Grotesque corporealities
Karin Harrasser: Cheetah legs, lion feet and lobster claws. On prostheses and an appreciation of incapability
Karin Harrasser devotes herself to various transgressions and shortfalls of organic human beings by way of prosthetic technology. In addition, she examines the political implications of (technological) narratives of transformation and whether technological body modifications ultimately have a tendency towards conservatism in spite of their spectacularity. Food for thought from the medical history of prosthetics and the diverse artistic explorations of the subject generates a perspective that underlines the precarious status of technologically modified physicality and is skeptical of self-fulfilling prophecies of trans-humanist techno fantasies while maintaining technology-friendly feminist positions.
Adam Harper: Permutations of the Body in Electronic Music Imagery
It’s nothing new that the representations of bodies in the imagery and videos of independent and underground music differ from those of the mainstream. Their canon of movement is often extraordinary as well. Yet with that area’s increased interest in digital worlds and other prisms of modernity come metaphors that have long haunted electronic music: bodies and expressivities that augment the traditionally “human”, or even lie beyond it entirely. These bodies – those of cyborgs, androids, machines and mutants – are not the conventional locus of beauty and authenticity popular music has often preferred. They are, in fact, malleable, unstable, precarious, transformed – but also transformative. Looking at artists like Holly Herndon, Arca, Jesse Kanda, Gaika, Gazelle Twin, Planningtorock and Moor Mother, Adam Harper explores the ways in which distinctions between human bodies, between human and non-human bodies, between real and unreal bodies, and between technological and organic bodies have been variously dissolved in music, image and movement.
is a professor of Cultural Studies at the Art University in Linz. After studying history and German Linguistics she did her PhD at the University of Vienna. She then did her habilitation at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Besides her academic activities, she has been part curating various projects, like NGBK Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, TQW. Together with Elisabeth Timm she is publishing the Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaten (Magazine for Cultural Studies).
is a music critic, and has written for Frieze, The Wire, The FADER and Resident Advisor. His book Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making was published by Zero Books in 2011, and is considered a response to Simon Reynolds’ bestseller Retromania, in which Reynolds postulates that pop solely draws on already existing material. He also writes and lectures on music academically for both City and Goldsmiths University, London.