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

Institut du monde Anglophone
Sorbonne Nouvelle University
5, rue de l’École de médecine 75006 Paris
June 22-23, 2018

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.

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