cfp 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.

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.

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