Posthumanism in the Arts

The course provides an outline of the history of art and music with the relation to the philosophical problem—the end of humanism in Western mind. The polemical statements and debates of the philosophers, musicians, painters and art makers will intertwine with the discussions and analyses of different works of art, related to the range of the main topics—the universal catastrophe, the obliteration of the entire humanity, the spiritual misery, the Holocaust, and the various problems of posthuman society, such as the self-identification of robots, postantroposcene life of the objects and memory. The works of art, brought to the audience from numerous international exhibitions, the examples of bio-art and of contemporary music and artistic pursuits, and the classical compositions of Russian and Western composers, who described traumatic realism and apocalypse, will be displayed, analyzed, and discussed.