TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

 

The third international interdisciplinary conference "Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science" will take place in 11-13 November 2018 in Mexico City, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Centro de Cultura Digital. Including theoretical and artwork presentations TTT2018 continues to focus: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality - as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. Coordinated in partnership with the program of the FACTT 2018 - Festival Art & Science Trans-disciplinary and Trans-national the conference is co-organized by the Research and Creation Group Arte+Ciencia, UNAM (Mexico), Arte Institute (USA), Cultivamos Cultura (Portugal) besides the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University (Greece).

Art is, in so many ways, a reflection of reality, its glorification as well as its challenger, in an instinctive understanding that nothing is stable despite the effort to keep a balance between the comfort of belief and the delusion of control. Art and science interrelations are not always clear and one could have the impression that the artist seems more permeable to the influence of science than the scientist to the influence of art. Art’s playfully transgressive nature offers creative bypasses to the grammar of science and expands the dialogue with its openness to a multiplicity towards the new. Nevertheless, art – albeit its originary affinity with the taboo – is never completely liberated from moral considerations. Deeply involved into this lively discourse on the nature of the taboo, art becomes the very domain of contemporary experimentation with transgression, in order to provoke and sparkle discourse, catalyzing possible forms of transcendence.

Submissions are welcome from all art and research fields and cutting-edge technology in art research. Suggested, but not exclusive topics, are those associated, with:

• Biopunk, hybridity and aesthetics of mutation
• Cyborg, augmentation and bοdy modification
• Post gender, transgressive identities and social models
• Psycho-pharmacology, somatechnology and post-humanism
• Chemistry of the mind, natural healers and mind enhancement
• Biotechnology, DIYbio and biohacking
• Ethology, human and nonhuman
• Evolution, extinction and randomness