TRANSUMANISM ŞI CINEMATOGRAFIE
TRANSUMANISM AND CINEMATOGRAPHY

- clues of future worlds about the present -

Summary/Abstract: Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of aradical improvement of the human condition by overcoming the process of aging, by augmenting the intellectual, psychological and physiological human capacities with the advancement of techno science. Thus, there is an extremely thin and subtle boundary between transhumanism and utopian thinking, between the exacerbated fideism in matter and the objective reality of the evolution of the human species, between a persuasive biotech marketing scheme and a self-fulfilling prophecy - these multiple points of access in the subject of transhumanism are causing theoretical and practical difficulties, in continuous dynamics, concerning the future of technological development. To clarify this context, we propose to use transhumanist films as cognitive research material, in order to identify some recurrent human biases of the present that could lead to biotech catastrophic errors in the future. Cinema, as a way of seeing the world, is an environment that owns specific methods, by which it allows the current experimentation of the future to produce fantasies of different possibilities. Considering the film representations of transhumanism, we’ll explore the central question of the proposed research – are we humans actually augmenting ourselves, or is technology augmented by humanity? The answer to this question, a partial agreement about the symbiotic human-technology relationship, is necessary in order to ensure the biological freedom of our next generations.

• Details
• Contents