Jörg Sternagel - Böcker

Providing a solid media-philosophical groundwork, Beyond Mimesis contributes to the theory of mimesis and alterity in performance philosophy while serving to stimulate and inspire future inquiries where studies in media and art intersect with philosophy. It collects a wide range of philosophical and artistic thinkers' work to develop an exacting framework with clear movement beyond mimesis in aesthetic experiences in uncanny valleys. Together, the chapters ask if intersubjective acts of relating that are defined by alterity, responsivity or witness and trust can be transferred to artificial beings without remainder. The proposed framework uses a particularly fruitful theoretical model for this inquiry known as the “uncanny valley”—a fictitious schema developed in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. According to Mori, artificial beings or animated dolls become more eerie to us the more “humanlike” they appear. The model’s utility requires distinguishing between visual media and real life, but in general, it suggests that there is a fundamental incommensurability between people and artificial beings that cannot be ignored. This necessitates that all-too realistic representations as well as fictional encounters with artificial beings do not transgress certain limits. According to Mori, it is an ethical imperative of their design that they evidence a certain degree of dissimilarity with people. This notion seems especially applicable to artistic projects in which animated dolls or robots make explicit their “doll-ness” or “robot-ness” and thus inscribe a moment of reflexivity into the relations they establish.With contributions by Elena Dorfman, Jörg Sternagel, Dieter Mersch, Allison de Fren, Nadja Ben Khelifa, James Tobias, Grant Palmer, Stephan Günzel, Nicole Ku?uleinapuananioliko?awapuhimelemeleolani Furtado, Misha Choudhry and a conversation between Carolin Bebek, Simon Makhali, and Anna Suchard.

Providing a solid media-philosophical groundwork, the book contributes to the theory of alterity in Performance Philosophy, while stimulating and inspiring future inquiries where studies in media, art, and literature intersect with philosophy. It collects a selective as well as productive diversity of philosophical, literary, and artistic figures of thought, attaining an exacting framework as a result of a clearly elaborated ethics of alterity, innovatively opened up by way of an aisthetics of existence: Touching upon the Aristotelian concept of aisthesis, the material, perceptual and sensory dimensions of everyday bodily existence are highlighted to move beyond what aesthetics in Modern Philosophy just specializes in, namely art and the beautiful. The notion of existence is therefore borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who understands it as something concrete and richly interrelated, so as to avoid the dualisms both of psychological processes of consciousness and of physiological mechanisms. It is thus made explicit such that the unity of body and soul is not any arbitrarily arranged connection between “subject” and “object” but, rather, that it is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. Imaginatively then, the book puts into writing how alterity not only can be treated theoretically but can be also made accessible through writing as well as rendered relatable through reading. That is why it deals with exemplary interpersonal encounters in the lifeworld, in the arts, and in the media, which are initially thematized as intercorporeal experiences, so as to enable an approach for an ethics of alterity by way of, in particular, sites located within a phenomenology of perception oriented towards the lived body.

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.