Plásmata: Bodies Reimagined

“Plásmata: Bodies Reimagined” is a series of conversations and debates taking place in the context of “Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data,” an outdoor exhibition at Athens’ biggest public park exploring the body – individual, collective, human, nonhuman, planetary – and how technology and technologically constructed worlds are shaping, affecting, and impacting our bodies, identities, and place in the planet.

“Plásmata” focuses on the body not just as the locus of subjectivity, but also as the field of identity, political, and social conflict, as the core of both pleasure and pain, and ultimately of our very existence.

Over two days of conversations, artists, scholars, authors, and researchers are coming together to discuss what kind of bodies we are creating through technologies and technological worlds; bodies that are unequal, invisible, absent, controlled, or defined by binaries. How are artists reinventing bodies and subvert online worlds? What kind of bodies are we envisioning, creating, and engineering? Can new human manifestations – organic and machinic, human and nonhuman – integrated in nature, help us rethink humanness and envision multiple perspectives and equity across all forms of life?

Curated by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, FutureEverything

18:00 | Introduction

Prodromos Tsiavos (Head of Digital and Innovation, Onassis Foundation)

Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, FutureEverything

18:05 | Absent bodies: Value, (in)equality, control and bodies

Provocations by artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Caroline Sinders and Ekene Ijeoma

Followed by conversation and audience Q&A

Chaired by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, curator, “Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data”

19:05 | Brave new worlds

A conversation between Keiken and Lucy Sollitt on metaverse imaginations, online worlds, bodies, and identities

18:00 | Introduction

Prodromos Tsiavos (Head of Digital and Innovation, Onassis Foundation)

Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, FutureEverything

18:05 | Breaking the binary: Technoscience, future bodies and gender politics

Provocations by artists Dora Bartilotti, Mary Maggic and Ani Liu

Followed by conversation and audience Q&A

Chaired by Helen Kaplinsky, curator, writer, and researcher

19:05 | More than human: rethinking humanness

A conversation delving into the practices, theories, and meaning behind ideas of hybridity, post-humanism, interspecies entanglements, and symbiosis

With Piritta Puhto, curator and senior producer at Bioart Society, artist and researcher Saša Spačal, and Ariane Koek, Initiator and Founding Director of Arts at CERN