Cyborgs

Join us to hear from Joanna Zylinska about why the cyborg has returned at a time when there’s a boom in AI, research into immortality and an unfolding ecological crisis. The talk will include a screening of Zylinska’s short photo-film ‘Exit Man’, which explores the problem of human extinction and proposes ‘a feminist counter-apocalypse’ as an alternative cyborg scenario.

Listen to, breathe, taste and incite alternative Black queer liberations with speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge. You will explore possible climate-changed futures via her speculative fabulation ‘A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home’.

Watch a screening of ‘The Last Angel of History’, a film by Black Audio Film Collective. This film follows the journey of a data thief and uses Afrofuturism as a metaphor for cultural displacement, presenting a new way to understand the relationship between Black identity and the body. The film will be introduced by Errol Francis.

Watch a newly commissioned and irreverent performance by artist Mamoru Iriguchi about a humble enhancement to his body that would change his life for ever.

Join artist Rebekah Ubuntu to experience an Afrofuturist sound, video and performance work exploring unbelonging, questing and intersectional utopianism through the speculative gaze of an artificially intelligent cyborg.

Meet designers and engineers from UCL who are creating devices to extend our bodies’ capabilities. In the Medicine Man gallery, try out a third thumb designed by Dani Clode and learn how new limbs could affect our brains. In the Medicine Now gallery, see prototypes of new technologies to be used in surgery and during rehabilitation after injury, designed by engineers from UCL's Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering.

Join a participatory workshop run by Zia Álmos Joshua X and explore classification and how it relates to the cyborg. Your activities will focus on the legacy of Carl Linnaeus (who created the system of naming organisms that we still use today), modern ideas about symbiosis and interspecies relationships, and on the political and ethical power of technology.

Join a reading group to discover and discuss writing by Donna Haraway, Samuel R Delany, Octavia Butler, Will Harris and Ursula K Le Guin.

Take part in a virtual reality experience created by Hyphen-Labs in which you‘ll visit a neurocosmetology lab where black women are pioneering techniques of brain optimization and cognitive enhancement. At 19.00 hear from the creators as they talk about their work in speculative product design, emerging technologies, cognitive research and transhumanism.

Watch Le Gateau Chocolat as she sings two numbers that speak to her own struggles with identity as well as those of LGBTQIAP+ people everywhere: Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I am what I am’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’