About this Episode
In this episode, we explore one of the most persistent intuitive models of the self: the vessel. Drawing on anthropology and neuroscience, the video examines why the idea of a soul or self as something “contained within” the body remains so widespread—and what problems this shape creates when trying to understand agency.We encounter the “homunculus effect,” investigate infinite regress, and consider alternatives to the idea of a centralised core self. While critiquing the limits of the vessel model, we also examine its affordances—such as how hiddenness contributes to our perception of agency, and how layers of containment might help us reframe animacy as a “procession of skins.”This is the first of three episodes in Chapter 2 of the thesis, Scripting for Agency, exploring the shapes we use—often unconsciously—to model the self.
About this Series
Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.Links
Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-seriesPhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf
Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art
Diagramming the Self: Deriving Lay Theories of Self from Drawings: https://katarinarankovic.art/scriptin....
References
- Brownlee, Emma Claire. “The Dead and Their Possessions: The Declining Agency of the Cadaver in Early Medieval Europe.” European Journal of Archaeology 23, no. 3 (2020): 406–27.
- Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. London: Penguin, 2004.
- Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.
- Ranković, Miloš. “Theory and Practice of Handmade Distributed Representation.” PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/1458773/Theo....
- Ranković, Katarina. “Diagramming the Self,” 2023. https://katarinarankovic.art/scriptin....
- Taylor, Steve. “How a Flawed Experiment ‘Proved’ That Free Will Doesn’t Exist.” Scientific American, 6 December 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/....