Kas Oosterhuis will give a lecture at the two day conference `Critical and Clinical Cartographies´ at the TU Delft, co-organized by Hyperbody. The lecture will take place on Thursday the 13th of November from 16:30 to 17:00 at the Legermuseum in Delft.

Event outline:

The conference on Embodiment and Technology and Care and Design is organised by the Theory Section and Hyperbody of the TU Delft Architecture Department, in cooperation with Industrial Design Designing Health Research programme, and the Bio Mechatronics and Bio Robotics Section of the Department of Bio Mechanical Engineering, TU Delft.

What we will be exploring is the relation between the human body as an organism and the machine technologies used in medical care. In other words we will engage in the practice of cartography in order to map the ever-shifting thresholds between the organic and the inorganic, the innate and the acquired. In short, a condition “that is no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned and determines itself in each case along with what it determines.” This is the cornerstone of the Deleuzian concept of plasticity.

Medical knowledge has advanced rapidly over the past century and it continues to progress at an unprecedented speed. The developments in the medical sciences relate to the more theoretical discourses on ‘man and nature’ in the (new) humanities at large. The two terms are not as innocent as they might seem and we propose to approach them both critically and clinically. The encounter comes under the aspects of symptomatology or the study of signs, etiology or the search for causes, and therapy or the development and application of treatment.

While etiology and therapeutics are integral parts of medicine, symptomatology could be said to belong as much to design as it does to medicine. The task of the designer is to produce ‘pre-medical’ variation on the one hand and to select and synthesize ‘sub-medical’ variants on the other so that she may participate in the construction of new possibilities of life. A new mode of existence entails making life something more than personal and liberating it from what imprisons it. This is the question of health.

The four panels during the two days will provide for different points of entry to the problem of the body and its milieux.