Workshop: The Augmented Body: Affectivity, Perception, and Life in the Digital Age

Name: Workshop: The Augmented Body: Affectivity, Perception, and Life in the Digital Age
Start: 2025-12-18T10:00:00+01:00
Location: Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar, Deutschland

Schedule

Thu, 18 Dec, 2025 at 10:00 am

UTC+01:00

Location

Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar, Deutschland | Weimar, TH

In the digital age, the human body is no longer merely extended by tools—it is reconfigured through its media-technical environments, the body is mediated, co-constituted by dispositifs that reshape its relation to the world, reconfigure its capacity to feel, and transform the very structures of affectivity. This workshop departs from the premise that the augmented body is not simply a body-plus-technology, but rather a site of individuation and exteriorization—a space where action, perception, and affectivity are continuously redistributed. The question is no longer whether the human body is transformed by technology, but how profoundly such transformations affect the conditions of embodiment, sensibility, and ontological structure. What we used to understand as the human body now encompasses a different dimension—comprising extra-human living and non-living matter, cultural, political, and economic layers, etc. On one hand, it seems that the body (corps propre) has, in many ways, been replaced by configurations such as the political body, the digital body, or interface bodies—or perhaps more radically, the anthropomedial body. On the other hand, the extended body constitutes a new locus of being-in-the-world—a new opening to action, identification, relationality, and nature. How we exist is no longer tied to the physical body per se (corps propre), but to a whole set of configurations constituted through lived experience (vécu)—almost in an algorithmic manner. In this context, the notion of the augmented/digital body must be rethought.
The workshop is hosted by Ekaterina Odé
in cooperation with the GRAMA (DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Medienanthropologie)
www.uni-weimar.de/grama
Program:
10:00–10:30: Ekaterina Odé: Welcome & Opening Remarks
10:30–12:30 – Panel I. Affective Infrastructures & Networked Selves
Chair: Nathalie Schäfer
• Ulrike Wirth – Engaged and Dispersed: Hyperreactivity (Kohout) in Homophilic (Chun) Digital Neighborhoods
• Jens Kraushaar – On Mirror Dwelling in VRChat
12:30-13:30 —Lunch Break
13:30–15:30 – Panel II: Fiction as Affective Environment
Chair: Vanessa Franke
• Sebastian Lederle – Recollecting the Lost Environment of Cinema: Immersion and Dislocation in Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light
• Katja Hettich – Readers as Augmented Bodies: Affective Entanglements through Literary Fiction
15:30-16:00 — Coffee Break
16:00–17:30 – Panel III: Interfaces and Immersion
Chair: Ekaterina Odé
• Niklas Fabian Becker – Augmenting the Body, Augmenting Reality? Body-Technology-Relations (co-)constituting a ‘Virtually’ Augmented Reality
• Ekaterina Odé – Sharing the Real: from Anesthesia to a New Body