Hi all! Each year the MercyU School of Liberal Arts (SLA) launches a theme and then encourages faculty and students to create events based on the theme. The SLA theme this year is “bodies.” Faculty in the grad program are hoping to gather students together for a themed-event called “Psyche and Soma in the Age of Cyberculture.” Just what would the event actually involve? And when would it happen? We don’t yet know! But it would somehow have something to do with the question and mystery of the mind, the self, one’s psychical quidditas (psyche) in relation to one’s physical body (soma) in this age of cyberculture, meaning the age of the internet, phones, computers, AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, MMORPGS and other co-op shared gaming and virtual environments, social media, etc.

We’re first just looking to see who from our grad program would be interested in joining together to do something on the theme. Then, from there we’d confer and determine just what that something might be. The most standard thing would be some sort of a panel event, where a series of presenters would share something (perhaps a scholarly paper, perhaps a creative-writing piece, perhaps something of the studio-arts or digital arts, perhaps something musical, perhaps something cinematic, perhaps something like dance, etc.) each somehow related to the question, issue, mystery of “Psyche and Soma in the Age of Cyberculture.” But perhaps there’s some other sort of event that we might imagine.

If any student in the grad program is curious about or interested in this, please write to cloots@mercy.edu by October 25. Reaching out does not bespeak a commitment, so if you’re at all intrigued, just reach out. Let’s just get in view who all might be interested in banding together for this event. Once we have that in view, we’ll take it from there and figure out what we each might do, and when, and in what modality.