Embodiment & Intelligence

Being human—babbling, gesturing, falling in love—cannot be imagined without our bodies. But other intelligences need not share this characteristic. Moreover, intelligences are networked and distributed beyond a single human’s embodied personhood. Please join N. Kate Hayles (UCLA), Cary Wolfe (Rice), Agnieszka Kurant (Artist), and Claire Isabel Webb (Future Humans) in conversation on the limits and possibilities of more-than-human embodied intelligence.

Provocations

N. Kate Hayles: “(En)Framing the World: Embodied Perspectives and Second-Order Emergences”

Cary Wolfe: “Embodiment, Enaction, Representation”

Agnieszka Kurant: “Collective Intelligence or Uncomputables”

Claire Isabel Webb: “Intelligence’s Material Agnosticism”

Keynote Speakers

N. Kate Hayles

Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Hayles has published ten books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent books are Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago, 2017), and Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021). 

Agnieszka Kurant

Kurant is a conceptual artist. She is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award and the 2019 Frontier Art Prize. She has had solo exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli (2021) and Hannover Kunstverein (2023), did commissions for the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2015) and the MIT List Visual Arts Center (2022), and presented her work at MoMA (2020); Centre Pompidou (2023); the Istanbul Biennial (2019); the Biennale of Sydney (2024); SFMOMA, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Louisiana Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Moderna Museet. 

Claire Isabel Webb

Webb directs the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans Theme that investigates the histories and futures of life, mind, and outer space. Her book project, Reflexive Alienation, explores how scientists, despite alien life forms' perpetual and perhaps permanent unknowability, have designed sophisticated experiments of expectation that anticipate Other biologies and intelligences.

Cary Wolfe

Wolfe is the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. He is the founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press, which has published over fifty volumes to date. Wolfe’s recent projects are Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens' Birds (Chicago, 2020), and a special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, on "Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity" (2020).