Abstracts - York St John University

will suggest that the potential for understanding a greater sense of intimacy comes from an
engagement with the technology as a dynamic potential for a ‘sensing body’.
Kerry Francksen-Kelly is an active practitioner, choreographer, artist and senior lecturer
in dance at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has been working as a professional
practitioner since 1997, making interactive installation art, live performance and works for
camera. Kerry’s work has been performed and screened nationally and internationally and
she has successfully received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as
well as receiving independent commissions. Kerry holds a Masters in dance video
installation and is currently researching for a PhD, which aims to investigate the
interrelationship and potential synchronicity of live and mediated dance.
Panel 5. Future Corporealities
Super Intelligence and the Second Singularity – Performing the Future; a provocation
Phil Christopher (Edge Hill University)
This short paper or provocation will speculate about the supposed approach of the
transhuman and posthuman eras and the ways in which imagining such a future can impact
upon current contemporary performance practices. Ray Kurzweill’s notions of singularity
will be considered in relationship to the concept of singularity (and other perspectives) in
physics. In Kurzweill’s speculations about the rise, expansion and development of
technology notions of what it is to be human and how self and identity are defined are
significantly challenged. Whilst scientists need to consider sequentially the way in which
present knowledge may lead us to new techniques or technologies for manipulating and
investigating the world, the artist can leap forwards and imagine new contexts and
relationships and make these present in the act of performance. The paper will consider
how the singularitarian perspectives provide challenges to the artist and performance
practitioner by considering blueprints for performance and the creative processes that
might help us to understand profound changes in our relationship with technology.
Phil Christopher has written and directed in the theatre for many years including
community theatre, work with young people and disabled actors. He was awarded the
Manchester Airport Commission for Poetry in Theatre in 2001 as part of the Manchester
Poetry Festival. He was a SOLSTICE Fellow at Edge HiIl University in technology-­‐enhanced
learning as part of the university’s CETL and is now Head of Performing Arts at the
university.
Refolding (Laboratory Architectures Twins): Stitching, mirroring, doubling
Kira O’Reilly (Queen Mary, University of London)
This paper will introduce and discuss an ongoing collaboration between Canadian artist
Jennifer Willet and myself on a series of photographic works; digital images that explore
ideas of the construction of laboratory spaces and our occupancy within them, via
manifestations and mutations that depart from the clear confines of human and enter into
extended and excessive, abstracted forms and alterities.
Including references from cinema, baroque clothing drapery, Japanese Kimono
construction, and our own bioartistic practices we use a variety of media and methods.
From mutated laboratory coats that depart from their function as straightforward
utilitarian uniforms to performed physical dislocations with laboratory spaces and
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