POST-HUMANIST
“As with other theories, posthumanism can be used in advancing the ethics of design professions and in de-centering both the human and capitalism. ”
— Wid Bibliography 2nd Ed.
Kim Tallbear, A Sharpening of the Already Present: An Indigenous Materialist Reading of Settler Apocalypse 2020 [virtual lecture]
In this half-hour talk, scholar Kim Tallbear discusses the colonial project in relation to biases of Anthropocene discourse, and critically examines the current overlapping North American crises which together exemplify a need for ‘intellectual systems’ to disrupt ongoing colonial logic. She also contextualizes the increasing mainstream awareness of the climate crisis alongside racial capitalism, stressing that relational frameworks gaining increased visibility in theory and practice are due to “the collective genius of the people who have survived these wicked systems”. Her theoretical discussions of traditional ecological knowledge, anthropogenic change, and radical hope emphasize the indigenous intellectual labor that has created the space for current conversations around human and non-human relations.
“...when indigenous analysts speak about genocide we often understand that settler state genocide has been committed against us in concert with violence to our non-human relatives. Indeed, settler governments understood well that just as kidnapping our human children would help eliminate us as peoples, so would disrupting our kinship, our relations with non-human relatives who were also killed or eliminated. Non-human relatives such as bison, salmon, or forests, with whom indigenous peoples on these continents had mutually sustaining societies.”
Neuhaus: a temporary transdisciplinary academy for more-than-human knowledge [project]
For a four-month period beginning in the spring of 2019, the Het Niewe Instituut museum in Rotterdam transformed to the ‘Neuhaus’ academy, using its facilities and exhibit spaces for collaboration and exploration of more-than-human knowledge. The media archive of this temporary learning environment includes short video records of various activities with designers and researchers. These include the use of artificial intelligence technologies to co-create drawings with plants, sensory experiments designed to foster a heightened awareness of biological processes, and self-care investigations with designer Inès Leverrier Péborde. Longer videos include talks such as “Against Progress and Apocalypse: Diagrams for Nature Cultures,” with interdisciplinary researcher Elaine Gan, who discusses creativity in fieldwork and human de-centering practices.
“In Neuhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut wanted to challenge a notion of progress that has for centuries revolved around the specific needs and interests of some humans with the result that the realities of almost all other bodies, species, creatures and ecosystems have been side-lined”.
Posthuman Polymythology [graphic project]
Conceived by artist, designer, and researcher Anastasiia Raina, this collection of speculative graphic design work explores a posthuman design language that aims to address and encompass biopolitics, biotechnological matter, and genetically encoded information. One project in the anthology, hacking the hormone, imagines an open-access estrogen system that leverages technology as a form of body reclamation. Another project, the transforming principle, examines deep time and the post-anthropocentric everyday life through the study of the designer’s own blood cells.
“[Posthuman Polymythology] re-imagines what constitutes design today: it explores what lies beyond the materiality of objects, and makes the biotechnological matter of chemicals and encoded genetic information yet another medium of a design vocabulary.”
Joshua Bennett presents “Being Property Once Myself” and “Owed” with Imani Perry [virtual conversation]
Creative writer and scholar Joshua Bennett discusses two of his recent books, focusing on concepts of personhood and animal relations in the Black twentieth-century literary imagination, and drawing on this body of work to counter anti-Blackness in environmental discourse. In their conversation, Bennett and Perry discuss ecopoetics, Blackness, and notions of time, interspecies solidarity, post-apocalyptic futures, and the interior lives of non-human beings. This discussion is especially relevant for current conversations regarding interdisciplinary creative practice and nonhuman relations in Anthropocene discourse.
“I think the whole book is really about what witness animals bear to the ravages of human greed but also [...] There’s something too about the ongoing state of emergency of Black life alongside very real material ecological catastrophe that opens up those relationships and the language we have to describe them.”
Feral Atlas [online interactive platform]
The Feral Atlas project brings together a wide range of scholars and public thinkers to present curated non-hierarchical spatial analyses of feral species and dynamics, as well as Anthropocene conditions and perspectives. Users navigate the atlas’s web platform between interactive elements embedded in drawings, sound and video poems, field reports, and historical research. The wide-ranging representation strategies and forms of media combine with the unique user experience to emphasize research collaboration and experimental forms of knowledge dissemination.
“Feral Atlas argues that study of the Anthropocene should offer spatial as well as temporal analysis. Rather than an undifferentiated earth-wide effect, the Anthropocene is made in nonhuman responses to imperial and industrial infrastructure, which is distributed unevenly across the earth. Even carbon dioxide, distributed across the atmosphere, has a patchy distribution, created from the concentration of fossil fuel-burning factories and combustion engines, on the one hand, and carbon dioxide-reducing plant life, on the other. Such differentiation matters.”