CALL FOR PAPERS Corporal Literacy Maaike Bleeker: New developments in a variety of disciplines - ranging from philosophy to medicine to cognitive science - argue for a revaluation of the body as actively involved in processes of world making rather than a passive decoding machine. This revaluation of the body points to the necessity to change our understanding of the role of the body in processes of perception and meaning making. Corporal literacy understood as the bodily capacity to read and make sense also changes the notion of thought and meaning itself, the idea of what it means to do thinking, to make meaning, to rationalize. "What is important" write Lakoff and Johnson in their Philosophy in the Flesh, "is not just that we have bodies and that thought is somehow embodied. What is important is that the very peculiar nature of our bodies shapes our very possibilities for conceptualisation and categorization." Corporal literacy describes these abilities of the body to perceive, read and make sense. It is a strategic term, with which we want to make a space for interaction and collaboration between researchers approaching questions of bodily meaning making from various backgrounds. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books 1999: 19 Rob van Kranenburg: In A future world of supersenses, Martin Rantzer of Ericsson Foresight claims: "New communication senses will be needed in the future to enable people to absorb the enormous mass of information with which they are confronted," According to him the user interfaces we use today to transmit information to our brains threaten create a real bottleneck for new broadband services. "The boundaries of what constitutes consumer electronics and computers are getting blurred," said Gerard J. Kleisterlee, the chief executive of Royal Philips Electronics. "As we get wireless networking in the home, everything starts to talk to everything." Implementing digital connecitivity in an analogue environment without a design for all the senses , without a concept of corporal literacy, leads to information overload. In a ubiquitous computing environment the new intelligence is extelligence, "knowledge and tools that are outside people's heads" (Stewart and Cohen, 1997) In a ubiquitous computing environment the user has to be not only textually and visually literate, both also have corporal literacy, that is an awareness of extelligence and a working knowledge of all the senses. It is our claim in staking out a field of corporal literacy that in contemporary performance and theatrical practice we find an actualization of (and ways of dealing with) the bottleneck scenarios that are envisaged by information experts. At Big Consumer Electronics Show, the Buzz Is All About Connections January 13, 2003 By SAUL HANSELL, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/technology/13DIGI.html?ex=1043457162&ei=1&... A workshop/panel in the Conference: MULTILITERACIES: THE CONTACT ZONE 2003 International AILA Conference on Literacy http://memling.rug.ac.be/aila Submit abstracts by email in an attachment to kranenbu@xs4all.nl and maaike.bleeker@hum.uva.nl. Remember to give the name(s) of the author(s), affiliation, e-mail address, phone number, fax number and 50 word biodate. Location: Ghent, Belgium Date: 22-27 September 2003 Call Deadline: 28 March, 2003 Contact Persons: Rob van Kranenburg - Maaike Bleeker Contact Email: kranenbu@xs4all.nl - maaike.bleeker@hum.uva.nl IMPORTANT DATES: Deadline for submission of abstracts: 28 March, 2003. Notification of acceptance: 31 April, 2003. Program available: 15 August, 2003. Early bird registration: before 28 March, 2003 Details regarding the program, registration and hotel accommodation will be sent out in February 2003. If you submit an abstract, you will automatically receive this information -- web: http://simsim.rug.ac.be/staff/rob mail: kranenbu@xs4all.nl mobile: ++32 (0) 472 40 63 72 Call home first 0032 9 2333 853