Dialogues beyond the Human: Interactions of Materiality, Technologies, and Performance in the Creative Humanities

By embracing posthuman perspectives, speculative methodologies and embodied practices, we aim to trouble understandings of agency, interaction and collaboration. Our interrelating presentations will examine how the creative humanities can encourage a conceptual and experiential movement beyond a human-centred framework, engaging with broader ecological, neuroqueer, historical, and diverse voices.

With /

• Andrea Reyes Elizondo: Performance/lecture of a ‘persona’ as a speculative method and embodied practice for justice-oriented historical-archival research.

• Bram Ieven: Lecture-performance Dreaming of the End combines a soundscape with a literary essay about extinction.

• Jose Hopkins: Performance/lecture on posthuman participation, examining how argued non-sentient non-human beings (like plants or fungi) participate in creative processes, challenging concepts of materiality, agency and participation.

• Ksenia Fedorova: Talk focusing on contemporary technological art practices, forms of their organization and speculative visions on societal impact.

• Ruth Clemens: Talk exploring the interaction between reading, writing, text, and materiality (especially in terms of the posthuman – posthuman ideas of language and semiotics) and also in neuroqueer perspectives on interaction, communication, and accessibility.

• Sophie van Romburgh: Lecture-performance that investigates conversations between materiality and experience in my walks (trails, rhythms, the sand in my shoes), drawings (ink, brush, paper, seawater, gestures), a medieval riddle poem and text-to-image AI, and a 17th-century scholar’s live imaginings of words.