The 2026 Ammerman Center Symposium will take place March 26-28, 2026, when we will celebrate 40 years of the Arts and Tech Symposium at Connecticut College. The call will be made public spring 2025.
The theme for the 18th Symposium will be "All Too Human," an encounter with the ever-shifting ground of what it means to be human, non-human, or along the spectrum between. Scientific and technological advances affect bodies–as extensions, prostheses, centers of knowledge production, and beyond. This year’s theme seeks to read the human with and against the grain using art and technology as potent sites of inquiry.
“All Too Human” centers the Human and troubles its boundaries: it seeks definition into what is essential to the human, how humanness unites communities, yet also divides through xenophobia. It engages with the state of Humanism as a philosophy, and the challenges to it. How do technology and techno-optimism collide or collaborate with Humanism? How do we remain humanistic in the face of extreme strife, from war to automation? Who gets to decide what or who is human, and how are technological and representational systems implicated in this process?
“All Too Human” considers the Non-Human: it expresses the aspirations, anxieties and critical thought over the non-human as it becomes more powerful, autonomous, and generative. Is there a point at which technological agents could be considered human? What would other forms be that these agents could take that stretch or disrupt our understanding of what humanity is? As we grow more aware, through old and new ways of knowing, of the agency of non-humans from plants to animals to fungi, where are the lines drawn? And what is the role of art and technology in catalyzing and criticizing all of the above?
“All Too Human” is simultaneously strength and precarity; it gets at the heart of collective knowledge and collaboration as much as it considers radical individualism. To be human, all too human, is to be creative, generative, and in conversation with those around you and a larger, globalized experience.
Please direct any questions or media inquiries to cat@conncoll.edu.
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