Beyond-nature / Beyond-life

Due to the rapid development of materials sciences during the past decades, such disciplines known as bioinspired materials and biorobotics have posited themselves as domains whose starting point is inspiration from nature, or more precisely, from various ‘natural’ or biological objects and processes found in the natural world. For example, the technology of CRISPR gene editing developed in the 2010s may be elucidating for such projects. These projects in genetics go beyond the common conception of the readability of the world, and showcase attempts to program nature as an application of genome editing. One may therefore suggest that ‘nature’ does not act any more as a limit beyond which one cannot reach further; rather, it is a mark which may be or should be transcended.

As such examples may show, some of these developments intend to reach domains that are not only ‘beyond nature’ but also ‘beyond life’. Because many of these projects are often conducted in relation with medical research, they may result in possibilities of re-writing life while simultaneously re-writing what health and illness may potentially become. Especially due to the advent of cyber technologies, the emerging artifacts that combine the material with the digital revolutionize medical worlds, surpassing conceptions of ‘biology as information’. Correcting nature and correlatively correcting life for the purpose of ‘fixing’ or ‘ameliorating’ parts of it opens new inquiries on how understanding, researching and theorizing life and its being ‘nature’ expand ‘beyond’ these domains.

The aim of the workshop is to explore new discourses and conceptual approaches in which the research on ‘beyond-nature’ and ‘beyond-life’ is embedded. We intend to question the ways in which they reflect older traditions, identify concrete examples that support the use of such concepts, and examine how they contribute to a new theoretical landscape in the 21^st century.

Program

09:30 Coffee and cookies

10:00-10:30: Denisa Butnaru, Michael Friedman: Introduction

10:30-11:30: Falk Tauber (Freiburg)
Beyond natural motion – Plant and animals as inspiration for soft autonomous machines

11:30-12:30: Benjamin Lipp (Copenhagen)
On Interfacing Life with and through Smart Pain Technology

12:30-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00: Bianca Jansky (Augsburg)
Mundane every-day life maintenance and repair-work in algorithm-mediated (self)care with devices in, on and with bodies

15:00-16:00: Eric Deibel (Maynooth)
AI and humans who think about life: on neurotechnology and generative biology

16:00-16:15 Coffee Break

16:15-17:15: Ulrich Schwaneberg (Aachen)
Protein engineering of adhesion promoting peptides for innovations in material science that go beyond-nature

19:30 Dinner (self-paid)