Chimera

Chimera identifies the characteristics of the "Expanded Body", here defined as a meeting point between science, technology, art, and design in their trans-disciplinary investigation of the human body in dialogue with its surrounding environment.

Methodologically, the book investigates how the bio-mechanical, sensory, and cognitive expansions of our soma, provided in XX and XXI century by techno-science and studied by art, design and philosophy, can contribute to model a new natural-artificial body able to activate "entangled" relationships with both human and non-human elements that inhabit the environment in which we are immersed. Chimera highlights and systematizes common features and affinities in the works of artists and designers working with tools of techno-science - Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Marco Donnarumma, Sputniko!, Margherita Pevere, Neil Harbisson, Anouk Wipprecht among others - who place the relationship between us and context around us at the center of their poetics.

Drawing on researches of the 20th century and placing them in dialogue with the latest developments in the fields of neuroscience, biotechnology, prosthetics, and body hacking, this book is the first research that, through a radical systematization of the main currents of posthuman thought, identifies the boundaries between art and design capable of suggesting an alternative to transhuman nightmares, anthropocentric dystopias, and hypermedia-driven drifts of our bodies. Opening, in an original and courageous way, to new fluid, queer, and non-hierarchical relational dimensions between us and the more-than-human environment in which we are immersed.