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Hille with his remarkable memory reminded me of this, as mentioned today in class. They performed a prototype of the project in interspeciesness during Noorderlicht a year or two ago. Some links with the subjects you spoke about today.

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Somewhere 200 years in the future, on the ruins of an inhospitable Anthropocene, after climate change has changed the world beyond recognition, Symbiosis takes place. This post-human biotope might be rich and teaming with new artificial or enhanced biochemical life: new genetically altered life forms, (chemical) robots, hybrid technologies, and/or autonomous intelligent systems. They are all sharing resources, habitats, bodies and information in an inclusive way on the premise of: Symbiosis.

Symbiosis is a performative, multiuser and multisensory VR installation in which the human body will be redesigned. It allows every participant to embody a post-human or even nonhuman reality: a completely symbiotic human-animal or human-technologic relationship. Dutch experience design collective POLYMORF investigates in a speculative way how a more symbiotic exchange of genetic, cultural and technological traits between people and other present or future living entities can increase or change the agency of all. How will such affect future coexistence, legal rights and relationships between humans and all other living entities on a physical, emotional and spiritual level?

Symbiosis uses VR as a theatrical and philosophical tool to design an embodied multi-sensory experience. Within Symbiosis, the visitor is both spectator and performer. The installation consists of a performative space that offers a multi-user VR experience. Each experience is describing a specific symbiotic human-animal or human-technologic relationship. By choosing one of the stories, the visitor selects a character and role in the overall story world. All participants play a different symbiotic role in each other's individual lives and all characters come together at the end of the experience to join in a shared food experience. Within the performance, the physical body of the visitor is used as a muscle to control his/her speculative virtual body. Each experience will come with a uniquely designed soft robotic wearable enabling various haptic bodily interactions manipulations and interactions.

The individual VR experiences build towards a collective eating ritual, sharing virtual and real foods, and the virtual body as food. For this, a series of specially designed snacks will infuse the virtual food with unexpected taste sensations.The all-vegetarian snacks are designed by Dutch Michelin-starred restaurant Karpendonkse Hoeve master chefs. Symbiosis is inspired by Donna Haraway's book Staying With The Trouble and The Camille Stories: Children of Compost making physically tangible posthuman body architectures within a post humanistic social context, questioning current Humanistic, Anthropocentric and Liberal beliefs. cheack for more info www.symbiosis.show

Symbiosis won the IDFA Special jury award for by creative technology in the Immersive non fiction cathegory. Read the Idfa Jury report

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SYMBIOSIS
Is designed and produced by Polymorf in collaboration with Studio Biarritz.

Concept, scenario and art direction: Marcel van Brakel
Directed by: Marcel van Brakel and Mark Meeuwenoord
Coding pneumatics engineering and sound design: Mark Meeuwenoord

Interaction: coding and hardware integration: Luciano Pinna, Frank Bosma en Wijnand van Tol
3D Lead designer: Roberto Digiglio
Wearables: Maurice Spapens
Food design: Karpendonkse Hoeve

Producer: Corine Meijers
Sales and partnerships: Marieke Nooren

3D modeling and animation: Martijn Zandvliet, Edwin Kuipers, Hauke Boer and Tim van Nielen
Soft robotics: Marcel van Brakel, Pom Smit, Ruben Maas
Hardware: Scott van Haastrecht

Additional design team:, Nienke Markus, Mel Reaven, Gal Kinan, Wouter van Meegdenburg, Elja Rutters, Richelle Smits, Paul Staring, Bram Ockeloen, Lucas Groothuis, Indy van Casteren.

Voice artist onboarding: Louise Porter
Voice artist Colorado river toad: Molly O'Blivion
voice artist slime mold: Holly Habstritt Gaal
voice artist Camila: Anahita Mekanik
voice artist Multibody, the mother: Janet Peters
Voice artist Multibody, the daughter: Maya Hawke
Voice artist Multibody, the lover: Querida Lu Ahn Funck
voice artist Multibody, the anglerfish: Brian Dives

Publication:Rob van Hoesel (TEC Books) and Joost Broeren

Digital strategy: Nienke Huitenga

Commissioned by:
STRP and Breda Photo

Partners:
IDFA Doclab & MIT Media Lab
Financially supported by:
Film Fund NL and Creative Industries Fund NL
Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK)

Presented at the Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab 2020
and the Venice Gap-Financing Market 2021

Special thanks to: Ingrid van Eeghem, Jaap Krabbendam, Wander Eikelboom, Theo Andriessen, Ton van Gool, Gieske Bienert and Synchron. MU Hybrid Art House, EYE and (Im)possible Bodies, Donna Haraway and Duke University press for allowing the use of ideas from " The Camille Stories: Children of Compost," in Staying with the Trouble, written by Donna Haraway. Copyright, 2016, Duke University Press

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Somewhere 200 years in the future, on the ruins of an inhospitable Anthropocene, after climate change has changed the world beyond recognition, Symbiosis takes place. This post-human biotope might be rich and teaming with new artificial or enhanced biochemical life: new genetically altered life forms, (chemical) robots, hybrid technologies, and/or autonomous intelligent systems. They are all sharing resources, habitats, bodies and information in an inclusive way on the premise of: Symbiosis.

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Drawing in the LandRock Art in the Upper Nepean, Sydney Basin, New South Wales

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Drawing in the LandRock Art in the Upper Nepean, Sydney Basin, New South Wales

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A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art

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A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art

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Abstract

Futurists have long embraced the idea that human survival will depend on the ability to survive in outer space. Some also recognized the ocean's depths as resembling space in its promise for human success, survival, or redemption. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, more well-known for his space stories, created imagined futures in which the ocean proved key to humanity's future. The Deep Range (1957) presents the ocean not only as a source of food and other material resources but also as an environment providing generative challenges to ensure social and moral development. The ocean's critical place in the planet's future and the survival of the human species has recently been recognized in the 2019 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose "assessment of the ocean and cryosphere in a changing climate reveals the benefits of ambitious mitigation and effective adaptation for sustainable development and, conversely, the escalating costs and risks of delayed action." Mitigation and adaptation are needed to stave off some of the worst effects of climate-related problems, many of which, such as overfishing, acidification, plastic waste, noise pollution, and sea level rise, involve the oceans and, particularly, the undersea.

Imagined futures of the ocean have been intertwined with reflections on human evolution and what it means to be human. The aerospace engineer and futurist Erik Seedhouse anticipates the creation by genetic engineers of the new species Homo aquaticus three years before his predicted 2076 modification of humans for space. Whether he knows or not, he is retreading a sequence anticipated by Clarke and other futurists in the 1950s and 1960s who expected ocean exploration to prepare the way for reaching space. In 1962 Jacques Cousteau announced Homo aquaticus, describing in a speech to the first World Congress on Underwater Activities in London the intentional evolution of a human species to live underwater, "bringing humanity full circle back into the sea."

By then, Cousteau was famous as the coinventor of the Aqualung, the first commercially available scuba gear, and as the creator of the popular underwater film, Silent World. While Seedhouse's 2011 prediction for Homo aquaticus rested on genetic engineering and nanorobots, with no suggestion that nature might contribute, Cousteau's involved both technological intervention and eventual natural adaptation.

Cousteau invoked Homo aquaticus as the ocean, especially the undersea, came into focus as a prospective industrial site that, in parallel to the aerospace industry, inspired new technologies to enable undersea mining, aquaculture, oil drilling, and other ambitious uses. Many ocean scientists and engineers in the late 1950s and 1960s embraced a broader vision for working in and creating knowledge of the ocean than what came to be known as "oceanography." Engineering and human physiology were viewed as integral to the ocean science that would support these new activities. Embraced by ocean boosters of the powerful metaphor of the ocean as a frontier akin to the American West animated this optimistic view of the sea as a place people could learn to control.

Gaining the ability for people to work, and eventually live, in the sea was integral to the ocean frontier vision. Cousteau's undersea work through the 1960s was animated by the goal of fully exploiting ocean resources. His Homo aquaticus speech came just after his Conshelf I experiment, in which two oceanauts, Albert Falco and Claude Wesly, lived for six days in a habitat at thirty-seven feet, working daily in depths down to eighty feet. Similar experiments were underway in the United States, including the Sealab program led by naval officer and physician George Bond, and another by the inventor-entrepreneur Edwin Link. While aerospace companies spun off divisions to develop small submersibles and other technologies to help people gain access to the ocean with the protection of hard shells and artificial environments, Cousteau's Aqualung was the linchpin of the anticipated new and more naturalized, though still highly exploitative, human relationship with the sea. Boosters assumed that human minds and hands, untethered from the surface, would be essential for coming undersea industries. Divers needed long decompression stops after deeper and longer dives, to allow accumulated nitrogen gas to dissipate so that divers did not get sick. Experiments with so-called saturation diving aimed to enable people to remain at depth for days or weeks in undersea habitats, from which they could go out and work in the ocean. The idea was to increase productive bottom time relative to decompression time.

Cousteau proposed medical intervention to create Homo aquaticus. As he explained, "They will breathe by extracting oxygen directly from water after operations to surgically implant gills in their throats." The gills would also enable carbon dioxide to be expelled. Lungs would be filled with an incompressible liquid to make them immune from the pressure that increases with depth, which Cousteau expected would enable swims to the depth of a mile and quick returns without decompression sickness. He predicted people would be born in sea floor habitats by 2000. Although they would require the same surgery as their parents, he implied that nature might soon intervene, declaring, "I think there will be a conscious evolution of Homo aquaticus, spurred by human intelligence rather than the slow blind natural adaptation of species." Invoking evolution, even if aided by intervention, naturalized the process.

The story of Homo aquaticus reveals the extent to which the future of humanity has become tied to the ocean, including as a font of moral rebirth and, more recently, as a refuge for the human species. Antony Adler argues that ocean sciences have been intertwined with fears and fantasies about the future, showing how "scientists, politicians, and publics have involved the marine sciences and ocean environments in discourse about the fate of humanity and of the planet-debates which have conjured fantasies about utopian futures, as well as fears about human weaknesses and of humanity's ultimate demise." If oceans have proven a site and focus of fear and fantasy across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Linda Garforth demonstrates, apocalyptic and utopian science fiction visions of the future helped forge the sense of environmental crisis that arose in the 1970s. While the formal environmental movement focused more on air, fresh water, and land, the ocean also featured in dystopian as well as alternative utopian imaged futures. Media theorist Melody Jue views the ocean as "science fictional," not because of connections to aliens but because of "the effect of cognitive estrangement underwater, of shocking the reader out of their normative habits of thinking and speaking about the world that belie our terrestrial acculturation." Jue's attention to submersion, in her case diving as a method for the oceanic humanities, is shared by other blue humanists. Steven Mentz and Philip Hoare both write about their practices of ocean swimming and, in connection, invoke the so-called aquatic ape hypothesis, of a supposed aquatic phase in human evolution, not to debate the theory's scientific strengths and weaknesses but to express "an 'oceanic feeling' that many of us recognize even when we don't know where it comes from."

This article historicizes that "oceanic feeling" by investigating the precursors to and emergence of Cousteau's Homo aquaticus idea and other similar visions, the attempts to realize these predictions through technology or the manipulation of bodies, and the legacies flowing from them. Evolution, as a biological and a social concept, and also as a metaphor, became fused to conceptions of the ocean by the nineteenth century and shaped the underwater imaginary thereafter. Homo aquaticus, while animated by older traditions, flourished in the context of intensely optimistic post-World War II hopes for human use of ocean, especially its depths. The imagined transformation of human bodies to survive underwater rendered the undersea, otherwise antithetical to them, into a natural environment for people. While Cousteau's Homo aquaticus promised to unlock ocean wealth, subsequent versions shifted to yearnings merely for human survival. The origin, shape, and fate of the Homo aquaticus idea offer insights into our human relationship with the rapidly changing ocean environment, while its persistence may reflect hope for prospective solutions to encroaching, human-caused disasters.

The Ocean and Evolution

The association of the ocean with evolution surfaced by the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin worked out his theory of evolution by natural selection as men of science turned sustained attention to the ocean's depths. He himself collected marine specimens with specially adapted oyster dredges, joining a growing community of naturalists intent on studying new marine species. During his HMS Beagle voyage, he gained "a familiarity with the seafloor that was unprecedented among naturalists of the day" through working side-by-side with naval hydrographers. Marine invertebrates figured prominently in Darwin's thinking as he developed his theory, and a discovery in 1866 of a living species of stalked crinoid, previously known only through fossils, was greeted as possible confirmation of Darwin's theory. This find suggested the ocean's depths as an important site for evolution. Jules Michelet's La Mer ( The Sea), popular in both France and Britain, prompted contemplation of the human evolutionary relationship to the sea, encouraging readers "to imagine a fantastic metamorphic marine in which any organism might rapidly perform the physiological transformations that structure his evolutionary history."

An influential promoter of Darwin's theory, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, encountered evolution through his studies of radiolaria and other marine forms and, through his work, anchored human evolution to the sea. He argued that the development of the embryos of individuals of a species passed through the stages of that species' evolutionary descent. He used embryos to illustrate his theory that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," pointing to structures in vertebrate embryos that in fish develop to support gills as representing a stage when the vertebrate resembles fishlike ancestors. In this influential, now discredited, formulation shown in figure 1, humans as they develop from fertilization onward pass through stages that reenact their oceanic origins.

This link between human bodies and oceans was taken up by others. Sigmund Freud made Haeckel's concept of recapitulation central in his doctrine of psychoanalysis, arguing that dreams about immersion in water not only sublimated anxieties about birth but also might reflect primordial oceanic ancestry. The British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, known for the "primordial soup" theory of life's origins, for his work in population genetics, and for suggesting in vitro fertilization, among many other achievements, noted in 1927 the origin of humans in the ocean. Comparing blood's composition to seawater, he wrote, "we pass our first nine months as aquatic animals, suspended in and protected by a salty fluid medium. We begin life as salt-water animals." He foresaw humans' having the capacity to control their evolution and face the necessity to do so. Science fiction writers at the time posited aquatic races and artificial gills, associating such adaptation with the primitive.

After the Second World War, the trope of human evolutionary origins in the sea pervaded writings relating to the potential of the ocean frontier. In her best seller The Sea around Us, Rachel Carson noted that, just as life began in the sea, "so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved." Less poetically, the author of the popular 1954 book Man under Water exclaimed, "From an evolutionary point of view, a person swimming underwater is back where he started from." The US President John F. Kennedy remarked at the celebration of the America's Cup yacht race in 1962, "When we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came." In 1960 Clarke published his nonfiction book The Challenge of the Sea, predicting innovative uses of the sea. Introducing it, the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun noted life's origins in the sea, then extended the evolutionary trajectory to prophesy: "From a poetical, but not too farfetched, viewpoint we on earth can consider the bottom of the sea as man's point of departure on his extremely long trip to outer space."

Natural evolution as understood through science gave way to progress that would lean on human ingenuity and technology, although the ancestral connection lingered. Carson asserted that people, who no longer live in the ocean, can reenter it by inventing "mechanical eyes and ears that would create for [their] senses a world long lost, but a world that, in the deepest part of [their] subconscious mind, [they have] never wholly forgotten." Clarke noted, "Every human being, during the nine months in the womb, retraces the story of evolution from sea to land, and at one time the embryo is almost more fish than animal." His invocation of human origins in the ocean laid the foundation for his hope that medicine might prove capable of "continuing development" of a human embryo at the "fish" stage to produce "men-fish who could live in air or water." He mentioned ideas of unnamed scientists to make artificial gills and surgically attach them to human bodies and reported that Haldane thought men might breathe liquids if a suitable oxygen-carrying fluid could be developed. These predictions animate the 1938 story "The Merman," about an aquarist who invents a compound to turn lungs into gills and accidently uses it on himself. Clarke's extensive diving expertise clarified the functional implication for human bodies underwater: lungs full of liquid instead of gas would free a person from the danger from crushing pressures of the depths. By the time Cousteau predicted Homo aquaticus, a number of observers both emphasized that human bodies had emerged from an evolutionary process that began in the sea, and predicted a future when a combination of intelligence and technology might render the underwater environment a natural one, even for the air-breathing human species.

Inspirations for Homo aquaticus

While Clarke's book and "men-fish" prognostication predate Cousteau's Homo aquaticus, Cousteau's inspiration was likely similar to Clarke's rather than derived from it. First, they shared a belief in the incredible promise of the ocean to provide material benefits if people could work in it. Second, the trope of human origins in the ocean was widespread by then and related to older associations of the sea as a site of respite, renewal, and spiritual rebirth through submersion. Aside from these general contexts, there are specific stories from the World War II and postwar years that kept afloat the idea of human bodies transformed to live underwater.

A 1942 humorous fantasy novel, Mr. Limpet, by the American writer Theodore Pratt, introduced a bespectacled bookkeeper who became a fish, aided the United States in the war against Germany, and swam off to evolve a new, better "race of men." Mr. Limpet, in despair because of the raging global war, worries that the human species "had reached the topmost stair in its evolution and would now go down the other side with a rush," disappearing entirely so that "human life would have to evolve all over again." Standing at a pier, Limpet wishes he were a fish, falls in, and becomes one. On learning that the United States has entered the war, he convinces the navy to commission him as a lieutenant to spot German submarines. After his valuable service a friend warns him of plans to study then kill him, so he swims off with Ladyfish, whom he earlier rescued from a fishing boat, to the breeding ground where, "with human intelligence still contained in him, he and Ladyfish might produce something from which would evolve, if it were necessary, another race of men," presumably free of those qualities that led to world war.

The tale of Mr. Limpet involves the partial rewinding of evolution. Limpet's body transforms into a fish but retains his human intelligence-and his poor sight; he still needs eyeglasses! The grimly optimistic ending suggests that humanity's future depends on the offspring of he and Ladyfish retreading evolutionary ground. The ocean not only fostered humanity's original evolution but also was the obvious site for the do-over. Yet the new species of human must return to land: "As the present one had done, it would crawl from the salt sea." This element would be jettisoned in Homo aquaticus visions to come. Mr. Limpet inspired the 1963 movie, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, which opens with a top-secret meeting to discuss intelligent activity among dolphins. Those familiar with Limpet's wartime service suspect he is responsible. The final screen reads, "The End?," suggesting he will continue his exploits. The film does not invoke evolution explicitly, but Limpet tells Ladyfish that together they could be the start of a new and better world.

While the movie version of Mr. Limpet's adventures could not have contributed to Clarke's or Cousteau's ideas about men-fish, which appeared in 1960 and 1962 respectively, either could have read Pratt's novel. Other stories before then also played on evolution's acting on bodies underwater and may have influenced Homo aquaticus. The 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon posits a Devonian-era amphibious humanoid representing a link between land and sea animals. James Blish's 1952 story, "Surface Tension," watches the crew of a human colonization ship create a race of microscopic aquatic humanoids to survive on a planet whose land is covered with shallow puddles. Kenneth Bulmer's 1961 Beyond the Silver Sky similarly depicts a world whose "sky," the underneath of the sea's surface, is dropping. The gilled inhabitants actively try to prevent further aquatic adaptations such as webbed feet. In his earlier City under the Sea, aquaculture is staving off starvation for the world's billions, but the undersea has fostered a new race of water-breathing human monsters.

Whether Cousteau or Clarke encountered these stories of humans evolving to live underwater, they reveal oceanic meditations in imagined futures of the period. One story prompts detailed consideration because of its striking balance of natural and technological adaptation to the depths. In Undersea Fleet, published by Frederik Pohl and John Williamson in 1956, Sub-Sea Academy cadet Jim Eden befriends a classmate, David Craken, who was born in a pressure-protected dome four miles deep near the Kermadac Trench, one of the deepest on earth. Eden learns from Craken about a group of human-like creatures who evolved to live underwater and have been taught by Craken's father to domesticate the sea serpents who guard the rare and valuable Tonga pearls from the Trench ( fig. 2). The Trenchers, as they call themselves, descended from Polynesians trapped on sinking land that became a seamount. "When their island submerged, they somehow managed to live. They reverted to the past, the far-distant past when every living thing lived in the water." Craken's father calls them "amphibians," David explains, because "their lungs are changed to work like gills."

Note the insistence on evolutionary reversal to enable survival. The underwater photographer John Williamson associated Polynesians and other Indigenous divers he hired with amphibiousness. Commenting on the 1941 American Museum of Natural History underwater diorama, "Pearl Divers in Coral Reef, Tongareva, French Polynesia" ( fig. 3), on which Williamson worked, the cultural historian Ann Elias observes that the divers have strangely elongated fingers and limbs, suggesting the intent to show "that these are native people who long ago adapted to the underwater environment by becoming amphibians." Williamson described an African-Bahamian diver he hired as "nearly as amphibious as human beings can be." Rendering Indigenous divers as more animal than human, a trope dating to the sixteenth century, condemned them as inferior to white people.

For white people to gain the ability to operate successfully underwater, ingenuity and technology, not nature, were the key. This trajectory is apparent in Captain Nemo's walk through the sea floor "forest" as Crespo enabled by special underwater breathing suits, as narrated by Jules Verne in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea ( fig. 4). In Undersea Fleet, while the Trenchers are evolved from Polynesians, Eden and the other cadets undergo rigorous training and are issued specialized technology to operate at great depths. They are even part of an experiment with "depth adaptation" injections to make their tissues more resistant to pressure. The historian Gary Kroll argues that post-World War II knowledge of the ocean was mediated by the twin dynamic of "technophobia" and "technophila," best reflected for him by Thor Heyerdahl and Cousteau. Heyerdahl's technophobic engagement with the ocean, signaled by the balsa logs of the raft Kon-Tiki that carried him in 1947 from South America to the Tuamotu Islands, celebrated the primitive and the exotic, exemplifying the postwar societal impulse to escape civilization. Cousteau's technophilia, by contrast, involved technologies such as his Aqualung, diving saucer, and undersea habitats that promised human conquest of the sea. Undersea Fleet reflects this postwar tension in the respective relationships of the Trenchers, on the one hand, and the cadets, on the other, with the ocean.

Whether or not fiction summoned Homo aquaticus, more proximate evidence suggests that Cousteau, or perhaps the American journalist James Dugan, began early on playfully associating divers using Cousteau's novel "diving lung" with human evolutionary change. Dugan met Cousteau in 1944 and wrote enthusiastically about his diving and filmmaking activities thereafter. His first article, penned immediately after the meeting (though not published until 1948), introduced readers to Cousteau's divers as "a new species of large mammalian fish," calling them "the first of the menfish, a new order of marine life." Dugan dubbed Cousteau "the progenitor and first of the species pices erectus" and joked, "I think Commander Cousteau was reluctant to tell me that [diver] Frederic Dumas was turning into a fish." Many of the photographs from the article appeared again in a Life magazine piece that garnered Cousteau his first Hollywood contact. Dugan's relationship with Cousteau extended to a partnership; among other projects he ghostwrote Silent World in 1953, coauthored The Living Sea in 1963, and assisted with the proposal for film industry funding of Conshelf II, the phase of Cousteau's undersea habitat program that led to the 1964 film World without Sun.

Evolving Homo aquaticus

While technology would be essential to complete the transformation to Homo aquaticus, divers widely agreed that the experience of diving changed people profoundly. Divers' bodies underwent not only physiological changes that technology or surgery aimed to overcome but also the bodily experience of the undersea that seemed to convey a privileged knowledge of the ocean. The oceanographers Willard Bascom and Roger Revelle explained that a scientist undersea using scuba "becomes part of the medium. Subject to the same forces, he partakes of the feelings of the underwater animals as he is swaying with passing waves and drifts along, weightless, with the ocean currents." This experience from the sea creatures' perspective transformed divers. As Clarke declared, "Everyone who goes underwater becomes an amateur scientist." Immersion also promised divers more. Shortly before Cousteau's Homo aquaticus speech and two days after returning to the surface from his week in the Conshelf I habitat, Falco reported to Cousteau: "I don't know exactly what happened. I am the same person, yet I am no longer the same. Under the sea everything is . . . moral." Dugan insisted that "the coming undersea life will be inspiring," drawing parallels to creative historical epochs such as the Renaissance. The presumed efficacy of underwater experience to provoke lasting change in divers may have contributed to the vague but optimistic sense that, once human ingenuity enabled people to operate underwater, nature might take over.

The gist of my life's work had been to free man from the bondage of the surface. . . . And not only to put man there but to help him adapt, explore, subsist, survive, and learn. And he was beginning to live in the ocean, of the ocean, and for the ocean in the person of those two possessed men who calmly ignored me. I had a pang of envy for them. Men of a new kind were beginning to evolve, and I was not one of them.

For Cousteau, as for Pratt's Mr. Limpet, the process of subsisting, surviving, and learning in the ocean's depths would change the individuals, but with consequences for the species.

While innumerable observers ritually noted that human life emerged from the sea, a well-known marine scientist posited a direct human evolutionary connection with water. In 1960 Sir Alistair Hardy delivered a startling lecture to the British Sub-Aqua Club in Brighton, "Aquatic Man: Past, Present, and Future." Hardy by that time was famous for his research and writings; he served as zoologist on the RRS Discovery investigations in Antarctica from 1925 to 1927, invented the continuous plankton recorder, and contributed greatly to the understanding of marine ecology. Soon after returning from Antarctica, he learned that humans differ from other primates in having a layer of subcutaneous fat. From that time he entertained the idea that humans might have an aquatic past but did not make his hypothesis public until late in his career, after he had been knighted. As he explained in his lecture and a later essay, many uniquely human characteristics might be explained by evolution to live an aquatic life. For example, apes can walk upright but do so only when wading through water, so perhaps erect posture and bipedalism emerged from spending time in water. Noting the amount and accessibility of food along both fresh and saltwater coasts, Hardy suggested that getting shellfish out of hard shells may have motivated tool use. Human hairlessness might be another vestige of a semiaquatic lifestyle.

Although there is no clear evidence, it is difficult to imagine that Cousteau had not encountered Hardy's theory. Cousteau gave his Homo aquaticus speech two years after Hardy's lecture. Hardy was a well-known ocean scientist, and Cousteau, though himself more of an ocean technologist, was acquainted with many ocean scientists. Also, Cousteau was head of the World Underwater Federation, whose members were scuba divers from three dozen nations, and Hardy delivered his lecture to a diving club, so it seems likely he heard of it through diving circles. Finally, Hardy's comments attracted media coverage, which though critical from the perspective of evolutionary biology should have caught the attention of Dugan, a journalist interested in underwater exploration who was working closely with Cousteau. Indeed, Dugan wrote favorably about Hardy's theory in conjunction with Cousteau's Homo aquaticus idea in a 1963 New York Times feature, claiming positive reactions to Homo aquaticus by physiologists and oceanographers and remarking that "it was no surprise to the distinguished zoologist Sir Alistair Hardy, who postulates that the human species has already gone through an aquatic stage in its development."

Enacting Homo aquaticus

Cousteau's Homo aquaticus vision, as sketched in a July 1963 Popular Mechanics article, required people to "live within the sea and take possession of it." Although he became known as an environmentalist, his ocean exploration until the mid-1960s and his articulation of Homo aquaticus were both anchored in ambitions to colonize the ocean and exploit its resources. As Jon Crylen and Nicole Starosielski point out, Cousteau's projects and the more general ambitions for the oceanic undersea were exclusionary, accomplished by white male bodies and constructing the sea generally as a place for whites.

The imagined future in Undersea Fleet posited a stark distinction between nonwhite bodies, male and female, that adapted naturally to the undersea and the white male bodies of the cadets who conquered the ocean through technology. Divers and ocean boosters in the 1950s and 1960s conflated nature and technology in much the same way Cousteau did through Homo aquaticus. With scuba, the author of a diving handbook explained, people "are returning to the atmosphere in which life began millions of years ago." Lloyd Bridges, star of the popular television series Sea Hunt, noted that life originated in the sea, musing, "Perhaps this accounts for our quick adaptation to the fluid world." To some observers, technology enabled a return to the environment that fostered life; others invoked the possibility of a lingering ancient memory assisting people who go underwater. Dugan claimed that Homo aquaticus was "completing the cycle" by returning men to the sea, while Cousteau explained that humans should do "what porpoises, seals and other mammals have done already-adapt to underwater living." Achieving this would begin with technology, at first the Aqualung, but also saturation diving experiments aimed to prepare for permanent habitation. These experiments were viewed in evolutionary terms. A 1966 Sealab II report explained, "As man in the beginning came from the sea, the surface environment held the evolutionary design criteria-as we enter the program of retrogressive evolution, we must proceed with utmost care." Researchers had to unwind human evolution to seek human survival in the depths. The obvious solution at first was technology.

In the years immediately following Cousteau's speech, several institutions and experiments seemed to lead the way. In 1962 the British naval surgeon Stanley Miles published a book on medical problems of the underwater environment. In 1963 Per Solander took the helm of the new Physiological Research Laboratory at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Intended as a bridge between Scripps's physiologists, biologists at the University of California, San Diego, and the university's new medical school, the lab undertook "cardiovascular and respiratory research on large marine vertebrates and 'aquatic' man." Four years later the Undersea Medical Society formed in Bethesda, Maryland.

Other initiatives concentrated on equipment rather than medical research. Walter Robb, in research for General Electric, created a silicone membrane that kept water out but let oxygen and carbon dioxide through. Articles in Science News Letter and Life magazine in 1964 touted potential uses for submarines, undersea habitats, or hospital patients needing enriched oxygen environments. Eye-catching photos of a hamster seemingly floating in water but with dry fur accompanied the articles. The "aqua-hamster" drew oxygen from the water surrounding its tank ( fig. 5). Another researcher, Waldemar A. Ayres, tested an artificial gill at Jones Beach, New York, in 1962, a month before Cousteau's speech. Ayres patented his device in 1966, which prompted Popular Mechanics to report on it as well as Robb's membrane.

Kylstra considered his demonstration that mice could breathe oxygen in liquid evidence of the reversibility of evolution because adult mammals had accomplished "aquatic respiration." He explained that people had for centuries tried to "invade" the oceans, "perhaps driven by a subconscious nostalgia for atavistic weightlessness in the vast hydrosphere." Although he believed that human desire to enter the ocean was natural, success would require technological manipulation of bodies. Many popular accounts of ocean exploration reported these experiments on artificial gills and liquid breathing. Achievement of undersea colonization would require, Pell argued, the "creative brain and skills that substitute for physical adaptation," and he predicted "true fish-men taking their oxygen from the water, their ears and skin protected by special films, living, working, and playing in the depths." Similarly, the 1967 book Riches of the Sea anticipated the human ability to breathe oxygen from seawater based on the work of Ayres, Kylstra, and others, eventually to result in Cousteau's Homo aquaticus, "the final step toward making men underwater creatures."

Legacy of Homo aquaticus

While Cousteau may have drawn inspiration from Hardy's aquatic ape hypothesis, his reported answer to critics at the World Underwater Congress suggested that futurism motivated him: "Ever since Jules Verne," he retorted, "the informed human imagination has projected what is to come." Cousteau's Homo aquaticus idea, reported in media outlets including Science Digest, Popular Mechanics, the New York Times, Life Magazine, Time, and others, may have contributed to the popularity of The Incredible Mr. Limpet and other similar stories. The first fictional "Homo Aquaticus" appeared immediately after Cousteau's announcement, introduced by its editors with Cousteau's comment on Verne. In Poul Anderson's 1963 story, space explorers investigate the fate of colonists who had built a planet's abandoned cities, discovering a group of air-breathing, hairless, pale swimmers with fins, webbed feet and hands, and no external ears who had evolved into a sentient aquatic species ( fig. 6). These beings had returned to the sea for survival when they lost the power sources for their highly technological society. Gordon Dickson's 1967 novel The Space Swimmers chronicled a division of humanity into the Land-Born and the Sea-Born; its sequel, Home from the Shore (1978), features the long-looming clash between them.

Science fiction of the 1970s likewise included evolutionary alongside technological changes enabling people to live and work undersea to survive terrible catastrophes on land. In Hal Clement's Ocean on Top, the narrator investigates missing fellow Power Board agents and discovers an unknown, self-sufficient undersea civilization that predates the global power rationing regime. Its surgically altered citizens breath an oxygen-saturated liquid trapped near the ocean floor and subsist on cultivated plants in a lifestyle requiring enormous energy. In Monica Hughes's Crisis on Conshelf Ten, moon resident Kepler Mastermann visits an undersea community on Earth and sees that the terrestrial governments are commandeering undersea resources, just as they do to space colonies. He discovers people who have modified their bodies to have gills instead of lungs, which has put them "out on a limb of the tree of evolution, and they're just about to saw off the branch!" The changes they undergo from living in the depths threaten their humanity.

While both these stories involve surgical manipulation of bodies to permit survival undersea, the 1975 science fiction novel Red Tide posits that the pressure at great depths could change a body to enable survival there. An experimental station on the Cobb seamount at 110 feet, which is dedicated to researching how humans could live independently underwater, receives orders to destroy its surface barge and cut communications because biological warfare has released a deadly epidemic. One project involves liquid breathing through surgical intervention, resulting in dramatic changes in the men who undergo the procedure: "They seemed a species apart. Their rhythms of life were different. They slept in short cat naps." Whereas scuba felt to one of them like "fighting his way through an alien element," the liquid he breathed "seemed to flow in and out of him like life-blood. He felt ethereal, a disembodied spirit, energy through ether, working directly with the pressure and current like a hawk, catching a thermal." A second line of research found that the pressure at great depths was permanently altering the bodies of the mice, and one scientist, stuck at the lowest level of the facility at seventy-two hundred feet. The scientist reports that mice are taking up carbon dioxide and metabolizing it to produce feces that have become their own food supply. She envisions surgery to recirculate feces to small intestines so that human deep-sea dwellers would not need to eat. When the station crew try to rescue her, she refuses, explaining, "I'm not a regular member of the human race anymore." Dwelling at great depths has initiated a permanent change to her physiology, just as the surgical manipulation of the two men irrevocably transformed them.

Science fiction since then has continued to view the ocean as the site of alternative evolutionary possibilities, including for feminist- and pacifistic-imagined futures in addition to survivalist tales. The elaboration and promotion of Hardy's aquatic ape hypothesis by Elaine Morgan in her 1972 book Descent of Woman helped inspire such stories. Morgan called attention to the sexism embedded in theories of men hunting in savannah environments as the primary driver of human evolution. Although panned by biologists, the book became a best seller, making the idea of humans evolving in response to aquatic environments available to futurists. Historian of science Erika Lorraine Milam analyzed two works from the 1980s that posited novel biological and social orders in the far future in response to such evolution. Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos tells the story of a group of people stranded on an imaginary island who become the founding population of a new species of humanity to survive the human-caused catastrophes that killed off everyone else on the planet. Through the extreme contingency of a shipwreck and the subsequent evolutionary adaptation to life in water, humans' brains have shrunk, their skin has grown fur, and their hands have transformed into flippers, rendering the far-distant species peaceful and content if animalistic. Drawing inspiration from Morgan's feminist critique, Joan Slonczewski's Door into Ocean similarly posits evolutionary and social changes associated with a population living on an oceanic moon. The nonviolent, all-female Sharers have physical adaptations to their watery world including inner eyelids to protect eyes during diving and skin that appears purple as a result of symbiotic microbes that release oxygen to enable long dives.

Aquatic adaptation remains a theme in science fiction and popular culture, especially as awareness of near-future sea level rise has emerged. Some stories involve permanent physical changes to bodies to enable underwater survival or action. In the 1983 novel Startide Rising, dolphin bodies have been genetically altered by human patrons to enable space travel, but prostheses are needed by humans and dolphins depending on whether the action is in dry or wet spaces aboard vessels or on planets where they land. Paul d'Entremont's 1990 story, "Waterbreathers, Inc.," chronicles a community whose citizens use nanorobots, in combination with a process that can be taught, to breathe underwater and then remove the water from their lungs on return to dry habitats. That children learn the process more easily than adults suggests future natural evolution. The 1995 film Waterworld features a main character who has acquired gills and webbed feet and hands in a future world where there may be no more dry land. The 2011 story Dark Life by Kat Falls and its sequel Rip Tide center around the adventures of Ty, the first child born in the Benthic Settlement, where people have retreated because of a lack of living space on land. Like other children there, Ty has a special ability, in his case sonar, resulting from the pressure of deep water on his developing brain. This story, like so many others before and after Cousteau's Homo aquaticus, presents underwater living as equally physically and societally transformative.

Conclusion

Scuba put people into the ocean, both contributing to and reinforcing the cultural construction of the undersea as an environment inimical to human bodies that was newly expected to be of increasing relevance. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, evolution-as a biological and social concept and metaphor-colored the experiences of those who attempted to know the ocean through technology. Cousteau, Clarke, and their fellow ocean boosters drew on human evolution to naturalize their goal of putting people underwater to work and live. They constructed the underwater realm as a frontier where people could employ technology and direct their own evolution, extending the naturalness of biological evolution to assert the possibility of an intentional evolution to an aquatic form.

Compared with outer space, the ocean depths appeared during the postwar decades as a more accessible arena. While space exploration of that era involved work done initially exclusively by white men, the ocean emerged as a more democratic site where recreation joined work as the reason for being there and where amateurs, including women and children, could play. Yet popular culture reprsentations and diving manuals depicted white women and children entering the underwater realm, not people of color. Similarly, evocations of human evolution into aquatic beings from the 1960s onward involved white characters. Homo aquaticus, in most iterations to date, represents an anthropomorphic and an exclusionary vision.

While space enthusiasts admit that extraterrestrial colonies will never serve as a realistic solution to poverty and overpopulation, the ocean has from the nineteenth century appeared as a promising solution to human challenges. Antecedents to Homo aquaticus such as Water Babies linked human moral development to biological evolution. Others involved imagined technologies for putting bodies underwater, starting with Verne, for the purpose of controlling or colonizing the undersea. A host of actual technologies ranging from diving bells used at least since antiquity and helmet diving starting in the late nineteenth century produced cyborgs, hybrids of human bodies and machines. After the Second World War, technology for underwater access became linked to evolution. Homo aquaticus proved a generative vision, inspiring a profound revision of the possibilities for human bodies in the sea. Homo aquaticus actively promoted novel cultural views of the ocean, initially as a limitless frontier, but shifting in the 1970s to a place of last resort for human survival.

In the present moment the ocean is viewed by many as a threatened environment that simultaneously threatens human societies with inundation and destruction. History reveals that the Homo aquaticus vision sketches just one of many possible ways that humans have interacted with the undersea. Recently scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to recognize diving as an integral part of human and even hominid cultures through deep time and around the globe. Anthropologists have found evidence that Neandertals in Europe and Asia dove for aquatic species to use as food and tools. West African cultures prized and practiced swimming and diving long before European contact, and enslaved members of these communities carried these skills and their associated cultural values with them in the African diaspora. People in Oceania perceive oceans as part of the space of society, viewing their home as "seas of islands" that include the undersea as well as the surface. Recent physiological and genetics research has suggested that the Bajau people of Southeast Asia, who can spend more than half of their workdays underwater gathering fish and sea cucumbers, exhibit physical traits different from those of nearby terrestrial populations, which may result from genetic adaptations to diving. Recent free diving records to remarkable depths hint that human bodies may have greater capacity for being underwater than long imagined; one expert predicts the achievement of a depth of one thousand feet within the next decade.

This wave of recent recognition of the historical importance and geographic spread of human underwater activities emerges in part from the renewed attention the ocean attracts in the present moment. Its importance is not to suggest that Cousteau and other futurists were right that spending time underwater could cause humans to evolve into an aquatic form, although that may, perhaps, yet happen. These examples of human engagement with the underwater over deep time and across cultures suggest the possibility of alternative models for possible human relationships with the undersea than might have been imaginable in the past. It may be too soon to say whether present and future visions of Homo aquaticus will, like Seedhouse's, aim to control, colonize, and exhaustively utilize ocean resources to support the social status quo, or perhaps seek pacifist, feminist, or other hopeful ways forward that are socially inclusive, respect culturally different ways of knowing the ocean, and might perhaps even recognize the rights of other species and the ocean itself.

Acknowledgments

This article was enriched by comments from participants at the Greenhouse Speaker Series at the University of Stavanger, Norway, in September 2019; the Marine Transgressions Conference at the Environmental Humanities Research Centres of Bristol University and University of Bath Spa, Bristol, in June 2018; the Experiencing the Global Environment Workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in February 2016; and from two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Richard Bleiler for a rich list of relevant fiction I had not found as well as to Steven Mentz and Christine Keiner for generous and helpful comments on a draft.

References

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"Bringing Humanity Full Circle Back into the Sea" | Environmental Humanities | Duke University Press

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Futurists have long embraced the idea that human survival will depend on the ability to survive in outer space. Some also recognized the ocean's depths as resembling space in its promise for human success, survival, or redemption. Science fiction writer Arthur C.

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Subjective Mapping at Suikerterrein for Sense Ecology

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Subjective Mapping at Suikerterrein for Sense Ecology

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#subjectivemapping #sensecology #relationship #sensoryexperience #bodiesofwater #hydrofeminsm #grieving #anger #ecology

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Animism is a religious and ontological perspective common to many indigenous cultures across the globe. According to an oft-quoted definition from the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor, animists believe in the “animation of all nature”, and are characterized as having “a sense of spiritual beings…inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls”.

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Animism is a religious and ontological perspective common to many indigenous cultures across the globe. According to an oft-quoted definition from the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor, animists believe in the "animation of all nature", and are characterized as having "a sense of spiritual beings...inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls". More recently, ethnographers and anthropologists have moved beyond Tylor's initial definition, and have sought to understand the ways in which indigenous communities, in particular, enact social relations between humans and non-human others in a way which apparently challenges secular, Western views of what is thought to constitute the social world. (This new approach in anthropology is sometimes called the "new animism".) At a minimum, animists accept that some features of the natural environment such as trees, lakes, mountains, thunderstorms, and animals are non-human persons with whom we may maintain and develop social relationships. Additionally, many animist traditions regard features of the environment to be non-human relatives or ancestors from whom members of the community are descended.

Animism, in some form or other, has been the dominant religious tradition across all human societies since our ancestors first left Africa. Despite the near ubiquity of animistic beliefs and practices among indigenous peoples of every continent, and despite the crucial role of animism in the early emergence and development of human religious thought, contemporary academic philosophy of religion is virtually silent on the subject. This article outlines some key ideas and positions in the current philosophical and social scientific discourse on animism.

Table of Contents

1. Concepts of Animism

Animist religious traditions have been particularly prevalent among hunter-gatherer societies worldwide. A variety of different and conflicting religious traditions across the globe have been labeled "animist". So, animism is not a single religious tradition, but is instead a category to which various differing traditions appear to belong. Just as "theism" is a term that extends to cover any belief system committed to the existence of a god, "animism" is a term that extends to cover any belief system satisfying the appropriate definition (such as the classical Tylorian definition given in the introduction to this article). Note that the terms "theism" and "animism" are not mutually exclusive: an animist may or may not also be a theist. There is some dispute, particularly among anthropologists, as to whether there is a single definition that works to draw the wide variety of traditions typically considered as animist under a single umbrella.

Contemporary social scientific discussion of animism has witnessed a renaissance beginning in the late twentieth century, and this has led different authors to consider a range of alternative ways in which we might conceive of the characteristic qualities of animist thought. Some noteworthy recent contributors to this debate are Nurit Bird-David, Philippe Descola, Tim Ingold, Graham Harvey, and Stewart Guthrie. Before surveying a few of the conceptions currently discussed in this literature, it is worthwhile to be clear on what is not meant by the term "animism".

a. Hylozoism, Panpsychism, and Vitalism

When attempting to define "animism", it is important to first disentangle the concept from three closely related philosophical doctrines: Hylozoism, Panpsychism, and Vitalism. Animism is often conflated with these three doctrines as scholarly concepts of animism have traditionally drawn from the work of Tylor, and particularly from his conception of animism as a belief in the "animation of all nature," a doctrine which he also labels "universal vitality". Phrases such as these, with their allusions to a "world consciousness", have given rise to the mistaken impression that animism is a doctrine about the entire universe being fundamentally alive or sentient or filled with soul.

Hylozoism is the view that the universe is itself a living organism. It is a doctrine often attributed (although erroneously, [see Fortenbaugh 2011, 63]) to the third director of Aristotle's Lyceum, Strato of Lampsacus, who argued that motion in the universe was explicable by internal, unconscious, naturalistic mechanisms, without any need for an Aristotelian prime mover (ibid, 61). This characterization of the universe's motion as sustained by internal, unconscious mechanisms is seen as analogous to the biological mechanisms and processes sustaining life. However, religious animists typically reject the claim that all things are living, and they also reject that the universe as a whole is a living being. Typically, the animist takes particular features of the natural world as endowed with personhood or some form of interiority, often having their own cultural lives and communities akin to those of human beings.

Panpsychism is the view that "mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world" (Goff and others 2017, §2.1). Mind is, on this view, a building block of the universe. Unlike the animist, the panpsychist does not take features of the natural world to have a fully-fledged interior or cultural life akin to that of human beings. Additionally, it is not characteristic of animism to take mental properties to be fundamental to the universe or to be distributed in all systems or objects of a given type. For example, the animist need not accept that all rocks have an interior life, but only that some particular rocks do (perhaps a rock with unusual features, or one which moves spontaneously or unpredictably).

Vitalism is the out-of-favour scientific view that biological phenomena cannot be explained in purely mechanical terms and that a complete explanation of such phenomena will require an appeal to spiritual substances or forces. Proponents of the view included Francis Glisson (1597-1677), Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), and Alessandro Volta (1745-1827). Vitalists hold that all living things share in common a spiritual quality or fluid (famously dubbed by Henri Bergson as the "élan vital"). With this élan vital in hand, it was thought that phenomena that appeared recalcitrant to purely mechanical explanation (for example, the blossoming of flowers, the reproduction of worms, the musings of humans, the growth of algae, and so forth) could be explained in other, more spiritual terms. Animists, unlike vitalists, need not be committed to the existence of any sort of metaphysically special spirit or soul phenomena. Additionally, animists very often take non-biological phenomena (rivers, winds, and the like) to be animate.

b. Modernist Animism

In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume speaks of a tendency for primitive human beings "to conceive all beings like themselves." Natural phenomena are attributed to "invisible powers, possessed of sentiment and intelligence" and this can be "corrected by experience and reflection". For Tylor, "mythic personification" drives the primitive animist to posit souls inhabiting inanimate bodies. In a similar vein, Sigmund Freud writes that the animist views animals, plants, and objects as having souls "constructed on the analogy of human souls" (1950, 76). James Frazer's Golden Bough is a particularly good example, with animism being referred to as "savage dogma" (1900, 171). Rites and rituals relating to animism are described as "mistaken applications" of basic principles of analogy between the human world and the natural world (62). For these writers, animism is understood as a kind of promiscuous dualism and stray anthropomorphism. The animist is committed to a superstitious belief in anthropomorphic spirits, which reside within non-human animals or altogether inanimate objects. It is considered an erroneous view.

Although this position has faced criticism for presenting the animist's worldview as a kind of mistake (see, for example, Bird-David 1999), similar modernist conceptions of animism persist, particularly in the evolutionary psychology of religion. A notable modern proponent is Stewart Guthrie, who takes animist belief as a problem requiring an explanation. The problem needing explained is why people are so disposed to ascribe agency and personhood to non-agents and non-persons. Setting the problem in this light, Guthrie rejects post-modern and relativist tendencies in the contemporary anthropological literature, which seek to investigate animism as an ontology that differs from, but is not inferior to, naturalistic scientific understandings of the world. This post-modernist approach, Guthrie argues, makes "local imagination the arbiter of what exists," and thereby abandons many important realist commitments inherent in the scientific project (2000, 107).

Guthrie's own view is that animistic thinking is the result of an evolutionarily adaptive survival strategy. Animistic interpretations of nature are "failures of a generally good strategy" to perceive agents in non-agentive phenomena. The strategy is generally good since, as he puts it, "it is better for a hiker [for example] to perceive a boulder as a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder" (2015, 6). If we are mistaken in seeing agents everywhere, the price to pay is small. Whereas if we are not mistaken, the payoff is high. This idea has been developed further by other cognitive scientists of religion, such as Justin Barrett, who accounts for this propensity as resulting from what he calls a hyperactive agency detection device (usually abbreviated to HADD): an innate and adaptive module of human cognition.

This modernist or positivist view of animism can be contrasted with several post-modernist views, which are surveyed below.

c. Enactivist Animism

Another approach to animism takes it as a kind of non-propositional, experiential state. Tim Ingold characterizes animism as a lived practice of active listening. Animism, he says, is "a condition of being alive to the world, characterized by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next" (2006, 10). Borrowing a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, Ingold characterizes the lived experience of animism as "the sense of wonder that comes from riding the crest of the world's continued birth". The animist does not so much believe of the world that it contains spooky "nature spirits"; rather, she participates in a natural world, which is responsive and communicative. Animism is not a system to which animists relate, but rather it is immanent in their ways of relating.

On this enactivist account, the crucial thread of animist thinking is not characterized by a belief in spirits or a belief in the intentionality of non-intentional objects. Animist thinking is instead construed as a kind of experience-the living of a particular form of life, one which is responsive and communicative with the local environment, and one which engages with the natural environment as subject, not object. Thus, there is a distinctive and characteristically interpersonal quality of animist phenomenology. The animist's claim-say, that whales are persons-is not a belief to which she assents, nor is it a hypothesis which she might aim to demonstrate or falsify. On the contrary, the animist does not know that whales are persons, but rather knows how to get along with whales.

This understanding of animism echoes the philosophy of religion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously rejected the notion that the substantive empirical claims of religion should be understood as attempts at objective description or explanation. Instead, religion should be understood as a frame of experience or "world picture". A similarly permissive approach to animism and indigenous religion has recently been championed by Mikel Burley, who stresses the importance of evaluating competing religious world-pictures according to their own internal criteria and the effects that such world pictures have on the lived experience of their adherents (see Burley [2018] and [2019]).

A similar view can also be found in work outside of the analytic philosophical tradition. Continental philosophers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, for example, argue that the modern scientistic worldview alienates us from our environment and is the cause of widespread disenchantment by way of the "extirpation of animism" (2002, 2). Thus, it is our experience of the world around us which is diminished on the scientistic frame, and this disenchantment can be cured by taking up an animistic frame of experience. Martin Buber is another philosopher who stresses the fundamentally spiritual nature of what he calls the "I-Thou" aspect of experience (a subject-subject relation), which can be contrasted with the "I-It" aspect (a subject-object relation). The pragmatist philosopher William James uses the very same terms in his expression of what is characteristic of a religious perception of the universe: "The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou " (2000 [1896], 240).

It is through the animist's experience of the world as fundamentally grounded in interpersonal relations that her experience is characterized as distinct from the Western, naturalistic world picture, in which interpersonal encounters are austerely restricted to encounters between human beings.

d. Animism as Ontology

For many post-modern anthropologists, the purpose of research is understood to be a mediation between different but equally valid constructions of reality or "ontologies". This modern shift of emphasis is sometimes labeled the "ontological turn" in anthropology. According to theorists in this school, animism should be understood as consisting in a distinct ontology with distinct commitments. Philippe Descola is one writer who characterizes animism as just one competing way among several in which the culturally universal notions of "interiority" (subjective or private states of experience) and "exteriority" (physical states) can be carved up. For Descola, the animist views elements of the external world as sharing a common interiority while differing in external features. This can be contrasted with the naturalist's worldview, which holds that the world contains beings which are similar in their physicality (being made of the same or similar substances), yet which differ in their interiority. Thus, for the animist, while humans and trees, for example, differ in exteriority, they nevertheless share in common the possession of similar interior states. In 'animic' systems, humans and non-humans possess the same type of interiority. Since this interiority is understood to be common to both humans and non-humans alike, it follows that non-humans are understood as having social characteristics, such as respecting kinship rules and ethical codes.

On such an account, the animist takes the interiority of any given creature to differ from human interiority only to the extent that it is grounded in different cognitive and perceptual instruments. A tree, for example, cannot change location at will, and so has an interior life very different from that of a human being or a raven. Nevertheless, trees, humans, and ravens share in common the quality of interiority.

A more radical view in the same vein, dubbed "perspectivism", is described by Viveiros de Castro, who notes that among various Amerindian indigenous religions, a common interiority is understood to consist in a common cultural life, and it is this common culture which is cloaked in diverse exterior appearances. This view turns the traditional, Western, naturalistic notion of the unity of nature and the plurality of culture on its head. Instead, the unity of culture is a fundamental feature of the animists' world. Whereas in normal conditions, humans see humans as humans, and animals as animals, it is not the case that animals see themselves as animals. On the contrary, animals may see humans as possessing the exteriority of animals, while viewing themselves as humans. Jaguars, for example, see the blood they drink as beer, while vultures see maggots as grilled fish. They see their fur, feathers, claws, beaks, and so forth as cloaks and jewellery. In addition, they have their own social system organized in the same way as human institutions are (Viveiros de Castro, 1998, 470).

Although a particularly interesting position in its own right, perspectivism seems to apply to only a limited number of Amerindian cultures which are the objects of Viveiros de Castro's studies, and so perspectivism may not serve as a broad and inclusive account of animism that could act as an umbrella for the broad range of traditions which are, on their face, animistic.

Both Descola's and Viveiros de Castro's accounts assume that the animist ascribes interiority to non-humans as well as to non-living creatures. However, it is unclear whether all or even most putatively animist communities share in this view. At least some communities regarded as animist appear to enact social relationships with non-human persons, yet do not appear to be committed to any dualist ontological view according to which non-human persons are actually sentient or have their own unique interior states or souls (for a discussion with reference to indigenous Australian animism, see Peterson 2011, 177).

e. Social-Relational Animism

An increasingly popular view understands animism, not as depending upon some abstract notion of interiority or soul, but rather as being fundamentally to do with relationships between human and other-than-human persons. Irving Hallowell, for example, emphasizes an ontology of social relations that holds between the world's persons, only some of whom are human (1960, 22). Thus, what is fundamental to the animist's worldview is a commitment to the existence of a broad set of non-human persons. This approach has been championed by Graham Harvey, who summarizes the animist's belief as the position that "the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others" (2005, xi). That is not to say that animists have no concept of objecthood as divorced from personhood, but rather that animist traditions seriously challenge traditional Western views of what sorts of things can count as persons.

A version of this view has been championed by Nurit Bird-David (1999) who takes animism to be a "relational epistemology", in which social relations between humans and non-humans are fundamental to animist ontology. What is fundamental to the animist's worldview is the subject-subject relation, in contrast to the subject-object relation taken up in a naturalist's understanding of the world. This in no way hinges on a metaphysical dualism that makes any distinction between spirits/souls and bodies/objects. Rather, this account hinges on a particular conception of the world as coming to be known principally via socialization. The animist does not hypothesize that some particular tree is a person, and socialize accordingly. Instead, one personifies some particular tree as, when and because one socializes with it. Thus, the commitment to the idea of non-human personhood is a commitment that develops across time and through social interaction.

The animist's common adoption of kinship terms (such as "grandfather") for animals and other natural phenomena may also be elucidated on this picture. In earlier writing, Hallowell (1926) describes the extent to which "bear cults" of the circumpolar region carefully avoid general terms, such as "bear" or "animal", when addressing bears both pre- and post-mortem. Instead, kinship terms are regularly adopted. This can be explained on the assumption that the social role of the kinship term is being invoked ("grandfather", for example, refers to one who is wise, who deserves to be listened to, who has authority within the social life of the community, and so on). Indeed, in more recent writing, Bird-David speculates whether an understanding of animist belief as fundamentally built on the notion of relatives rather than persons may more accurately account for the sense in which the animist relates with non-human others (2017). For the animist, on this revised account, the world does not so much consist in a variety of human and non-human persons, who differ in their species-specific and special forms of community life; rather, the world is composed of a network of human and non-human relatives, and what is fundamental to the animist's worldview is this network as well as the maintenance of good relations within it.

2. The Neglect of Animism

Unlike theism, animism has seldom been the focus of any sustained critical or philosophical discourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, where such traditions of critical discourse have flourished, a realist interpretation of animist belief has been received negatively. 17 th century Japanese commentaries on Shinto provide a rare example of such a critical tradition. Writers such as Fukansai Habian, Arai Hakuseki, and Ando Shoeki critically engaged with the mythological and animistic aspects of Shinto, while also illuminating their historical and political subtexts. Interestingly, in his philosophical discourse On Shinto, Habian produces several naturalistic debunking arguments against animism, among which is the argument that the Japanese have developed their peculiar ontology in the same way as other island peoples, who all developed similar mythologies pertaining to a familial relationship with the unique piece of land on which they find themselves. He goes on to argue that the Japanese cannot truly be descendants of the Sun, since in the ordinary course of events, humans beget humans, dogs beget dogs, and so on. Thus, human beings could not actually be born of the Sun. It follows that the Japanese race could not be the descendants of Ameratsu, the Sun kami. Another critical argument from Habian runs that the heavenly bodies cannot be animate beings, since their movements are too linear and predictable. Were the moon truly animate, he argues, we should witness it zig-zagging as does an ant (Baskind and Bowring 2015, 147). Such debates, naturally, had little impact in the West where they were largely inaccessible (and anyways considered irrelevant). After the voyages of discovery and during the age of empire, the steady conversion of colonized peoples to the proselytizing theistic traditions of colonial powers added credence to the notion that primitive animist religions had indeed been discarded for more sophisticated religious rivals (particularly, Christianity and Islam).

The modernist view (championed by the likes of Hume, Tylor, and Frazer) according to which animism is an unsophisticated, primitive, and superstitious belief was carried over wholesale into contemporary 20 th century analytic philosophy of religion. One might expect that as religious exclusivism waned in popularity in philosophy and popular culture, animism would come to be appreciated as one valid religious perspective among many other contenders. Yet even permissive religious pluralists, such as the philosopher John Hick, denied that primitive animistic traditions count as genuine transformative encounters with transcendental ultimacy or "the Real" (1989, 278). One recent attempt to reconcile religious pluralism and indigenous religious traditions can be found in the work of Mikel Burley, although it remains to be seen what impact this approach will have on the field.

Other philosophers of religion (such as Kevin Schilbrack [2014] and Graham Oppy [2014]) argue that the philosophy of religion needs to critically engage with a greater diversity of viewpoints and traditions, which would include animism, as well as ancestor worship, shamanism and the like. Of course, it is not incumbent on these philosophers to celebrate animism. But it is important that that the field dubbed "philosophy of religion" engage with religion as a broad and varied human phenomenon. The cursory dismissal that animism receives within the discipline is, apparently, little more than a hangover of colonial biases.

The view that animist traditions fail to compete with the "great world religions" remains surprisingly pervasive in mainstream philosophy of religion. A reason for this may have to do with a prevailing conception of animist traditions as having no transformative or transcendental aspects. They are immanentist religions, which seldom speak of any notions of salvation or liberation as a central religious aim. Instead, there is a focus on the immediate needs of the community and on good working relationships which stand between human persons and the environment. Because animists are immanentists, their traditions are seen as failing to lead believers to the ultimate religious goal: salvation. However, it is clear enough that there are no non-circular grounds on which to base this appraisal. Why would we judge transcendentalist religions superior, or more efficacious, compared to immanentist ones, unless we were already committed to the view that the ultimate goal of religion is salvation?

3. Public Arguments for Animism

Some philosophical arguments can be mounted in support of animism. Some of these arguments hinge on evidence which is publicly available (call them "public arguments"). Others may hinge on what is ultimately private or person-relative evidence (call them "private arguments"). Two closely related public arguments may be proffered in support of animism:

a. Argument from Innateness

Within the field of psychology, it has been observed that children have a "tendency to regard objects as living and endowed with will" (Piaget 1929, 170). Young children are more inclined to ascribe agency to what most adults regard as inanimate objects. Evidence suggests that this tendency to attribute agency decreases markedly between three and five years of age (Bullock 1985, 222). This tendency to attribute agency is not the result of training by caregivers. Implicit in much of the psychological research is the idea that the child's perception of widespread agency is naive, and corrected by the path of development to adulthood. This was an argument already stated by the Scottish enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid in the 18 th century. Yet it is unclear on what grounds, apart from our pre-existing naturalistic commitments, we might base this appraisal.

Against the view that childhood animism is corrected by experience, David Kennedy writes that the shift towards naturalist modernism has left the child's animist commitments in a state of abandonment. Kennedy asks somewhat rhetorically: "Do young children, because of their different situation, have some insight into nature that adults do not? Does their "folly" actually represent a form of wisdom, or at least a philosophical openness lost to adults, who have learned, before they knew it, to read soul out of nature?" (Kennedy 1989). The idea that childhood animism is corrected by experience is the natural consequence of a commitment to a modernist conception of animism, but it would be a harder position to maintain according to the alternative conceptions surveyed above.

b. Argument from Common Consent

The traditional argument from common consent runs that because the majority of religious believers are theists, theism is probably true. A revised common consent argument may be launched, however, which runs that since separate and isolated religious communities independently agree to the proposition that features of the natural world (such as rocks, rivers and whales) are persons, it follows, therefore, that animism is probably true (Smith 2019). This argument relies on the social epistemic claim that independent agreement is prima facie evidence for the truth of some proposition. A similar argument supporting ancestor worship can be found in a recent article by Thomas Reuter (2014). Moreover, it is argued that since the widespread distribution of theists has been brought about by the relatively recent proselytization of politically disempowered peoples, such widespread agreement is not compelling evidence for the truth of theism. Indeed, even contemporary defenders of the common consent argument for the existence of God accept that independent agreement is stronger evidence for the truth of some proposition than agreement generated by some other means, such as "word of mouth" or indoctrination (see, for example, Zagzebski [2012, 343]). It would seem, then, that even on their own terms, contemporary proponents of the common consent argument for the existence of God ought to consider animism as a serious rival to theism.

4. Private Arguments for Animism

Recently, it has been popular to move beyond public defenses of religious belief and toward private or person-relative defenses. Such defenses typically charge that believers are warranted to accept their religious beliefs, even if they lack compelling discursive arguments or public evidence that their views are reasonable to believe or probably true. Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief is the best-known work in this vein.

If such defenses are not inherently epistemologically suspicious, then it remains open for the animist to argue that while there may be no overwhelmingly convincing arguments for animism, animist beliefs are nevertheless internally vindicated according to the standards that animists themselves hold, whatever those standards might be. It could be argued that animist belief is properly basic in the same way that Plantinga takes theistic belief to be (Plantinga 1981). In addition, it may be argued that animist beliefs are not defeated by any external challenges (Smith [2019], for example, gives rebuttals to evolutionary debunking arguments of animism). Thus, it might be argued that animism is vindicated not by external or discursive arguments according to which animism can be shown to be probably true, but by epistemic features internal to the relevant animistic belief system. The animist may argue that although animist belief is thereby justified in a circular manner, this is in no way inferior to the justification afforded to other fundamental beliefs (beliefs about perception, for example), since epistemic circularity is a feature of many of our most fundamental beliefs (William Alston [1986] defends Christian mystical practices by appeal to this kind of tu quoque argument).

5. Pragmatic Arguments for Animism

It is the nature of pragmatic arguments to present some aim as worthwhile, and to recommend some policy conducive to the achievement of that aim. Animist belief has been recommended by some writers as conducive to achieving the following three aims.

a. Environmentalism

An understanding of the environment as rich with persons clearly has implications for conservation, resource management, and sustainability. The scope of human moral decision-making, which may affect the well-being of other persons, is broadened beyond a concern only for human persons. It is on these grounds that philosophers and environmental theorists have argued that a shift towards animism is conducive to the success of worldwide conservation and sustainability efforts. Val Plumwood, for example, argues that an appreciation of non-human others is nothing short of a "basic survival project". She writes that "reversing our drive towards destroying our planetary habitat," may require "a thorough and open rethink which has the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives" (2010, 47). The argument runs that within a positivist, scientistic paradigm, reverence and appreciation for the natural world is replaced by a disregard or even an antipathy, according to which the natural world is understood as a mere resource for human consumption.

Much of the appeal of this view appears to hinge on the popular belief that many indigenous societies lived in harmony with nature and that this harmony is a direct result of their understanding of the outside world as an extension of their own society and culture. Against this ecological "noble savage" view, some scholars have charged that this romanticized picture of the animist is unrealistic, as there seems to be at best a tenuous causal connection between traditional animist belief systems and enhanced conservation practices (Tiedje 2008, 97). Any link between animism and environmentalism will also hinge importantly on precisely which natural phenomena are understood to be persons, and whether such persons require much or any respect at all. A tradition that views a fire as a subject and a grassland as a mere object is unlikely to be concerned when the former consumes the latter.

b. Feminism

It has been argued that the liberation of women is a project which cannot be disentangled from the liberation of (and political recognition of) the environment. The objectification of nature is seen as an aspect of patriarchy, which may be undone by the acceptance of an ethics of care which acknowledges the existence of non-human persons. The frame of thinking in which patriarchy flourishes depends upon a system of binary opposition, according to which "nature" is contrasted with "reason", and according to which anything considered to fall within the sphere of the former (women, indigenous peoples, animals, and so forth) is devalued and systematically disempowered (Mathews 2008, 319). Thus, animism, in so far as it rejects the traditional binary, is perceived as an ally of (a thoroughly intersectional) feminism.

Moreover, the argument is made that animism, as an epistemological world picture, itself constitutes a feminist challenge to patriarchal epistemologies and the conclusions drawn from them. So, whereas monotheistic religious traditions are taken to be grounded in abstract reasoning about ultimate causes and ultimate justice (supposedly "masculine" reasoning), animism is taken to be grounded in intuition and a concern for the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. Likewise, while an austere philosophical naturalism views the external world as fundamentally composed of unconscious, mechanistic, and deterministic causal objects whose real natures are grasped by sense perception and abstract reasoning, an animist epistemology is sensitive to the fundamentality of knowing others, and so shares common cause with feminist epistemological approaches (such as Stuckey [2010, 190]).

c. Nationalism and Sovereignty

Given the intimate connection that the animist draws between communities and their local environment, animism has been endorsed in promoting nationalistic political agendas as well as in reasserting indigenous sovereignty over contested ancestral lands. In New Zealand, for example, legal personhood has been granted to both a mountain range (Te Urewera Act 2014) and a river (Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017). In both cases, legal personhood was granted in accordance with the traditional animist commitments of local Māori, and the acts were thereby seen as reasserting indigenous sovereignty over these lands.

Nationalist political movements have also made appeal to animism and neo-paganism, particularly in hostile quests of expansion. Since animist traditions draw strong connections between environment and culture, land and relatedness, there is fertile ground for such traditions to invoke exclusive rights to the use and habitation of the environment. The promotion of Volkisch neo-paganism, for example, was used to motivate Nazi arguments for German Lebensraum, or living space-the expansion into "ancestral" German lands (Kurlander 2017, 3-32). Similarly, Shinto was instituted as the state religion in Japan in 1868 to consolidate the nation after the Meiji restoration. It was further invoked to defend notions of racial superiority up to the Second World War. As direct descendants of Amaterasu (the sun kami), the Japanese race had a claim to racial superiority, particularly over other Asian races. This claim to Japanese racial supremacy, itself a consequence of animist aspects of Shinto mythology, was often used in defense of the expansion of the Japanese empire throughout the Asia-Pacific region (Holtom 1947, 16).

6. References and Further Reading

Alston, W. (1986) 'Epistemic Circularity' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 47 (1): pp. 1-30.

Baskind, J. and Bowring, R. (2015) The Myotei Dialogues: A Japanese Christian Critique of Native Traditions. Boston: Brill.

Bird-David, N. (1999) ""Animism" Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology" Current Anthropology. 40: (S1). pp. S67-S91.

Bird-David, N. (2017) Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. Oakland: University of California Press.

Buber, M. (1970) in Kaufman, W. (trans.). I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner's and Sons.

Bullock, M. (1985) "Animism in Childhood Thinking: a New Look at an Old question" Developmental Psychology. 21: (2) pp. 217-225.

Burley, Mikel (2019) A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Descola, P. (2013) in Lloyd, J. (trans.) Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago. Chicago University Press.

Fortenbaugh, W. (2011) Strato of Lampsacus: Text, Translation and Discussion. New York: Routledge.

Frazer, J. (1900) The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan and Co.

Freud, S. (1950) Totem and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

Guthrie, S. (2015) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Guthrie, S. (2000) "On Animism" Current Anthropology. 41 (1): pp. 106-107.

Hallowell, I. (1926) "Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere" American Anthropologist. 28 (1): 1-175.

Hallowell, I. (1960) "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View" in Harvey, G. (ed.) (2002) Readings in Indigenous Religions. London. Continuum: pp. 18-49.

Harvey, G. (2005) Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hick, J. (1989) An Interpretation of Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Holtom, D. C. (1963) Modern Japan and Shinto Nationalism (3rd edition). New York: Reprinted with special arrangement with University of Chicago Press by Paragon Book Reprint Corp.

Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: University Press.

Hume, D. in G. C. A. Gaskin (ed.) (2008). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and The Natural History of Religion. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Ingold, T. (2006) "Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought" Ethnos. 71 (1): pp. 9-20.

James, W. (1896) "The Will to Believe" in Stuhr, J. (ed.) (2007) Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 230-243.

Kennedy, D. (1989) "Fools, Young Children, Animism, and the Scientific World Picture" Philosophy Today. 33 (4): pp. 374-381.

Kurlander, E. (2017) Hitler's Monsters. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Mathews, F. (2008) "Vale Val: In Memory of Val Plumwood" Environmental Values. 17 (3): pp. 317-321.

Oppy, G. (2014) Reinventing Philosophy of Religion: An Opinionated Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peoples, H., Duda, P. and Marlowe, F. (2016) "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion" Human Nature. 27. pp. 261-282.

Peterson, N. (2011) "Is the Aboriginal Landscape Sentient? Animism, the New Animism and the Warlpiri" Oceania 81 (2): pp. 167-179.

Piaget, J. (1929) The Child's Conception of the World. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Plantinga, A. (1981) "Is Belief in God Properly Basic?" Noûs. 15 (1): pp. 41-51.

Plumwood, V. (2010) "Nature in the Active Voice" in Irwin, R. (ed.) Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities. London: Continuum. pp. 32-47.

Reid, T. 1975. Inquiries and Essays. (K. Lehrer and R. E. Beanblossom, Eds.). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

Reuter, T. (2014) "Is Ancestor Veneration the Most Universal of All World Religions? A Critique of Modernist Cosmological Bias" Wacana. 15 (2): pp. 223-253.

Skrbina, D. (2018) "Panpsychism" Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/panpsych/ (Accessed 25-May-2018).

Schilbrack, K. (2014) Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Smith, T. (2019) "The Common Consent Argument for the Existence of Nature Spirits" Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

Stucky, P. (2010) "Being Known by a Birch Tree: Animist Refigurings of Western Epistemology" Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. 4 (3): 182-205.

Tiedje, K. (2008) "Situating the Corn Child: Articulating Animism and Conservation from a Nahua Perspective" Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. 2 (1): pp. 93-115.

Tylor, E. B. (1929) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. Vol. 1. London: John Murray.

Viveiros De Castro, E. (1998) "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism" Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4 (3): pp. 469-488.

Zagzebski, L. (2012) Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. Oxford: University Press.

Author Information

Tiddy Smith
Email: smithtiddy@gmail.com
Otago University
New Zealand

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Animism is a religious and ontological perspective common to many indigenous cultures across the globe. According to an oft-quoted definition from the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor, animists believe in the "animation of all nature", and are characterized as having "a sense of spiritual beings...inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls".

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Posthumanism rejects the (hu)Man traditionally imagined by humanism, especially its status as separate from or superior to the world around it. Posthumanism is part of a movement in critical theory which grew throughout the past century to decentralize the human, account for the nonhuman, and examine the relationships between humans and nonhumans. Posthumanism does not draw stark distinctions between human, animal, and machine, as Descartian philosophy would have it. Instead, it focuses on how everything is made from the same building blocks of matter, existing within and alongside each other.

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Where does Posthumanism come from?

As the name implies, posthumanism aims to push against or move beyond humanism, a worldview which took hold in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Humanism emerged from the Enlightenment's break with entirely religious and/or magical explanations of the universe, bolstered by a new vision of the future. Rather than accepting time as cyclical or predetermined with a fixed endpoint (the apocalypse in Christian theology), people began imagining the future as open, or at least subject to human influence.

In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes that this view of the future became, "the epistemological ground for a new, democratic conception of politics, based on equality [...] and on agency over the future" (2020) - that is, humanism. Humanism privileged the perspective and power of Man, championing individual rights, agency, and self-determination. Humanists called for a process of continual self-improvement and believed that Man could eventually gain complete knowledge of the world. Humans became the subject and object of study in the developing disciplines, the "Humanities."

For Neil Badmington, the philosophies of René Descartes are exemplary of humanism. Badmington summarizes Descartes' perspective in his book on Posthumanism:

Descartian philosophy emphasizes reason as the absolute difference between human and nonhuman and draws a distinction between mind (rational, spiritual, essentially human) and body (unwieldy, wordly, essentially animal). Posthumanism seeks to unsettle these dualisms.

Notions of agency and equality are common in humanist rhetoric, serving as the foundation for many declarations of civil/human rights and historical revolutions. Despite humanism's equalizing impulse, a glance at history reveals that many were excluded from this vision of unity. The human described by humanism was a specific one: male, white, able-bodied, "Western." As Rosi Braidotti writes,

The humanist 'Man' simultaneously excludes many and over-universalizes the human experience. It is with these universalizing shortcomings in mind that posthumanism emerges. It seeks to place the (hu)Man back into a more attentively framed network of nonhuman others, whilst recognising the exclusions and injustices that pervade Enlightenment-era Humanist thinking.

Defining posthumanism & the posthuman

Posthumanism rejects the (hu)Man traditionally imagined by humanism, especially its status as separate from or superior to the world around it. Posthumanism is part of a movement in critical theory which grew throughout the past century to decentralize the human, account for the nonhuman, and examine the relationships between humans and nonhumans. Posthumanism does not draw stark distinctions between human, animal, and machine, as Descartian philosophy would have it. Instead, it focuses on how everything is made from the same building blocks of matter, existing within and alongside each other.

For many scholars, the necessity of a posthuman perspective is apparent in our everyday lives. We live in the Anthropocene, "the age of the human," and climate change reveals the detrimental effects of privileging humans above all else. As natural disasters increase in frequency and extremity, the connections between ourselves and our environment only become more apparent. Posthuman theory, Braidotti writes, is "a generative tool to help us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in [...] the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet" (2013).

Posthumanism argues that the very concept of the human as a discrete and autonomous lifeform is inherently problematic. As Donna Haraway effectively illustrates in When Species Meet,

Human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. (2008)

Such science helps dethrone this notion of the human as a bounded or exceptional lifeform; the human is intrinsically tangled up with, and dependent upon, a lively matrix of nonhuman life to sustain itself. Similarly, Darwinian evolutionary theory tells us that we arrive at the human by way of a network of nonhuman transformation. Our coccyx bone is an echo of our primate origins, the webbing on our hands and feet a prescient reminder of our deeper oceanic heritage. In this context the human is by definition always and already posthuman, or more-than-human.

Moreover, as our reliance on technology increases, we find ourselves constantly entangled with the inorganic nonhuman - from pacemakers and prosthetic limbs to social media algorithms and the Metaverse. Posthumanism responds to this entangled world by asking us to interrogate what it means to be human, to pay better attention to the nonhuman, and to consider how the boundaries between human and nonhuman may be more porous than we think.

Recognizing this porosity, Braidotti offers a concise summary of posthumanism in Posthuman Knowledge:

While posthumanism might seem like a modern invention or the latest fad in critical theory, it has origins far before this century. Posthumanist scholars have worked to point out earlier places where posthumanism is relevant and identifiable - classical literature, Renaissance thought, antebellum antislavery writing. Many cultures, particularly indigenous communities, have long produced knowledge systems which recognize the interconnected relationships between humans and nonhumans.

In rejecting humanism, posthumanism also calls into question the academic subjects indebted to humanism: the Humanities. The Humanities are often defined by their study of what makes us human. What future do the humanities have in a posthuman world? Does posthumanism threaten to destroy the disciplines which produced it? Or, can we envision a notion of the "post-humanities," academic scholarship that embraces posthumanist thought? (For more on the posthumanities, see Posthuman Knowledge and Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed.)

Posthumanism & new materialism

A related movement sharing some of posthumanism's concerns is New Materialism. New Materialism responds in part to critical theory's "linguistic turn" in the second half of the twentieth century - in simplest terms, the belief that all meaning is produced by language/culture. For example, Judith Butler argues that bodies have no inherent sex or gender; meaning is culturally ascribed to them, often through repeated speech acts (see our study guide on Judith Butler's Theory of Gender Performativity). New Materialists aim to disrupt this separation of matter and meaning, along with other dualisms like body-mind and nature-culture.

As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write in New Materialisms, we live in a profoundly material world, and we ourselves are made of matter:

By refocusing on matter, and how different materials interact, New Materialism joins with posthumanism in reconsidering what it means to be human. In her New Materialist text Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett explores how all matter, human or not, organic and inorganic, contains thing-power, a level of vitality, force, and agency. Building on Spinoza's notion of "affective" bodies and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's idea of the "assemblage," Bennett argues that all matter is entangled in complex webs of influence. Rather than endowing humans with exclusive agency, Bennett describes how humans and nonhumans constantly act upon each other. Recognizing the thing-power in all matter, Bennett does not "claim that there are no differences between humans and bones, only that there is no necessity to describe these differences in a way that places humans at the ontological center of the hierarchical apex" (2010). Humans may be particularly complex systems of matter, but we are matter all the same, like bones, trees, dogs, or computers, and not truly distinct from those other forms of matter. As Bennett writes:

New Materialists aim to reconsider what it means to be a 'subject': if subjectivity is not granted to humans through some kind of exceptional rationality or transcendent soul, can it be recognized as inherent in matter itself?

New Materialism and posthumanism both aim to de-exceptionalize the human, asking: How do we understand the ways in which humans and nonhumans become entangled and indistinguishable? How would our understandings of subjectivity and agency - and our ways of living in the world - change if we recognized them in the nonhuman and the nonhuman in us? What might it look like to leave the category of "human" behind?

Posthumanism versus transhumanism

Posthumanism can often be confused with transhumanism, another theoretical perspective like New Materialism, which reconsiders the boundaries of the human. Both posthumanism and transhumanism became fully theorized in the late 20th century and both view the human as a dynamic, evolving frame rather than a fixed category. However, the philosophies differ in their goals and currents of scholarship.

Posthumanism critiques anthropocentrism, which places the human at the top of a hierarchy due to some essential difference between humans and nonhumans. Rather than defining the human in contrast to the nonhuman, or granting the human special status, posthumanism views humans as part of interconnected and interdependent relationships with nonhumans. Posthumanist thinkers critique speciesism, or the privileging of the human perspective, and strive to unsettle a strict dualism between human and nonhuman.

In contrast, transhumanism does not reject the humanist approach. In fact, transhumanism focuses on human enhancement through science and technology. As Francesca Ferrando explains in Posthuman Glossary, "In the progressive timeline of the transhuman, the future bears unique potentials: some humans may transcend their actual outﬁt in such radical ways as to become posthuman (Bostrom 2005a)" (2018). This dual use of the term "posthuman" adds to the confusion of post- and transhumanism. While transhumanism envisions the "posthuman" as a stage after our current transhuman era, Ferrando writes,

In short, both posthumanists and transhumanists may discuss topics that seem borrowed from science fiction - cyborgs, body modifications, the possibility of transplanting human consciousness into a machine. However, a transhumanist would approach these discussions with an eye toward human enhancement, considering how we might change or leave behind the human body in order to achieve greater longevity or advancement. On the other hand, a posthumanist would use these topics as an opportunity to interrogate the categorical and physical boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. (For more on transhumanism and how it differs from posthumanism, see Posthuman Glossary and Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed.)

Donna Haraway & the cyborg manifesto

In 1985, Donna Haraway published her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" (reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature), an "ironic political myth" based on the figure of the cyborg, which would become a posthumanist classic. "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism," she writes, "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" ([1985] 2013).

Haraway's essay rejects several dualisms upon which humanism rests, arguing that categories that may have once seemed distinct can no longer honestly be separated. The first is the distinction between animal and human. Speciesism or anthropocentrism (the tendency to value the human above all) has come increasingly under fire as environmental and animal rights movements gain traction and attention. Haraway writes:

The cyborg not only blurs human and animal but also dissolves the separation between animal/human (organism) and machine, the second dualism Haraway refutes. While the difference between machine and man may have seemed obvious to Descartes, Haraway responds to a world in which technology has "made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed": "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" ([1985] 2013).

The third dualism Haraway rejects is the distinction between physical and non-physical, again turning to technology as evidence: "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile" ([1985] 2013). This physical-non-physical divide can also be seen in the division between body (matter) and mind which New Materialism aims to unsettle by rooting agency and subjectivity in matter itself.

The technological advancements since "A Cyborg Manifesto" was first published only make Haraway's statements more prescient. So much of us exists on the Internet, in data, simultaneously physical and ethereal. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the Metaverse upset the distinction between physical and non-physical, human and technology, fact and fabrication.

For Haraway, in line with these unsettling effects, cyborgization is a double edged sword:

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. ([1985] 2013)

Posthuman examples: cyborgs & monsters

When theorizing the posthuman, scholars such as Haraway turn to creatures like cyborgs and monsters to help envision hybrid, more-than-human existences. Science fiction and gothic/horror literature relish imagining the nonhuman and interrogating the boundary between the "human" and the "other." In doing so, they provide fertile ground for posthuman analysis.

Cyborgs, aliens, and monsters from science fiction and horror have for centuries asked us to question where the human ends and the "other" begins. Badmington sees the popularity of science fiction movies in the mid-twentieth century as further evidence of the decline of humanism, a popular recognition that man's dominance may be slipping (if it was ever truly there in the first place):

While Lacan was holding court in Paris, productions such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, War of the Worlds, and The Blob were emerging from the Hollywood studios. In these science-fiction films - as in their literary counterparts - Man faced a threat from an inhuman other: 'his' position at the centre of things was at risk. 'They' were ready to take over, to subject 'us' to 'their' rule. Debate about the end of humanism, in other words, was not the exclusive property of critical theory: it pervaded everyday life. (2000)

While nonhuman creatures in fiction and film often appear as threats to be exterminated, metaphorically asserting Man's dominance, many monster theorists and posthumanists see monsters as more than defeatable doom-bringers. In them, we can see reflections of ourselves, even premonitions of what we could be if we embraced posthuman possibilities. The monster polices the boundaries of the possible, simultaneously relying upon and stretching beyond categorical distinctions.

What exactly makes Frankenstein's creature, constructed of human parts, not human - his large proportions, superhuman strength, lack of a biological mother? At what point does the human become a vampire, a zombie, a werewolf - creatures that, in many stories, once were human before being infected with nonhuman otherness? What frightens us more - beings that were once human (like zombies) or beings that elude our understanding entirely (like H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu or Ridley Scott's Alien)? As Stefan Herbrechter writes in Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis,

The posthuman monster à la Frankenstein thus poses the question to 'us', as representatives of an imaginary humanity: Why have you created me like this? And in doing so it vents its scorn: 'So you think you are human?'. (2013)

Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis
Stefan Herbrechter

Pitfalls of posthumanism

Posthumanism embraces paradox, sitting often in contradictions and questions. While this is one of posthumanism's strengths, it can also lead to frustrations and roadblocks. As Braidotti writes in Posthuman Feminism,

However, posthumanism aims to challenge this exclusionary notion of the human; in fact, as Braidotti continues, the "critical knowledge of those who are considered less than human is urgently needed in the debates on the posthuman, both for their own sake and for the common good," in part because "those who do not fully occupy the position of human subjects, in the fullness of the rights and entitlements that notion entails, have a unique vantage point about what counts as the unit of reference for a re-definition of the human" (2021).

Posthumanism can also fall into the very trap it criticizes: prioritizing the human perspective. In attempting to theorize the subjectivity and agency of the nonhuman, scholars may resort to describing the nonhuman in human terms and imposing the human on the nonhuman. However, Bennett suggests that maybe "a bit of anthropomorphizing will prove valuable":

Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman "environment." (2010)

Can we view nonhumans as equal players without needing them to play by our rules? Or, the more accurate and difficult question: what would it take to abandon the humanist rules of the game entirely? What new understandings of ourselves and the world around and within us would we discover?

Further posthuman reading and resources on Perlego

Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Peter Mahon

Posthuman Gothic edited by Anya Heise-von der Lippe

From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism: Philosophies of Immanence, edited by Christine Daigle and Terrance H. McDonald

More Posthuman Glossary edited by Rosi Braidotti, Emily Jones, and Goda Klumbyte

Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall

Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory by Patricia MacCormack

The Ahuman Manifesto by Patricia MacCormack

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway

Bibliography

Badmington, Neil, ed., Posthumanism. Bloomsbury, 2000.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Bennett, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Harvard University Press, 2020.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Polity, 2019.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Feminism. Polity, 2021.

Braidotti, Rosi and Maria Hlavajova. Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury, 2018.

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, ed., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 2013.

Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl and Jacob Wamberg, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Paige Allen

MSt, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies(University of Oxford)

Paige Elizabeth Allen has a Master's degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University. Her research interests include monstrosity, the Gothic tradition, illness in literature and culture, and musical theatre. Her dissertation examined sentient haunted houses through the lenses of posthumanism and queer theory.

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Posthumanism & Posthuman Theory | Definitions, Examples & Analysis

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Where does Posthumanism come from? As the name implies, posthumanism aims to push against or move beyond humanism, a worldview which took hold in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Humanism emerged from the Enlightenment's break with entirely religious and/or magical explanations of the universe, bolstered by a new vision of the future.

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nostrils further back

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what would humans look like if we evolved to become an aquatic species? 

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what would humans look like if we evolved to become an aquatic species? 

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virtuality of body - what the body could become (p.60)

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virtuality of body - what the body could become (p.60)

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Isabel Marcos has been selected for Kunstfort Kasus 2020, an annual residency program that gives an artist or designer the opportunity to expand their studio work to (the surrounding area of) the Kunstfort for one year. From a postcolonial and hydrofeminist perspective Marcos investigates the meaning of objects in the water, such as anchors, chains and buoys. For the Kunstfort Journal Marcos wrote a personal essay about the production of rope and the use of rope in human activities on the water.
Mostly, my interest in ropes arose from soft architectures; ¹ hydrofeminism; ² and a desire to learn from objects that are used to moor and dock floating constructions, such as anchors, chains and ropes. Within these objects - designed to exist in an amphibious environment - the friction between dryland and wet life is somehow manifested. Before actively introducing rope making in my artistic practice, I spent many hours browsing through the Rijkmuseum Collection website to research amphibian artifacts. It wasn't surprising to find the Rijksmuseum's digital archive filled with objects extracted from merchant ships on the bottom of the sea. After all, the Dutch colonial empire was one of the world's most extensive, reaching from Surinam, to South-Africa and Indonesia.

The short length of rope that the image on the right shows was excavated from the wreckage of 't Vliegend Hert (the flying deer), also known as t' Vliegend Hart (the flying heart), ³ a VOC ship built in 1729 that operated between 1730 and 1735. On the 3rd February 1735, at the onset of her second trip to Indonesia, 't Vliegend Hert hit some underwater sandbanks. The ship sank 18km off the shore of Vlissingen with its 256 crewmembers, and a hull filled with building materials; defense equipment; ammunition; silver and gold coins.

The rope was found in 1981, during an underwater excavation carried by the British-Dutch team "North Sea Archeological Group". It only measures 17cm in length, and clearly shows the effects of centuries of immersion in corrosive salt water. The rope was found around a wooden tackle block, also preserved at the Rijksmuseum Collection. ⁴ This indicates that it must have been part of a much longer rope that was most likely used to load and unload cargo on the vessel. In a way, the rope is one of the less captivating objects excavated from the shipwreck. Gold and silver coins, colored-clay pipes, dark glass bottles of wine - some still including cork and layer of wine, lead rolls, human ribs are among the more spectacular results of the North Sea Archeological Groups´ efforts. Although these objects sparkled off my computer screen, offering a remarkable glimpse into history, they didn't manage to hold my attention. What wasn't visible interested me more. How much toll had the salt water exactly taken? What deteriorated, and how much histories decayed at the bottom of the sea, as political regimes changed and wars divided the continents? The rope is my favorite. Everything, from canon ammunition to chests brimful of coins, needed this rope to embark on the ships voyages across the oceans separating the vast Dutch colonial empire.

Human beings began manufacturing and using ropes thousands of years before they threw themselves to conquer the watery world. In Walkscapes. Walking as an aesthetic practice, Italian architect and scholar Francesco Carieri challenges the common but erroneous conviction that architecture is an invention of the sedentary world rather than the nomadic world. ⁵ Carieri claims that architecture goes beyond the physical construction of space and form: architecture is the symbolic construction and perception of space. The first city was founded on the strings, ropes and nets that enabled the primitive communities to carry their belongings and abandon the caves; it was the erratic path and its nomadic evolution. Anthropologist Tim Ingold goes so far as to say that "the making and use of threads could be a good index of the emergence of characteristically human forms of life". ⁶ These notions developed by Ingold and Carieri bring the invention of architecture close to what American archaeologist Elizabeth Barber called the "String Revolution".

In 1994, Barber defended that threading, twisting and knotting plant-based fibers had an essential role since at least the Upper Paleolithic in a text called "the String Revolution", that was published in her book Women's Work: The First 20.000 Years. Barber challenged the idea that the first human manufactured tools were created from rigid materials such as stone. String technologies hadn't received the same attention as stone and bone artifacts, partially because their organic materials couldn't withstand the passage of time. Barber further develops her thesis by suggesting that the association of plants, thread manipulation and textiles in general with female labor played a role in the lack of attention these materials received as well. ⁷ It is believed that twenty to thirty thousand years ago, women were already in charge of string making, a gender difference that is still upholded today.

Ropes carry, tie together, hold and moor; they help us to build new relations to space. The material of the rope from 't Vliegend Hert could be abacá banana tree fibers, also known as Manila hemp, but I can't be sure. The first time I encountered Manila rope was on July the 7th, 2020. I visited A. Nobel&Zn. that day: a big warehouse and ship supply shop located in Zwijndrecht, a small town at the outskirts of Dordrecht, The Netherlands. The entrance to the enormous building faces the Oude Maas river, and when I arrived, there were more ships moored in front of the entrance than cars parked in the lot. When I entered the shop, I realized I didn't fit in at all with the profile of clientele at A. Nobel&Zn. Nevertheless, Mr. Nobel almost immediately approached me to offer his kind help and advice. He couldn't keep his curiosity to himself: "Why are you here? How did you find this place?", he asked in correct but shy English.

I was there because I wanted to learn more about nautical ropes. How do they feel? What materials are they made from? What are their textures, colors, and how do you use them? All these questions had been in my mind ever since I first outlined my plans for a project at Kunsfort bij Vijfhuizen. There were hundreds of meters of different ropes in the shop. I told Mr. Nobel straight away that I didn't own a boat, nor had I spent much time at sea. Actually, I was an artist, and I was there to familiarize myself with the nautical equipment his family sold for generations. He excitedly opened a sack, to show a bundle of khaki colored rope: "If you are an artist, you are going to like this one. It's called Manila rope". This rope was the only one manufactured from natural fibers in the establishment: every other kind was synthetic, or a mixture of cotton and synthetic fibers. The sack covering the big hank of Manila rope read: Pure Manila Rope. 20mm diameter. 220m length. 59.2 kg weight. Earth Friendly Ropes. When I asked if he knew the origins of this so called friendly rope, he raised his shoulders, and said he could only guess.

Later, I learned about British Naval Captain James Cook, who named the rope after the capital city of the Philippines and started trading it to Europe in the mid 1700s. Before, Spain, which had colonized the Philippines in the second half of the 16th century, rigged their ships sailing between Manila and Acapulco, Mexico, with Manila rope. Due to its strength and resistance to salt water, Manila rope was the most popular for nautical activities, before synthetic rope became mass produced in 1950, and took over of the market of nautical rope. Nowadays, 85% of the global production of Manila hemp takes place in the Philippines and the Manila rope that is exported to Europe is mostly used in luxurious yachts and sailing boats decoration.

Many different plants can be worked into fibers for ropes. For example, some types of wild grass from the family of the graminae, native to the Mediterranean region of Spain and North of Africa can be dried into esparto fibers. Esparto is not as popular for rope as Manila hemp, regular hemp, sisal and jute, but together with linen, it is the only plant-based fiber manufactured in Europe. Its use dates back 5,000 years at least. Esparto fibers are much shorter than the other types of fiber. This makes the rope less resilient. Moreover, the edges of the fiber break and protrude from the rope easily with use, which makes the rope hairy, and unsuitable for nautical use. Intrigued by learning more about the tactile qualities of esparto, and encouraged by the idea of working with a material that never participated in the colonial economies, I decided to search for some of these fibers. ⁸

In August 2020, I visited Juan Sanchez's atelier, located in the ground floor of his house in Carabanchel, a working-class residential neighborhood in Madrid, Spain. Juan is an espartero ( esparto artisan). His father was an espartero, and so was his grandfather. Even though Juan was a computer engineer and worked in that field for years, when his father retired, he decided it was time to change his career and take over his father's business. Until recently, he owned a shop in Madrid's old city center where he sold basketry, small souvenirs, ropes, carpets and window blinds. Unfortunately, due to the covid-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns, in June 2020 Juan had to permanently close the shop that was in his family since 1927. He currently works from his atelier/home, selling esparto fibers by order as he repairs furniture and creates craftworks by commission.

When I bought some esparto machacado ⁹ from Juan we chatted about my plans to make an esparto-based installation for the space and context of Kunsfort bij Vijfhuizen. He gave me two advises: esparto rope should only be made manually; and esparto belongs to dry climates, so urged me to be careful with its conservation in the Dutch humid polder. We also talked about hairy ropes, and I was happy to find that Juan found this quality as interesting and precious as me.

Even though the hairiness of esparto rope is generally seen as a weakness, it has a practical use in mussel farming. Mussels attach better to the rough and uneven surface of a hairy rope than to a smooth one, therefore the ropes allow mussels to grow in size and population. In Galicia, the north-western region of Spain, these material properties led to a thriving industry of farming bivalve mollusks. Ropes are suspended in a vertical position by tying them to a floating platform, producing a grid of soft columns that expands in diameter as mollusks grow on them. These structures - bateas - were originally created by farmers using old boat hulls and esparto ropes. Contemporary bateas use a type of synthetic rope, usually nylon or polyester, that is purposely designed to be hairy.

Thinking about hairs and water, I´m reminded of British writer Elain Morgan's claim that human beings evolved from semi-aquatic apes. She supports her "Aquatic Ape Theory" by addressing the specific distribution of hair on our bodies. "Perhaps this ape lost its hair, because like the whale, she needed to stay warm in the water, and thus opted instead for a nice cushion of subcutaneous insulation. Perhaps she nonetheless held on to her abundant tresses (allowing her hair to grow thicker during pregnancy) so that her infant would have somewhere to cling while they paddled about together in the sea", reflects Astrida Neimanis, hydrofeminist theorist and author of Bodies of Water, on Morgan's story. ¹⁰ Although so far, the theory hasn't been proven, more evolutionary biologist have shown interest for Morgan's alternative feminist evolutionary story the last few years. To me, the "Aquatic Ape Theory" makes a lot of sense. This is not because I'm a good swimmer (I am definitely not) but because of the sensorial experience of floating on your back: the way your hair waves in the water as you move your head from one side to the other. If our ancestors were soft skinned apes with long hair on their heads, could braiding each other's hair have been a first step in learning how to manufacture strings from vegetable fibers?

Back in the Netherlands from Madrid, with as much esparto fibers as I could fit in my hand luggage, I contacted the TextielLab in Tilburg, eager to experiment and learn more about string making with this material. The TextielLab is a unique workshop for textiles. It comprises six different departments: weaving, knitting, embroidery, laser cutting, tufting and passementerie. In response to my request for collaboration, I received a phone call from Karen in September 2020, one of the artisans working at the TextielLab. When I spoke to Karen, my initial idea to make an esparto-based installation had condensed into a plan to create a penetrable "soft wall". This wall was to consist of numerous esparto cords hanging from the ceiling until the floor, something that could be done at the passementerie department.

Karen has been working at the TextielLab for over 18 years, and she is one of the most experienced tufters of the country. She also works part time at the passementerie department. Passements means edgings in French. Passementerie comprises any fabric less than 15 cm wide, such as cords, strings, laces, elastics, ribbons, etc. Karen has a lot of knowledge on ropes, cords and braids but she had never worked with esparto before, and neither had I.

In January 2021, I travelled to Tilburg to meet Karen in the TextielLab. I brought the esparto fibers with me. In the train to Tilburg I read an interview with Swiss artist Françoise Grossen, by the editors of McGuffin Magazine. ¹¹ Grossen, famous for her big rope installations, claims that the difference between art and craft is non-existent. The paradigm in which she matured as an artist must have had something to do with her position: textiles where a highly gendered medium in the 60s. Exhausted of this narrow and sexist frame, Grossen actively resisted categorization and borders. She studied architecture for a short period of time before starting her studies in fine arts. Architecture remained a source of inspiration and fascination for her, however. Some of her biggest and better-known works were commissioned during the high demand for textile sculptures in the world of architecture and project development in the 70s in North America. To some, the postmodern architecture of that decade needed "softening", ushering in the rise of popularity of large site-specific fiber sculptures. While reading the interview, I wondered if Grossen also resisted the limits between her work and the architecture that embraced it?

When I arrived at the TextielLab I waited for Karen at the front desk, and thought back on the last thing Juan told me in his atelier in Madrid: " Esparto must be worked by hand, never with machines. You can find tutorials in YouTube; I can also send you self-made videos if you want to learn how to twist and braid the fibers". But what if we braid the fibers, instead of tensing and twisting them? What if we combined the esparto with other materials? What would a purposely hairy cord look like? In a way, I felt the presence of Grossen, and her strong resistance of borders as we began working in ways so different than prescribed and passed down by tradition and culture. Karen and I decided to not watch video tutorials, but learn through experimentation instead. At the end of the day, we reached 15 meters of hairy esparto cord. We´ll make more though. Who knows if it will end up in the water, and if so: how much toll will the water ask?
Isabel Marcos is an artist, PhD candidate at UCLM University in Cuenca (Spain) and a guest teacher at Minerva Art Academy in Groningen. She is currently a guest researcher at ASCA, Universiteit van Amsterdam and an artist in residency at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen.
1. I use the term soft architecture as an umbrella for the world of textiles, female labor, and how they relate to contemporary architecture discourses. I borrow the term from the Office for Soft Architecture, the alter ego that Canadian poet Lisa Robertson uses to write about "the history of surfaces". For more information: Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003).
2. Hydrofeminism is a proposal to think and learn from water firstly introduced by Australian theoretician Astrida Neimanis in her book Bodies of Water. Posthuman feminist phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
3. It is most likely that the original name of the ship was 't Vliegend Hert because the VOC ships were usually named after animals. In this text I have decided to use 't Vliegend Hert instead of 't Vliegend Hart, unless quoting a different author.
4. For those interested in learning more about the salvage of the wreckage of 't Vliegen Hert, and how the national, cultural and economic interests involved in such operation intertwine, I strongly recommend reading "Integrated assessment of the buried wreck site of the Dutch East Indiaman 't Vliegent Hart", published by Tine Missiaen, Ine Demerre and Valentine Verrijken in RELICTA (BRUSSEL) 9, 2012, 191-208.
5. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes, Walking as an aesthetic practice (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili SL, 2009).
6. Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History (New York: Routledge, 2007), 42.
7. Elizabeth Waylan Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 years. Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994).
8. Hemp, sisal and jute are other types of natural fibers used in the manufacture of ropes, and they were introduced to Europe during the colonization of India, Bangladesh (hemp and jute), the Caribbean Islands, Mexico and Brazil (sisal). These countries are still the manufacturing centers of these fibers, and the "western world" is still the main consumer of them.
9. Machacado literally means crushed or mashed. When the esparto needs a lot of manual work, the fibers are crushed between two stones to make them more flexible, soft and avoid cuts on the hands while working with them.
10. Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 136.
11. Kirsten Algera, and Ernst van der Hoeven, "Follow the Rope" McGuffin. The life of things no. 3, The Rope (2016/2017), 175-188.

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Is­abel Marcos has been se­lected for Kunstfort Kasus 2020, an an­nual res­i­dency pro­gram that gives an artist or de­signer the op­por­tu­nity to ex­pand their studio work to (the sur­rounding area of) the Kunstfort for one year. From a postcolonial and hydrofeminist perspective Marcos investigates the meaning of objects in the water, such as anchors, chains and buoys.

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 As  a  part  of  our  lifeworld,  water  must  take  up  an  expression  in  some  body,  and  human  embodiment  is  one  of  these  particular  expressions.

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 As  a  part  of  our  lifeworld,  water  must  take  up  an  expression  in  some  body,  and  human  embodiment  is  one  of  these  particular  expressions.

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 reimagining  our  embodied  relation  to  water

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 reimagining  our  embodied  relation  to  water

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A feminist figuration of bodies of water, I argue, offers a way of confronting these differences, but it also extends the key critique of an Anthropocene talk that pits Man against Nature ‘out there.’ Bodies of water insists that if we do live as bodies ‘in common,’ this commonality needs to extend beyond the human, into a more expansive sense of ‘we’. (p.12)
"In the context of bodies of water, that cave of self-secureness, moreover, dissolves in the dissident facticity

of transcorporeal flows."(p.14)
"Transcorporeality refers

to ‘the literal contact zone between human and more-than-human nature’ (2)

and insists that bodies are never fully autonomous"(.p33)

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#ecology #posthuman #speculativefiction #hydrofeminism #bodiesofwater #climatechange

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Listen to this episode from Occult Confessions on Spotify. The text of the Emerald Tablet can fit on the back of a t-shirt but through the ages experimenters across Europe and the Middle East have puzzled over this spare collection of lines in search of the secret to transmutation.

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#CharlesLindsay#ArtAndScience

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Charles Lindsay - The Fusion of Science and Art

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Experimenta: Sound Design and Biomimicry.

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#biomimicrysound #sounddesign #experimental

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Experimenta: Sound Design and Biomimicry.

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Please join Imagine Science Films for another edition of our Experimenta series. This week, we will be speaking with ISF Artist in Residence Charles Lindsay ...

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#aidesign #biomimicry #fashion #biomorphic #biomorphicfashion #artificialintelligence

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Femke Herregraven - "Diving Reflex" 2019 

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Femke Herregraven - "Diving Reflex" 2019 

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" According to this aquatic ape hypothesis, the “diving reflex” created a neurological connection between the throat, mouth, and brain. This allowed people to hum/sing, and eventually develop speech. "
Science Fiction story about how humans learned how to sing (then speak, language; strottenhoofd) because of a water monkey hypothesis

http://femkeherregraven.net/diving-reflex/

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Diving Reflex (Because We Learned Not To Drown We Can Sing)
Prix de Rome / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL)
19 October 2019 - 22 March 2020

Essay Prix de Rome by Maarten Buser

Femke Herregraven's multimedia installations connect seemingly disparate conceptual and material elements. Her work focuses on the effects of abstract value systems on historiography and individual lives. This research is the basis for the conception of new characters, stories, and objects.

With 'Diving Reflex (Because We Learned Not to Drown, We Can Sing)', Femke continues her research on the notion of the "catastrophe." In classical Greek tragedy, this concept referred to the final resolution of the story and only became linked to natural disasters in the eighteenth century. On the basis of the fictionalized characters "The Last Man" and Elaine Morgan, she speculates about survival strategies, and uses the human diving reflex as a conceptual tool to explore the meanings of catastrophe. Catastrophe bonds, known as cat bonds, are central to Diving Reflex.

In the 'Catbond Calendar' we see how in Western European countries, the future is mapped, calculated, and traded on financial markets on the basis of predictions about potential catastrophes. This seems to have already clinched the fate of "The Last Man," who symbolizes privileged individuals who, merely, rehearses these scenarios of scarcity and despair. His antithesis appears in the form of Elaine Morgan, a character based on the eponymous Welsh feminist writer who attributes human development to the evolution of isolated primates in semi-aquatic environments. According to this aquatic ape hypothesis, the "diving reflex" created a neurological connection between the throat, mouth, and brain. This allowed people to hum/sing, and eventually develop speech. While Morgan's diving reflex gives rise to a new voice during times of catastrophe, "The Last Man" gradually loses his.
...

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Diving Reflex (Because We Learned Not To Drown We Can Sing) Prix de Rome / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL) 19 October 2019 - 22 March 2020 Essay Prix de Rome by Maarten Buser Femke Herregraven's multimedia installations connect seemingly disparate conceptual and material elements.

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#Wedlich#Slime#SlimeANaturalHistory

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#Metamodernism

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#Animism

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As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers - as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind - I've concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.

Scientific rationalism and economistic thinking may be the dominant forces of our time, but they aren't so good at creating social purpose and meaning. Which may help explain why evidence of a new animism keeps popping up as a way to re-enchant the world, often finding its voice through commoning. This should not be too surprising, suggests ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, because the biology of life points to reality itself as a commons.

Commons are realms of life defined by organic wholeness and relationality. They stand in stark contrast to a modern world whose hallmark is separation - the separation of humans from "nature"; of individuals from each other; and a separation between our minds and our bodies.

To be sure, animism has a problematic history. Early anthropologists generally projected their own worldviews onto tribal peoples, denigrating them as backward. As staunch Cartesians and moderns, they saw body and mind as utterly separate. So anyone who ascribed a living presence to animals, mountains and natural forces could only be seen as "primitive" and "superstitious."

But today's animism (as seen through western eyes) is different. It sees the experience of life as a dynamic conversation among the creatures and natural systems of the Earth. It is about surrendering an anthrocentric vision and seeing the world as "full of persons, only some of whom are human," in which "life is always lived in relationship with others," as religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has put it. Animism is "concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons." It resembles the "I-thou" relationship of respectful presence proposed by theologian Martin Buber.

For me, two recent readings have brought animism into sharper focus for me.

The first is a piece in The Guardian by British nature writer Robert Macfarlane (November 2, 2019) that points to "new animism" on the rise. He starts by mentioning a number of "rights of nature" laws that have been enacted around the world. Ecuador and Bolivia are the the most famous cases, but did you realize that the City of Toledo, Ohio - on the banks of Lake Erie - approved a referendum in 2019 that gives "legal personhood" to that troubled lake? Lake Erie now joins the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India and the Whanganui River in New Zealand in enjoying legal standing in their respective nation-states.

Macfarlane explains the significance of the Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights:

Embedded in the bill is a bold ontological claim - that Lake Erie is a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services. The bill is, really, a work of what might be called "new animism" (the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning spirit, breath, life). By reassigning both liveliness and vulnerability to the lake, it displaces Erie from its instrumentalised roles as sump and source. As such, the bill forms part of a broader set of comparable recent legal moves in jurisdictions around the world - all seeking to recognise interdependence and animacy in the living world, and often advanced by indigenous groups - which have together come to be known as the "natural rights" or "rights of nature" movement.

Macfarlane goes on to say that a "'radical re-storying' is presently under way across culture, theory, politics and literature, as well as law" that can be seen in "the creative protests of Extinction Rebellion; in the "new animist" scholarship of Isabelle Stengers, David Abram and Eduardo Kohn" and the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. I would add the ecophilosophy of Andreas Weber ("Biology of Wonder" "Matter and Desire") and Stephan Harding ("Animate Earth").

All these efforts, says Macfarlane, "seek to recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors," in the words of Amitav Ghosh.

I have also been quite taken by Eduardo Kohn's 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Kohn boldly asks the modern mind to show humility in how it thinks about and represents "nature." It asks that we try to see the more-than-human world as a vast living system of "biosemiotics" - embodied, living organisms that are constantly creating meaning as they interact with each other.

Kohn warns that we moderns are "colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality.... Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them [nonhumans] to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves."

So in our modern world of separation, we assume that "nature" is all about individuals striving to survive a dog-eat-dog market competition, ignoring the deep symbiosis and cooperation that is a major part of all biological life. We also assume that the natural world is inert, unfeeling, and without meaning - a mute backdrop for the drama of humankind.

Kohn spent four years doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Runa of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, an experience that forced him to rethink the meaning of "real." He brilliantly argues that our planet is alive, literally, and therefore we humans, as biological beings, are deeply implicated in "a complex web of relations that [he calls] an 'ecology of selves.'"

Whether an organism presents as a threat to others, a sometime-cooperator, or a distant support through the landscape, living creatures must always invent a "self." The whole process of generating and sustaining living selves creates "meaning" embodied in the shape, behavior, and expression of an organism. Or as Kohn puts it, "All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive." Life and meaning cannot exist without each other.

Hence the explanation for the book's title. Kohn argues that forests think as its constituent living organisms interpenetrate each other in highly complicated ways, giving rise to an ecosystem of selves, whether plants or animals or microorganisms.

That's what is so difficult for we moderns to understand - the aliveness and relationality that pervades our planet! It's not just humans who are alive and having thoughts. All sorts of living organisms are creating selves and meaning, independent of human observation and activity. "The rain forest, writes Kohn, is "an emergent and expanding multilayered, cacophonous web of mutually constitutive, living, and growing thoughts."

The question is, Can we tune into that frequency, the "vast ecology of selves" that are inscrutable to modern epistemologies and ways of knowing? Can we moderns allow ourselves to enter into the logic of how forests think? Can we learn to see the relations between plants and soil, for example, or between human and jaguar, as forms of living representation and meaning, even if they lie beyond linguistics?

We are so accustomed to seeing ourselves as separate and apart from "nature" - as the apex predator that can reshape "nature" however we wish - that we have trouble situating ourselves within the flows and constraints of a living planet. We presume to be masters of "nature" - a presumption ratified by language itself. Western cultures have a strong preference for using generic, abstract nouns whereas indigenous cultures tend to use precise verbs that name relationships and interactions with living systems. Indigenous languages reflect the idea that "there exist other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human."

I resonate to the new animism because, like the commons, it is about honoring relationality as a core reality of life. That's an idea that Silke and I tried to feature in our new book Free, Fair and Alive. We wanted to reconceptualize the commons as a living social system of relationships, not merely as an economic vehicle for "managing resources."

Commoning is all about the peer construction of relationships, including with the large ecosystems in which we live. Fortunately, the new rights of nature laws, scholarly literature on animism, and the proliferation of countless commons are fueling the great OntoShift that is needed. Aliveness and the relationality it requires are getting their due recognition.
Teaser photo credit: Rajesh Pamnani via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

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As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers - as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind - I've concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.

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#Crytallography

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Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

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#DavidAbram#Animism

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#BuenViver#SumakKawsay

SumakKawsay:
meaning roughly “living well” or “life in harmony”

Buen Vivir is based on the belief that true well-being (“the good life”) is only possible as part of a community. The good of the community is placed above that of the individual. Furthermore, this is community in an expanded sense; it includes Nature, plants, animals, and the Earth

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Ecuador is building on its indigenous past by incorporating the concept of sumak kawsay into its approach to development. Rooted in the cosmovisión (or worldview) of the Quechua peoples of the Andes, sumak kawsay - or buen vivir, to give it its Spanish name - describes a way of doing things that is community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive. A far cry from the market-is-king model of capitalism, it inspired the recently revised Ecuadorian constitution, which now reads: "We ... hereby decide to build a new form of public coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living."

In English, buen vivir loosely translates "good living" or "well living", although neither term sits well with Eduardo Gudynas, a leading scholar on the subject. Both sit too close to western notions of wellbeing or welfare, he says: "These are not equivalents at all. With buen vivir, the subject of wellbeing is not [about the] individual, but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation."

Similar thinking is inspiring other social movements across South America, says Gudynas. The link to other indigenous belief systems, such as those of the Aymara peoples of Bolivia, the Quichua of Ecuador and the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, is explicit. Yet Gudynas is at pains to point out that buen vivir owes as much to political philosophy as it does to indigenous worldviews. "It is equally influenced by western critiques [of capitalism] over the last 30 years, especially from the field of feminist thought and environmentalism," he explains. "It certainly doesn't require a return to some sort of indigenous, pre-Colombian past."

Gudynas is the executive secretary of the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology in Uruguay and author of 10 books and many academic articles, including a recent background paper on the buen vivir philosophy.

A defining characteristic of buen vivir is harmony, he says, harmony between human beings, and also between human beings and nature. A related theme is a sense of the collective. Capitalism is a great promoter of individual rights: the right to own, to sell, to keep, to have. But this alternative paradigm from South America subjugates the rights of the individual to those of peoples, communities and nature.

How does this play out in practice? Take property, for example. According to buen vivir, humans are never owners of the earth and its resources, only stewards. This plays against idea of natural capital, now used widely in business circles. Ecosystem services, for example, where a monetary value is given to environmental goods such as the water provision of rivers or carbon sequestration of forests, is anathema. A more accurate parallel to buen vivir might be collaborative consumption and the sharing economy, two related ideas that are gaining traction globally.

"If you put a price on nature, then you're suggesting an ownership of the planet ... Furthermore, capital is something that is interchangeable between people. But if you destroy the environment, then it's difficult to rebuild it, which undermines it being interchangeable," Guynas argues.

The same is true for human capital. To say a factory worker's hand is worth more than his foot because he or she needs the former to operate a machine constitutes an "unacceptable mercantilisation" in Gudynas' opinion. "For the worker, he still doesn't get his hand back," he adds. Likewise, he cautions against market-driven thinking creeping into education too. "Buen vivir wouldn't design education programmes as forms of investment in human capital, but rather it would design them so that people become more illustrados [enlightened]".

Despite these critiques, the principles of buen vivir are not fundamentally incompatible with market capitalism - albeit with some important modifications. Starting with the demand side, advocates of buen vivir stress the need for us to consume less: "It's all very good pushing for energy efficiency and the like, but if your product does less environmental damage per unit but you end up selling lots more units, then the net impact is worse." The logic is hard to argue with. Nor is it an argument to which corporations are deaf to, as Unilever's championing of 'decoupled growth' illustrates.

In addition, consumers need to begin to pay the "real value" of the products they consume, Gudynas argues. That's to say, environmental and social costs should be incorporated into the final price and not externalised. He gives the example of a $25 electric fan on sale in his home city of Montevideo. "It's made in China, with plastic that isn't recyclable, with copper probably from Chile and other metals perhaps from Peru. None of the social and environmental costs of mining or transport appear in the price. If they did, it could never retail at that price."

An economy structured in accordance with buen vivir would require significant changes to capitalist modes of production too, especially with regards to agriculture. A major crunch point is size. For buen vivir, explains Gudynas, small is beautiful. Small-scale production has a number of benefits: it's more likely to reflect and enhance local culture, to include local people and to protect the local environment. Importantly, it also has a higher probability of serving local needs too. The days of industrial agriculture geared for export would be numbered therefore - a fact that Andean consumers of quinoa would no doubt welcome.

"The current discussion in about how to apply buen vivir is based around production processes that use low levels of raw materials and energy, and [which are] orientated towards regional markets," Gudynas continues. "This would imply a certain disconnection of South America as an exporter of primary commodities for the global economy. It also implies extracting only the amount of natural resources that we need to demand in the continent itself."

Traditional approaches to corporate social responsibility don't come out too well either. "Studies about CSR show that it is a good strategy for improving the brand of a company, but that it doesn't have much impact on the social performance of the sector," Gudynas argues. The problem is partly to do with the founding principles of modern corporations. "They aren't made to be responsible," he says. "They are made to generate profits."

Even if the two - responsibility and profits - could be resolved, the impediment of size still crops up: "There's an enormous distance between the decision-makers, the owners and the consequences of the company's actions ... and the managers running the company day in, day out aren't really accountable for the social impacts of their decisions because the owners are so diffuse and spread out."

Gudynas concedes that buen vivir remains an unfolding philosophy. Nor is it meant primarily as a template for organising economic affairs. Rather it describes a way of life and a form of development that sees social, cultural, environmental and economic issues working together and in balance, not separately and hierarchically as at present.

Rather than see buen vivir as a strict blueprint for change, Gudynas suggests that it is better to view it as a launch pad for fresh thinking and new perspectives: "It helps us see the limits of current development models and it allows us to dream of alternatives that until now have been difficult to fulfil."
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Buen vivir: the social philosophy inspiring movements in South America

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Ecuador is building on its indigenous past by incorporating the concept of sumak kawsay into its approach to development. Rooted in the cosmovisión (or worldview) of the Quechua peoples of the Andes, sumak kawsay - or buen vivir, to give it its Spanish name - describes a way of doing things that is community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive.

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#IsabelleStengers#Animism

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Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers-weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling.

But bridge-making is a situated practice. As a philosopher, I am situated: a daughter to a practice responsible for many divisions, but which may also be understood as a rather particular means of bridge-making. The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all Western philosophy can be understood as footnotes to Plato's texts. Perhaps I became a philosopher because writing such footnotes implies feeling the text as an animating power-inviting participation, beckoning to me and suggesting the writing of another footnote that will make a bridge to the past, that will give ideas from the past the power to affect the present.

In spite of this, I will not take advantage of the possibility that philosophy is a form of textual animism, using this to delocalize myself, to feel authorized to speak about animism. Indeed, where what we call animism is concerned, the past to be considered is primordially the one in which philosophical concepts served to justify colonization and the divide across which some felt free to study and categorize others-a divide that still exists today.

Thus, in contrast to David Abram, whose experience enables him to turn the animist modes of experience, awareness, and knowledge into an intensely powerful bridge-making tool, as a generative constraint I must accept to not feel free to speak and speculate in a way that would situate others. Rather, I must acknowledge the fact that my own practice and tradition situate me on one side of the divide, the side that characterized "others" as animists. "We," on our side, presume to be the ones who have accepted the hard truth that we are alone in a mute, blind, yet knowable world-one that is our task to appropriate.

In particular, I shall not forget that my side of the divide is still marked today not only by this epic story, but also, and perhaps more crucially, by its moral correlate: "thou shalt not regress." Such a moral imperative confers another meaning on my decision to stand on the side I belong to. Indeed, there is some work to be done on this side. We can by addressing the moral imperative that mobilizes us, as it produces an obscure fear of being accused of regression as soon as we give any sign of betraying hard truth by indulging soft, illusory beliefs.

As for this hard truth itself, philosophers are anyhow no longer on the frontlines where it is expounded. When scientists' contradictory arguments resound, we are only bystanders. Neuroscientists may freely characterize what we were proud of-freedom and rationality-as mere beliefs. Anthropologists like Philippe Descola may freely affirm that our "naturalism" is just one of four human schemes organizing the human and nonhuman world (with animism being another of these schemes). As philosophers, we may certainly wonder whether the neuronal explanation is a case of "naturalism," or whether our organizing schemes can themselves be explained in terms of some neuronal attractors. But what we know is that those who are not authorized scientists cannot intervene in these questions, any more than a mere mortal could intervene in the Olympian gods' quarrels. Neither philosophers nor theologians have a voice in such matters, although the former are descendants of Greek reason and the latter are the inheritors of the monotheistic creed. Let us not even speak of the old lady with a cat who claims that her cat understands her.

Scientists may disagree on how we are wrong, but they agree that we are wrong. The epic is no longer about the "ascent of Man," but rather about the ascent of the Scientist. How, then, to keep the question of animism, if it is taken seriously at all, from being framed in terms that verify Science's right to define it as an object of knowledge?

The work that I feel needs to be done on my side of the divide may be characterized in terms of what the ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has called a "decolonization of thought"-the attempt to resist a colonizing power that begins already with the old lady with the cat, defining her in terms of a belief that may be tolerated but never taken seriously. However, I would not identify this colonizing power with the living work of scientists. The feeling that it is possible and necessary to resist also stems from my interest in what I would call scientific achievements, and my correlative disgust at the way such achievements have been translated into the great epic story about "Science disenchanting the world."

Science, when taken in the singular and with a big S, may indeed be described as a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge. In the name of Science, a judgment has been passed on the heads of other peoples, and this judgment has also devastated our relations to ourselves-whether we are philosophers, theologians, or old ladies with cats.

Scientific achievements, on the other hand, require thinking in terms of an "adventure of sciences" (in the plural and with a small s). The distinction between such an adventure and Science as a general conquest is certainly hard to make if you consider what is done in the name of science today. However, it is important to do so because it allows for a new perspective: what is called Science, or the idea of a hegemonic scientific rationality, can be understood as itself the product of a colonization process.

On this side of the divide, it would then be possible to remain true to a very particular adventure, while also betraying the hard demands of an epic. In order to think sciences as an adventure, it is crucial to emphasize the radical difference between a scientific conquering "view of the world" and the very special and demanding character of what I would call scientific "achievements." In experimental sciences, such achievements are the very condition of what is then, after they have been verified, celebrated as an objective definition. An experimental achievement may be characterized as the creation of a situation enabling what the scientists question to put their questions at risk, to make the difference between relevant questions and unilaterally imposed ones.

What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a "partner" in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, the role of this partner is not only to answer questions but also, and primordially so, to answer them in a way that tests the relevance of the question itself. Correlatively, the answers that follow from such achievements should never separate us from anything, because they always coincide with the creation of new questions, not with new authoritative answers to questions that already mattered for us.

We can only imagine the adventure of sciences that would have accepted such claims as obvious, which would have accepted the very specific challenge of addressing whatever they address only if the situation ensures that the addressee is enabled to "take a position" about the way it is addressed. What we should not imagine, however, is that science would then have verified animism.

We may well think instead that the term itself would not exist. Only a "belief" can receive such a global name. If the adventurous specificity of scientific practices has been acknowledged, no one would dream of addressing others in terms of the "beliefs" they would entertain about a "reality" to which scientists enjoy privileged access. Instead of the hierarchical figure of a tree, with Science as its trunk, what we call progress would perhaps have had the allure of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other.

One might object by calling this a figure of anarchy. Yes-but an ecological anarchy, because while connections may be produced between any parts of a rhizome, they also must be produced. They are events, linkages-like symbiosis. They are what is and will remain heterogeneous.

In order to resist the powerful image of a treelike progress, with Science as its trunk, I will now address another idea of Gilles Deleuze, that of our need to "think by the milieu," meaning both without reference to a ground or ideal aim, and never separating something from the milieu that it requires in order to exist. To think then in terms of scientific milieus and what they demand, it is clear that not everything will agree to some of these demands. In particular, not everything may accept the role associated with scientific creation, the role of putting to the test the way it is represented.

I once offered the example of the Virgin Mary-not the theological figure but the intercessor whom pilgrims address. It's wrong to think that the Virgin Mary could make her existence known independently of the faith and trust of pilgrims; for her to do so in a situation committed to the question of how to represent her would be in bad taste. Rather, tif we accept that that aim of a pilgrimage is the transformative experience of the pilgrim, we must not require the Virgin Mary to "demonstrate" her existence to prove she is not merely a "fiction." We must not, in other words, mobilize the categories of superstition, belief, or symbolic efficacy in an attempt to explain away what pilgrims claim to experience. Instead, we must conclude that the Virgin Mary requires a milieu that does not answer to scientific demands.

However, pilgrims and the Virgin are weak examples of rhizomatic phenomena because they have been captured by the dichotomy of "natural" and "supernatural" causations. Within such a dichotomy, one would ask: What is responsible for the healings that occur at Lourdes and other miracle sites-a miraculous intervention or some sort of "enhanced placebo effect"?

This question authorizes the ugly scene, where, before announcing a miracle, the church hierarchy awaits the verdict of physicians empowered to decide whether a healing can be explained away in terms of "natural causes," such as a placebo effect. This relies on a disastrous definition the "natural," namely: that which Science will eventually explain. "Supernatural" is then-just as disastrously-whatever challenges such explanations. In other words, the milieu here opposes any rhizomatic connections, pigeonholing the case in terms of belief-those who believe that "nature," as the domain where Science rules, explains effects that kindle superstition, and those who accept this belief but add another one: a belief in a power that transcends nature.

The half-forgotten case of magnetism offers an interesting contrast here. In the nineteenth century, magnetism provoked a passionate interest that blurred the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Nature was made mysterious, and supernature was populated by messengers bringing news from elsewhere to mediums in a magnetic trance-a very disordered situation that understandably invited the hostility of both scientific and church institutions.

It has even been proposed that psychoanalysis was not the subversive "plague" that Freud boasted of, but rather a restoration of order, since it helped explain away mysterious cures, magnetic "lucidity," and other demonic manifestations pigeonholed as purely human. In the name of Science it deciphered a new universal cause. The Freudian unconscious was indeed "scientific" in the sense that it authorized the denigrating of those who marveled and fantisized, and it extolled the sad, hard truth behind specious appearances. It verified the great epic Freud himself popularized: he was following Copernicus and Darwin, inflicting a final wound on what he called our narcissistic "beliefs."

A distinct operation was attempted by the surrealist poet André Breton, who claimed that the magnetism should be taken out of the hands of scientists and physicians, who mutilate them through polemical verifications dominated by the suspicion of quackery, self-delusion, or deliberate cheating. For Breton, the point was not to verify what magnetized clairvoyants see, or to understand enigmatic healings, but to cultivate lucid trances (automatism) in the milieu of art, with the ultimate aim of escaping the shackles of normal, representational perception. The milieu of art would explore the means to "recuperate our psychical force."

Breton's proposition is interesting, as the milieu of art could indeed have supported and sustained the unsettling effects associated with magnetism. Such a milieu would perhaps have been able to produce its own practical knowledge of trances-a knowledge concerned only with effects of trances, indifferent to whether the causes were "natural" or "supernatural." Yet Breton's proposition was less a practical one than an appropriative one, marked by a typically modernist triumphalism. To him, art was supreme, not a craft among other crafts but instead the final manifestation of the "surreal," purified of superstitious beliefs-such as animism.

He would thus not envisage making rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than a representational) relation to the world. He would not break with the perspective that still dominates so many "interdisciplinary" encounters, where the "subjectivity" of the artist's standpoint is contrasted with the "objectivity" of Science. It is as if a contrast could be produced between two banners in a devastated landscape, each bearing one of these subjugating, commanding words-and therefore each empty. The seemingly opposite banners agree on one crucial thing: we should not betray the moral imperative that commands us to trample on what appears as a cradle we are able to leave, and have the imperious duty to leave.

Here it becomes crucial to finally ask, as an active, transformative, and not a reflexive question: Who is this we? It is a question whose efficacy I will associate with yet another operation, that of "reclaiming." Again it will be a question of thinking by the milieu, but this time a milieu that is dangerous and insalubrious, one that entices us to feel that we bear the high responsibility to determine what is entitled to "really" exist and what is not. It is a milieu that is, as a consequence, ruled by the power of judgmental critique.

Scientists are infected, of course, as are all those who accept their authority to decide what objectively exists. But also infected might be those who would claim to be animists, if they affirm that rocks "really" have souls or intentions, like humans. It is the "really" that matters here, an emphasis that marks the polemical power associated with truth. Coming back for a moment to the anthropologist Philippe Descola's classification, I would guess that those who are categorized as animists have no word for "really," for insisting that they are right and others are victims of illusions.

Reclaiming begins with recognizing the infective power of this milieu, a power that is not defeated in the slightest when the sad relativity of all truth is affirmed. Quite the contrary, in fact, since the sad-because monotonous-refrain of the relativist is that our truths do not "really" have the authority they claim.

Reclaiming means recovering what we have been separated from, but not in the sense that we can just get it back. Recovering means recovering from the very separation itself, regenerating what this separation has poisoned. The need to struggle and the need to heal, in order to avoid resembling those we have to struggle against, are thus irreducibly allied. A poisoned milieu must be reclaimed, and so must many of our words, those that-like "animism" and "magic"-carry with them the power to take us hostage: do you "really" believe in...?

I received this word "reclaiming" as a gift from neo-pagan contemporary witches and other US activists. I also received the shocking cry of neo-pagan Starhawk: "The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils." Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no longer take seriously the accusation of devil worshipping that was once levelled at witches. Rather, our milieu is defined by the modern pride in being able to interpret both witchery and witch hunting in terms of social, linguistic, cultural, or political constructs and beliefs. What this pride ignores, however, is that we are the heirs of an operation of cultural and social eradication-the forerunner of what was committed elsewhere in the name of civilization and reason. Anything that classifies the memory of such operations as unimportant or irrelevant only furthers the success of those operations.

In this sense, our pride in our critical power to "know better" than both the witches and the witch hunters makes us the heirs of witch hunting. The point is obviously not to feel guilty. It is rather to open up what William James, in his "The Will to Believe," called a genuine, effective option, complicating the "us" question, demanding that we situate ourselves. And here the true efficacy of Starhawk's cry enters. Reclaiming the past is not a matter of resurrecting it as it was, of dreaming to make some "true," "authentic" tradition come alive. It is rather a matter of reactivating it, and first of all, of smelling the smoke in our nostrils-the smoke that I smelled, for instance, when I hurriedly emphasized that, no, I did not "believe" that one could resurrect the past.

Learning to smell the smoke is to acknowledge that we have learned the codes of our respective milieus: derisive remarks, knowing smiles, offhand judgments, often about somebody else, but gifted with the power to pervade and infect-to shape us as those who sneer and not among those who are sneered at.

However, we can try to understand everything about how the past has shape us, but understanding is not reclaiming because it is not recovering. Indeed, this is the anguished question of David Abram, a question that we cannot avoid just by invoking capitalism or human greed: How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth? Abram writes that an answer to this question hit him when he was in a bookshop where all the sacred traditions and resources of moral wisdom of the present and the past were gathered:

No wonder! No wonder that our sophisticated civilizations, brimming with the accumulated knowledge of so many traditions, continue to flatten and dismember every part of the breathing earth ... For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings. Once inscribed on the page, all this wisdom seemed to have an exclusively human provenance. Illumination-once offered by the moon's dance in and out of the clouds, or by the dazzle of the sunlight on the wind-rippled surface of mountain tarn-was now set down in an unchanging form.

Yet David Abram still writes, and passionately so. As a first step towards recovery, I propose that the experience of writing (not writing down) is marked by the same kind of crucial indeterminacy as the dancing moon. Writing resists the "either/or" dismembering of experience. It resists the choice between either the moon that "really" offers us illumination, as an intentional subject would do, or the moon of the critique, just triggering what would "really" be of human provenance.

Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. It makes one feel that ideas are not the author's, that they demand some kind of cerebral-that is, bodily-contortion that defeats any preformed intention. (This contortion makes us larvae, as Deleuze wrote). It could even be said that writing is what gave transformative forces a particular mode of existence-that of "ideas." Alfred North Whitehead suggested that Plato's ideas are those things that first of all erotically lure the human soul-or, we could say, "animate" humans. For Whitehead, what defines the (Greek) human soul is "the enjoyment of its creative function, arising from its entertaining of ideas."

However, when the text is written, taking an "unchanging form," it may well impose itself as being of human provenance-even giving the impression that it can be the vehicle for accessing the intentions of the writer, for grasping what he "meant to communicate" and for what is ours to "understand." Correlatively, the Platonic soul may become a definition divorced from experience, something that we have and that "nature" does not have.

Whitehead wrote that, after The Symposium, where Plato discusses the erotic power of ideas, Plato should have written another dialogue called The Furies, which would have dealt with the horror lurking "within imperfect realization." The possibility of an imperfect realization is certainly present whenever transformative, metamorphic forces make themselves felt, but this is especially true where ideas are concerned, if, as I claim, the realization of ideas implies writing.

Indeed, once "written down," ideas tempt us to associate them with a definite meaning, generally available to understanding, severing the experience of reading from that of writing. This is all the more so in a world that is now saturated with texts and signs that are addressed to "anyone"-separating us from the "more than human" world to which ideas nevertheless belong. In order to reclaim animism, however, it is not sufficient to entertain an "idea" that would allow us to claim that we know about it-even if for people like myself it is crucial to realize that my experience of writing is an animist experience, attesting to a "more than human" world.

Reclaiming means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as "not ours" but rather as "animating" us, making us witness to what is not us. While such a recovery cannot be reduced to the entertaining of an idea, certain ideas can further the process-and can protect it from being "demystified" as some fetishistic illusion. Such an idea is the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of "assemblage" (the often-discussed translation for the French " agencement ").

An assemblage, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the coming together of heterogeneous components, and such a coming together is the first and last word of existence. I do not first exist and then enter into assemblages. Rather, my existence is my very participation in assemblages, because I am not the same person when I write and as I am when I wonder about the efficacy of the text after it is written down. I am not gifted with agency or intention. Instead, agency-or what Deleuze and Guattari call "desire"-belongs to the assemblage as such, including those very particular assemblages, called "reflexive assemblages," which produce an experience of detachment, the enjoyment of critically testing previous experience in order to determine what is "really" responsible for what. Another word for this kind of agency that doesn't belong to us is animation.

Relating animism to the efficacy of "assemblages" is a dangerous move, however, because it may well reassure us a bit too easily. It is part of our fabrication as readers, to feel free to ponder without experiencing the existential consequences of our questions. For instance, we may be tempted to understand assemblages as an interesting concept among others, pondering its connections with other concepts-that is, without feeling our intentional stance threatened by its demand. And also without fearing the suspicious gaze of the inquisitors, without feeling the smoke in our nostrils. We are protected by the references we quote.

This is why it may be better to revive more compromised words, which have been restricted to metaphoric use only. "Magic" is such a word, as we freely speak of the magic of an event, of a landscape, of a musical moment. Protected by the metaphor, we may then express the experience of an agency that does not belong to us even if it includes us, but an "us" as it is lured into feeling.

I would propose that we need to forfeit this protection in order to relieve ourselves of the sad, monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that we should not accept being mystified, a voice that relays that of the inquisitors. This voice may tell us about the frightening possibilities that would follow if we gave up critique, the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions. But it is first of all the voice of the epic story that still inhabits us. "Thou shall not regress!"

We would admit many daring propositions as long as-like Breton's-they reflect a version of the epic, as long as they warrant that only selected types (artists, philosophers, and so forth) are authorized to explore what mystifies others.

Magic undercuts any such version of the epic. And this is precisely why neo-pagan witches call their own craft "magic": naming it so, they say, is itself an act of magic, since the discomfort it creates helps us notice the smoke in our nostrils. Worse, they have learned to cast circles and invoke the Goddess-She who, the witches say, "returns," She to whom thanks will be given for the event that makes them capable of doing what they call "the work of the Goddess."

In so doing, they put us to the test! How can we accept regression, or conversion to supernatural beliefs? The point, however, is not to wonder whether we have to "accept" the Goddess that contemporary witches invoke in their rituals. If we said to them, "But your Goddess is only a fiction," they would doubtless smile and ask us whether we are among those who believe that fiction is powerless.

What the witches challenge us to accept is the possibility of giving up criteria that claim to transcend assemblages, and that reinforce, again and again, the epic of critical reason. What they cultivate, as part of their craft (it is a part of any craft), is an art of immanent attention, an empirical art about what is good or toxic-an art which our addiction to the truth has too often despised as superstition. They are pragmatic, radically pragmatic, experimenting with effects and consequences of what, as they know, is never innocuous and involves care, protections, and experience.

The witches' ritual chant-"She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes"-could surely be commented on in terms of assemblages, since it resists the dismembering attribution of agency. Does change belong to the Goddess as "agent" or to the one who changes when touched?

But the first efficacy of the refrain is in the "She touches." The indeterminacy proper to assemblages is no longer conceptual. It is part of an experience that affirms the power of changing to be NOT attributed to our own selves nor reduced to something "natural." It is an experience that honors change as a creation.

Moreover, the point is not to comment. The refrain must be chanted; it is part and parcel of the practice of worship. Can the proposition that magic designates both a craft of assemblages and their particular transformative efficacy help us to reclaim it from both the safety of the metaphoric and the stigma of the supernatural? Can it help us to feel instead that nothing in nature is "natural"? Can it induce us to consider new transversal connections, resisting all reduction, unlike this sad term "natural," which in fact means "no trespassing: available for scientific explanation only," and also unlike "the symbolic," which covers about everything else?

Reclaiming always implies a compromising step. I would claim that we, who are not witches, do not have to mimic them but instead discover how to be compromised by magic.

We might, for instance, experiment with the (nonmetaphoric) use of the term "magic," which designates the craft of illusionists who make us perceive and accept what we know to be impossible. Magic, the witches say, is a craft. They would not be shocked by a transversal connection with the craft of performing magicians if this connection was a reclaiming one-that is, if the craft of performing magicians was addressed as what survived when magic became a matter of illusion and manipulative deception in the hands of quacks, or left to the mercenary hands of those who know the many ways we can be lured into desiring, trusting, buying.

And this is precisely what David Abram, himself a slight-of-hand magician, proposes when he relates his craft with what makes it possible, that is, "the way the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible." What "illusionists" artfully exploit would then be the very creativity of the senses as they respond to what Abram characterizes as "suggestions offered by the sensible itself." If there is an exploitation, the magician himself is exploited as the suggestions are offered not only by his explicit words and intentional gestures, but also by subtle bodily shifts that express that he himself participates in, and is lured by, the very magic he is performing.

Our senses, Abram concludes, are not for detached cognition but for participation, for sharing the metamorphic capacity of things that lure us or that recede into inert availability as our manner of participation shifts-but, he insists, never vanishes: we never step outside the "flux of participation." When magic is reclaimed as an art of participation, or of luring assemblages, assemblages inversely become a matter of empirical and pragmatic concern about effects and consequences, not of general consideration or textual dissertation.

Alluring, suggesting, specious, inducing, capturing, mesmerizing-all our words express the ambivalence of lure. Whatever lures us or animates us may also enslave, and all the more so if taken for granted. Scientific experimental crafts, which dramatically exemplify the metamorphic efficacy of assemblage conferring on things the power of "animating" the scientist into feeling, thinking, imagining, are also a dramatic example of this enslaving power. What I would call with Whitehead an "imperfect realization" of what they achieve has unleashed a furious conquest in the name of which scientists downgrade their achievements, presenting them as mere manifestation of objective rationality.

But the question of how to honor the metamorphic efficacy of assemblages-neither taking it for granted nor endowing it with supernatural grandiosity-is a matter of concern for all "magic" crafts, and more especially so in our insalubrious, infectious milieu. And it is because that concern may be common, but can receive no general answer, that reclaiming magic can only be a rhizomatic operation.

A rhizome rejects any generality. Connections do not manifest some truth about what is common beyond the rhizomatic heterogeneous multiplicity-beyond the multiplicity of distinct pragmatic significations associated with "magic" as related to what we call politics, healing, education, arts, philosophy, sciences, agriculture, or to any craft requiring or depending upon a capacity to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention.

The only generality here is about our milieu and its compulsion to categorize and judge-and spiritualism is here a probable judgment-or to negate whatever would point to the metamorphic dimension of what is to be achieved. Rhizomatic connections may be a non-general answer to this generality. Each "magic" craft needs connections with others in order to resist infection by the milieu, the divisive power of social judgment, to smell the smoke that demands we decide whether we are heirs to the witches or the witch hunters.

But connections may also be needed to heal and to learn. Where the dangerous art of animating in order to be animated is concerned, what connects may be practical learning about the needed immanent (critical) attention. Not about what is good or bad in itself, but about what Whitehead called realization. Again, no mode of realization may be taken as a model, only as calling for pragmatic reinvention. In order to honor the making of connections, to protect it against models and norms, a name may be required. Animism could be the name for this rhizomatic art.

Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist. Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist "in general," only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected-and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world.

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The Mystery of the Giant Crystals: How the 36-foot Geode of Pulpí Formed

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The Mystery of the Giant Crystals: How the 36-foot Geode of Pulpí Formed

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The geological history that led to the formation of giant crystals and a 36-foot geode has been revealed by scientists. By looking at the abandoned mine where the geode of Pulpí was found, they were able to show the conditions it formed in hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The geode of Pulpí was discovered in 1999 in the Mina Rica silver mine in southeast Spain. The walls of the cave are covered with huge crystals that are so transparent they look like blocks of ice. It is thought that the geode of Pulpi is one of the largest in the world, with the interior measuring about 390 cubic feet.

Huge crystal caves have been discovered across the globe in recent decades, including the El Teniente mine in Chile and, most famously, the Cave of Crystals in Naica, Mexico. Explaining how these geological features formed, however, is difficult-they grow very slowly and, in most cases, the systems in which they developed are no longer active.

"To reveal their formation has been a very tough task because unlike in the case of Naica, where the hydrothermal system is still active, the large geode of Pulpí is a fossilized environment," Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, from Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC)," said in a statement.

García-Ruiz and colleagues were hoping to find out how the geode of Pulpí grew by creating geological maps of the area and performing mineralogical and geochemical analysis to work out the geological history that led to its formation. Their findings have been published in .

In previous research, scientists showed how the Naica crystals were gypsum. This is an evaporite mineral composed of calcium sulfate with two water molecules. It is commonly found in layered sedimentary deposits, according to Geology.com.

The Naica crystals grew in a low-salinity solution in temperatures around 54 degrees Celsius, forming through a "self-feeding mechanism," where the evaporite mineral anhydrite-which often forms where large amounts of sea water are evaporated-changed to gypsum after being exposed to water.

Exactly when the geode of Pulpí formed is not known, but it was at some point after the Mediterranean Sea dried up 5.6 million years ago. Best estimates currently put the geode of Pulpí at between 600,000 and 2 million years old.

In their study, García-Ruiz and the team discovered the Pulpi megacrystals formed at around 20 degrees Celsius, at a depth where temperature fluctuations were lower than the maximum solubility of gypsum. This, they found, led to the dissolution and recrystallization that would allow the crystals to grow.

The growth is similar to the formation of the Naica crystals, the team notes. They also say the geode of Pulpí formed when it was closer to the surface and would have been more sensitive to changes in global temperatures. Climate change, the study says, "episodically contributed by a ripening process enhanced by temperature oscillations."
https://www.newsweek.com/democratic-debate-questions-slammed-three-hours-no-questions-tonight-about-climate-housing-1465583

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The Mystery of the Giant Crystals: How the 36-foot Geode of Pulpí Formed

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The geological history that led to the formation of giant crystals and a 36-foot geode has been revealed by scientists. By looking at the abandoned mine where the geode of Pulpí was found, they were able to show the conditions it formed in hundreds of thousands of years ago.

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Protopia: The opposite of a “Dystopia”. In Dystopia, people are stuck in some kind of recurring pattern of suffering (like George Orwell’s “foot trampling a human face — for ever”, as in 1984). A Protopian society, then, is one where people are free from such gridlocks and can thus work actively to improve life. It’s a more carefully stated form of a dream of societal transformation: It doesn’t say that “everything will be good for everyone”; it focuses not on the state-of-things-at-a-given-moment, but on the possibility — the shared capacity — to move in mutually desirable directions.

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Why Modern Utopia Fails - But Metamodern Protopia Might Not
Eutopia? Protopia? Everyone seems to be using these terms nowadays, but what do they actually mean? What's the difference between these new ones and good old utopia? And are they just buzzwords? If you want to know the difference and discover what's behind the hype, and if you want to know how we may finally manage to venture beyond the modern mirage of utopia, this Hanzi article is for you.
Is it appropriate to be a Utopian these days?

Yes and no. Or rather, we may need a term that gathers bold dreamers, thinkers, and doers into an energized force for the necessary and timely transformation of societies around the world - but still avoids the pitfalls of 20th-century utopianism.

What, then, can be "better than Utopia?" It turns out that vast landscapes do indeed open up to us if we allow ourselves to ask that question.

Let us journey beyond Utopia.

Our first stop on this journey of the mind we can call Eutopia. But the journey continues farther afield - into what we may call Protopia. And strangely enough, Protopia is much closer to our reality than we think.

Utopia, Eutopia and Protopia.

" Utopia " means "nowhere" and denotes a static state of cultural and political perfection: society when it has become as good as it possibly can get. As nebulous and dreamy as Utopia might seem, it always implies a certain, rather concretely thought-out, attained perfection of society. As such, there is the "bad" now and the "good" future - and the path from darkness into light. It's ideological in the negative sense of the word, i.e. tunnel-visioned according to a scheme of good and evil (today's grim capitalism, tomorrow's humane socialism; today's cold, extractive materialism, tomorrow's ecological coziness...)

" Eutopia" (if you read this article out loud to your kids, you'll have to say "utopia-with-an-E" every time you pronounce it) is an increasingly popular neologism that seeks to replace Utopia; it means "the good place" (there's even a Netflix comedy show with philosophical themes titled The Good Place, which arguably reflects this shift in our ways of dreaming up better worlds). Arguably, it suffers from similar problems as Utopia: it's ultimately impossible, it's static, and what you deem as "good" I might find "bad".

" Protopia" is another recent term, coined by futurist Kevin Kelly and it is defined as the opposite of a "Dystopia". In Dystopia, people are stuck in some kind of recurring pattern of suffering (like George Orwell's "foot trampling a human face - for ever", as in 1984). A Protopian society, then, is one where people are free from such gridlocks and can thus work actively to improve life. It's a more carefully stated form of a dream of societal transformation: It doesn't say that "everything will be good for everyone"; it focuses not on the state-of-things-at-a-given-moment, but on the possibility - the shared capacity - to move in mutually desirable directions. Simply stated, one could say that a Protopian society is one that has the capacity to become incrementally better as a result of the freedom of its members.

Utopia: Modern // Eutopia: Postmodern // Protopia: Metamodern.

Conceptually, we can connect Utopia to the "modern project", i.e. to the growth of rationalism since the fifteenth century, Eutopia to the postmodern critique thereof, i.e. to the many ways that artists and intellectuals have picked apart the modern behemoth since the 19th century, and Protopia to what I call the metamodern synthesis (of modern and postmodern thinking) - and thus to the cultural currents that are growing in today's digitized world.

I thus argue that Protopia, properly understood, is - somewhat paradoxically - the synthesis of "nowhereland" and "the good place". I will start from Kelly's way of defining the term, expand upon it, and invite people to take it up as a concept to carry our shared dreams all the way to fruition.

As such, Protopia constitutes what I hold to be the best term for the massive set of interlinked projects of activists, thinkers, and practitioners around the world who seek to contribute to the necessary and desirable transformations of societies around the world.

I have written extensively on such visions myself; often centering on the shift from a Modern to a Metamodern society. One way or another, I believe that idealists with vastly different projects are contributing to a Metamodern planetary society and its cosmo-local expressions across different world cultures.

This article is a call for Metamodernists (and similarly inclined people) to gather around the Protopian project (or set-of-potential-projects-to-be-discovered-and-enacted); a project that resides at the crossroads of fact and fiction.

Protopians of all walks of life - unite!

... But before that, let us properly define Protopia. The unity we speak of here is a fairly abstracted one: to be part of the same great shifting patterns of the world. To do that, we need to revisit Utopia and Eutopia.

"The Prologue and the Promise" by Robert McCall (1919-2010). A mural commissioned by Walt Disney's EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida.

Even long before Thomas More's coinage of the term " utopia" through the 1516 "social-science-fiction" novel with that word as its title, utopias (by whatever name these dreams may have taken) have exerted an influence on the sociological imagination of people around the world: how could society be different than it is? Not just different. Radically, dramatically, breathtakingly different, for the better - in a manner that breaks out of the confines of ordinary existence and into the tremendous, that which lets the spirit soar?

"Utopia" was an astute play-on-words, a literary sleight-of-hand on More's side: The word translates to "no place". The perfect land of yonder was nowhere to be found. No doubt, More must have been inspired by the European "discovery" of America about two decades earlier: If there are indeed faraway lands on shores so different - could there be, under the sun, genuinely other ways of life, even of large-scale, urbanized life? Ways of life that would seem worthy of the human spirit and not just another grim parody of a society's own values and goals?

Utopia: The farther away, the closer you get

We all have an inherent tendency to believe that great changes in ourselves, our archetypal "hero's journey" of inner transformation, requires us not to look under the nearest rock or in the neighboring village, but travel to a faraway shore- be it the Far East, the vestiges of a glorious past, the rollercoasters of psychedelic weirdness, or mind-bending koans in the shape of quantum mechanical equations - for the transformation to occur in full and earnest.

We tend to believe that a more profound transformation requires a proportionally longer stretch of travel (and, of course, then "outer space is the final frontier"). By the same logic, More places his land of sociological perfection, Utopia, at the farthest reaches of the known world, so far away that it practically becomes "nowhere". To be perfect is to be far away.

It's not unlike women in early fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien: the feminine appears as mysterious, pure, distant, ephemeral, light, and beautiful creatures, barely real at all but all the more wonderous for it. In writers on the other side of the spectrum, like Charles Bukowski (who probably met with a lot more women than Tolkien but perhaps under less emotionally nourishing circumstances), the feminine is flawed, dirty, horny, oscillating between the alluring and the repugnant, and always all-too-human.

No utopian dream is possible without distance: In film and literature, fantasy and social realism are each other's opposites. Distance and utopia depend upon one another. Utopian projects all attempt the impossible: to place fantasy at the heart of the grueling complexities of an admittedly social-realist life, revolutionizing it by magically imbued technology, by fate or by faith, by revealing some kind of secret passage from the "ordinary world" of actual reality to the extraordinary realms of potentiality ... Or - at the very least - enchanting an otherwise disappointing life with the sense of clarity and hope of what is, after all, truly possible.

In fact, Utopian dreams paradoxically seem to gain momentum from moments of social realism. From the plight of workers and peasants in destabilized and backward Romanov Russia, to the sparks of the fever-pitched communist frenzy of the Khmers Rouges as the guerillas were stuck starving, sweating, and malaria-stricken in the jungle, to the popularity of millenarian and Age of Aquarius messages among the discontents of today's globalization - a harsh here-and-now has been fertile soil for a wonderous yonder-and-tomorrow.

Likewise, More's Utopia would likely never have been written, had not the author found the institutions of his own day and age lacking. Again, Utopia comes alive because of our distance to it - of course, combined with the insight that the world is changing, which grants sense of possibility, an untapped keg of potential.

Such change can be circular ("after this Iron Age we shall enter a new Golden Age") as is the case on the far-right political spectrum, or it can be one of progression into the unprecedented ("something will arrive after capitalism, something more worthy and humane!"), such as on the Left of the political imagination.

The nowhereland of Utopia thus grows from the very-here-and-now-land of "my life bloody sucks and yours probably does, too". Through the suffering and belittlement of everyday life, there is, of sorts, a baptism of fire - one that leaves a pure but hardened kernel in the human soul: Life can be different; it must be. The current status quo is barbaric; viewed from a future vantage point, it would be criminal. It must be brought to an end - even if the path to toppling it is dangerous. And since society is changing, since it is going somewhere, the road seems to lead away from here and into the realm of what's possible. The misery of here-and-now is a pointer towards the glory of yonder, of the future.

Utopia: Off with their heads!

Perhaps More never meant for his Utopia to be more than a parody-by-reversal of his Renaissance or Early Modern England - a looking glass through which the imperfections and unenlightened practices and norms of his society became apparent. Likely, More himself intended for the distance to be kept; his tone is hardly one of a fiery revolutionary. But already in his days, Protestant leaders were fanning the flames of peasant revolts against all authority on the European continent.

The longing for and premonition of Utopia seem to propel the human spirit to more than More's wry commentary and critique of social irrationalities and injustices: these motives behoove us to dream, to create, to experiment, to rebel, to subvert, to start anew - but also to risk our lives... and those of others: to kill, to search and destroy.

Beyond More's spirited novel Utopia, there are the real utopias; serious, entirely unironic attempts to defeat the mundane world we know and to somehow conclusively transcend it once and for all. At once unimaginably bold and vain, such intentions have animated humans in their worst and finest hours, often both at once. Oh, wet communist dreams of a just society! Oh, the elevated spirit of Rousseau, who first noticed that modern life needn't be this way - that another world is possible! And this Enlightenment thinker was read religiously by the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the architects of The Terror.

The modern ideology of conservatism grew as a direct response in early 19th century Europe to the French Revolution and the utopian dreams of the time. The conservative mind points out - and really has a point in doing so - that all societies have grown organically and not according to schemes, never entirely according to the plan of an architect. Anarchists have their own way of saying something similar: If the project is to recreate society in the mental image of a few visionaries or leaders, it always leads to disaster. Our postcolonial heritage around the world is a case in point - certain plans of new societies and social orders have been pressed upon the world by Europeans, in turn destroying entire cultures.

Utopias have been based on spiritual premonitions gleaned from our peak moments and epiphanies, on rational calculations of what would make sense and should reasonably be within the realm of possibility - and sometimes Utopia is born at the strange crossroads between the religious and the rational: spirit and mind, magic and science, faith and social engineering. Utopian societies set up by Europeans in America always gathered around certain religious denominations - projects that to this day define American culture and its heritage in the birthing planetary culture of our day. Since Antiquity, hermetic and gnostic traditions have mingled with the sense of wonder that technology brings - the mystical with the rational, the ghost in the machine, what Erik Davies called the "trickster of technology" has beckoned us towards Utopia. In today's world, this technologically mediated hope for a drastic transformation takes forms such as fully automated luxury communism and other visions of post-scarcity, the singularity, transhumanism, and the techno-libertarianism of hackers.

When utopian projects have been acted upon in reality, in real, historical, societies, they have inevitably collapsed - if not destroying their entire populations, at the very least ruining the institutions of society and causing great harm.

Perhaps most importantly - and I am far from alone in pointing this out - this is due to the static nature of Utopian visions: a destination describing how things should be arranged in society. Even more perniciously, there are societies - from socialist people's republics to downright delirious cults - who declare themselves to be so well on the path to Utopia that they in practice already are the Utopian society; and hence, "nothing can be wrong with it". But naturally- there is always trouble in paradise. And every such trouble must then be explained away with some exception (because, by definition, this already is the perfect society, right?): class enemies, contra-revolutionaries, traitors, unbelievers in our midst, dark cabals, conspiracies against the public! And what do you do with those? The Queen of Hearts has the answer.

So you can't have Utopia without "the deject". The stuff you're getting rid of. The stuff you're "throwing away" (that's what the word "deject" implies). The more light, clear, and fever-pitched the Utopian dream, the darker and more abominable the deject seems to the Utopian mind - and the more murderous an undercurrent comes with it.

Utopia: It's weaved into every modern person's mind, ever

And this brings me back to the idea of Modernity and its inherent connection to Utopia. Modernity is, fundamentally, as I argue in my upcoming book The 6 Hidden Patterns of History, the principle of triangulation: comparing your viewpoint to mine, we can either verify or falsify my claims. This principle originates (pre-conceptually) in the arts of the Renaissance in Northern Italy of the fifteenth century: the arrival of mathematical correct perspective in paintings and illustrations. Here, the natural universe is torn away from the social or cultural world: The king is going to be smaller if he is "farther away" in the painting, even if he happens to be socially more important than other characters in the painting. Everything - and everyone - is placed within a 3D space with one disappearing point at the center of the painting.

Now, what I mean is that - in the mind of its followers and enactors - "Utopia" is such a "point towards which everything else seems to point". Everything, including the picture of the here-and-now, is situated in space in relation to this point at an infinite or unknowable distance. The structure of the Modern mind itself thus implies some kind of Utopia, some kind of end-point, always present in the worldview itself- albeit one always disappearing into the distance.

Interestingly enough, then, even conservatives and anarchists - who are nominally critics of grad schemes - formulate utopias, as these ideologies are also spawns of Modernity. The conservative formulates the utopia of progress according to society's already existing institutions (libertarians like Johan Norberg and centrists like Steven Pinker also represent similar views in today's public debate), and anarchists formulate how people could collaborate their way into a society that is kindlier, more just, working in accordance to the shared will (and goodwill) of the many.

All said and done - Utopia is bound up with modernity itself. As long as the modern project exists, Utopia will keep beckoning, in spiritual, secular, or tech-spiritual forms.

But the modern project, of course, does not lead to Utopia. It's a mirage. One that has been very understandable and perhaps historically necessary, but an illusion in the distance, no less. Rather, modernity with its "progress narrative" leads to its own demise - to civilizational collapse - due to inherent systemic limitations we shall refrain from discussing here. The striving towards Utopia only accelerates that process of decay.

A static vision of the future, of society perfected, cannot materialize. And the Modern mind, by its very way of structuring reality, drives towards this impossibility. Bold and adventurous as this striving is, it can only lead to collapse. Utopia always was, and always will be, a failure - a road to hell paved with good intentions, as the saying goes.

A house in the self-governing anarchic commune Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.

If Modernity, in its deeper sense, originated in the emergence of "perspective" in the visual arts, in the Renaissance paintings of Northern Italy - it only began to fully come into fruition around the early 19th century in Europe, with industrialization and the rise to prominence of the scientific-rational worldview. And, of course, with the Enlightenment beginning to shape society as a whole.

Eutopia: Two counterreactions to Modernity

From around this time onwards - when Modernity was beginning to bloom in full - counterreactions to the Modern project started to appear. These reactions came from two distinct sources. One was the resistance of the colonized, of slaves, of indigenous peoples, of non-European civilizations and traditions around the world. New such sources of questioning, resistance, and attempts at redefining knowledge, reality, power relations, and nature itself have emerged ever since. In today's world, for instance, Indian dalits struggle to influence the official definition of themselves on Wikipedia in an uphill battle against mostly white, Western, male experts, while indigenous tribes of the Amazon seek to protect their lands from extractive exploitation by international corporations. Following the postcolonialist feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we can employ an umbrella term for this kind of counter-reaction: the subaltern (although the term was initially coined by the cultural Marxist, Antonio Gramsci).

The other source of counterreactions grew from within Modern society itself - the impulse of Romanticism that reacted against the cold rationality of the Modern project (through literature, through paintings, through philosophical stances, and through social and spiritual movements) became the first in a long series of counter-cultures that came from the "most Modern" strata of society, often the most cultivated and educated. Indeed, many of these counter-cultures became so important that they flavored Modernity itself - just consider, for instance, the influence of the American Beat Generation on popular culture and thus on the Hollywood-saturated mainstream of Western culture and beyond. In a very general sense, there is thus an intimate connection between such widely disparate phenomena as Romanticism, socialism, feminism, anti-racism, expressionist and dadaist art, critical theory and sociology, and hippies: They all somehow grow from and react against the confines of that assumed 3D background space of Modernity and its purported sense of objectivity and implied directionality. That is why we can meaningfully understand these as expressions of the Postmodern mind - one that breaks away from Modernity and its static perspective where nature and culture are separate.

[ Please note that I'm not using the term "Postmodern" in the conventional academic sense here, i.e. specifically relating to certain philosophical currents in the 1970s and onwards, but as a general structure of mind and society that emerges as a critique of Modern society, as discussed in my book, The Listening Society.]

If Modernity tore nature loose from its social confines (again, space itself, not social roles, define the perspective, and so the king will be smaller if he is farther away in the painting with a mathematical correct perspective), then Postmodernity places the view on nature back into its social and cultural context - a context it never left. After all - who's looking? Whose gaze is it that describes reality in a certain way? The direction the gaze is looking will always define the direction, the horizon, the Utopia of this particular viewer. Does the photo realism and mathematical correct 3D perspective of a Renaissance painting (and, by extension, of Newtonian mechanics, of the scientific method, of market liberalism and representative democracy) truly encompass the perspective of, say, arts and rituals in the Yoruba traditions of West Africa? Do not women, on average, think less spatially and more relationally than men - and if so, does this background assumption not subtly exclude feminine perspectives? We can call this second category, simply, the countercultural.

In many cases, these two currents - the subaltern and the countercultural- have intermingled and drawn upon one another. Sociological understandings of how knowledge is constructed in society (a countercultural understanding) have, for instance, benefitted from the outsider perspectives of Amazonian tribes (in Claude Levi-Strauss' structuralist anthropology) and W.E.B. DuBois' early studies of African-Americans. Conversely, today's subaltern movements from different cultures gather around the ideas such as Multitude, i.e. the larger network of diverse social justice movements. Regardless of how they are combined, they all entail some kind of breach with the Modern project itself and its Utopia, its grand narrative(s). What you get instead is the search for the good life, for a better society, in the exception.

Eutopia: Breaking out of the Renaissance painting

In terms of societal visioning, of the release of the sociological imagination as a force for transformation, this shift from Modern to Postmodern worldviews entails a corresponding shift from Utopia to Eutopia - from nowhereland to "the good place". The Postmodern mind holds that "the good place" is not somewhere distant, nor a static vision like Plato's Republic: it's here and now - but it is more contextual, more local, more momentary, more subversive. The Good Place is hidden in plain sight, as it were. You don't get there by following the yellow brick road towards the static Utopian horizon, but precisely by breaking away from that "Modern 3D" framework altogether. Phonetically, Utopia and Eutopia sound the same - but the different spellings reveal a shift - away from the spatial journey to Utopia, and towards the perspectival sleight-of-hands that reveal the little Eutopias that were there all along; the worlds that were forgotten, suppressed, made invisible.

The Eutopian (not to be confused with the European or the Ethiopian - yes, I know it's a weird term, bear with me) striving is, in a profound but difficult-to-spot manner, a direct reversal of the Utopian one: Where the Utopian sees a distance between the misery of here-and-now and the promised land on the horizon that seems to logically follow from the here-and-now, the Eutopian notices how close, how utterly present The Good Place already is, and how it needs only be revealed. Utopia feeds on distance, Eutopia on closeness: on that which was too close to be properly seen as long as eyes were staring into the distance.

And so Eutopia is sought in the commons (these solidary forms of economic organization that predate capitalism and exist in most traditional societies to this day), in the relative happiness of e.g. San hunter-gatherer societies, in different Shangri-Las of local communities of care in downtrodden neighborhoods, in solarpunk collectives, in the rugged camps of Occupy Wallstreet and the spirit that animates them. The Eutopian is convinced that if you look hard enough at foreign cultures and civil society, at the intellectual voices that are decidedly non-Western, non-mainstream, at the many movements of social justice around the world, at the most experimental communities of Kibbutzes and Mexican Zapatistas and the Kurdish Rojava and Spanish communist villages and experimental cryptocurrencies... then you'll see it: a fleeting but all-too-real proof that another world is possible, a genuinely good place. Eutopia.

While the Eutopian avoids the grand schemes and fixed sense of direction inherent in Modern Utopia, there is a certain limitation to it: If "the good place" is always found in an exception, in the uniqueness of a situation, the Good Place is never successfully generalized and transferred across time, space, and cultural differences. The Eutopian reveals that ways of life already exist that are even preferable to whatever Utopia the masses of the Modern mainstream have been imagining - if only we can shift our perspectives and stop staring at that disappearing point in the distance. The Eutopian turns every stone, scours history, archeology, and anthropology to find glimmers of hope, and then beckons: if was possible, imagine then what could be possible for all societies across the world, if only we escaped the shackles of our limited ideas of the world!

But, alas, the search for Eutopia never ends - it never settles, it never locks on target and builds momentum; it never starts the positive feedback cycle that marks the growth of all living systems; it never translates across different scales. Fireworks of enthusiasm spark, again and again, energizing Eutopians to believe that a great shift of perspective is coming, a new set of ideas, a new project, a new struggle, a new subtly exotified other in a distant village or rural land, in the favelas or banlieues. But for all the intimacy with indigenous wisdom, for all the experience in social justice movements, for all the studies of Eastern Traditions - the Eutopians never come up with solutions to the great challenges of the Modern project. To the Eutopian, it feels as though the great transformation is always just around the corner; and so the relentless search continues indefinitely.

Eutopia is necessary for our dreams of a better society to become multi-perspectival, inclusive, and integrative of many perspectives - but it ultimately asks the wrong question. It still looks for The Good Place. Certainly, depending on what criteria are being measured for, such "good places" do indeed exist in secret corners of the world, even if they are always bound within limited confines of space, time, context, and a limited set of criteria of how the "good" is measured. The problem is that Eutopia is always defined in opposition to whatever is perceived as Modern and mainstream - and, as such, it misses the mark on the greatest challenge of all: to find the generative conditions that increase the likelihood of many Eutopias across multiple contexts.

We all know we're not headed towards a solarpunk world, or a techno-libertarian crypto world, or an afro-futurist world, or one run by cozy cooperatives - but the multiplicity of such Eutopias, and their interconnectedness, means everything. Together, a thousand such islands of new ways of life can be lifeboats for millions or billions of people - and together, they can redefine the way the planetary system works.

In its original, minimalist - and admittedly rather lacking - formulation by Kevin Kelly, Protopia is simply a term that denotes the gradual improvement of society over time, without claiming either perfection or the reaching of a point of stability. If we cannot allow ourselves to believe in a future paradise that has stabilized around a blissful state of affairs (Utopia), and we find it insufficient to look for those beautiful little exceptions of what life and society can be in certain regards under specific circumstances (Eutopia), perhaps we can more cautiously and realistically allow hope and faith in gradual but over time substantial improvements of society. As mentioned earlier, Kelly views such a capacity to improve as the true opposite of Dystopia.

That's Kelly's original take on the term, Protopia. We could stop there, but frankly, it's not a particularly enlightening or inspiring prospect in and of itself. Still - it's a helpful point of departure.

There are more and less generous ways to read Kelly's take on Protopia. Naturally, if improvement is constant and there are never any setbacks, that's also an unchanging state of affairs (like Utopia's static vision)-the derivative of an even slope is still a line. If that's how we interpret Kelly's idea - as literally an improvement on key measures from year to year, indefinitely - it would be equally or more unrealistic than Utopia's static "perfect world". Likewise, this would mean that whatever direction in which society is "improving" needs to be constant and correctly defined for all time - that its direction can never shift. That is also untenable: The measure of a society's "success" necessarily shifts over time, and thus the vectors of what is considered to be an improvement must shift as well.

At the very least, then, a more generous interpretation of Kelly's Protopia - one that gives it more intellectual credit - would grant that it allows for society to fluctuate between good and bad periods, but that it has the capacity to shift into oscillations that, as a whole, are preferable to what existed before. There is improvement, but not necessarily every year. Rather, in the pattern of how good and bad events play out. And, of course, that a society's way of understanding itself and what it means to "improve" things becomes "wiser" over time. If we use a convoluted term from philosophy, we could say that Protopia allows for authentic dialectics: for good and bad things, as interpreted from widely different perspectives of the good and bad, to emerge together in ever-surprising but ultimately non-arbitrary manners.

Or, another way to say it, drawing on the chaos theory tradition: Protopia is not the constant (linear) improvement of society from year to year, but an improvement of society's "phase space", i.e. a shift of which phases society can enter into as it evolves: desirable and undesirable phases included.

Let's use the more gracious interpretation as we go on.

Protopia: Beyond Kelly's original definition

The correct synthesis of Utopia and Eutopia should be able to do more: It should inspire hope and spark the imagination beyond what reforms and gradual improvements can; it should bring a coordinating shared sense of direction for millions of unique but inter-related collaborators who are somehow part of the same societal transformation across sectors (tech, arts, spirituality, business, politics, movements, academia); and it should combine the sense of the tremendous, the open horizon of Utopia and the vision of a world so much better than all we have known, with the multi-perspectivalism and curiosity of the Eutopian search for the hidden-in-plain-sight beauties that we've looked past. In brief, it should be able to combine the best of both worlds while avoiding their respective pitfalls.

And so, if we are to mine the concept of Protopia for a deeper meaning - one that is worth rallying around across sectors and across projects, over different cultures, and across longer stretches of time - we may need to expand upon Kelly's original formulation. I would claim, however, that the below suggested expansion carries forward the spirit of the original meaning, just adding more layers to it.

We are now thus taking a turn into the Metamodern: we must coordinate the sense of direction and progress of the Modern (Utopia) with the sensitivity and critical awareness of the Postmodern (Eutopia). Metamodernism is that which emerges from the skepticism of Postmodern skepticism. As Jason Ananda Storm has argued, the Postmodern mind is skeptical of everything but its very own skepticism. Once you begin to question your own skepticism, you come to embody the position of sincere irony, or informed naivety. That is to say, you begin to allow yourself to believe in grand schemes again, even if you know that your "Utopias" are fictional and possibly dangerous. There is a recognition that the lack of a great story to weave reality with, is just as dangerous. You start looking for the pattern that connects the many little Eutopias - The Good Place found in strange corners and exceptions - and in that pattern, you begin to see the vast field of potential of many different social realities that have been, that could be, and that should be.

So The Good Place does happen - but not arbitrarily. It happens given certain circumstances. It flickers past in history, in moments in our lives, in special places... But what then are the best possible conditions for the increased likelihood for such little Eutopias to emerge - always unique, always context-bound, always unexpected, by their nature impossible to predict? That's the question. To the extent it can be said that we are still looking for a Utopia, a grand direction, it is the abstract direction that will create the greater number and intensity of little Eutopias flickering by in the cosmos.
That is Protopia: the non-arbitrary pattern that connects the multiplicity of Eutopias; it is the search for the conditions that generate Eutopias - i.e. the "generative conditions" of Eutopia.
This Metamodernist mode of seeing potentials in the world begins from studying the many possibilities, the Eutopias, each of which offers a unique perspective and critique of the status quo. But it doesn't simply leave all of those Eutopias as disconnected fragments floating about in a larger void of meaninglessness. It lets the different Eutopias inform one another. It weighs and pits them against one another; it triangulates from their conflicting insights and ways of life - and as such it develops a context-sensitive form of utopianism, of dreamy faith. Or should I say: Protopianism.

With the Protopian stance, no compromise needs to be made: The faith, the zeal of the revolutionary, is there for the taking, but the path towards it is always by learning more, by listening in to the hidden potentials of everyday life that the multiplicity of human experience (and/or that of other lifeforms) offers.

Protopia: Another set of assumptions generate another set of futures

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Protopian activism requires some different basic assumptions about reality than Eutopian activism. In a sense, the Protopian vision breaks the one great taboo of the Postmodern mind: to order and organize different perspectives into a grander scheme. But it is no longer the scheme of a 3D world with a certain goal in the distance - it corresponds, rather, to folding through a fourth or even fifth dimension, showing how many different goals are possible, yet complexly interlinked on a more abstract plane of analysis.

It is a horizon opening up as the Protopian perspective unfolds, but not a singular horizon, but a multiple horizon. It is the horizon of the property space of all possible events - what one might term an "event horizon" (drawing an analogy to the warped space-time around a black hole, where time collapses so that all events occur simultaneously; a real cosmological phenomenon). Somewhat more poetically put - to be a Protopian is to try to touch the event horizon.

Hopefully, then, readers will agree that Metamodernism needs Protopia and vice versa, that the two concepts seem intertwined, and that the Metamodern mindset unlocks the great adventure of Utopian dreams, albeit in a space of playful experimentation with coordinating the many lessons that come from transcending and transgressing the limitations of Modern society and its trajectories. Let me simply end by highlighting a few key differences between the Utopian, Eutopian, and Protopian stances on societal transformation.

The Utopian believes in progress. The Eutopian believes in critique and a rediscovery of simpler wisdoms and relationships. The Protopian believes that progress can be enacted by understanding how the many critiques and rediscoveries of wisdom are interconnected into a larger whole.

The Utopian envisions a linear path towards a brighter future. The Eutopian believes that pearls of happy and sane society are found precisely by looking away from the trodden path. The Protopian envisions a non-linear pathway to a wider range of possibilities, a chaotic or strange attractor, which in itself constitutes the wider map of potential futures (or the "phase space" of society's evolution), but where it is impossible to foresee which future will actually occur. So: from linear, to non-linear, to chaotic thinking.

The Utopian is driven by sincere faith. The Eutopian is driven by an ironic distance to plots and plans and only trusts the genuinely surprising. The Protopian is driven by a sincerely-ironically held faith - not in the actual future (that may fly or fall, as things do) but in the potential of what marvels are always-already possible.

The Utopian believes in the future. The Eutopian believes in alternate timelines. The Protopian believes that alternate timelines can and should be skillfully weaved into a multiplicity of beautiful futures - but that it is not determined that they will be. The Protopian relates to what we may call the "topology of timelines".

The Utopian believes that the games of life, competition, strife, pain, will wither away once Utopia is achieved. The Eutopian believes that a resting place is already available if we could only look away from the grand narratives that have enthralled us, that the games of life are actually only an illusion to awaken from. The Protopian believes that the games of life are real and just as hurtful as we experience them, but that they have been changed throughout history, they can be changed again, and they very likely will be at one time or another. The Protopian believes in Game Change and what I have formerly called "relative utopia" - if slavery did end and democracy did prevail, why shouldn't corresponding leaps be possible in the future?

The Utopian believes that the world gets better if people work to improve it. The Eutopian believes that people ruin the world more than they help it by all their plans, plots, and attempts at controlling everything. The Protopian believes that progress is inherent to the universe, but that it always comes at a terrible price - of new problems emerging, and of old beauties lost.

Consider the above list carefully before you get a tattoo.

In brief - let us tread the multiple but intrinsically interlinked paths to Protopia, while keeping an ironic smile at our own self-importance. Protopia is a "vision of visions". It works not with one future, but with the entire event horizon of all possible futures.

We know it won't work, that a thousand surprises will corrode whatever paths we may cut. But it is the very knowledge of certain failure that guarantees our non-linear victory and the emergence of Protopia in the world - that is to say, a real improvement over time. That's why Protopia is more than a fairy tale.

And that's a good enough reason for Protopians around the world to unite. The quality of Protopian unity is not that of the monolith, however, nor of the bundle of rods. It is the unity of mycelium: infinitely interconnected, always in flux, busy breaking down the dying while creating soil for the new to blossom.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of 'The Listening Society', 'Nordic Ideology' and the upcoming books 'The 6 Hidden Patterns of History' and 'Outcompeting Capitalism'. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on and , and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi . See www.metamoderna.org for more content.

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What's The Difference between Utopia, Eutopia, and Protopia?

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Why Modern Utopia Fails - But Metamodern Protopia Might Not Eutopia? Protopia? Everyone seems to be using these terms nowadays, but what do they actually mean? What's the difference between these new ones and good old utopia? And are they just buzzwords?

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#Healing#Self-HealingMaterial

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Self-healing materials are artificial or synthetically-created substances that have the built-in ability to automatically repair damages to themselves without any external diagnosis of the problem or human intervention. Generally, materials will degrade over time due to fatigue, environmental conditions, or damage incurred during operation. Cracks and other types of damage on a microscopic level have been shown to change thermal, electrical, and acoustical properties of materials, and the propagation of cracks can lead to eventual failure of the material. In general, cracks are hard to detect at an early stage, and manual intervention is required for periodic inspections and repairs. In contrast, self-healing materials counter degradation through the initiation of a repair mechanism that responds to the micro-damage. Some self-healing materials are classed as smart structures, and can adapt to various environmental conditions according to their sensing and actuation properties.

Although the most common types of self-healing materials are polymers or elastomers, self-healing covers all classes of materials, including metals, ceramics, and cementitious materials. Healing mechanisms vary from an instrinsic repair of the material to the addition of a repair agent contained in a microscopic vessel. For a material to be strictly defined as autonomously self-healing, it is necessary that the healing process occurs without human intervention. Self-healing polymers may, however, activate in response to an external stimulus (light, temperature change, etc.) to initiate the healing processes.

A material that can intrinsically correct damage caused by normal usage could prevent costs incurred by material failure and lower costs of a number of different industrial processes through longer part lifetime, and reduction of inefficiency caused by degradation over time.

The ancient Romans used a form of lime mortar that has been found to have self-healing properties. By 2014, geologist Marie Jackson and her colleagues had recreated the type of mortar used in Trajan's Market and other Roman structures such as the Pantheon and the Colosseum and studied its response to cracking. The Romans mixed a particular type of volcanic ash called Pozzolane Rosse, from the Alban Hills volcano, with quicklime and water. They used it to bind together decimeter-sized chunks of tuff, an aggregate of volcanic rock. As a result of Pozzolanic activity as the material cured, the lime interacted with other chemicals in the mix and was replaced by crystals of a calcium aluminosilicate mineral called Strätlingite. Crystals of platey strätlingite grow in the cementitious matrix of the material including the interfacial zones where cracks would tend to develop. This ongoing crystal formation holds together the mortar and the coarse aggregate, countering crack formation and resulting in a material that has lasted for 1,900 years.

Related processes in concrete have been studied microscopically since the 19th century.

Self healing materials only emerged as a widely recognized field of study in the 21st century. The first international conference on self-healing materials was held in 2007. The field of self-healing materials is related to biomimetic materials as well as to other novel materials and surfaces with the embedded capacity for self-organization, such as the self-lubricating and self-cleaning materials.

Plants and animals have the capacity to seal and heal wounds. In all plants and animals examined, firstly a self-sealing phase and secondly a self-healing phase can be identified. In plants, the rapid self-sealing prevents the plants from desiccation and from infection by pathogenic germs. This gives time for the subsequent self-healing of the injury which in addition to wound closure also results in the (partly) restoration of mechanical properties of the plant organ. Based on a variety of self-sealing and self-healing processes in plants, different functional principles were transferred into bio-inspired self-repairing materials. The connecting link between the biological model and the technical application is an abstraction describing the underlying functional principle of the biological model which can be for example an analytical model or a numerical model. In cases where mainly physical-chemical processes are involved a transfer is especially promising. There is evidence in the academic literature of these biomimetic design approaches being used in the development of self-healing systems for polymer composites. The DIW structure from above can be used to essentially mimic the structure of skin. Toohey et al. did this with an epoxy substrate containing a grid of microchannels containing dicyclopentadiene (DCPD), and incorporated Grubbs' catalyst to the surface. This showed partial recovery of toughness after fracture, and could be repeated several times because of the ability to replenish the channels after use. The process is not repeatable forever, because the polymer in the crack plane from previous healings would build up over time. Inspired by rapid self-sealing processes in the twining liana Aristolochia macrophylla and related species (pipevines) a biomimetic PU-foam coating for pneumatic structures was developed. With respect to low coating weight and thickness of the foam layer maximum repair efficiencies of 99.9% and more have been obtained. Other role models are latex bearing plants as the weeping fig (Ficus benjamina), the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) and spurges (Euphorbia spp.), in which the coagulation of latex is involved in the sealing of lesions. Different self-sealing strategies for elastomeric materials were developed showing significant mechanical restoration after a macroscopic lesion.

In the last century, polymers became a base material in everyday life for products like plastics, rubbers, films, fibres or paints. This huge demand has forced to extend their reliability and maximum lifetime, and a new design class of polymeric materials that are able to restore their functionality after damage or fatigue was envisaged. These polymer materials can be divided into two different groups based on the approach to the self-healing mechanism: intrinsic or extrinsic. Autonomous self-healing polymers follow a three-step process very similar to that of a biological response. In the event of damage, the first response is triggering or actuation, which happens almost immediately after damage is sustained. The second response is transport of materials to the affected area, which also happens very quickly. The third response is the chemical repair process. This process differs depending on the type of healing mechanism that is in place (e.g., polymerization, entanglement, reversible cross-linking). These materials can be classified according to three mechanisms (capsule-based, vascular-based, and intrinsic), which can be correlated chronologically through four generations. While similar in some ways, these mechanisms differ in the ways that response is hidden or prevented until actual damage is sustained.

From a molecular perspective, traditional polymers yield to mechanical stress through cleavage of sigma bonds. While newer polymers can yield in other ways, traditional polymers typically yield through homolytic or heterolytic bond cleavage. The factors that determine how a polymer will yield include: type of stress, chemical properties inherent to the polymer, level and type of solvation, and temperature. From a macromolecular perspective, stress induced damage at the molecular level leads to larger scale damage called microcracks. A microcrack is formed where neighboring polymer chains have been damaged in close proximity, ultimately leading to the weakening of the fiber as a whole.

Polymers have been observed to undergo homolytic bond cleavage through the use of radical reporters such as DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) and PMNB (pentamethylnitrosobenzene.) When a bond is cleaved homolytically, two radical species are formed that can recombine to repair damage or can initiate other homolytic cleavages which can in turn lead to more damage.

Polymers have also been observed to undergo heterolytic bond cleavage through isotope labeling experiments. When a bond is cleaved heterolytically, cationic and anionic species are formed that can in turn recombine to repair damage, can be quenched by solvent, or can react destructively with nearby polymers.

Certain polymers yield to mechanical stress in an atypical, reversible manner. Diels-Alder-based polymers undergo a reversible cycloaddition, where mechanical stress cleaves two sigma bonds in a retro Diels-Alder reaction. This stress results in additional pi-bonded electrons as opposed to radical or charged moieties.

Supramolecular polymers are composed of monomers that interact non-covalently. Common interactions include hydrogen bonds, metal coordination, and van der Waals forces. Mechanical stress in supramolecular polymers causes the disruption of these specific non-covalent interactions, leading to monomer separation and polymer breakdown.

In intrinsic systems, the material is inherently able to restore its integrity. While extrinsic approaches are generally autonomous, intrinsic systems often require an external trigger for the healing to take place (such as thermo-mechanical, electrical, photo-stimuli, etc.). It is possible to distinguish among 5 main intrinsic self-healing strategies. The first one is based on reversible reactions, and the most widely used reaction scheme is based on Diels-Alder (DA) and retro-Diels-Alder (rDA) reactions. Another strategy achieves the self-healing in thermoset matrices by incorporating meltable thermoplastic additives. A temperature trigger allows the redispertion of thermoplastic additives into cracks, giving rise to mechanical interlocking. Polymer interlockings based on dynamic supramolecular bonds or ionomers represent a third and fourth scheme. The involved supramolecular interactions and ionomeric clusters are generally reversible and act as reversible cross-links, thus can equip polymers with self-healing ability. Finally, an alternative method for achieving intrinsic self-healing is based on molecular diffusion.

Reversible systems are polymeric systems that can revert to the initial state whether it is monomeric, oligomeric, or non-cross-linked. Since the polymer is stable under normal condition, the reversible process usually requires an external stimulus for it to occur. For a reversible healing polymer, if the material is damaged by means such as heating and reverted to its constituents, it can be repaired or "healed" to its polymer form by applying the original condition used to polymerize it.

Among the examples of reversible healing polymers, the Diels-Alder (DA) reaction and its retro- Diels-Alder (RDA) analogue seems to be very promising due to its thermal reversibility. In general, the monomer containing the functional groups such as furan or maleimide form two carbon-carbon bonds in a specific manner and construct the polymer through DA reaction. This polymer, upon heating, breaks down to its original monomeric units via RDA reaction and then reforms the polymer upon cooling or through any other conditions that were initially used to make the polymer. During the last few decades, two types of reversible polymers have been studied: (i) polymers where the pendant groups, such as furan or maleimide groups, cross-link through successive DA coupling reactions; (ii) polymers where the multifunctional monomers link to each other through successive DA coupling reactions.

Cross-linked polymers

In this type of polymer, the polymer forms through the cross linking of the pendant groups from the linear thermoplastics. For example, Saegusa et al. have shown the reversible cross-linking of modified poly( N-acetylethyleneimine)s containing either maleimide or furancarbonyl pendant moideties. The reaction is shown in Scheme 3. They mixed the two complementary polymers to make a highly cross-linked material through DA reaction of furan and maleimide units at room temperature, as the cross-linked polymer is more thermodynamically stable than the individual starting materials. However, upon heating the polymer to 80 °C for two hours in a polar solvent, two monomers were regenerated via RDA reaction, indicating the breaking of polymers. This was possible because the heating energy provided enough energy to go over the energy barrier and results in the two monomers. Cooling the two starting monomers, or damaged polymer, to room temperature for 7 days healed and reformed the polymer.

The reversible DA/RDA reaction is not limited to furan-meleimides based polymers as it is shown by the work of Schiraldi et al. They have shown the reversible cross-linking of polymers bearing pendent anthracene group with maleimides. However, the reversible reaction occurred only partially upon heating to 250 °C due to the competing decomposition reaction.

Polymerization of multifunctional monomers

In these systems, the DA reaction takes place in the backbone itself to construct the polymer, not as a link. For polymerization and healing processes of a DA-step-growth furan- maleimide based polymer (3M4F) were demonstrated by subjecting it to heating/cooling cycles. Tris-maleimide (3M) and tetra-furan (4F) formed a polymer through DA reaction and, when heated to 120 °C, de-polymerized through RDA reaction, resulting in the starting materials. Subsequent heating to 90-120 °C and cooling to room temperature healed the polymer, partially restoring its mechanical properties through intervention. The reaction is shown in Scheme 4.

The thiol-based polymers have disulfide bonds that can be reversibly cross-linked through oxidation and reduction. Under reducing condition, the disulfide (SS) bridges in the polymer breaks and results in monomers, however, under oxidizing condition, the thiols (SH) of each monomer forms the disulfide bond, cross-linking the starting materials to form the polymer. Chujo et al. have shown the thiol-based reversible cross-linked polymer using poly( N-acetylethyleneimine). (Scheme 5)

Poly(urea-urethane)

A soft poly(urea-urethane) network uses the metathesis reaction in aromatic disulphides to provide room-temperature self-healing properties, without the need for external catalysts. This chemical reaction is naturally able to create covalent bonds at room temperature, allowing the polymer to autonomously heal without an external source of energy. Left to rest at room temperature, the material mended itself with 80 percent efficiency after only two hours and 97 percent after 24 hours.[citation needed ] In 2014 a polyurea elastomer-based material was shown to be self-healing, melding together after being cut in half, without the addition of catalysts or other chemicals. The material also include inexpensive commercially available compounds. The elastomer molecules were tweaked, making the bonds between them longer. The resulting molecules are easier to pull apart from one another and better able to rebond at room temperature with almost the same strength. The rebonding can be repeated. Stretchy, self-healing paints and other coatings recently took a step closer to common use, thanks to research being conducted at the University of Illinois. Scientists there have used "off-the-shelf" components to create a polymer that melds back together after being cut in half, without the addition of catalysts or other chemicals.

The urea-urethane polymers however have glassy transition temperatures below 273 K therefore at room temperature they are gels and their tensile strength is low. To optimize the tensile strength the reversible bonding energy, or the polymer length must be increased to increase the degree of covalent or mechanical interlocking respectively. However, increase polymer length inhibits mobility and thereby impairs the ability for polymers to re-reversibly bond. Thus at each polymer length an optimal reversible bonding energy exists.

Vitrimers are a subset of polymers that bridge the gap between thermoplastics and thermosets. Their dependence on dissociative and associative exchange within dynamic covalent adaptable networks allows for a variety of chemical systems to be accessed that allow for the synthesis of mechanically robust materials with the ability to be reprocessed many times while maintaining their structural properties and mechanical strength. The self-healing aspect of these materials is due to the bond exchange of crosslinked species as a response to applied external stimuli, such as heat. Dissociative exchange is the process by which crosslinks are broken prior to recombination of crosslinking species, thereby recovering the crosslink density after exchange. Examples of dissociative exchange include reversible pericyclic reactions, nucleophilic transalkylation, and aminal transamination. Associative exchange involves the substitution reaction with an existing crosslink and the retention of crosslinks throughout exchange. Examples of associative exchange include transesterification, transamination of vinylogous urethanes, and transamination of diketoneamines. Vitrimers possessing nanoscale morphology are being studied, through the use of block copolymer vitrimers in comparison to statistical copolymer analogues, to understand the effects of self-assembly on exchange rates, viscoelastic properties, and reprocessability. Other than recycling, vitrimer materials show promise for applications in medicine, for example self-healable bioepoxy, and applications in self-healing electronic screens. While these polymeric systems are still in their infancy they serve to produce commercially relevant, recyclable materials in the coming future as long as more work is done to tailor these chemical systems to commercially relevant monomers and polymers, as well as develop better mechanical testing and understanding of material properties throughout the lifetime of these materials (i.e. post reprocess cycles).

Capsule-based systems have in common that healing agents are encapsulated into suitable microstructures that rupture upon crack formation and lead to a follow up process in order to restore the materials' properties. If the walls of the capsule are created too thick, they may not fracture when the crack approaches, but if they are too thin, they may rupture prematurely. In order for this process to happen at room temperature, and for the reactants to remain in a monomeric state within the capsule, a catalyst is also imbedded into the thermoset. The catalyst lowers the energy barrier of the reaction and allows the monomer to polymerize without the addition of heat. The capsules (often made of wax) around the monomer and the catalyst are important to maintain separation until the crack facilitates the reaction. In the capsule-catalyst system, the encapsulated healing agent is released into the polymer matrix and reacts with the catalyst, already present in the matrix. There are many challenges in designing this type of material. First, the reactivity of the catalyst must be maintained even after it is enclosed in wax. Additionally, the monomer must flow at a sufficient rate (have low enough viscosity) to cover the entire crack before it is polymerized, or full healing capacity will not be reached. Finally, the catalyst must quickly dissolve into the monomer in order to react efficiently and prevent the crack from spreading further.

This process has been demonstrated with dicyclopentadiene (DCPD) and Grubbs' catalyst (benzylidene-bis(tricyclohexylphosphine)dichlororuthenium). Both DCPD and Grubbs' catalyst are imbedded in an epoxy resin. The monomer on its own is relatively unreactive and polymerization does not take place. When a microcrack reaches both the capsule containing DCPD and the catalyst, the monomer is released from the core-shell microcapsule and comes in contact with exposed catalyst, upon which the monomer undergoes ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP). The metathesis reaction of the monomer involves the severance of the two double bonds in favor of new bonds. The presence of the catalyst allows for the energy barrier (energy of activation) to be lowered, and the polymerization reaction can proceed at room temperature. The resulting polymer allows the epoxy composite material to regain 67% of its former strength.

Grubbs' catalyst is a good choice for this type of system because it is insensitive to air and water, thus robust enough to maintain reactivity within the material. Using a live catalyst is important to promote multiple healing actions. The major drawback is the cost. It was shown that using more of the catalyst corresponded directly to higher degree of healing. Ruthenium is quite costly, which makes it impractical for commercial applications.

For the first method, fragile glass capillaries or fibers are imbedded within a composite material. (Note: this is already a commonly used practice for strengthening materials. See Fiber-reinforced plastic.) The resulting porous network is filled with monomer. When damage occurs in the material from regular use, the tubes also crack and the monomer is released into the cracks. Other tubes containing a hardening agent also crack and mix with the monomer, causing the crack to be healed. There are many things to take into account when introducing hollow tubes into a crystalline structure. First to consider is that the created channels may compromise the load bearing ability of the material due to the removal of load bearing material. Also, the channel diameter, degree of branching, location of branch points, and channel orientation are some of the main things to consider when building up microchannels within a material. Materials that don't need to withstand much mechanical strain, but want self-healing properties, can introduce more microchannels than materials that are meant to be load bearing. There are two types of hollow tubes: discrete channels, and interconnected channels.

Discrete channels can be built independently of building the material and are placed in an array throughout the material. When creating these microchannels, one major factor to take into account is that the closer the tubes are together, the lower the strength will be, but the more efficient the recovery will be. A sandwich structure is a type of discrete channels that consists of tubes in the center of the material, and heals outwards from the middle. The stiffness of sandwich structures is high, making it an attractive option for pressurized chambers. For the most part in sandwich structures, the strength of the material is maintained as compared to vascular networks. Also, material shows almost full recovery from damage.

Interconnected networks are more efficient than discrete channels, but are harder and more expensive to create. The most basic way to create these channels is to apply basic machining principles to create micro scale channel grooves. These techniques yield channels from 600-700 micrometers. This technique works great on the two-dimensional plane, but when trying to create a three-dimensional network, they are limited.

The Direct Ink Writing (DIW) technique is a controlled extrusion of viscoelastic inks to create three-dimensional interconnected networks. It works by first setting organic ink in a defined pattern. Then the structure is infiltrated with a material like an epoxy. This epoxy is then solidified, and the ink can be sucked out with a modest vacuum, creating the hollow tubes.

Through dissolving a linear polymer inside a solid three-dimensional epoxy matrix, so that they are miscible to each other, the linear polymer becomes mobile at a certain temperature When carbon nanotubes are also incorporated into epoxy material, and a direct current is run through the tubes, a significant shift in sensing curve indicates permanent damage to the polymer, thus 'sensing' a crack. When the carbon nanotubes sense a crack within the structure, they can be used as thermal transports to heat up the matrix so the linear polymers can diffuse to fill the cracks in the epoxy matrix. Thus healing the material.

A different approach was suggested by Prof. J. Aizenberg from Harvard University, who suggested to use Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces (SLIPS), a porous material inspired by the carnivorous pitcher plant and filled with a lubricating liquid immiscible with both water and oil. SLIPS possess self-healing and self-lubricating properties as well as icephobicity and were successfully used for many purposes.

Organic threads (such as polylactide filament for example) are stitched through laminate layers of fiber reinforced polymer, which are then boiled and vacuumed out of the material after curing of the polymer, leaving behind empty channels than can be filled with healing agents.

The creation of a capsule-based system was first reported by White et al. in 2001, and this approach has since been adapted by a number of authors for introduction into fibre reinforced materials. This method relies on the release of an encapsulated healing agent into the damage zone, and is generally a once off process as the functionality of the encapsulated healing agent cannot be restored. Even so, implemented systems are able to restore material integrity to almost 100% and remain stable over the material lifetime.

A vascular or fibre-based approach may be more appropriate for self-healing impact damage in fibre-reinforced polymer composite materials. In this method, a network of hollow channels known as vascules, similar to the blood vessels within human tissue, are placed within the structure and used for the introduction of a healing agent. During a damage event cracks propagate through the material and into the vascules causing them to be cleaved open. A liquid resin is then passed through the vascules and into the damage plane, allowing the cracks to be repaired. Vascular systems have a number of advantages over microcapsule based systems, such as the ability to continuously deliver large volumes of repair agents and the potential to be used for repeated healing. The hollow channels themselves can also be used for additional functionality, such as thermal management and structural health monitoring. A number of methods have been proposed for the introduction of these vascules, including the use of hollow glass fibres (HGFs), 3D printing, a "lost wax" process and a solid preform route.

Coatings allow the retention and improvement of bulk properties of a material. They can provide protection for a substrate from environmental exposure. Thus, when damage occurs (often in the form of microcracks), environmental elements like water and oxygen can diffuse through the coating and may cause material damage or failure. Microcracking in coatings can result in mechanical degradation or delamination of the coating, or in electrical failure in fibre-reinforced composites and microelectronics, respectively. As the damage is on such a small scale, repair, if possible, is often difficult and costly. Therefore, a coating that can automatically heal itself ("self-healing coating") could prove beneficial by automatic recovering properties (such as mechanical, electrical and aesthetic properties), and thus extending the lifetime of the coating. The majority of the approaches that are described in literature regarding self-healing materials can be applied to make "self-healing" coatings, including microencapsulation and the introduction of reversible physical bonds such as hydrogen bonding, ionomers and chemical bonds (Diels-Alder chemistry). Microencapsulation is the most common method to develop self-healing coatings. The capsule approach originally described by White et al., using microencapsulated dicyclopentadiene (DCPD) monomer and Grubbs' catalyst to self-heal epoxy polymer was later adapted to epoxy adhesive films that are commonly used in the aerospace and automotive industries for bonding metallic and composite substrates. Recently, microencapsulated liquid suspensions of metal or carbon black were used to restore electrical conductivity in a multilayer microelectronic device and battery electrodes respectively; however the use of microencapsulation for restoration of electrical properties in coatings is limited. Liquid metal microdroplets have also been suspended within silicone elastomer to create stretchable electrical conductors that maintain electrical conductivity when damaged, mimicking the resilience of soft biological tissue. The most common application of this technique is proven in polymer coatings for corrosion protection. Corrosion protection of metallic materials is of significant importance on an economical and ecological scale. To prove the effectiveness of microcapsules in polymer coatings for corrosion protection, researchers have encapsulated a number of materials. These materials include isocyanates monomers such as DCPD GMA epoxy resin, linseed oil and tung oil., For encapsulation of core like as mentioned above, number of shell materials have been utilised such as phenol formaldehyde, urea formaldehyde &, dendritic or PAMAM, melamine formaldehyde, etc. Each shell material has its own merits and demerits. Even these shell materials extended their applications in control delivery of pesticides and drugs. By using the aforementioned materials for self healing in coatings, it was proven that microencapsulation effectively protects the metal against corrosion and extends the lifetime of a coating.

Cementitious materials have existed since the Roman era. These materials have a natural ability to self-heal, which was first reported by the French Academy of Science in 1836. This ability can be improved by the integration of chemical and biochemical strategies.

Autogenous healing is the natural ability of cementitious materials to repair cracks. This ability is principally attributed to further hydration of unhydrated cement particles and carbonation of dissolved calcium hydroxide. Cementitious materials in fresh-water systems can autogenously heal cracks up to 0.2 mm over a period of 7 weeks.

Self-healing of cementitious materials can be achieved through the reaction of certain chemical agents. Two main strategies exist for housing these agents, namely capsules and vascular tubes. These capsules and vascular tubes, once ruptured, release these agents and heal the crack damage. Studies have mainly focused on improving the quality of these housings and encapsulated materials in this field.

According to a 1996 study by H. L. Erlich in Chemical Geology journal, the self-healing ability of concrete has been improved by the incorporation of bacteria, which can induce calcium carbonate precipitation through their metabolic activity. These precipitates can build up and form an effective seal against crack related water ingress. At the First International Conference on Self Healing Materials held in April, 2007 in The Netherlands, Henk M. Jonkers and Erik Schlangen presented their research in which they had successfully used the "alkaliphilic spore-forming bacteria" as a "self-healing agent in concrete". They were the first to incorporate bacteria within cement paste for the development of self-healing concrete. It was found that the bacteria directly added to the paste only remained viable for 4 months. Later studies saw Jonkers use expanded clay particles and Van Tittlelboom use glass tubes, to protect the bacteria inside the concrete. Other strategies to protect the bacteria have also since been reported. Even microcapsule based self-healing applications has been extended on bio-based coating materials. These coatings are based on neem oil and possesses another bio-based character as it utilized vegetable oil as a core material.,

Generally, ceramics are superior in strength to metals at high temperatures, however, they are brittle and sensitive to flaws, and this brings into question their integrity and reliability as structural materials.[117] phase ceramics, also known as MAX Phases, can autonomously heal crack damage by an intrinsic healing mechanism. Micro cracks caused by wear or thermal stress are filled with oxides formed from the MAX phase constituents, commonly the A-element, during high temperature exposure to air.[118] Crack gap filling was first demonstrated for Ti ₃AlC ₂ by oxidation at 1200 °C in air.[119] Ti ₂AlC and Cr ₂AlC have also demonstrated said ability, and more ternary carbides and nitrides are expected to be able to autonomously self-heal.[120] The process is repeatable up to the point of element depletion, distinguishing MAX phases from other self-healing materials that require external healing agents (extrinsic healing) for single crack gap filling. Depending on the filling-oxide, improvement of the initial properties such as local strength can be achieved.[121] On the other hand, mullite, alumina and zirconia do not have the ability to heal intrinsically, but could be endowed with self-healing capabilities by embedding second phase components into the matrix. Upon cracking, these particles are exposed to oxygen, and in the presence of heat, they react to form new materials which fill the crack gap under volume expansion.[122] This concept has been proven using SiC to heal cracks in an Alumina matrix,[123] and further studies have investigated the high temperature strength,[124] and the static and cyclic fatigue strength of the healed part.[125] The strength and bonding between the matrix and the healing agent are of prime importance and thus govern the selection of the healing particles.

When exposed for long times to high temperatures and moderate stresses, metals exhibit premature and low-ductility creep fracture, arising from the formation and growth of cavities. Those defects coalesce into cracks which ultimately cause macroscopic failure. Self-healing of early stage damage is thus a promising new approach to extend the lifetime of the metallic components. In metals, self-healing is intrinsically more difficult to achieve than in most other material classes, due to their high melting point and, as a result, low atom mobility. Generally, defects in the metals are healed by the formation of precipitates at the defect sites that immobilize further crack growth. Improved creep and fatigue properties have been reported for underaged aluminium alloys compared to the peak hardening Al alloys, which is due to the heterogeneous precipitation at the crack tip and its plastic zone. The first attempts to heal creep damage in steels were focused on the dynamic precipitation of either Cu or BN at the creep-cavity surface. Cu precipitation has only a weak preference for deformation-induced defects as a large fraction of spherical Cu precipitates is simultaneously formed with the matrix. Recently, gold atoms were recognized as a highly efficient healing agents in Fe-based alloys. A defect-induced mechanism is indicated for the Au precipitation, i.e. the Au solute remains dissolved until defects are formed. Autonomous repair of high-temperature creep damage was reported by alloying with a small amount of Au. Healing agents selectively precipitate at the free surface of a creep cavity, resulting in pore filling. For the lower stress levels up to 80% filling of the creep cavities with Au precipitates is achieved resulting in a substantial increase in creep life time. Work to translate the concept of creep damage healing in simple binary or ternary model systems to real multicomponent creep steels is ongoing.

Recently, several classes of organic dyes were discovered that self-heal after photo-degradation when doped in PMMA and other polymer matrices. This is also known as reversible photo-degradation. It was shown that, unlike common process like molecular diffusion, the mechanism is caused by dye-polymer interaction.

Self-healing epoxies can be incorporated onto metals in order to prevent corrosion. A substrate metal showed major degradation and rust formation after 72 hours of exposure. But after being coated with the self-healing epoxy, there was no visible damage under SEM after 72 hours of the same exposure.

Numerous methodologies for the assessment of self-healing capabilities have been developed for each material class (Table 1).

Material class

Damage mechanism

Healing

Polyurethane foam coating

Puncturing with a spike

Reduction of the effective leakage area by negative strains pushing the walls of the fissure in the foam coatings to one another.

Hence, when self-healing is assessed, different parameters need to be considered: type of stimulus (if any), healing time, maximum amount of healing cycles the material can tolerate, and degree of recovery, all whilst considering the material's virgin properties. This typically takes account of relevant physical parameters such as tensile modulus, elongation at break, fatigue-resistance, barrier properties, colour and transparency. The self-healing ability of a given material generally refers to the recovery of a specific property relative to the virgin material, designated as the self-healing efficiency. The self-healing efficiency can be quantified by comparing the respective experimental value obtained for the undamaged virgin sample ( f virgin) with the healed sample ( f healed) (eq. )

In a variation of this definition that is relevant to extrinsic self-healing materials, the healing efficiency takes into consideration the modification of properties caused by introducing the healing agent. Accordingly, the healed sample property is compared to that of an undamaged control equipped with self-healing agent f non-healed (equation ).

For a certain property Pi of a specific material, an optimal self-healing mechanism and process is characterized by the full restoration of the respective material property after a suitable, normalized damaging process. For a material where 3 different properties are assessed, it should be determined 3 efficiencies given as ƞ ₁( P ₁), ƞ ₂( P ₂) and ƞ ₃( P ₃). The final average efficiency based on a number n of properties for a self-healing material is accordingly determined as the harmonic mean given by equation . The harmonic mean is more appropriate than the traditional arithmetic mean, as it is less sensitive to large outliers.

(3)

At least two companies are attempting to bring the newer applications of self-healing materials to the market. Arkema, a leading chemicals company, announced in 2009 the beginning of industrial production of self-healing elastomers. As of 2012, Autonomic Materials Inc., had raised over three million US dollars.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Self-healing materials are artificial or synthetically-created substances that have the built-in ability to automatically repair damages to themselves without any external diagnosis of the problem or human intervention. Generally, materials will degrade over time due to fatigue, environmental conditions, or damage incurred during operation.

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#Biomimetics#Biomimicry

the emulation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Biomimetics or biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems. The terms "biomimetics" and "biomimicry" derive from Ancient Greek: βίος ( bios), life, and μίμησις (), imitation, from μιμεῖσθαι ( mīmeisthai), to imitate, from μῖμος ( mimos), actor.

# data[].attributes.body
#RogerHiorns#BlueRoomCrystals#Installation#2008#Crystal

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#UrsulaLeGuin#CarrierBag#Fiction

# data[].attributes.body
#Claytablets #1#CrystalStrcuture

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#Claytablets #2

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#Claytablet

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#Transhumanism#Posthumanism #Octopus #Evolution

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Welcome to cephalopod
evolution

Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) is a PSYCHO- PHYSICAL training regimen for human evolution {{enhancement, extension, transformation}} in the face of rapid ecological and technological change. A series of exercises train new sensitivities and capabilities within the existing human biological system, based on the #role-model-organism# of the cephalopod. The regimen focuses on the internal capacity building of three key cephalopodic traits within the human: embodied and tactile intelligence, shape-shifting camouflage and distributed intelligence.

Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) was developed at the MIT Media Lab (aka the future factory) by Miriam Simun in collaboration with luciana achugar.
2

transhumanist dreams

#trainingtranshumanism {{{transhumanism:: the physical, psychological and emotional enhancement of the human}}} not through augmentation or implantation but through TRAINING, LABOR, BODY-WORK.

The literal definition for transhuman is " beyond human." Another definition describes the enhancement of humans' physical, cognitive and emotional abilities. For the last half-century, transhumanism has come to be understood as a vision for the future of the human that melds human and machine. Heavily influenced by science fiction and currently heralded by silicon valley, popular transhumanist projects attempt to upload the brain to the Internet, end death, enhance cognition through neurobiological intervention and artificial intelligence, and generally and push beyond the limits of human capacity with technology.

A primary goal of many transhumanists is to convince the public that embracing radical technology and science is in the species' best interest. The ultimate melding of "man and machine." [1]

"Posthumanism is a description of a new form of human existence in which the boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are blurred, as well as a prescription for an ideal situation in which the limitations of human biology are transcended, replaced by machines. The transition from the human condition to the posthuman condition will be facilitated by transhumanism, the project of human enhancement that will ultimately yield the transformation of the human species from the human to the posthuman. As an intellectual movement, transhumanism is still very small, but transhumanist ideas exert deep and broad influence on contemporary culture and society...[I] argue that it should be seen as a secularist faith: transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance." [2]

Worship of technology. A quick image search renders the preceding images - the melding of man with machine (and one woman). Data storage, wireless brain-to-device interaction, implanted error correction devices...the predominant model for the future of the human is a computing machine.

While "solving" death and discarding with my body do not reside high on my agenda, the enhancement of capability is a worthy endeavor, and certainly one we need to contend with all these futures.
But I don't want to become a machine.

3
What do you want?

I WANT.

I WANT TO BECOME.
I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD.
{{{ #allthewaysintobecoming }}} We are agents of our own evolution... but what is the model according to which we operate?

Embedded in all projects of innovation are the grains of desire, of vision, of ideology - explicit or not. This transhumanist project begins with a declaration of desire.

The future(s) we propose are the future(s) we desire.

4
training
as technology
This attempt at becoming requires the use of a technology rooted in bodily labors: training.
The Merriam-Webster's dictionary offers a definition of the term technology: "the use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems and a machine, piece of equipment, method, etc., that is created by technology." In 1937, the American sociologist Read Bain wrote that "technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them." [3] The US Patent department enables the patenting of objects but also processes: methods are also understood to be technologies.

Training is a method of producing a new kind of human, out of an old one. We train pilots, astronauts, soldiers. We train trainers. We develop methods and processes in order to produce biological organisms with new capabilities. These trainings are also a technology.

Training, as opposed to devices, is a technology that requires a different kind of resource investment: of time and of labor - not simply of capital. Training does not [have to] require expensive gadgets, material goods, the newest devices. Training requires labor, diligence, commitment and effort.

In this way, training as technology - if wielded in thoughtful ways - can encourage equity in access. Certainly, time is a valuable resource, and hard to come by - but fundamentally - time can be made where capital and access to material technologies can not. Training is about making-do with what one has and making it better, through labor, through commitment, through effort: through sweat.

#rolemodelspecies

Cephalopods are the class of marine mollusks that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus. They have been in existence for over 400 million years.

"Cephalopods - especially octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid - have a special importance. These animals are an independent experiment in the evolution of large and complex nervous systems - in the biological machinery of the mind. They evolved this machinery on a historical lineage distinct from our own. Where their minds differ from ours, they show us another way of being a sentient organism, writes Peter Godfrey- Smith in Other Minds." [4]

Another way of being, another way of seeing, another way of feeling, another way of responding, another way of perceiving, another way of being, of being, of being...

5
embodied + tactile
intelligence

"The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in touch, in ways that enable response-ability."

- Karen Barad [5]

Embodied cognition is a thinking that occurs in relation to the world. It is an understanding and intelligence that occurs fundamentally in relation to a specific context. It thus requires - and is shaped by - our physical bodies and the physical, real- world environment. It is where all intelligence emerged from, and the site to which human intelligence remains tethered.

To understand intelligence as fundamentally tied to perceptive and action-based abilities that reside in our bodies.

This position presents us with an entirely other set of possibilities for intelligence and action in the world.

The cephalopod as model explores the radical extreme of embodied cognition and intelligence - neural-cognitive processes literally occurring in what we vertebrates term the "peripheral " body parts. The cephalopod represents a radical example of neurobiology - decision making with the body, without involving the 'main' brain. [6]

As Mather and Kuba describe:

"The arm contains a widespread sensory system that allows the animal to collect mechanical and chemical information from the immediate environment and to appropriately react to the stimuli." [7]

Said another way by Godfrey-Smith: "In the octopus, the motions are guided by the arm's own chemical and tactile sensors, not by vision." [8] It is the arm itself that makes decisions, based on its embodied understanding of the world.

" Cephalopods have large nervous systems...as many as two-thirds of these neurons are dedicated to the nerve cords and ganglia in the peripheral nervous system (PNS)

rather than the central nervous system ..." [9] Not only is their cognitive processes localized, it is highly sensorial: "...a significant portion of the central nervous system in cephalopods is dedicated to visual, tactile, and chemosensory perception. " [10]

IF
{it is in large part this intimate, fuzzy and malleable relation of mind/body/environment in the cephalopod that has enabled it to survive millennia, adapting to an ever- changing environment.}
THEN
{developing and improving a thinking in humans that listens to our body and occurs in relation to our environment will develop our awareness, understanding, concern and resiliency of/for/in our surroundings; environment; ecology. The ecological crisis will only intensify if we continue to solely foreground non-situated cognition to address ecological concerns.
To stimulate our tactile capacities. To heighten our embodied sensitivities.

These cognitive enhancements will provide us with new sensations, new awarenesses, new relations to the world, each other, and ourselves. As luciana achugar lays out "a more connected, more sensational relation" to the world.

6
shapeshifting
camouflage

Cephalopods can change color, texture, shape and even mimic other organisms' movement patterns. They do this largely in order to avoid detection by predators and prey, and as a form of signaling - communicating with each other.

The malleability of representation of which cephalopods are capable makes them very resilient creatures, able to swiftly adapt to any situation. This is one of the reasons this animal - a shell-less invertebrate, essentially a giant piece of meat swimming through the sea - has been able to propagate and succeed for millennium in an ocean full of predators.

Consider also Mather and Kuba's description of the S. sepioidea squid's evaluation of predator behavior and subsequent response in a near-shore field study:

"Different cues elicited different responses within and across species... Could the squid be "mind reading" the intention of the fish? It is more likely that they were picking up small movement or postural cues, but the necessity to do such complex evaluations suggest a heavy pressure to succeed in these calculations." [11]

Such findings show that beyond a simple color-changing camouflage capability, cephalopods practice a complex and sophisticated shapeshifting strategy for best survival. This requires an immense awareness of their physical and social environment, which they gain through highly attuned visual, tactile, and chemo-receptive sensors - as well as embodied and tactile cognition - operating both centrally and locally.

The US military is funding both biological and engineering research to better understand how cephalopod skin and their chromatophores function, in order to develop materials and tools that will enable an evolution detection-avoidance capabilities for military purposes. [12] #TrainingTranshumanism takes a broader and more holistic approach. What can we learn from the complex interactions of the shapeshifter?

We define camouflage as:

1. [A] hyper-awareness of one's hyper-local environment, and

2. [B] the ability to shape-shift - in role, behavior, identity or simply presentation - for utmost resiliency in said environment.

7
distributed intelligence

"All vertebrates share a general body-plan, and their nervous systems show a common inheritance. Cephalopods have an entirely different organization, both in body and in brain. The vertebrate plan features a head and spinal cord, with the peripheral nervous system coming off it. This is a rather centralized design. Molluscs, along with several other invertebrate groups, developed what is sometimes called a 'ladder-like' nervous system. In many molluscs there are knots of neurons, or ganglia, spread along the body, linked by two kinds of connections - 'vertical' ones along the body and 'horizontal' ones across it, like a ladder. Though this was the likely molluscan starting point, in the evolution of coleoid cephalopods there was both expansion and partial centralization of this nervous system." [13]

This distributed neural organization in means that intelligence - the ability to think and respond - is spread throughout their bodies. Different body parts can sense and act upon sensation without that information necessarily ever traveling to the 'main brain.' Even the term 'main brain' may provide an incorrect model for understanding cephalopodic intelligence. As Godfrey- Smith writes,

"In fact, the cephalopod nervous system is so decentralized that it might seem to be a mistake to even look for this kind of unified processing. They may have a radically different style of psychological organization from us." [14]

"For an octopus, its arms are party self- they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain's perspective, they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own... central guidance of the movements is never complete, and the peripheral system always has its say." [15]

Perhaps then, instead of understanding the octopus as a single organism with nine brains, we should understand it as nine organisms - housed within a single skin.

There is evidence that supports this position: Even after an arm has been severed, it can continue to hunt and catch food, attempting to feed it to a mouth no longer around. [16] Octopus researchers describe different arms as appearing to have different personalities that remain consistent over time: one arm curious, another shy. [17] Bret Grasse, cephalopod husbandry expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, tells of an octopus arm that attempted to feed itself only to have the body shoot jets of water at the arm in order to get it away. This debate continued for several minutes. [18]

"When we act, the border between self and environment is usually fairly clear. If you move your arm, for example, you control the arm both on its general path and also in many fine details of its motions. Various other objects in the environment are not under your control at all, though they can be moved indirectly by manipulating them with your limbs. Uncontrolled movements by an object around you are usually a sign that it is not part of you...If you were an octopus, these distinctions would be blurred." [19]

We train this blurriness. How might our attitudes shift if we were at times unsure if what we encounter is self or other? If we trained to be so sensitive as to inhabit another bodies' perceptions, sensations, activations inside our own bodies? "Other bodies" can include human bodies, non-human bodies, bodies of water, etc? How might our perceptions, relations, actions change?

As a vertebrate with a centralized intelligence, total distribution is impossible. Perhaps then, achieving cephalopod evolution is impossible alone. Perhaps then, the future of the human requires more than one human; to share cognition; to enter into states of shared intention; to become, for a while at least, a sort of single organism.

The distributed nervous system not only problematizes the conception of the self, but also the relationship between self and environment:

Beyond cooperation, beyond collaboration: toward a shared intention.

Our own embodiment is
never fully autonomous.
We require other bodies,
that in turn require other
bodies, to bathe us into
being. [20]

Our skin is our sensor,
also our border, holding
this jumble of physical
organs, gases, liquids, we
call the self together. But
even our skin is a membrane
- porous.

So I want you to let this sharp distinction that we
usually carry around with
us to start to blur - just
get a little fuzzy at the
edges - where fingers touch
fabric, where weight rests
on surface, where arm
brushes leg.

1. H. Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012, Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith, Zygon/r 47/4

2. R. Bain, 1937, Technology and State Government, American Sociological Review 2/6: 860

3. Flusser, Vilem and Louis Bec (2012) Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press

4. Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2017, Other Minds: The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life. London: William Collins

5. Karen Barad, 2013, On Touching-The Inhuman That Therefore I Am, differences 23/3: 206-223

6. Jennifer A. Mather and Michael J. Kuba, 2013, The cephalopod specialties: complex nervous system, learning, and cognition, Canadian Journal of Zoology 91/6: 431-449

7. Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2013, Cephalopods and the Evolution of the Mind, Conservation Biology 19: 4-9

8. Ibid.

9. Zullo, Letizia and Binyamin Hochner, 2011, A new perspective on the organization of an invertebrate brain, Communicative and Integrative Biology 4/1: 26-29

10. Ibid.

11. Jennifer A. Mather and Michael J. Kuba, 2013, The cephalopod specialties: complex nervous system, learning, and cognition, Canadian Journal of Zoology 91/6: 431-449

12. See Cunjiang et al, 2014, Adaptive optoelectronic camouflage systems with designs inspired by cephalopod skins and Harmon, 2014, Octopus-Inspired Camouflage Flashes To Life In Smart Material

13. Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2013, Cephalopods and the Evolution of the Mind, Conservation Biology 19: 4-9.

14. Ibid.

15. Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2017, Other Minds: The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life. London: William Collins

16. Katherine Harmon, Even Severed Octopus Arms Have Smart Moves, Scienti c American, August 27, 2013 blogs.scienti camerican.com/octopus-chronicles/even- severed-octopus-arms- have-smart-moves/

17. Jennifer A. Mather, 2008, To boldly go where no mollusc has gone before: Personality, play, thinking, and consciousness in cephalopods, American Malacological Bulletin 24/1:51-58.

18. Jump UpBret Grasse, Personal Conversation, April 12 2018.

19. Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2017, Other Minds: The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life. London: William Collins

20. Astrida Neimanis, 2017, Bodies of Water. London: Bloomsbury.

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TRANSHUMAN OCTOPUS EVOLUTION - MANIFESTO

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Welcome to cephalopodevolution Training Transhumanism (I WANT TO BECOME A CEPHALOPOD) is a PSYCHO- PHYSICAL training regimen for human evolution {{enhancement, extension, transformation}} in the face of rapid ecological and technological change. A series of exercises train new sensitivities and capabilities within the existing human biological system, based on the #role-model-organism# of the cephalopod.

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#Bodiesofwater#AstridaNeimanis

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#AstridaNeimanis #Hydrofeminism

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Hydrofeminist and educator Astrida Neimanis offers a provocation of various cultural readings and literary proposals of amphibious living in a potentially reinstated water world. While navigating forms of hydrotrauma, the politics of holding and flux, and the reconceptualization of entanglement, the author proposes a series of interventions and poetical imaginings of what could be, along with multiple trans-temporal cosmologies of watery life.

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Astrida Neimanis: How to Become a Body of Water (Lessons in Hydrofeminism) - Classroom - Art & Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hydrofeminist and educator Astrida Neimanis offers a provocation of various cultural readings and literary proposals of amphibious living in a potentially reinstated water world. While navigating forms of hydrotrauma, the politics of holding and flux, and the reconceptualization of entanglement, the author proposes a series of interventions and poetical imaginings of what could be, along with multiple trans-temporal cosmologies of watery life.

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#Crystal#Tears#Transformation#Alchemy

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When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher's photographs, you might think you're looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you're looking at her tears.

The Los Angeles-based photographer's project, The Topography of Tears, stemmed from a curiosity steeped in emotional release. After losing contact for years, Fisher reconnected with a close friend - who passed away soon after.

Her tears at the time, she says, were of grief and gratitude in similar proportions. In the midst of her mourning, she felt a sudden curiosity.

"I wondered, 'What do tears look like, really, if I could see them up close?' " she says. "The corollary to that was wondering if every tear looks the same, if a tear of one emotion would look like that of another."

To find out, she collected a tear on a glass slide and photographed it with a digital microscopy camera mounted on a vintage microscope.

When she examined the first tear, magnified 100 times, the result looked like an aerial photograph - "except instead of looking down on the land, I'm looking at my emotional terrain," Fisher says.

That sense of surprise sparked the decadelong project.

Since 2008, Fisher has kept slides everywhere, in her purse, in drawers at home, ready to collect samples anytime. When she cried - whether from grief, elation or onions - she collected a tear and wrote down how she felt.

Several factors influenced what the images looked like: whether the tear was air-dried or compressed, the volume of tear fluid, chemicals the tear interacted with, the settings on the camera and microscope, and how Fisher processed and printed the photograph.

Some tears contained little of visual interest; others generated dozens of images. Like any landscape photographer, Fisher chose the elements - in this case, different patterns and textures within a single tear - she wanted to include in the frame.

"When I'm looking through a microscope, I'm applying the same sensibility as taking any other picture," Fisher says.

Even though Fisher uses scientific equipment and processes to make her images, the project isn't scientific, and it isn't meant to be. Rather than document her tears' biological properties, she instead reflects on "their existential and poetic nature." When making an image, Fisher does what so many photographers do: searches for meaning in what's in front of her.

In making this work, Fisher discovered that her emotions weren't so simple and clear-cut.

"I had never really contemplated tears before, or paid attention to the nuance of my own emotions," Fisher says.

She found that tears could help break down barriers that words couldn't. Often after crying, "the circuits [would] just connect," she says. Whether the tears spurred empathy, compassion, remorse or forgiveness, Fisher could move forward in a way that she couldn't have before.

Many cultures view tears as shameful, a sign of weakness. But for Fisher, they are a force for unity and connection: our deepest responses to life's joys and tragedies, regardless of race, gender or nationality.

"In these times particularly, I think it matters a lot to find our essential similarities with one another," she says. A tear, Fisher says, is a microcosm of our larger human experience, like a drop of water in an ocean.

There's also poetry in the idea that our emotional terrain bears visual resemblance to the physical world; that our tears can look like the vistas we see out an airplane window. Fisher's images are the only remaining trace of these places, which exist during a moment of intense feeling - and then vanish.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher's photographs, you might think you're looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you're looking at her tears. The Los Angeles-based photographer's project, The Topography of Tears, stemmed from a curiosity steeped in emotional release.

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light interacts with different atoms to create different colors.

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light interacts with different atoms to create different colors.

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#Grow#Crystals

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A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituents, such as atoms, molecules or ions, are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure, forming a crystal lattice that extends in all directions. In addition, macroscopic single crystals are usually identifiable by their geometrical shape, consisting of flat faces with specific, characteristic orientations.

The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography. The process of crystal formation via mechanisms of crystal growth is called crystallization or solidification. The word crystal is derived from the Ancient Greek word κρύσταλλος (krustallos), meaning both "ice" and "rock crystal", from κρύος (kruos), "icy cold, frost".

Most minerals occur naturally as crystals. Every crystal has an orderly, internal pattern of atoms, with a distinctive way of locking new atoms into that pattern to repeat it again and again. The shape of the resulting crystaL-such as a cube (like salt) or a six-sided form (like a snowflake)-mirrors the internal arrangement of the atoms. As crystals grow, differences in temperature and chemical composition cause fascinating variations. But students will rarely find in their backyard the perfectly shaped mineral crystals that they see in a museum. This is because in order to readily show their geometric form and flat surfaces, crystals need ideal growing conditions and room to grow. When many different crystals grow near each other, they mesh together to form a conglomerated mass. This is the case with most rocks, such as granite mentioned above, which is made up of many tiny mineral crystals. The museum-quality specimens shown in the images here grew in roomy environments that allowed the geometric shapes to form uninhibited.

The internal arrangement of atoms determines all the minerals' chemical and physical properties, including color. Light interacts with different atoms to create different colors. Many minerals are colorless in their pure state; however, impurities of the atomic structure cause color. Quartz, for example, is normally colorless, but occurs in a range of colors from pink to brown to the deep purple of amethyst, depending on the number and type of impurities in its structure. In its colorless state, quartz resembles ice. In fact, the root for crystal comes from the Greek word krystallos-ice-because the ancient Greeks believed clear quartz was ice frozen so hard it could not melt.

Scientists typically describe crystals as "growing," even though they are not alive. In subterranean gardens, they branch and bristle as trillions of atoms connect in regular three-dimensional patterns. Each crystal starts small and grows as more atoms are added. Many grow from water rich in dissolved minerals, but they also grow from melted rock and even vapor. Under the influence of different temperatures and pressures, atoms combine in an amazing array of crystal shapes. It is this variety and perfection of form and symmetry that has long drawn scientists to the study of minerals. Symmetry is a regular, repeated pattern of component parts. Symmetry is everywhere in nature-the paired wings of a butterfly, the whorls and petals in a sunflower, the pattern of a snowflake, the legs of a spider-and minerals are no exception. In crystals, these repeated patterns occur within the basic atomic structure and reflect the pattern of faces of the crystal. You often can see the characteristic symmetry of a mineral crystal with the naked eye, but if the crystal is tiny, then you may need to look at it with a magnifying glass or microscope (as will be demonstrated in Lesson Plan 2). Recognizing symmetrical patterns in crystals may be difficult at first, but experience helps: the more specimens you look at, the more symmetry-and crystals-you will recognize. However, some specimens do not have well-formed crystals and are difficult even for experts to classify.

Crystal structure

The scientific definition of a "crystal" is based on the microscopic arrangement of atoms inside it, called the crystal structure. A crystal is a solid where the atoms form a periodic arrangement.

Not all solids are crystals. For example, when liquid water starts freezing, the phase change begins with small ice crystals that grow until they fuse, forming a polycrystalline structure. In the final block of ice, each of the small crystals (called "crystallites" or "grains") is a true crystal with a periodic arrangement of atoms, but the whole polycrystal does not have a periodic arrangement of atoms, because the periodic pattern is broken at the grain boundaries. Most macroscopic inorganic solids are polycrystalline, including almost all metals, ceramics, ice, rocks, etc. Solids that are neither crystalline nor polycrystalline, such as glass, are called amorphous solids, also called glassy, vitreous, or noncrystalline. These have no periodic order, even microscopically. There are distinct differences between crystalline solids and amorphous solids: most notably, the process of forming a glass does not release the latent heat of fusion, but forming a crystal does.

A crystal structure (an arrangement of atoms in a crystal) is characterized by its unit cell, a small imaginary box containing one or more atoms in a specific spatial arrangement. The unit cells are stacked in three-dimensional space to form the crystal.

The symmetry of a crystal is constrained by the requirement that the unit cells stack perfectly with no gaps. There are 219 possible crystal symmetries, called crystallographic space groups. These are grouped into 7 crystal systems, such as cubic crystal system (where the crystals may form cubes or rectangular boxes, such as halite shown at right) or hexagonal crystal system (where the crystals may form hexagons, such as ordinary water ice).

Crystal faces and shapes

Crystals are commonly recognized by their shape, consisting of flat faces with sharp angles. These shape characteristics are not necessary for a crystal-a crystal is scientifically defined by its microscopic atomic arrangement, not its macroscopic shape-but the characteristic macroscopic shape is often present and easy to see.

Euhedral crystals are those with obvious, well-formed flat faces. Anhedral crystals do not, usually because the crystal is one grain in a polycrystalline solid.

The flat faces (also called facets) of a euhedral crystal are oriented in a specific way relative to the underlying atomic arrangement of the crystal: They are planes of relatively low Miller index. This occurs because some surface orientations are more stable than others (lower surface energy). As a crystal grows, new atoms attach easily to the rougher and less stable parts of the surface, but less easily to the flat, stable surfaces. Therefore, the flat surfaces tend to grow larger and smoother, until the whole crystal surface consists of these plane surfaces. (See diagram on right.)

One of the oldest techniques in the science of crystallography consists of measuring the three-dimensional orientations of the faces of a crystal, and using them to infer the underlying crystal symmetry.

A crystal's habit is its visible external shape. This is determined by the crystal structure (which restricts the possible facet orientations), the specific crystal chemistry and bonding (which may favor some facet types over others), and the conditions under which the crystal formed.

Occurrence in nature

Rocks

By volume and weight, the largest concentrations of crystals in the Earth are part of its solid bedrock. Crystals found in rocks typically range in size from a fraction of a millimetre to several centimetres across, although exceptionally large crystals are occasionally found. As of 1999, the world's largest known naturally occurring crystal is a crystal of beryl from Malakialina, Madagascar, 18 m (59 ft) long and 3.5 m (11 ft) in diameter, and weighing 380,000 kg (840,000 lb).

Some crystals have formed by magmatic and metamorphic processes, giving origin to large masses of crystalline rock. The vast majority of igneous rocks are formed from molten magma and the degree of crystallization depends primarily on the conditions under which they solidified. Such rocks as granite, which have cooled very slowly and under great pressures, have completely crystallized; but many kinds of lava were poured out at the surface and cooled very rapidly, and in this latter group a small amount of amorphous or glassy matter is common. Other crystalline rocks, the metamorphic rocks such as marbles, mica-schists and quartzites, are recrystallized. This means that they were at first fragmental rocks like limestone, shale and sandstone and have never been in a molten condition nor entirely in solution, but the high temperature and pressure conditions of metamorphism have acted on them by erasing their original structures and inducing recrystallization in the solid state.

Other rock crystals have formed out of precipitation from fluids, commonly water, to form druses or quartz veins. The evaporites such as halite, gypsum and some limestones have been deposited from aqueous solution, mostly owing to evaporation in arid climates.

Ice

Water-based ice in the form of snow, sea ice and glaciers is a very common manifestation of crystalline or polycrystalline matter on Earth. A single snowflake is typically a single crystal, while an ice cube is a polycrystal.

Organigenic crystals

Many living organisms are able to produce crystals, for example calcite and aragonite in the case of most molluscs or hydroxylapatite in the case of vertebrates.

Crystallization

Crystallization is the process of forming a crystalline structure from a fluid or from materials dissolved in a fluid. (More rarely, crystals may be deposited directly from gas; see thin-film deposition and epitaxy.)

Crystallization is a complex and extensively-studied field, because depending on the conditions, a single fluid can solidify into many different possible forms. It can form a single crystal, perhaps with various possible phases, stoichiometries, impurities, defects, and habits. Or, it can form a polycrystal, with various possibilities for the size, arrangement, orientation, and phase of its grains. The final form of the solid is determined by the conditions under which the fluid is being solidified, such as the chemistry of the fluid, the ambient pressure, the temperature, and the speed with which all these parameters are changing.

Specific industrial techniques to produce large single crystals (called boules) include the Czochralski process and the Bridgman technique. Other less exotic methods of crystallization may be used, depending on the physical properties of the substance, including hydrothermal synthesis, sublimation, or simply solvent-based crystallization.

Large single crystals can be created by geological processes. For example, selenite crystals in excess of 10 meters are found in the Cave of the Crystals in Naica, Mexico. For more details on geological crystal formation, see above.

Crystals can also be formed by biological processes, see above. Conversely, some organisms have special techniques to prevent crystallization from occurring, such as antifreeze proteins.

Defects, impurities, and twinning

An ideal crystal has every atom in a perfect, exactly repeating pattern. However, in reality, most crystalline materials have a variety of crystallographic defects, places where the crystal's pattern is interrupted. The types and structures of these defects may have a profound effect on the properties of the materials.

A few examples of crystallographic defects include vacancy defects (an empty space where an atom should fit), interstitial defects (an extra atom squeezed in where it does not fit), and dislocations (see figure at right). Dislocations are especially important in materials science, because they help determine the mechanical strength of materials.

Another common type of crystallographic defect is an impurity, meaning that the "wrong" type of atom is present in a crystal. For example, a perfect crystal of diamond would only contain carbon atoms, but a real crystal might perhaps contain a few boron atoms as well. These boron impurities change the diamond's color to slightly blue. Likewise, the only difference between ruby and sapphire is the type of impurities present in a corundum crystal.

In semiconductors, a special type of impurity, called a dopant, drastically changes the crystal's electrical properties. Semiconductor devices, such as transistors, are made possible largely by putting different semiconductor dopants into different places, in specific patterns.

Twinning is a phenomenon somewhere between a crystallographic defect and a grain boundary. Like a grain boundary, a twin boundary has different crystal orientations on its two sides. But unlike a grain boundary, the orientations are not random, but related in a specific, mirror-image way.

Mosaicity is a spread of crystal plane orientations. A mosaic crystal is supposed to consist of smaller crystalline units that are somewhat misaligned with respect to each other.

Quasicrystals

A quasicrystal consists of arrays of atoms that are ordered but not strictly periodic. They have many attributes in common with ordinary crystals, such as displaying a discrete pattern in x-ray diffraction, and the ability to form shapes with smooth, flat faces.

Quasicrystals are most famous for their ability to show five-fold symmetry, which is impossible for an ordinary periodic crystal (see crystallographic restriction theorem).

The International Union of Crystallography has redefined the term "crystal" to include both ordinary periodic crystals and quasicrystals ("any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram").

Quasicrystals, first discovered in 1982, are quite rare in practice. Only about 100 solids are known to form quasicrystals, compared to about 400,000 periodic crystals measured to date. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman for the discovery of quasicrystals.

Crystallography

Crystallography is the science of measuring the crystal structure (in other words, the atomic arrangement) of a crystal. One widely used crystallography technique is X-ray diffraction. Large numbers of known crystal structures are stored in crystallographic databases.

Reference:
Wikipedia: Crystal
Wikipedia: Crystallization
Wikipedia: Crystal growth
Smithsonian education: Minerals and Crystals
How Crystals Grow: DOI:10.1038/164303a0 , Nature

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How Do Crystals Form & Grow? - Geology Page

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A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituents, such as atoms, molecules or ions, are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure, forming a crystal lattice that extends in all directions. In addition, macroscopic single crystals are usually identifiable by their geometrical shape, consisting of flat faces with specific, characteristic orientations.

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the sun and light as an organic material

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the sun and light as an organic material

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#Alum#Purification

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GENERAL INFORMATION

Alum crystals - that have triangular facets - grown on a silk substrate. The technique used here is called crystallization. Alum crystals are clear and faceted with great definition so they are often compared to diamonds. However these can get so big that it is not really credible that they are diamonds, but they play with light in similar ways.
Physical form
Surface treatment

Color without additives: transparent and translucent white. (Turns opaque after baking in the oven for 10 minutes at 100 degrees Celcius.)
Fabrication time
Preparation time: 1 Hour

Processing time: 1 day or overnight

Need attention: None. Leave in a warm place, don't move or touch it.

Final form achieved after: 1 day
Estimated cost (consumables)
2,00 Euros for a 400 ml saturated solution

RECIPE

Ingredients

Alum powder - 125 g (potassium aluminium sulfate dodecahydrate), plus some more just in case
we will try to reorganize these molecules into crystals.

Water - 400 ml/gr
To dissolve the alum powder and reorganize into a crystal

Water - 1000 ml/g

Silk - a 10x10cm swatch
As a substrate for the alum crystals to attach to

Tools

1. Cooker or kettle

2. A piece of silk

3. A smooth glass jar or bowl big enough to fit your piece of silk without touching the sides or having to fold or crease it. Make sure this it totally clean.

4. A wide heat-resistant bowl or oven pan this is the bain marie: the glass jar should fit inside this bowl and have some space for hot water

5. Spoon

6. A stick or chopsticks that are long enough to stay put on top of the glass jar.

7. Clips to fasten the silk to the stick

Yield

About 80-100% of the alum powder will attach itself the silk in the form of larger crystals.

Method

1. Preparation

Weigh the alum

Prepare the silk by attaching it to the wooden stick with clips. When you hang it inside the glass jar it should not touch the bottom or the walls of the jar

Boil the water

Put the glass jar inside the wide oven dish/pan. Pour as much boiling water as possible into the bigger pot, without making the glass jar float. This is the bain marie that will keep your crystal solution warm and help it cool down very very slowly (resulting in bigger crystals).

Put this in a (warm) place where you can leave it for 8-16 hours without anyone moving or touching it.

2. Dissolving the alum

Measure 400 ml and put it in the glass jar (which is already inside the bain marie to keep it warm).

Spoon by spoon, add the alum while stirring. When no more alum dissolves and just sinks to the bottom, your solution is saturated. If there are grains on the bottom, pour off the liquid and clean the jar before continuing. You don't want anything on the bottom of the jar.

Now suspend your silk into the jar, again making sure it doesn't touch any sides or the bottom, and not folded in on itself.

3. Let the crystals form

Now leave the crystal to grow. The less you touch it, the easier it is for the molecules to find each other on the silk and form big beautiful crystals.

If you have the patience, give it 16 hours. But pretty decent-sized crystals will have formed as soon as 6-8 hours later.

Rinse them under cold tap water and let them dry.

Drying/curing/growth process

Mold depth: N/A

Shrinkage thickness: N/A

Shrinkage width/length: N/A

Shrinkage and deformation control
N/A
Curing agents and release agents
None.
Minimum wait time before releasing
6 hours
Post-processing
Store the crystals in a dry place. They will re-dissolve immediately when the are submerged in hot water, starts to dissolve after an hour in water at room temperature, and is completely dissolved after being in water at room temperature for 4 hours.

Don't throw away left-over liquid or unused crystals, they can be redissolved a next time.
Further research needed on drying/curing/growth?
More research on colorants could be done. Black soot ink results in black crystals, purple crystals can be achieved by adding some chromium alum powder (or: potassium chromium sulfate dodecahydrate) to the solution.

Process pictures
Alum crystal on an LED (top) turned opaque white after 10 mins in the oven at 100 degrees celcius. On the bottom: a borax crystal (recipe here), Loes Bogers, 2020 2-3 cm crystals on silk, Loes Bogers, 2020 2-3 cm crystals on silk, Loes Bogers, 2020 Cultural origins of this recipe Improvised suspension system, Loes Bogers, 2020 Silk inside the bain marie, Loes Bogers, 2020
Variations

Add a colorant such as black soot ink (other natural dyes are still experimental!)

Turn your crystals opaque white by putting them in the oven for 10 minutes at 100 degrees celcius.

Use different textiles (e.g. velvet attracts many small crystals)

Lay your silk flat in a bowl to cover the entire surface with smaller crystals

Let the crystals grow without the bain marie to see what happens

Glue a piece of silk on an LED with hot glue to grow a crystal that you can use in electronics projecs instead of plastic casings (see video below).

The same technique can be used with epsom salt, sugar and borax.

Adding conductive paint to the solution creates crystals that can be used as capacitive sensors.

ORIGINS & REFERENCES

Potassium alum was known to the Ancient Egyptians as early as 1500 B.C and was described in the age old writings of Pliny and Dioscorides under many different names: alumen, salsugoterrae, stupteria and other substances with vaguely similar properties and uses like: misy, sory, chalcanthum, atramentum sutorium, iron sulfate or "green vitriol". The word "alum" is still used for many different kinds of alum compounds and are often used interchangeably but they are not all the same. Potassium alum is mentioned in the Ayurveda with the name phitkari or saurashtri.[citation needed] It is used in traditional Chinese medicine with the name mingfan (明矾).

Potassium alum was used extensively in the wool industry from Classical antiquity, during the Middle Ages, and well into 19th century as a mordant or dye fixative. The textile dyeing industry in Bruge, and many other locations in Italy, and later in England, required alum to stabilize the dyes onto the fabric (make the dyes "fast") and also to brighten the colors. As an ingredient it was of utmost economic importance during the Renaissance.

Needs further research? Yes

Key Sources

This is a variation on: Alum Crystals in "Textile as Scaffold" by Anastasia Pistofidou for Fabricademy 30 October 2019. Lecture notes: link

Which in turn refers to: Growing Gems Crystal Project by Home Science Tools Learning Center: link

Pistofidou's recipe is published under a Creative Commons Attibution Non-Commercial licence. It is unclear if the original recipe is copyrighted, further research required.
Sustainability tags
ETHICS & SUSTAINABILITY

Saying anything about the ethics and sustainability mineral crystals is relative. What do you compare it to? It is currently not known to be tied to practices of exploitation (when compared to, for example, the blood diamonds people fight horrific wars over.

Potassium alum historically was mainly extracted from alunite, but is now produced industrially by adding potassium sulfate to a concentrated solution of aluminium sulfate. Aluminium sulfate can be obtained from clays, bauxite, cryolite, and alum schists (found in Germany, Belgium, Scotland, Czech Republic).

Mineral deposits that alum can be harvested from are relatively abundant - again, compared to say, diamonds - but are still a finite resource that involves mining practices with all its historical problematics around stealing land from indigenous peoples, as well as worker's safety and depletion of the earth's resources (which is likely to be downplayed in factsheets from the mines themselves).

Unlike diamonds, borax and alum crystals can be regrown into different constellations infinitely allowing for multiple designs that can be executed reusing the same compound. They are not precious in the way diamonds and are, but pretty brilliant in their own right.
Maker(s) of this sample

Renewable ingredients: no

Vegan: yes

Made of by-products or waste: no

Biocompostable final product: no

Reuse: yes, dissolve and regrow in hot water

Environmental conditions
Needs further research?: yes, local producers seem reluctant to share sourcing information about these products. It is unclear where it comes from, whether it is natural or synthetic and what kind of mining practices are involved.
Recipe validation
PROPERTIES
Images of the final sample Alum crystals on silk (right), and on velvet (left), Loes Bogers, 2020 Smaller crystals grown on silk on top of a black bowl, Loes Bogers, 2020 Smaller crystals grown on silk (lay it flat in a wide glass bowl), Loes Bogers, 2020 Large crystals grown on silk, Loes Bogers, 2020 Large crystals grown on silk, Loes Bogers, 2020

Strength: medium

Hardness: rigid

Transparency: transparent/variable (turns opaque after 10 mins at 100 degrees celcius)

Glossiness: glossy/satin

Weight: heavy

Structure: closed/variable

Texture: rough

Temperature: cool

Shape memory: high

Odor: none

Stickiness: low

Weather resistance: poor

Acoustic properties: needs further research

Anti-bacterial: needs further research

Non-allergenic: needs further research

Electrical properties: needs further research

Heat resistance: low/needs further research

Water resistance: low

Chemical resistance: needs further research

Scratch resistance: high

Surface friction: sliding

PH modifiers: none

ABOUT

Name: Loes Bogers

Affiliation: Fabricademy student at Waag Textile Lab Amsterdam

Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Date: 27-02-2020 - 27-02-2020

Humidity: 40-50%

Outside temp: 5-11 degrees Celcius

Room temp: 18 - 22 degrees Celcius

PH tap water: 7-8

Has recipe been validated? Yes, by Cecilia Raspanti, TextileLab, Waag Amsterdam, 9 March 2020

REFERENCES

Textile as Scaffold by Anastasia Pistofidou for Fabricademy 30 October 2019. Lecture notes: link

Dark diamond mining by EJTech, 25 February 2020: link

Growing Gems Crystal Project by Home Science Tools Learning Center: link

Grow your own simulated diamonds with a big alum crystal, by Anne Marie Helmenstein for ThoughtCo, 13 February 2018: link

Potassium alum, on Wikipedia, n.d. link

Aluminium Compounds, inorganic by Otto Helmboldt, e.a. in Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, 15 April 2007: link

A History of the International Dyestuff Industry A History Of The International Dyestuff Industry by Peter J T Morris and Anthony Travis, 01 January 1992: link

What is Alum? by Anne Marie Helmenstine for ThoughtCo, 11 July 2019: link

Kinetics of nucleation in solutions, by Jaroslav Nývlt, Journal of Crystal Growth, Volumes 3-4, 1968: link

Brunsteiner et al., Toward a Molecular Understanding of Crystal Agglomeration, Crystal Growth & Design, 2005, 5 (1), pp 3-16: link

Crystal Growth Kinetics, Material Science and Engineering, Volume 65, Issue 1, July 1984: link

Crystallization and Precipitation: Optimize Crystal Size, Yield, and Purity with Crystallization Equipment by AuthoChem Applications, n.d.:link

Crystallization, Wikipedia, n.d. link

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Alum crystals - that have triangular facets - grown on a silk substrate. The technique used here is called crystallization. Alum crystals are clear and faceted with great definition so they are often compared to diamonds. However these can get so big that it is not really credible that they are diamonds, but they play with light in similar ways.

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#Crystallization

what does it mean to crystalize?

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#Process#CrystalSeeds

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#CrystalCave

interesting to try an recreate this image as part of the performance

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#Marble #Cave #Place

marble cave looks like a nice place to be
can i make a set like this?

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this is no joke, i had to do a second try because the first one didnt work, i needed to dissolve the powder more and saturate it even more, it worked now

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#Björk

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Björk - Crystalline (Official Music Video)

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#Alum#Crystal

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How to grow Alum crystals! - Huge alum crystals diy in supersaturated solution.

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#Sapphire

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#Sapphire#Poem#Poetry#Crystal

and possible lyrics for sound piece

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cultural and symbolical meanings of sapphire

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cultural and symbolical meanings of sapphire

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#Crystal#Symbolism#Magic#Healing#Calming#Religion#Sapphire

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Sapphires figure prominently in numerous beliefs and traditions, both past and present. For centuries, sapphires have been used for , magic, healing rituals, and astrological prognostication.

Early priests and scholars believed that precious gemstones, including sapphires, had specific "virtues" that could be used to benefit man if their powers were properly harnessed. According to legend, Helen of Troy (c. 12th century B.C.) owned a large star sapphire, which was believed to hold the key to her desirability.

The famous "seal" of King Solomon (c. 1000-931 B.C.) was legendary, not only because it was an inscribed sapphire, but also because it apparently gave him power over spirits in the air, earth, and underworld.

During the Hellenistic period (400-100 B.C.) when gemstones were associated with specific deities or occult powers, sapphires were routinely inscribed with the head of Jupiter (Zeus) , the god of the sky.

During this same period, Arabian kings were known to wear sapphires to protect themselves from envy and physical injury. Early sailors believed that sapphires would protect them from drowning at sea.

In Medieval times, sapphires were used as a test for infidelity; it was thought to change color if worn by the unfaithful. The wives of the crusaders were tested with sapphires (including color change sapphires!) when their husbands returned from their campaigns.

The famed explorer Marco Polo traveled from Constantinople to Samarkand, leaving sapphires with the rulers he entertained. He told lavish stories of the gorgeously deep blue Ceylon sapphires that he delivered to the Venetian court, and many of the large Ceylon sapphires in royal treasuries today can be accredited to Marco Polo's movements.

The History Of Sapphires In Religion

Sapphires have ancient associations with religion. The ancient Persians believed that Earth was balanced on a giant sapphire that was reflected in the color of the heavens. Buddhists believed that sapphires had a calming effect on people, which facilitated their devotion to prayer and meditation. The seventh heaven of Islam is bathed in a shining light of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.

Sapphires are key symbols in the Christian religion, where they are associated with chastity, piety, and repentance. To the early Christians, sapphires symbolized heaven and their yearning for eternal life. Tradition holds that Moses' Ten Commandments were written on tablets of sapphire so strong that a hammer swung against them would be smashed to pieces. Each of the Apostles was associated with a specific gem, and sapphire was known as the stone of St. Paul.

Charlemagne owned an enormous sapphire that he wore prominently to display his devotion to God. In the 6th century, a papal bull decreed that every cardinal was to wear a sapphire ring on the right, or "blessing" hand. In the 12th century, this practice was encouraged because it was believed to suppress sexual desires, promoting chastity and piety.

The History Of Sapphires In Medical Use

During the 12th to 14th centuries, members of the Christian clergy became interested in "lithotherapy" - the practice of using gemstones to heal the sick. The father of modern botany and zoology, Dominican monk Albertus Magnus (c. 1193-1280), was one of many serious scholars who dabbled in the study of lithotherapy. Skeptics were dismissed as heretics, and scholars who did not enthusiastically support tenets of lithotherapy were threatened with excommunication.

The Christian clergy were not the only scholars fascinated with the power of sapphires. Alchemists also sought to harness their legendary powers. Sapphires were also the favorite stone of necromancers, who employed them to summon spirits of the dead for prophecy and black magic.

General Medical Applications

In ancient times, sapphires have been used to protect the wearer by boosting the immune system. They were said to calm overactive body systems, treat disorders of the blood, and regulate the glands.

They were believed to alleviate the suffering caused by rheumatism, allergies, biliousness, hiccups, and cancer. They were even said to cure chronic fevers and epilepsy. Blue sapphire was thought to increase the lifespan, and end headaches, nightmares, and nosebleeds when placed on the forehead.

The ancient Egyptians used ground sapphires for eye-washes! The idea that sapphires were beneficial for the eyes persisted through the Middle Ages. The Dominican monk, Albertus Magnus (1327-1377) recorded that he saw a sapphire remove a foreign body from the eye. In 1391, a sapphire was donated to St. Paul's Church in London by Richard-de-Preston, a grocer, so that it might cure the eye ailments of pious parishioners.

Mental Health And General Well-Being

Early medieval writers believed that sapphires could reduce outbreaks of rage, dispel malicious behavior, and repel envy. They were considered helpful for treating colic, mental illness, and hysteria, and they were considered a good antidepressant.

The location where sapphires are worn is believed to bestow particular health benefits:

Index (first) finger: Eases ailments of the stomach and respiratory system.

Second (middle) finger: Strengthens the mind, liver, and spleen.

Third finger: Aids the kidneys and circulatory system. It is also the best place to wear a ring if you wish for happiness and joy.

Little finger: Bolsters the reproductive system, knees, legs, and feet.

Understanding Sapphires In Spiritual Practices

Sapphires are known as the stones of wisdom and serenity. They are used to release mental tension and dispel depression. They are believed to facilitate meditation, calm the mind, and provide the mental clarity required to surmount obstacles.

Specific colors of sapphires are believed to have additional attributes:
Star Sapphires
Exceptional for their protective qualities; the rays of the star represent faith, hope, and destiny.
Yellow Sapphires
Bring prosperity, stimulate the intellect, and remove toxins from the body.
White Sapphires
Open the crown chakra, which elevates spirituality and cosmic consciousness.
Blue Sapphires
Especially effective for chakra healing-especially the throat chakra. They are a good stone for those who are intent on finding spiritual truth.
Purple Sapphires
Improve meditation and psychic abilities. They are also effective in calming overwrought emotions.
Green Sapphires
Stimulate the heart chakra improving one's capacity for compassion, loyalty, and trust in others. They also enhance your ability to recall dreams.
Pink Sapphires
Remove emotional stumbling blocks and illuminate the path to higher consciousness. They attract positive elements into your life.
Black Sapphires
Build both careers and the power of intuition.

Since precious metals are energy amplifiers, the metal used to mount sapphires also have the ability to augment the power of each of the sapphire varieties .

Gold's biocompatibility and conductivity have been recognized for ages. Worn on the body, it is said to be helpful for treating blood, skin, and heart conditions as well as epilepsy, scoliosis, dyslexia, and autism.

Because gold is chemically inert, it is also believed to prevent spiritual corrosion, fatigue, and negativity. If the wearer is mindful to avoid a tendency toward greed, gold serves to relieve tension, anger, and feelings of inferiority.

Yellow gold harnesses the warmth of the sun and it promotes self-awareness and the realization of dreams. Rose gold enhances spirituality, and white gold channels the energies of both the sun and the moon.

Silver is often associated with the feminine characteristics of compassion and empathy. Because of these traits, it helps to channel the positive energy of gemstone-including sapphires-into the body.

What Is Vedic Astrology?

The cultures of the Indian subcontinent have studied different aspects of gemstones for centuries. Ancient Sanskrit texts give us a great deal of information on sapphire's ability to influence the cosmos. Jyotisha refers to an ancient Indian system of astronomy and astrology, also known as Vedic Astrology.

Jyotisha is a form of predictive astrology; prognostication centers on an evaluation of the natal horoscope as it relates to the moment and subject of inquiry. The practice of Jyotisha is based on the sidereal zodiac, which is different from the tropical zodiac used in Western astrology.

Jyotisha is primarily concerned with the sun, moon, five visible planets, and two lunar nodes (called Rahu and Ketu). These "planets," as they are collectively called, impact our lives on many levels and contribute to our mental, physical, material, and spiritual well-being.

Each of the planets emits colored rays of light: the rays of the Sun are red, Moon orange, Mars yellow, Mercury green, Jupiter blue, Venus indigo, Saturn violet, Rahu ultraviolet, and Ketu infrared. When the rays are out of balance or "afflicted," physical or emotional sickness occurs. Imbalances result when the planetary rays are distorted or improperly received by an individual.

Gemstones have long associations with astrology because as crystalline forms of energy they retain the astral influences of the sun, moon, and planets longer than any other known substance.

Because gemstones have the ability to absorb, reflect and radiate different frequencies of light, they can be used to correct or amplify planetary influences. Practitioners of Jyotisha prescribe different gemstones to (a) promote the positive effects of favorable birth planets or (b) ameliorate the effects of unfavorable birth planets.

The primary gemstones include: which is associated with red light; -orange light; -yellow light; -green light; Yellow sapphire -blue light; -indigo light; and Blue Sapphire -violet light. It should be noted that White (colorless) Sapphires might, on occasion, be substituted for diamonds because they too are associated with indigo light.

Navaratna Amulets

One of the most universal of all amulets is the , or "nine gems." Navaratnas are set with the nine gemstones of Jyotisha, which are known to influence the health and destiny of the wearer. White or colorless sapphires are never used in Navaratnas, because they are only considered as substitute, not primary, planetary gems.

Since Jupiter is the planet of material prosperity, progeny, and spiritual growth, many consider this planet of critical importance to their lives. People who suffer from depression, poverty, bad luck, blood or immune disorders, respiratory ailments, and liver problems may find their problems ameliorated by yellow sapphire. Although yellow sapphires can be effective if they are two carats in size, experts typically recommend that they be at least three carats.

Care must be taken in prescribing blue sapphire to treat a weak or afflicted planet Saturn in the natal chart of an individual, and it must be considered in conjunction with the individual's ascendant, or rising sign. Saturn is considered a malefic planet; if poorly positioned, the individual may live a short lonely life full of sorrow, disappointment, bad career choices, and fear.

Saturn rules the nails, teeth, bones, and nervous system. Blue sapphire can be used to treat heart disease, tuberculosis, rheumatism, deafness, mental and nervous disorders, and baldness. Blue sapphires of five carats are typically recommended, but effects will be realized if the stone is at least two carats in size.

Although diamond is usually recommended for an ill-positioned or weak Venus, white (colorless) sapphire may be used as a substitute, or secondary gemstone. If the planet is afflicted, there may be problems in marriage or other relationships, lack of passion and sexual drive, or an absence of beauty and luxury in life. Venus also rules the reproductive system, kidneys, eyes, cheeks and throat.

There are several ways to harness the healing powers of gems. Some practitioners make elixirs or tinctures, which are taken internally. However, most experts agree that the most effective means is to wear gemstones that touch the skin.

It is important to note that Jyotisha benefits the wearer of ; crystals do not have the same effect. Jyotish gemstones must also be natural, untreated gemstones. Synthetic sapphires have not been exposed to planetary rays over countless eons, and therefore cannot be used in Jyotisha. Heat treatment also negates a sapphire's inherent energy, rendering it useless for therapeutic applications.

To harness the power of sapphires, they must be eye clean. Wearing flawed sapphires, even in ignorance, can have dire effects-especially in the case of blue sapphires. An experienced Vedic astrologer will also inform you of the means to purify your gemstones, the best time and day to wear the gemstones, and the length of time they should be worn to have the greatest effect.
Insider View from the President of The Natural Sapphire Company: Specializing in natural sapphires we have a lot of clients asking us about how our sapphires can help them in a wide range of uses that I've often felt personally uncomfortable commenting on. I've grown up from a young age looking at sapphires, and although they always seemed to captivate my attention, I didn't understand (or agree) with the idea that a sapphire could heal a medical issue, give you good luck, or change your personality. I would tell customers to reconsider their idea that they should find another way to fix their problems; that it was highly unlikely that if they bought a fine quality sapphire they would suddenly make more money, find love, heal their ailments. Often they didn't like that I would say these things. Over the years I have heard so many stories from our clients about how after a sapphire had been prescribed to them they saw improvements. So now I've grown to keep a more open mind about the topic and belief. I would even admit that I enjoy carrying a sapphire crystal in my pocket at times. I have a fascination for the raw uncut natural crystal, I have a few larger size pieces that I continuously hold and inspect/wonder as I look at it, it does release or initiate some kind of energy from within. I am without question attracted to the crystal.
So now over time I've moderated my position on the idea that sapphires can possibly heal, help and improve one's life. If you truly believe in something then it is true . The miracles of sapphires to protect and inspire might just be as powerful as the ancient scriptures say they are, I will admit sapphire can alter emotions, they have for me and I can't deny it.

With an extensive background in sapphires, let's now explore the multitude of colors and varieties to choose from, starting with Blue Sapphires.

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The Powerful History of Sapphires | Special Uses of Sapphires in History

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From eye ailments to disorders of the blood, to improving mental health or bringing peace, sapphires have been used for special purposes in history and are believed by many to hold curative influences. Discover the history of sapphires and modern day interpretations using sapphires for well-being.

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#Crystals#Growing

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The Department of Chemistry's Chemistry Outreach Group, comprising mostly postgraduate students, do about 1000 hours a year of work with Primary, Intermediate and High School students around Dunedin, Otago and Southland. In particular, students create and run weekly or fortnightly classes, and 'chemistry magic shows' for students in over 30 schools across the region.

Research by the National Education Monitoring project has identified years 4 to 8 as being the time when students become disengaged with science, we therefore target this age range, although we do work with other age ranges. This not only raises the profile of chemistry, and science in general, in these schools but also gives our own students the chance to gain new skills in both understanding and then communicating scientific ideas effectively as well as sharing their enthusiasm for science (areas identified the government as a desirable in practising scientists).

We have been highlighted by the:

as a model for successful outreach within NZ and recently have hosted International visitors from the UK and USA to work with us. We are also heavily involved with:

This programme is solely funded within the Department of Chemistry and there is no cost to schools who we work with.

Students can use their time spent on outreach to qualify for a Certificate in Outreach from the Division of Sciences.

Chemistry on the Web

Information and resources from the website of the American Chemical Society

The outreach website for the Bristol ChemLabS project

The leading organisation in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences.

Rob and Ella, lecturer and Honours student from the University of Otago's Chemistry department investigating the amount of dissolved iron in the oceans and seas around Antarctica.

View the latest videos on our YouTube channel

All the video resources from the RSC are now available on Youtube, including thermite, halogens and many others, including interviews with young chemists about their careers.

A collaboration between members of the Never Stop Recording crew and the University of Otago's Chemistry Outreach team.

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The Department of Chemistry's Chemistry Outreach Group, comprising mostly postgraduate students, do about 1000 hours a year of work with Primary, Intermediate and High School students around Dunedin, Otago and Southland. In particular, students create and run weekly or fortnightly classes, and 'chemistry magic shows' for students in over 30 schools across the region.

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#Water#Entanglement#VideoPerformance#SoundPiece#Body

video performance and sound piece
#Concept

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Wedlich#Slime#Water

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Most people have a natural aversion to slime, said Simon Ings in The Times. Yet according to the German biologist Susanne Wedlich, this wondrous substance deserves closer attention. Slime, she tells us, "holds the world together". For not only is it present just about everywhere in nature, but it is the very "source of life": had "stiffened water" not existed early in our planet's history, then cell development and multiplication - the processes that led to our existence - would never have been possible.

Slime is stuffed with facts of the "surely that can't be real?" variety, said Mark Mason in the Daily Mail. Hagfish defend themselves by jellying the water around them, causing even sharks to gag. There's a species of squid that "confuses predators by shooting out several slimy replicas of itself". And we learn, too, of a snail that uses slime trails to select its partner - a useful form of "advertisement-by-slime", Wedlich notes, since such creatures "rarely meet by chance, and speed-dating is out of the question".

Wedlich, who defines slime as "water caged in a three-dimensional structure", shows that our "prejudice" against it is unfounded, said Steven Poole in The Daily Telegraph. Without slime, we wouldn't be able to breathe, because our lungs use it to extract oxygen from air. In our bodies and in nature it has multiple functions: it acts as a lubricant, a glue and a barrier.

Slime, remarkably, can even think - or, "at least, slime moulds have been shown to solve mazes, and in one famous experiment connected a set of nodes in a way eerily similar to the actual Tokyo subway map". Both a "deft cultural history of slime" and an "exegesis of its science", this is a "rich and strange" - and compelling - book.
Granta 336pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99
The Week Bookshop

To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.

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Slime: A Natural History by Susanne Wedlich - a 'rich and strange' book | The Week UK

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Most people have a natural aversion to slime, said Simon Ings in The Times. Yet according to the German biologist Susanne Wedlich, this wondrous substance deserves closer attention. Slime, she tells us, "holds the world together".

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#EglėBudvytytė#SpeculativeFiction#Symbiosis

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#LynnMargulis#Symbiosis

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It bears remembering that we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The puzzlement is so immense precisely because the boundary between us and not-us is profoundly permeable - we become ourselves through communion and conviviality with what is not us. This is as true existentially as it is evolutionarily, for symbiosis - not competition - is the mightiest propulsive force of evolution.

To this truth the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938-November 22, 2011) devoted her life, crystalized in her influential Gaia hypothesis - the notion that organisms interact with their environment to make of Earth a synergistic, self-regulating crucible of life.

In her book Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (public library), Margulis - who understood uniquely the spirituality of science - writes:

Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings together different life-forms, always for a reason. Often, hunger unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal victim. Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are even more unlike than their unlikely "parents." "Individuals" permanently merge and regulate their reproduction. They generate new populations that become multiunit symbiotic new individuals. These become "new individuals" at larger, more inclusive levels of integration. Symbiosis is not a marginal or rare phenomenon. It is natural and common. We abide in a symbiotic world.

Properly understood, the biology of symbiosis undermines our most tightly held intuitions about the nature of the self as a distinct entity separate from other selves - an illusory separation dissolved in the biological reality of all living beings, but rendered most clearly visible in some of the simplest. A generation after Lewis Thomas wrote so lyrically about the symbiotic life of a jellyfish and a sea slug - which remains the finest thing I have ever read on the paradoxes and mysteries of the self - Margulis details another living antidote to what Pablo Neruda rightly indicted as our illusion of separateness:

In Brittany, on the northwest coast of France, and along beaches bordering the English Channel is found a strange sort of "seaweed" that is not seaweed at all. From a distance it is a bright green patch on the sand. The patches slosh around, shimmering in shallow puddles. When you pick up the green water and let it slip through your fingers you notice gooey ribbons much like seaweed. A small hand lens or low-power microscope reveals that what looked like seaweed are really green worms. These masses of sunbathing green worms, unlike any seaweed, burrow into the sand and effectively disappear. They were first described in the 1920s by an Englishman, J. Keeble, who spent his summers at Roscoff. Keeble called them "plant-animals" and diagrammed them splendidly in the color frontispiece of his book, Plant-Animals. The flatworms of the species Convoluta roscoffensis are all green because their tissues are packed with Platymonas cells; as the worms are translucent, the green color of Platymonas, photosynthesizing algae, shows through. Although lovely, the green algae are not merely decorative: they live and grow, die and reproduce, inside the bodies of the worms. Indeed they produce the food that the worms "eat." The mouths of the worms become superfluous and do not function after the worm larvae hatch. Sunlight reaches the algae inside their mobile greenhouses and allows them to grow and feed themselves as they leak photosynthetic products and feed their hosts from the inside. The symbiotic algae even do the worm a waste management favor: they recycle the worm's uric acid waste into nutrients for themselves. Algae and worm make a miniature ecosystem swimming in the sun. Indeed, these two beings are so intimate that it is difficult, without very high-power microscopy, to say where the animal ends and the algae begin.

The living world, Margulis observes, is rife with such symbiotic bonds that challenge the notion of where one self ends and another begins. There is the Plachobranchus snail, inside which is an inner garden of green symbionts so perfectly arranged in neat rows that they appear planted by an invisible hand; there is the Mastigias jellyfish with its tiny green umbrellas animated by single-celled zooxanthellae; there is the giant clam, Tridacna gigas, which orients ints entire colossal body toward the light for the benefit of the greenhouse of algae living inside it.

Then there are, of course, we - we who contain multitudes, our microbiome living as a portable universe within us. "Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence," Emerson inveighed. "I wish... to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them." But the patron saint of self-reliance was tragically antiscientific in his philosophy - in the living world, individuals as such simply don't exist. There are only masses, some of whom move about with the illusion of individuality. Margulis writes:

We animals, all thirty million species of us, emanate from the microcosm. The microbial world, the source and well-spring of soil and air, informs our own survival. A major theme of the microbial drama is the emergence of individuality from the community interactions of once-independent actors.

With an eye to our evolutionary future, itself a vista of tremendous humility, she adds:

The tendency of "independent" life is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. I suspect that the near future of Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation toward the fusions and mergers of the planetmates that have preceded us in the microcosm.

Complement with Iris Murdoch on how art unselves us and Helen Macdonald on the total solar eclipse as an instrument of unselfing, then revisit Margulis on the interconnectedness of life across time, space, and species.

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Symbiosis and the Unself: Evolutionary Biologist Lynn Margulis on How Interbeing Shapes Life on Earth

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It bears remembering that we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The puzzlement is so immense precisely because the boundary between us and not-us is profoundly permeable - we become ourselves through communion and conviviality with what is not us.

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video installation piece #mammals #posthumanism #videoart #audiovisual #samplingsound #nature #poetic

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first try out installation and experiments 

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first try out installation and experiments 

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#installation #lightasmaterial #sketch

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inspiration for water vessels to replace plastic kiddie pool 

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inspiration for water vessels to replace plastic kiddie pool 

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#watermirrors #incas #machupicchu #watervessels #astronomy

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The water mirrors or room of mirrors are one of the most famous constructions of Machu Picchu. It is a circular formation (like a plate) made of stone carved into the ground. When filled with water, it projects the reflection of the sky. Thus, the Incas used it as an astronomical observatory. Find out how to visit it, how much it costs, visiting hours and more information.

The Water Mirrors in Machupicchu

Machu Picchu was an Inca citadel and religious precinct that stands out for its scenic beauty and architectural wonder. Some of its most famous constructions are: the Temple of the Sun, the Intihuatana, the Temple of the 3 Windows, the Sacred Rock, the Temple of the Condor and the Water Mirrors. This last enclosure was an astronomical observatory where the Incas could observe (through water) the stellar gods such as the moon (keel). Learn more!

What are water mirrors?

The water mirrors are two cylindrical Inca constructions located in the archaeological site of Machu Picchu.

Its construction -similar to two mortars- was made on a natural outcrop of granite. Because of this it is also known as the 'Mortar Room'. However, its symmetry is not suitable for grinding.

The investigations indicated that the function of these constructions was to contain water -brought from sacred lakes or rivers-. And thus reflect the sky where the Inca gods rise (the sun, the moon, the stars). Due to this, the place was renamed 'The mirrors of water'.

Above all the gods, the 'Mirrors of the water' served to reflect the moon, also called the goddess 'Killa'. This Inca goddess (wife of the sun god) was linked to the chastity of women.

That is why the researchers presume that, unlike the neighboring Inca enclosures, the room of 'The water mirrors' did not have a roof.

Where are they located?

The 'Water Mirrors' are located in the urban area of ​​Machu Picchu (in the lower part of the citadel).

Next to this Inca construction are the Temple of the Condor and the House of the Inka.

Machu Picchu and all its buildings are located approximately 2,430 meters above sea level.

History of Machu Picchu's water mirrors

The Water Mirrors, as well as most of the constructions of Machu Picchu, were ordered to be built by Emperor Pachacutec approximately in 1450 AD

For its construction, the abundant rock formations in Machu Picchu were used. Thus, the Water Mirrors were carved in a natural rock located in the lower part of the enclosure.

In 1535 AD, and for the next few years, Machu Picchu was abandoned due to the Spanish invasion and the Vilcabamba wars. The Water Mirrors, and many constructions of the citadel, were covered with thick vegetation.

Finally, in 1911 the American explorer Hiram Bingham arrived at Machu Picchu giving news of his discovery. In the next few years, research work and enhancement of the Inca archaeological site were carried out.

Today the Water Mirrors are one of the most famous Inca constructions in the Inca city of Machu Picchu.

Water Mirrors - Machupicchu

What is the entrance fee to visit it?

The Water Mirrors can be visited with the tickets: a) Machupicchu Only, b) Machupicchu with Inca Bridge, c) Machupicchu with Huayna Picchu or d) Machupicchu with Huchuy Picchu.

How much does it cost?

UPDATED TICKET PRICE TO MACHU PICCHU*

Visiting hours

The visiting hours for Los Espejos del Agua are every day of the year from 6 am to 5 pm.

More information

Currently it is forbidden to touch the Mirrors of Water. You can only zoom in so far to take photos or view the construction. Moreover, there are protection ropes in place.

Near the Mirrors of Water, tourists can visit other famous Inca constructions such as the Temple of the Sun or the Temple of the Condor. Take advantage of!

Questions and answers about Machu Picchu's water mirrors

1. What are water mirrors?

The water mirrors are two cylindrical Inca constructions located in the archaeological site of Machu Picchu. They fulfilled the function of an astronomical observatory for the worship of the Inca gods.

2. Where are the water mirrors?

The water mirrors are located in the urban sector (lower part) of Machu Picchu.

3 What is the history of the water mirrors of Machu Picchu?

The construction of the water mirrors dates back to 1450 AD, when Emperor Pachacutec ordered their construction along with other temples and enclosures of Machu Picchu.

4. With what ticket to Machu Picchu can I visit the water mirrors?

You can visit the water mirrors with the ticket Machupicchu Only, the Machupicchu entrance with Inca Bridge, the Machupicchu entrance with Huaynapicchu and the Machupicchu entrance with Huchuypicchu.

5. What are the visiting hours of the water mirrors?

The water mirrors are available every day of the year from 6 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon.

6. How much does the visit to the water mirrors cost?

The 'Machupicchu Only' ticket offers a visit to the water mirrors. Cost: 152 soles for adults, 77 soles for university students and 70 soles for those under 18 years of age. Citizens of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia have greater discounts.

7. Can I touch the mirrors of the water?

No, the mirrors of the water cannot be touched by tourists. There is a safety rope that only allows you to observe or take pictures from a safe distance.

8. Can everyone visit the water mirrors?

Yes, tourists of all ages can visit the water mirrors of Machu Picchu. There is no age limit!

9. What other Inca constructions to visit besides the water mirrors of Machu Picchu?

In addition to the water mirrors, it is possible to visit: the temple of the sun and the temple of the condor in Machu Picchu.

10. What Inca ordered the construction of the water mirrors of Machu Picchu?

The chronicles indicate that this and the other temples and enclosures of Machu Picchu were built by order of Emperor Pachacutec in approximately 1450.

By Ticket Machu Picchu - Last updated, December 5, 2022

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The water mirrors or room of mirrors are one of the most famous constructions of Machu Picchu. It is a circular formation (like a plate) made of stone carved into the ground. When filled with water, it projects the reflection of the sky. Thus, the Incas used it as an astronomical observatory.

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process pictures of a carrier made of organic self harvested cotton from Costa Rica 

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process pictures of a carrier made of organic self harvested cotton from Costa Rica 

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#cotton #carrierbagoffiction #ursulakleguin #knitting #rawmaterials #weavingideas

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電脳的反抗と絶頂: エッセンシャル・ヘンリー川原 Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm: The Essential Henry Kawahara, by ヘンリー川原 (Henry Kawahara)

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#ecolocation #soundpiece #installation #newmediaart #audio #experimentalsound

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電脳的反抗と絶頂: エッセンシャル・ヘンリー川原 Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm: The Essential Henry Kawahara, by ヘンリー川原 (Henry Kawahara)

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#TheMarineMammalEar#Echolocation#Sound#Mammals #Posthumanism