“Corporeal Literacy as Perspective on Human-Technology Relations” – Maaike Bleeker

This seminar will explore an understanding of literacy as a corporeal condition, focusing in particular on the role of movement in how human bodies make sense of what they encounter. Enactive approaches to perception and cognition point to the central role of sensorimotor schema or skills in how bodies grasp patterns of contingency in manifolds of sensory impressions. Movement is also foregrounded by technological developments that afford new modes of interaction in which gestures and other movements are not—or not only—means of expression but become part of practices of apprehending in new ways. Touch-based technologies challenge users into new perceptual and cognitive actions and turn reading into a doing at the intersection of material and immaterial spaces. Video games rely on structures that require users to move through in order to understand. Movements are increasingly part of modes of navigating through information, of finding the right piece of music, of scrolling through lists of data, of organizing and making connections between diverse materials. These developments foreground the role of movement and sensations in the moment to moment unfolding of sense-making practices and point to the need for a non-representational approach to literacy as an embodied condition.