CFP: INSTITUT DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE – JUNE 22-23, 2018 – SORBONNE NOUVELLE UNIVERSITY, PARIS

Inhabiting immersive territories: neuroscientific and ecological perspectives on literature, videogames and the arts in the Anthropocene

While our natural habitat is being degraded by our inability to develop sustainable lifestyles on a planetary scale, arts create immersive environments, opening up new modes of inhabitation. Videogames, literature, cinema, theater, and visual arts design territories, inviting us to explore and to wander, to roam and to contemplate; unproductive activities that disrupt the cycles of neoliberalism and counter the cognitive styles it promotes.

These embodied activities are made possible by the reader/player/spectator’s capacity to immerse herself in texts, by her ability to enter altered states of consciousness. These states of consciousness allow us to dwell in secondary worlds, in which we can spend a significant part of our time and physiological resources, a significant part of our life. What can neuroscience, ecology and the humanities teach us about these states of consciousness, these modes of attention that modulate our encounter with artistic creations and their designed universes? And how do artists build these universes? How do they become a habitat for the “symbolic species” (to use Terrence Deacon’s words)? Can our daily frequentation of these territories change the way we relate to our geophysical, planetary environment?

It is around an intervention by neuroscientist Semir Zeki (University College of London) that we will engage with these questions. This conference is part of the Annual Neurohumanities Meetings held at Sorbonne Nouvelle since 2013, and is organized by the [Science/Literature] research group, EA 4398 PRISMES: https://litorg.hypotheses.org.

For more information please follow the link below:

https://immersions.hypotheses.org/

250 words abstracts accompanied by a biographical note are to be sent before April 20, 2018, to pierre-louis.patoine@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr.

Notification of acceptance date: February 28, 2018

Scientific Committee

Alexa Weik von Mossner (Klagenfurt University)

Carl Therrien (University of Montreal)

Alexis Blanchet (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Aude Leblond (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Jonathan Hope (University of Quebec in Montreal)