Hephaestus Reloaded

📖 The Scoop

This bilingual (English/Italian) publication, whose five authors are from Greece, Italy, and the US, invokes as its first inspiration the myth of Hephaestus who embodied a twofold entity: both handicapped and technically capable. The myth of Hephaestus has been passed across the centuries as an ancient metaphor signifying the idea of becoming-world, in which any distinction between the natural and the artificial, or the organic and the technical is blurred. Human beings, by virtue of their very weakness or limits, have enhanced their technological powers to the point of transcending their own given nature. At present, a variety of critical discourses in disciplines such as philosophy, history, aesthetics, and cognitive sciences pay attention to our becoming-hybrid (organic and mechanical beings) - unleashing a space for research that probes the concept of transcendence. Each of the contributions in this book addresses a new way to approach the role of transcendence.

In the occidental history of ideas, the notion of transcendence has received at least three canonical articulations that are challenged by this book: the religious one (Judeo-Christian traditions); the philosophical one (Platonic-intellectual universality of ideas); and the scientific one (the objective and technological turn of knowledge). Nonetheless, it is with the rise of cybernetics, with its digital and virtual modalities of systems, networks, and knowledge, that our human environment emerges as a source of knowledge in itself. Not simply as an object but rather as an agent molded and molding thinking and behavior. It is through this "immersive" view of nature, knowledge, and technique, that the notion of transcendence is approached in this book as mutually transitive to changes. What is explored here is how transcendence is ejected from the strictly theological, philosophical, or scientific grounding and emerges as a germinating point of becoming (something else).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

BRUNELLA ANTOMARINI has a PhD in Aesthetics from Universit� Gregoriana, Rome. She teaches Contemporary Philosophy and Aesthetics at John Cabot University, Rome and is the author of "The Maiden Machine: Philosophy in the Age of the Unborn Woman (Edgewise, 2013) and "Thinking Through Error: The Moving Target of Knowledge (Lexington Books, 2012).

ADAM BERG has a PhD in philosophy from the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel. He teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and at Cal Arts. Recent publications include "Phenomenalism, Phenomenology, and the Question of Time" (Lexington Books, 2016) and "Aesthetics in Present Future: The Arts and the Technological Horizon," co-edited with Brunella Antomarini (Lexington Books, 2013).

VLADIMIR D'AMORA lives and writes in Naples and Milan. He is trained as a classical philologist, and is a translator from Latin and Greek. He was a co-editor-in-chief of Vulgo.net and he published the poetry collection "Pornogrammia" (Emilio Mazzoli Edizioni, 2015), which was a finalist at Premio Poesia Citt� di Fiumicino 2015.

ALESSANDRO DE FRANCESCO is a poet, artist, and essayist based in Brussels and Basel. In 2015-2016 he was an artistic research fellow at the Research Centre for Visual Poetics at the University of Antwerp. His recent books include "Continuum: Writings on Poetry as Artistic Practice" (Uitgeverij, 2015) and "Remote Vision: Poetry 1999-2015" (punctum, 2016).

MILTOS MANETAS is a Greek-born painter, conceptual artist and theorist whose work explores the representation and the aesthetics of the information society. Manetas is the Founder of NEEN (the first art movement of the 21st century), a pioneer of art-after-videogames (machinima), and an instigator of Post-Internet Art. In 2009 he initiated the Internet Pavilion for the Venice Biennial, and in 2014, in collaboration with Rome's Swiss Institute, he introduced the concept of Newpressionism.

Genre: Art / Criticism & Theory (fancy, right?)