lives – an impact that takeson a specific shape in the information age (Citton, L’Avenir des humanités, 2010). This implies a form of collaborationbetween the work of scientists and engineers and the reflection led by scholarsin humanities and human sciences. This is never clearer than when engineerssuch as Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, or mathematicians such as Hannah Fry,call for ‘Hippocratic oaths’ to be taken by tech designers and mathematiciansin the process of devising the algorithms and new technologies that shape ourdaily lives. In the name of Harris’s and Raskin’s Centre for Humane Technology,as well as Fry’s insistance on building a technological future that iseconomically and politically fair, democratic, and cares for the mostvulnerable among us, we find confirmation that any reflection on our machinesimplies a renewed understanding of ‘who we are [as humans], where we’re going,what’s important to us and how that is changing with technology’ (Hello World, 2018). &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Thisone-day conference aims to show the willingness of researchers in humanitiesand human sciences to answer these calls for collective, inter-disciplinaryexplorations of a rapidly evolving technological world. As Epimetheus’s legacy,technology is at the core of our paradoxical human ambition to transcendourselves. Its ambiguous role, in both defining us and threatening our ownannihilation, is paramount in the cultural productions and social dynamics thatwe are trying to shed light on. And its impact on who we are and where we aregoing delineates the trajectories along which we must redefine our work asexplorers of the human condition.            This conference will be convened by Diane Leblond, a member of University of Lorraine’s IDEA (Interdisciplinarité dans les Études Anglophones), with the support of IDEA, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (UFR ALL) in Metz, and the École doctorale Humanités Nouvelles/Fernand Braudel. It will be held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities on the University of Lorraine’s campus in Metz, on March 27th, 2020. 