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The Cult of the Machine

Monday 25 October, 6pm  

With Katia Pizzi (Director, ICI London) on Italian Futurism and the Machin‘; Selena Daly (Royal Holloway, University of London) on ‘Futurism and Mechanical Warfare’; John London (Queen Mary University of London) on ‘The Futurist Beauty of Machines and the Masses’; and Molly Crozier (King’s College London) on ‘Beckett’s Italophile Protagonist: Belacqua, Machines, and Objects in More Pricks than Kicks‘.

First in a new series dedicated to Humans, Post-humans, Machine curated by Katia Pizzi and Kate Foster (Institute of Modern Languages Research)

From Archimedes’ screw to Leonardo’s helicopter to the Fiat 500, machines have always made human history. Machines built for warfare change political history, machines which connect people influence social attitudes, while machines for moving people and things impact socioeconomic development. Designed by humans to change their own environment and their place within it, machines have, at times, threatened to escape the control of the people who made them. Automata, robots, androids, cyborgs: in fiction and in life, the merging of the human and the machine has never stopped fascinating us. And now, we find ourselves able to envision as never before the possibility of real human-machine combinations, new bodies made from human and machine: the posthuman. But what does this mean for our species? A new dawn where we escape the limits of our physical bodies? Or an age where the human is no longer top dog? This series explores the interfacing of human-posthuman-machine with reference to Italian and European cultures, industries and practices.

Katia Pizzi is the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London and a Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her monograph Italian Futurism and the Machine (Manchester University Press, 2019) addresses the relationship between Italian Futurism and technology in literature and the visual and performing arts.

Dr Selena Daly is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a scholar of modern Italian history and culture; her book Italian Futurism and the First World War was published by University of Toronto Press in 2016 and she has published widely on Futurism and avant-garde cultures. She is currently working on a history of Italian migration during the years of the Great War.

John London is director of the Centre for Catalan Studies at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Contextos de Joan Brossa (2010), and the edited volumes Theatre under the Nazis (2000) and One Hundred Years of Futurism (2017). He curated and performed in Let’s Murder the Moonshine (2009), a multi-genre celebration of Italian Futurism supported by the Italian Cultural Institute London.

Molly Crozier is a PhD candidate in French at King’s College London, and recently submitted a thesis entitled ‘Expansive Bodies: Disability, Prosthesis, and Relationality in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Work’. It examines the fragmented, restricted, or struggling figures on Beckett’s stage as literally disabled, considering the ways in which such disabled bodies exceed their boundaries, reaching beyond themselves to form prosthetic relationships with objects and people. Her article, ‘“Aveugle comme le destin”: Blindness and its Inevitability in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre’, recently appeared in French Studies.

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  • Organizzato da: ICI London