[NetBehaviour] Call for Papers: MINDS, BODIES, MACHINES.

marc marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Mon Dec 18 16:59:26 CET 2006


Call for Papers: MINDS, BODIES, MACHINES.

This interdisciplinary conference, convened by Birkbeck’s Centre for 
Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of London, in partnership with 
the Department of English, University of Melbourne, and software 
developers Constraint Technologies International (CTI), will take place 
on 6-7 July 2007 at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, Bloomsbury.

The two-day conference will explore the relationship between minds, 
bodies and machines in the long nineteenth century. Recent research on 
the Enlightenment’s frontier technologies has established that era’s 
preoccupation with developing machinery that could simulate the 
cognitive and physiological processes of human beings. According to some 
critics, however, these Promethean ambitions were shelved during the 
nineteenth century, when the android as artefact was relocated to the 
realm of the imagination, where it became a threatening figure. 
According to this reading, the android as scientific project and a 
figure of possibility only re-emerges in our own era. The aim of this 
conference is to test this claim by exploring the continuities and 
discontinuities in the imagining of the human/machine interface in the 
nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

The conference organisers – Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck), Deirdre Coleman 
(Melbourne) and Paul Hyland (CTI) – invite proposals for papers that 
examine the intersection of minds, bodies and machines during the long 
nineteenth century. Topics include: the virtual and the real; 
technologies of the sublime; evolution and machines; techniques of 
communication; technologies of travel; medical technology; 
miniaturisation; self-reproduction; and spiritualism.

The conference programme will include plenary addresses, seminars and 
workshops. Confirmed speakers include: Dr Caroline Arscott, Professor 
Jay Clayton, Professor Steven Connor, Professor Iain McCalman, Professor 
Peter Otto, Professor Kevin Warwick and Dr Elizabeth Wilson.

A selection of papers arising from this conference will be published in 
the online journal /19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth 
Century/, www.19.bbk.ac.uk

Abstracts for papers of 20 minutes, as well as details of expected 
audio-visual needs, should be submitted no later than 28 FEBRUARY 2007.
Please send proposals by email to submissions at mindsbodiesmachines.org. 
For further information, see www.mindsbodiesmachines.org/conferences.html



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