Affording Difference

2015  -  Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany. In the framework of MetaBody (www.metabody.eu), this conference concerned the development and implementation of tools of interactive technology for different(ly abled) bodies, challenging the notion of ability/disability and considering all bodies as different(ly abled).

In the context of new tools for understanding and raising an awareness of cultural diversity, and tools for fostering embodied communication for a sustainable culture researchers questioned: How can we remove barriers to expression? How can we promote a more positive awareness of difference? What are the cultural differences in the perception of difference? How do these differences relate to acceptance and integration (inclusion)? How do different societies (including governmental and non-governmental organizations) approach inclusion? What if the language of gestures and movements could either overcome the obstacles of spoken language or even create new languages in which all kinds of bodies with diverse abilities, (some of them labeled "disabled") could communicate?

 

METABODY is a European project, Forum and Institute coordinated by Jaime del Val the non-profit organization Reverso, that since 2013 questions the homogenisation of expressions induced by current information and control technologies, which place unprecedented threats to plurality and to fundamental rights and freedoms by reducing our actions to predictable behaviours, and proposes to reinvent them highlighting the role and diversity of embodied expression through a new concept of interactive architecture that transforms in all its physical and digital aspects, constituting dynamic, participatory and performative environments for outdoors and indoors, an emergent and indeterminate space, a METATOPIA.