The fantasphere of the sentient world

• Grant number: 15/13071-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2015
• End date: September 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Maria Lucia Santaella Braga
• Grantee: Adriano Messias de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Exatas e Tecnologia. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 18/02038-9 - Monstrous technologies and the human condition questions in movies, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This project is included in the speculative realism (SR) studies and it is a consequence of the development of my PhD in Communication and Semiotics, when the confluence of semiotic, psychoanalytic and cinematic fields aroused my interest about sencient objects and environments, which in turn have their own ecologies in the scope of a flat ontology that breaks with the traditional hierarchies that had the human being at their top.The selected corpus focuses on audiovisual productions such the TV series Real Humans (2012) and movies such as She (2013) and Ex-Machina (2015), which announced technological changes in objects and environments. In this same context I detected cinematic representations of a human body increasingly biocyborguized. The main hypothesis is that audiovisual productions anticipate onto-philosophical changes that are interdependent of technology, which present an important interest to science, philosophy and psychoanalysis.The so-called "fantastic" is the predominant motive in the moving images to be studied, in whose forms it is possible to capture key issues from the perspective of the SR. Therefore, I believe that the term "fantasphere" (the big sphere of the fantastic) is enough to house a dialogue between the speculative realism and the profuse fantastic forms present in the imagetic field.The methodology encompasses a bibliographic and audiovisual research. For the state of the art I selected the following authors, among others: Lucia Santaella, Manuel Delanda, Elaine Graham, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman and Steven Shaviro in the SR field and semiotics; Roger Dadoun, Jean-Claude Beaune, Noël Carroll, Cassou-Nogues and Jean-Louis Leutrat in the field of fantastic movies; and for a psychoanalytic scope, the fundamental works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.