In realms of mediated and digital performance, choreographers’ experiments with technologies are presumably the most natural phenomenon as they are fundamentally engaged with bodies by thinking and substantiating their embodied knowledge of the bodies as the whole entity of mind and body (Remshardt, 2008, pp.48-49). Choreographers incorporate technologies as essential elements of performance, not subsidiary ones, redressing orthodox notions of dance performance by defying its condition, the physical co-presence of human performers and audiences. They not only expand a substance for incarnating choreographic knowledge from a body to an object and a (material or immaterial) space, but also reframe choreographic knowledge itself by reflecting on how a human subject’s corporeal and technological self are entangled to embody the world and the self within the world. As the case studies of this thesis have contemporary choreographic practices involve the disembodiment of the corporeal body in a virtual world and the dehumanisation/mechanisation of the human through cyborgian technologies. From an anthropocentric humanist perspective that treats technology and its increasing physical and cognitive ability as a potential threat to the human, or from a popular posthumanist/transhumanist perspective that pursues the transcendence of the body, technologically generated presence of the human subject in choreographic practices may be conceived as an apocalyptic future for the human body. However, this pessimistic view of virtual and cyborgian bodies perpetuates a dualistic assumption that primarily relegates the body to its sensorimotor surface separated from its abstract cognition and affords the privilege of the human’s inherent nature and its univocal perspective on the world, which is not how the choreographers address and conceptualise to the human body in my case studies. In this thesis, I have argued that the choreographers resist an anthropocentric dualism and hierarchy between the
In realms of mediated and digital performance, choreographers’ experiments with technologies are presumably the most natural phenomenon as they are fundamentally engaged with bodies by thinking and substantiating their embodied knowledge of the bodies as the whole entity of mind and body (Remshardt, 2008, pp.48-49). Choreographers incorporate technologies as essential elements of performance, not subsidiary ones, redressing orthodox notions of dance performance by defying its condition, the physical co-presence of human performers and audiences. They not only expand a substance for incarnating choreographic knowledge from a body to an object and a (material or immaterial) space, but also reframe choreographic knowledge itself by reflecting on how a human subject’s corporeal and technological self are entangled to embody the world and the self within the world. As the case studies of this thesis have contemporary choreographic practices involve the disembodiment of the corporeal body in a virtual world and the dehumanisation/mechanisation of the human through cyborgian technologies. From an anthropocentric humanist perspective that treats technology and its increasing physical and cognitive ability as a potential threat to the human, or from a popular posthumanist/transhumanist perspective that pursues the transcendence of the body, technologically generated presence of the human subject in choreographic practices may be conceived as an apocalyptic future for the human body. However, this pessimistic view of virtual and cyborgian bodies perpetuates a dualistic assumption that primarily relegates the body to its sensorimotor surface separated from its abstract cognition and affords the privilege of the human’s inherent nature and its univocal perspective on the world, which is not how the choreographers address and conceptualise to the human body in my case studies. In this thesis, I have argued that the choreographers resist an anthropocentric dualism and hierarchy between the
Seok_Jin_Han_Choreographing_the_Posthuman.docx