Actor & Avatar

Dieter Mersch (Prof. Dr. em.) is former head of the Institute for Critical Theory at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and former president of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik. His fields of work include philosophical aesthetics, media philosophy, image theory, and the philosophy of music. Thomas Strässle (Prof. Dr.) is head of the Institute for Transdisciplinarity (Y Institute) at the Hochschule der Künste Bern and professor of modern German and comparative literature at the Universität Zürich. His fields of work include German literature from the 17th to the 21st century in a European context and the relationship between literature and other arts, especially music and material aesthetics.Anton Rey, born in 1959, is a professor at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. After studying theater studies, literature and philosophy in Zurich and Berlin, he worked at the Schaubühne Berlin, Odéon Paris, Vienna Burgtheater, Munich Kammerspiele, among others with Peter Stein, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, Peter Zadek, Wim Wenders. Since 2002 he has been a lecturer, dramaturge, and researcher at the Department of Performing Arts and Film and since 2007 director of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF) in Zurich.Thomas Grunwald (Prof. Dr. em.), born in 1951, worked between 1992-2002 as Senior Neurologist at the Dept. of Epileptology, Bonn University Medical Center and was Medical Director at Swiss Epilepsy Clinic, Zurich between 2002 and 2021. Today he is a member of Zurich Epilepsy Institute, Zurich.Jörg Sternagel (Dr. phil. habil.) works as »Akademischer Rat« at the chair of media studies with a focus on digital culture at Universität Passau. He is a member of the advisory board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik. His research focuses on alterity, imagery, mediality and performativity.Lorena Kegel is a neuroscientist and psychologist by training passionate about healthcare and its digital future. In her past, she gained three years of experience as a PhD student in an interdisciplinary project group studying the brain during social interactions with avatars with functional magnetic resonance imaging.Miriam Laura Loertscher (Dr. phil.) is the head of the research focus film at the Institute of the Performing Arts and Film at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. She worked at different art institutions and film festivals in Switzerland (e.g. Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, International Animation Film Festival Fantoche in Baden) and finished her PhD about film perception and digital cinema at the Universität Bern in 2020.

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of »technical others« and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material.

Ursprungsland: DEZolltarifnummer: 49019900