CALL FOR PAPERS

The NECS 2017 Conference
SENSIBILITY AND THE SENSES. Media, Bodies, Practices

Paris, France
29 June to 01 July 2017
Hosted by the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

Pre-Conference
27 and 28 June 2017
Hosted by the Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7

Keynote presentations
Centre Pompidou
Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne

Deadline for submissions: 31 January 2017

Please note that the membership fee must be paid before submission (see http://www.necs.org/faq for more details). Pay the fee in January to get access for the full calendar year.

The question of the relationship between media, bodies, and the senses cuts across the entire history of media theories. Since their first appearance, technical media such as telegraphy, photography, gramophone, film, typewriter, the telephone, radio, and then television, computer, internet, as well as a wide variety of cultural techniques for the recording, processing, and transmitting of information have been analyzed taking into consideration their relationships with the human body and its sensory organs. Concepts such as “organ projection,” “prosthesis,” “innervation,” “extension,” and “interface” have been used to describe the contact and the interaction between human organisms and technical apparatuses with their various degrees of hybridization, which in turn have generated a whole series of utopian and dystopian visions of a future “post-human” condition. And while the very notion of medium is strictly related to the problem of sensory perception (since it finds one of its origins in the Latin translation of a Greek term, metaxy, which was used by Aristotle in order to indicate the material intermediary entities that make perception possible), the body itself (with its expressive face, its sensitive skin, and its meaningful gestures and movements) has often been considered a sort of primary medium, a crucial reference point in order to understand the very nature of mediation.

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