TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE in Art & Science
The fourth international conference “Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science” will take place November 26–28, 2020, in Austria, hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Including theoretical and art practice presentations, TTT2020 continues to focus (a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and aesthetics of liminality as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, and (b) on the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art.
What constitutes the unstable limits of what can be morally and epistemically accepted should be read within the historical horizons of cultures and circumstances. After all, what seems outrageously transgressive at one moment in time and from one perspective may eventually transcend into a commonplace practice. As we experience and even endorse a gradual, but substantial, de-centering away from anthropocentric values and ontologies, critique potentially harbors turmoil. Art practices pose critical questions about our certainties; sciences and humanities constantly test our limits and our ideas of worlds by pushing forward the conditions in which knowledge is produced.
Developments in science and technology that seem to enhance the borders of our experience of worlds and selves, revealing sometimes the fragility of social values, should be contemplated. Identities, ideologies, multiplicities, worlds, and visions are accepted and rejected, invented and destroyed: what are the forces behind and beyond? We propose critique within transdiscipline, where science, arts, and humanities meet in a research quest, in an attempt at reframing and reconfiguring what there is. Through immersion in the complex realm of limits and liminalities, one might trace the historical and trans-subjective structures filtering our experience of worlds, and ultimately open up space for transformations through the interaction of art, science, and the humanities.
Submissions are welcome from all art and research fields and cutting-edge technology in arts-based research. Suggested, but not exclusive topics, are those associated with: Biopunk, hybridity and aesthetics of mutation; Cyborg, augmentation and bοdy modification; Post-gender, transgressive identities and social models; Psychopharmacology, somatechnology, and post-humanism; Chemistry of the mind, natural healers, and mind enhancement; Biotechnology, DIYbio, and biohacking; Ethology, human and nonhuman; Evolution, genetics, and extended evolutionary synthesis; Cyber-eroticism, sex technology, and techno-lust; Biopolitics, displacement, and resistance. The conference language is English. Proposals are submitted for consideration to the members of the scientific and artistic committee.