bio
David Roden has worked a Lecturer and Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. He is author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (published by Routledge 2014). His research has addressed posthumanism, philosophical naturalism, cyberculture, deconstruction, the metaphysics of computer music and new realism.
title
"Letters from the Ocean Terminus"
abstract
This text is a letter from a disruptive, insurgent future, a theory-fiction that explores routes out of the present as aberrant transformations and terraforming desires. I will perform extracts from the text (which is forthcoming in the art journal Dis in a collection on the “post-contemporary” edited by Suhail Malik and Armen Avenessian).
The underlying argument of “Letters” is that understanding posthumanity in terms of the Disconnection Thesis (DT) requires us to view our relationship to the technologically formed future in primarily aesthetic than cognitive terms. This is, I claim, because DT is uninformative and unprescriptive about the condition of being or becoming posthuman. It follows that the posthuman can be progressively specified only by construction, by exploring strategies of disconnection through bodily, ecological or cognitive (self)alteration or self-hacking. Such processes are fundamental aesthetic whether or not they occur within conventional artistic genres or institutions.
The underlying argument of “Letters” is that understanding posthumanity in terms of the Disconnection Thesis (DT) requires us to view our relationship to the technologically formed future in primarily aesthetic than cognitive terms. This is, I claim, because DT is uninformative and unprescriptive about the condition of being or becoming posthuman. It follows that the posthuman can be progressively specified only by construction, by exploring strategies of disconnection through bodily, ecological or cognitive (self)alteration or self-hacking. Such processes are fundamental aesthetic whether or not they occur within conventional artistic genres or institutions.
