Reimagining the Posthuman Body in the Digital Age

The development of digital technologies —AI, biometrics, wearables, surveillance systems, and biotech — has reshaped the body, transcending a coherent biological whole into a dynamic site formed by data, networks, and algorithmic systems. This panel addresses the urgent need to critically examine how artistic practices confront, negotiate, and reimagine the body’s boundaries, rights, and roles in the increasingly asymmetrical digital era.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks from posthumanism, cyberfeminism, queer and trans studies, and decolonial critique, this session explores how artists reconfigure the posthuman body to question normative constructions of identity, agency, and embodiment. From Stelarc’s machinic prosthetics to Moon Ribas’s seismic implant and more recent experiments with generative AI, augmented reality, and bio-engineered forms, this panel explores the posthuman body in new conditions, technologies, sources, and aesthetics.

We ask: how do artists utilise or disrupt the posthuman bodies to challenge the normative ‘naturalisation’ of corporeality and materiality? How does the body reimagined create alternative resistance against the existing norms, restrictions, and inequalities exaggerated by digital technologies? What new aesthetics, ethics, or modes of subjectivity emerge through these innovative creations?

This session invites scholars and artists in art history and related fields to interrogate the artistic practices and critical expressions surrounding the posthuman body in the digital age. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary, critically engaged proposals that examine the intersections of posthuman corporeality with feminism, queer theory, posthumanism, new materialism, and the politics of gender, race, and beyond. Together, we aim to foster a rigorous dialogue on the political agency and generative potential of the posthuman body in an era of digital entanglement.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Shiyu Gao, Birmingham City University, shiyu.gao@bcu.ac.uk

Tengjin Bian, Loughborough University, t.bian@lboro.ac.uk