N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles

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REDCAT

"Hayles' work is considered to be the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention.”             —Kilden Journal of Gender Research

Co-presented with the CalArts Aesthetics and Politics Program

Duke Professor of Literature and CalArts' 2019 MA Aesthetics and Politics Theorist in Residence explores our fears and hopes as expressed in two recent films by Alex Garland, Ex Machina  and Annihilation. For Dr. Frankenstein's creature, the posthuman was imagined as an assemblage of human and animal bodies. In the 21st century, the two posthuman possibilities that loom large are genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Both films imagine the posthuman as some kind of fusion of the alien with the human, resulting in hybrid creatures human in appearance but deeply alien within. Hayles will address these implications for our imagined futures as species.