SESSION: 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.

Session Convenors:

Shiyu GAO, Birmingham City University

Tengjin BIAN, Loughborough University

Speakers:

Beatrice Sartori, University of Bologna

Death Re-Materialized. Posthuman Rituals of Data and Cells

In The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024), death becomes a hyper-technological event: observable, programmable, and mediated through digital infrastructures. The body’s decay unfolds as data, transforming mortality into an object of technological control and aesthetic spectacle. This cinematic vision epitomizes our datafied society, shaped by platform capitalism and biotechnological systems that govern bodies and their transformations, and confirms how digital technologies and biotechnologies play an increasingly central role in imagining afterlife and posthumous existence.

This contribution investigates how contemporary artists employ these same technologies to re-materialize death beyond humanist or transhumanist paradigms. How can technological and biotechnological practices render the virtual dimension of death material in a posthuman perspective? Drawing on feminist new materialisms and posthuman theory, the contribution conceives of the body as an assemblage of biological, technological, and informational processes co-constructed with nonhuman agencies.

Through the works of Ginevra Petrozzi and Svenja Kratz, the study examines artistic strategies that merge science and esotericism to rethink the ontology of the body. Petrozzi’s To Be a Witch in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2023) and Digital Esoterism (2021) transform surveillance systems into techno-rituals that generate data-driven embodiments. Kratz’s The Absence of Alice (2008–ongoing) and Transformation Studies (2024) use bioengineering and tissue culture to explore cellular immortality and posthumous persistence. Ultimately, these practices frame death as a transformative process, contributing to a posthuman understanding of the subject as a material-informational amalgam whose boundaries are continuously constructed and reconstructed through science and media.

Miguel Arrais Pacheco, University of Cambridge

Jacolby Satterwhite: Physical Erosion and the Digital Body

Jacolby Satterwhite’s digital practice exemplifies the possibilities and tensions of twenty-first century queer worldbuilding in contemporary art. Known for his immersive 3D CGI animations populated by proliferating, hybrid bodies, Satterwhite transforms the personal into self-mythologising digital experiences. In 2025, the artist began a series of surgeries to treat an infected prosthetic shoulder. This recent event reframes his longstanding engagement with bodily endurance and technological mediation through the lens of corporeal vulnerability. This presentation asks: what does it mean to perform in digital space with a physical body marked by illness and repair, when pain and exhaustion are largely made invisible but remain active agents of bodily degradation?

Satterwhite’s dance performances, rooted in voguing and modern dance, engage digital media through imaginative visual effects and the integration of screens onto his own body as sculptural elements. This embodied practice stages the entanglements and contradictions between physical and digital materialities. Through close visual analysis of Satterwhite’s video Birds in Paradise (2019), and drawing on crip theory, digital media theory and the framework of racialised queerness and transness, I examine how Satterwhite reconfigures posthuman embodiment in relation to labour and disability.

I argue that Satterwhite’s work exposes the limits of the digital: the eroding physical body becomes the medium for a queer artistic strategy reflecting the material costs of digital fantasy. By foregrounding how Black, queer, and disabled subjectivities shape and are shaped by contemporary art’s engagement with digital technologies, this paper contributes to ongoing art historical understandings of contemporary queer digital aesthetics.

Cynthia Dong, Independent scholar

“Everyone Is a Girl Online?” Unequal Gendered Labour Online in Shuang Li’s T (2017–2018)

TBD

Kristen Lewis, Concordia University

Biometric Art and the Plight of Play

In 2022 Raphael Lozano-Hemmer created Thermal Drift Density Map, an interactive artwork that visualizes participants movements using thermal imaging cameras. A digital screen mirrors the activity captured, rendering bodies into black and white pointillist forms that move dynamically with the live participant. Despite the playful context elicited by Lozano-Hemmer’s artwork, thermal imaging is an invasive biometric surveillance technology principally used in police and military contexts. While Lozano-Hemmer notes this reality when describing the work, he argues that it nonetheless affords participants the opportunity to engage with such technologies in a safer, unencumbered way. More than this, he argues that the artwork enables participants to flip the surveillance script and see behind the camera, thereby affording them greater agency.

In this paper I analyze how Lozano-Hemmer utilizes networked thermal imaging technologies to engage a posthuman spectator by requiring their data-driven biometric participation. While Lozano-Hemmer argues that the playful recontextualization of such technologies functions as a counter-tactic to their use in surveillance contexts, I argue that such recontextualization reinforces their capacity to produce harms by conforming to the “friendly” tactics of contemporary power regimes (Harcourt 2015, Zuboff 2019). Insofar as contemporary power is premised on appealing to our desires rather than exerting punishment, I argue that biometric artworks like Lozano-Hemmer’s aid in normalizing invasive data extraction practices that harms political subjects.