E-mail address: dragon@ieas-szeged.hu
Home institution: University of Szeged
Academic position: assistant professor
Areas of research: digital culture and theories, film theories,
adaptation, psychoanalysis
Title of the presentation: The Augmented Subject:
Technological Interfaces of Self, Skin and Geography
Most important Publications
- The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó (2006),
- Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (with Cristian Réka M., 2008),
- Tennessee Williams Hollywoodba megy, avagy a dráma és film dialógusa (2011, in Hungarian)
Title of the presentation
The Augmented Subject:
Technological Interfaces of Self, Skin and Geography
Abstract
When William Gibson?s protagonist, Hollis Henry is allowed a glimpse of a so-called locative art object for the first time in Spook Country (2002), she describes what it is to explore a digital and thereto unknown geography of her existence: an invisible extension of her reality, a layer that directly interfaces with physical experience. This experience is what we call today augmented reality: a digital layer that partakes of the productive power driving the flux of our subjectivity more and more. Today our everyday reality is augmented with this digital interface to an extent that our definitions of subjectivity should also reflect on the changes that it entails. What happens to our physical environment if we see it through a digital interface (think of our heavy reliance on GPS and Google Maps)? How do we ? literally ? find ourselves in this augmented geography? What happens to the physical border of our body, our skin that provides the surface for the constitution of our very self? Finally, how does our subjectivity reformulate itself as a volatile interface via its augmentation and extension to the digital realm? The paper proposes to look for possible answers for the above questions relying on theories concerning the geographies of the subject, the role of the skin in the formation of subjectivity, theories of the digital and of the interface, and psychoanalysis, illustrated by samples of contemporary technologies and products of popular culture.