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Deze week lever je eerste schrijfsels aan in de map, geef aan waneer je het deze week in het postvakje legt. Daarna kunnen we een schema maken van aantal schrijfsels ook met het individueel gesprek op het oog. 

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Deze week lever je eerste schrijfsels aan in de map, geef aan waneer je het deze week in het postvakje legt. Daarna kunnen we een schema maken van aantal schrijfsels ook met het individueel gesprek op het oog. 

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“Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World”

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Deborah Bird Rose aims to bring Val Plumwood’s philosophical animism into dialogue with Rose’s Australian Aboriginal teachers.

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The art of noticing: a call for hybrid intelligence

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Just like a mushroom taught us, we need to shift toward a hybrid model of intelligence, escaping from an extractive mindset and attuning to nature

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Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim: Indigenous knowledge meets science to take on climate change | TED Talk

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To tackle a problem as large as climate change, we need both science and Indigenous wisdom, says environmental activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim. In this engaging talk, she shares how her nomadic community in Chad is working closely with scientists to restore endangered ecosystems -- and offers lessons on how to create more resilient communities.

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Episteme and Ecology: Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain and the Decolonial Turn

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Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable of Our Times (2022) is an allegorical rendering of the repercussions of environmental degradation and the annihilation of indigenous ecological knowledge…

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Je kunt ook een fictieve brieven schrijven. Wat zou Timothy Morton terug hebben geschreven op basis van wat je weet van zijn onderzoek?? 

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Je kunt ook een fictieve brieven schrijven. Wat zou Timothy Morton terug hebben geschreven op basis van wat je weet van zijn onderzoek?? 

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Waarom wetenschap verbeelding mist, wat kunnen we leren van bijvoobeeld animisme, maar dan wel vanuit Westers perspectief

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Waarom wetenschap verbeelding mist, wat kunnen we leren van bijvoobeeld animisme, maar dan wel vanuit Westers perspectief

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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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As film-making group ReRun Productions we produced a series of documentaries on the world views and environmental philosophies of indigenous peoples, as well as films on philosophers such as Arne N…

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The research context in which Jan van Boeckel is particularly situated is arts-based environmental education. (On this page is a rich selection of early articles on this theme.) Jan is also drawn t…

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The World Breathing Me. Introduction to Artizein

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This introductory article argues why it is both relevant and timely to reflect on ways in which art and ecology can be brought together in educational practices – the theme of this edition of Artizein. It also provides an overview of all written contributions.

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The Power and Promise of Traditional Knowledge | Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer on Western science and indigenous traditional knowledge. This interview was recorded as part of the Public Lands Gatherings. More at: http://www.grandcanyontrust.org/public-lands-gatherings


TRANSCRIPT
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER: There are, on the planet, multiple ways of knowing, and relating to one another and to the gifts of the natural world. And one of the most recent of those ways of knowing is Western science—scientific ecological knowledge. 
And I am trained as a scientist—I’m a practicing scientist—so I have a sense of the great power of the scientific method.
In certain arenas, in certain questions, science is very, very good at helping us understand how things work. But it demands a kind of objectivity and separation from our own consciousness and the consciousness of the land that can lead us astray. 
So I think that science is a powerful tool for a certain kind of question. But the questions that face us right now are at the nexus of culture, and values, and the physical world, and our relationship to the physical world.
And science, because it specifically excludes values—it excludes the emotion that binds us to our places,  it excludes the spirit—how can that be the only tool that we use to solve environmental problems?
Our teachings of the medicine wheel say that we as human people have gifts of mind, certainly, of body, but also of emotion and spirit, and, that if we claim to understand something, but we only understand it with one of those ways—then we don’t really understand it.
And to me, the power and the promise of traditional knowledge is that traditional knowledge, instead of excluding emotion and spirit, invites it in. To say there are these other ways of knowing that can help to guide us.
So I’d love to think about what would a symbiosis look like between scientific tools and Indigenous philosophy and wisdom. But creating the right relationship between those ways of knowing is usually difficult because we live in almost an intellectual monoculture which has rendered traditional knowledge invisible and marginalized that knowledge. Though it is the elder knowledge, is the most solid, grounded, whole knowledge.
So what I love to imagine is a knowledge garden where the elder knowledge, which I think of as like corn—this beautiful, elder knowledge that it was here first, rising out of the land and people’s relationship with it.
And that’s the foundation of our knowledge, our intellectual scaffolding if you will.
And then, you know, when we plant our gardens, we also plant beans right next to that corn. And that bean I think is a really good metaphor for science. It’s curious. It’s always wandering in new directions. And it’s powerful, powered by that nitrogen fixation. 
But beans, unguided, make a mess of the garden. They take over things. They can actually reduce your garden to chaos. And sometimes I feel like science is like that bean, because science is unguided by emotion and spirit. It’s unguided by compasses of empathy and compassion.
So I like to think about if that corn of traditional knowledge could guide that bean as the bean wanders, it isn’t willy-nilly. It’s guided by moral responsibility, it’s guided by reciprocity, it’s guided by principles of intergenerational equity, it’s guided by respect for the intelligence, which is in the land, not just in our own heads. 
And so to me the great promise here is the same promise that comes when corn and beans grow together. It’s more powerful, more full; it feeds us more fully. 
So to think about a symbiosis, a knowledge garden, if you will, between traditional ecological knowledge guiding the tools of Western science, that I think is something that could lead us into a sustainable future.

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Wieren| Van Oorschot | 2018 175 blz | 61 kleurenillustraties Het leven op aarde kort samengevat: wij ademen in wat wieren uitademen. Zo eenvoudig is het. Wieren zijn de grootste zuurstofproducenten ter wereld. Maar ze zorg(d)en voor nog veel meer.

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Dag Linn,

We kwamen tot het besluit om per maand of om de twee maanden een zine te maken, die niet perfect hoeft te zijn, en waaraan ook andere kunnen mee helpen. Je vertelde dat het belangrijk is dat je op de plek bent. Nu wou je focussen op zeewier. Daarvoor kan ik je echt dit boek aanraden: http://miekzwamborn.nl/wieren-3/

Kijk hoe je met artistiek onderzoek en het associatieve tot je zine komt. Mogelijk ook ziewier in de zine geplakt of is dit te wreed? Quotes, afbeeldingen, aantekeningen, gekke interessante vragen, poëtische beslommeringen, een tekening, enzovoort. Observaties van de omgeving, mogelijk een interview met een bioloog of kenner van wieren. Waarbij de vraag of de natuur kan twijfelen een belangrijke is. Joost Oomen is een belangrijke inspiratiebron voor je.

Daarbij misschien ook beschouwing over verschil kunst en wetenschap?

Kun jij voor stellen wanneer de eerste zine moet af zijn? Zullen we 30 november nemen?  Dan kan ik dit ook doorgeven aan Rein Jelle.

Ze gaan we steeds in fasen snel zines in elkaar zetten op basis van het onderzoek wat je doet.

Zie ook artikel Robin Wall Kimmer die ingaat op taal; bomen en hoe animistisch haar oorspronkelijke taal is . Zie ook haar commentaar op verschil tussen wetenschap en haar inheemse kennis. En hoe zij die wil combineren.

Later wanneer je een aantal zines hebt gemaakt. Kunnem we hier op reflecteren.

Groetjes,

Hille

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Artist Statement

I am intrigued by the way (Western) society strives to understand nature. By placing ourselves outside or even above nature, we assume a role in which we investigate, describe and classify nature. As a result, we seem to have lost the connection with it and are slowly destroying our planet.

How can we restore this connection? And what role does photography play in this process, both now and in the past? My work does not result in an answer to these questions, but shows the visual exploration into these connections. Like a scientist, I observe my environment with infinite curiosity and apply the method of continuous doubt. In doing so, the camera acts as my research tool. Unlike a scientist, I try to let go of control by experimenting with different photographic techniques, thereby giving natural processes space and embracing the inexplicable.

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Bergen materialiseren dat ongrijpbare idee, in een oneindig proces van sedimentatie en erosie, dat ook wel geologische tijd of deep time wordt genoemd. Een steentje is een concreet stukje van die onbevattelijkheid: een brok samengeperste tijd, ontelbaar veel ouder dan een mensenleven. Het oprapen van een steentje is in die zin net als het nemen van een foto: het steentje is een momentopname, alleen speelt die zich echter af in een geheel andere temporaliteit dan waarin wij ons bestaan begrijpen. Misschien verklaart dat de magie van steentjes, en waarom velen van ons de aandrang voelen om ze op te pakken en in de zak te steken.

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Hiske Altena - Vital Mud - ISBN 9789492051974 - The Eriskay Connection - Hiske Altena

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With 'Vital Mud', Dutch artist Hiske Altena explores the theory that life on Earth once began in clay. In the 1980s, her uncle, now a retired geologi...

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Eeuwenlang nam men aan dat alle gesteenten waren ontstaan tijdens de zondvloed. Maar in 1788 introduceerde James Hutton (1726-1797) het idee dat de verschillende gesteenten op aarde niet in één keer zouden zijn geschapen, maar in een cyclische herhaling van natuurlijke processen die voor het menselijk oog niet waarneembaar zijn. Het beschrijft een onbevattelijk idee van tijd, zo schreef hij in zijn publicatie Theory of the Earth: 'we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end'.

Bergen materialiseren dat ongrijpbare idee, in een oneindig proces van sedimentatie en erosie, dat ook wel geologische tijd of deep time wordt genoemd. Een steentje is een concreet stukje van die onbevattelijkheid: een brok samengeperste tijd, ontelbaar veel ouder dan een mensenleven. Het oprapen van een steentje is in die zin net als het nemen van een foto: het steentje is een momentopname, alleen speelt die zich echter af in een geheel andere temporaliteit dan waarin wij ons bestaan begrijpen. Misschien verklaart dat de magie van steentjes, en waarom velen van ons de aandrang voelen om ze op te pakken en in de zak te steken. Fotografe Claudia den Boer migreerde verschillende steentjes, vanuit het Marokkaanse deel van de Sahara, de Tibetaanse hooglanden, rond de Montserrat in Catalonië en uit het Georgische deel van de Kaukasus. Van al deze landschappen nam ze steentjes en foto's - miniatuurversies van haar beleving.

Bij thuiskomst fotografeerde ze de steentjes in haar studio, maar het werkte niet. Ze verloren de schittering die haar had doen stoppen met lopen en haar naar de grond had laten bukken om ze op te rapen. Net als een negatief is een steentje slechts een oppervlak; het is de weerkaatsing van licht dat een beeld schept dat we willen vasthouden, waar we naar kunnen blijven kijken. Aan de voet van de Montserrat fotografeerde ze de steentjes uit alle windrichtingen opnieuw, in een daglichtstudio. Dit keer klopte het. Alleen het natuurlijke zonlicht, en zoals dat valt op een bergachtig landschap, kon de aura van de steentjes tot leven wekken.

Vreemd dat het zonlicht zoals dat in Nederland valt dat niet waar had kunnen maken. Het zegt iets over onze waarneming van een plek. Ons zicht op een berg veranderd met iedere stap die we opzijzetten, maar ook het seizoen, het tijdstip op de dag en de gemoedstoestand die onze blik stuurt. De omwonenden van de Montserrat spreken de berg toe als een 'zij' en vernoemen hun dochters naar haar; de berg is een wezen met een eigen karakter en grillen. En ook dezelfde zon schijnt overal anders. De hoek van de stralen en de weerkaatsing van het licht die het veroorzaakt is wat ons beeld van een plek schept, en hoe het negatief wordt getekend. Maar het negatief documenteert slechts één zintuig, en zelfs daar speelt het mee. Hoewel een foto een vastgelegde waarneming is, ondermijnt het die ook: een close-up van een steentje kan ineens worden aangezien voor een bergtop; een dorre, hete woestijnvlakte kan in een zwart-wit foto overkomen als een koel maanlandschap; het verlies van scherpte in het negatief lijkt op de foto ineens als mist voor onze ogen. De foto's van Claudia den Boer zijn als een zoektocht naar houvast die de foto zelf ons ontneemt.

Ergens doet het denken aan het sublieme waar De wandelaar boven de nevelen (1818) van Caspar David Friedrich naar op zoek was - het onbevattelijke - maar in tegenstelling tot de lange traditie van landschapsfotografie die hierop inspeelde, is Claudia den Boer geen Ansel Adams. We zien nauwelijks spectaculaire vergezichten, maar duiken juist in het landschap via haar lens. Den Boer gebruikte verschillende soorten film voor haar foto's: kleur, zwart-wit, polaroid en zelfs negatieven gemaakt van washi (Japans papier). Ieder van deze geeft een andere expressie aan het landschap: de een verzacht de contouren, de ander ontneemt kleur, of voegt juist een zweem van warmte toe. De vezelachtige structuur van washi voegt lijnen toe aan het landschap die er in werkelijkheid niet waren. Naast de verschillende soorten film wordt de toeschouwer steeds met (soms radicaal, soms nauwelijks waarneembaar) wisselende perspectieven geconfronteerd. De fotografe scande haar negatieven in, en reisde opnieuw door haar landschappen. Iedere foto werd een oppervlak om te verkennen. Ze kon opnieuw steentjes oprapen: door stukjes landschap uit het beeld te snijden, uit te vergroten en af te drukken als autonome beelden. Misschien is het daarom dat het in veel van haar foto's aan een horizon ontbreekt: ze zoekt geen pittoreske vergezichten, maar is nog steeds het landschap aan het aftasten - steentjes aan het rapen - en te doorgronden waarom.

In de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw creëerde de kunst- en cultuurhistoricus Aby Warburg (1866-1929) zijn Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, waarin hij terugkerende visuele thema's en patronen door de tijd heen traceerde, van de oudheid tot de Renaissance en daarna tot de hedendaagse cultuur. Zijn oneindige hoeveelheid beeldassociaties kon hij alleen in kaart brengen bij de gratie van de fotografie: hij kon kunstwerken en beeltenissen van over de hele wereld ineens in gelijk formaat naast elkaar leggen. Het is alsof Claudia den Boer met To pick up a stone haar eigen Bilderatlas Mnemosyne maakte, maar dan in letterlijke zin van het woord: Mnemosyne is de Griekse godin van het geheugen, en Atlas de voorvader van astronomen en geografen. De steentjes en foto's vormen herinneringen aan de gevoelens die ze had waarmee ze de landschappen verkende die ze verzameld heeft, en tegelijkertijd zijn het niet de steentjes die in To pick up a stone worden tentoongesteld, maar enkel waarnemingen daarvan. De foto's van Claudia den Boer zijn representaties van iets dat anders is dan het vastgelegde zelf: het specifieke verschil tussen de twee is het antwoord. De clou ligt verscholen in de confrontatie tussen metamorfoses - tussen landschap en landschapsfoto, tussen berg en steentje, tussen foto en werkelijkheid en tussen tijd en plaats. Wij als toeschouwers raken verstrikt in een oneindige cyclus: we vinden geen teken van een begin, noch een vooruitzicht op een einde.

Het boek To pick up a stone is hier te bestellen.
Mirjam Kooiman (1990) is kunsthistorica, curator bij Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam en mede-oprichter van het kunstblog De Kunstmeisjes. Ze studeerde Kunstgeschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam en studeerde af met de MA Curating Arts and Culture aan de UvA en de VU. Ze werkte als conservator-in-opleiding bij het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Kooiman nam plaats in diverse jureringen voor festivals en awards, zoals de Hariban Award, PARALLEL Photo Platform en Organ Vida. Ze schreef essays voor kunstenaarsboeken van o.a. Tyler Mitchell en Leonardo Magrelli en heeft bijdragen geleverd aan diverse publicaties zoals L'Internationale, Something We Africans Got en Migrant Journal. Ook schrijft ze regelmatig voor Foam Magazine.

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Bilderatlas - over het werk van Claudia den Boer

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Foam-curator en historica Mirjam Kooiman schreef het essay Bilderatlas naar aanleiding van de verschijning van het boek To pick up...

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Claudia den Boer’s second photobook is about connecting to something that has existed for a long time, to slow down, to be still, to look, and look again. Why do we tend to pick up stones? We toss them in the water, or take them as souvenirs. In doing so, we seem to seek connection to the earth, or maybe even to eternity. It is precisely this connection that Den Boer was searching for when she picked up stones in the Sahara and Tibet, around Montserrat and in the Georgian Caucasus. Through photographic studies, she examines the experience of light, scale, perspective, and spatiality in an eclectic and meditative selection of images depicting mountains, rocks, and stones.

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Claudia den Boer - To Pick Up a Stone - ISBN 9789492051554 - The Eriskay Connection

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Claudia den Boer's second photobook is about connecting to something that has existed for a long time, to slow down, to be still, to look, and look a...

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Reading by Osmosis/ Nature interprets Us. 2018-2020

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3 channel video installation, 22 minutes loop, 2016

Filmed with a thermal camera we see a hand touching objects in the plaster sculpture depot of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Focusing on the transference of body heat from hands to objects, bringing them into focus as they light up with the heat.

Thanks to FLIR and Tobias Mulders

Exhibiton view,

Stills,

Thanks to :

Qianfu & Xiamen Blind Massage

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3 channel video installation, 22 minutes loop, 2016 Filmed with a thermal camera we see a hand touching objects in the plaster sculpture depot of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Focusing on the transference of body heat from hands to objects, bringing them into focus as they light up with the heat.

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Samen met kunstenaar Jasper Griepink bezoekt Dagmar Bosma Song Sing Soil in de Vleeshal. In de gotische ruimte raken ze aan de hand van de krioelende, over elkaar heen buitelende en samenkluitende lichamen in gesprek over hoe aarde niet één is, de relatie tussen lied en land, en ecocentrische verstrengeling.

Het drassige polderlandschap raast voorbij. Samen met kunstenaar Jasper Griepink maak ik de treinreis van de randstad naar Middelburg, om daar de tentoonstelling Song Sing Soil door Eglė Budvytytė en Marija Olšauskaitė in de Vleeshal te bezoeken.

Jasper Griepink beschrijft zichzelf als een 'futuristische druïde' en een 'soil priestess'. Hun praktijk is onder andere geïnformeerd door ecofeminisme, sjamanisme en queer gemeenschappen. Met participatoire performances, sensoriële installaties en post-human popmuziek wijst hen naar mogelijke toekomsten waarin ecocentrische verstrengeling centraal staat. In zijn recente werk en onderzoek richt hij zich specifiek op de spirituele materialiteit van aarde. Afgelopen jaar presenteerde Jasper EARTHSHRINE in MU in Eindhoven, een tentoonstelling die het museum omtoverde tot een speculatieve tempel voor de aarde.

Onderweg blijken we al veel gemeen te hebben. Binnen onze kunstpraktijken hebben we allebei een voorliefde voor processen die leven en lekken en zich niet laten inkapselen. Dat heeft weleens gevolgen voor de ruimtes waarin we ons werk tentoonstellen. Jasper herinnert zich een sculptuur met een druipende vijverbodem op lange poten die waterschade veroorzaakte, en de muggenlarven die zich als onderdeel van een van hun werken ontpopten om uiteindelijk de hele kunstacademie te bevolken. In het gebouw van mijn masteropleiding hebben roestvlekken een patroon in de vloeren uitgebeten. Ik voel me daar nog weleens schuldig over. 'Maar waarom wordt er überhaupt verwacht dat kunst in een doosje aangeleverd kan worden?', brengt Jasper daartegen in.

In de aankondiging van Song Sing Soil lezen we alvast een fragment uit de performance die we later als onderdeel van de expositie gaan zien: 'I'm sucking my mess, I compost my fear, I lick up my smear.' Deze premisse prikkelt onze zinnen. Het wordt dus lekker vies, hopen we.

Voor de gelegenheid is de gotische tentoonstellingshal opgesplitst in twee aparte ruimtes. In de voorste zaal is de film Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars te zien, die vorig jaar getoond werd op de 59ste Biënnale van Venetië. De camera volgt een groepje jongeren dat zich langzaam verplaatst door een afwisselend landschap van bossen, zandduinen en korstmossteppen. Hun bewegingen zijn zwerm-achtig, lijken voortgedreven te worden door een collectief in plaats van een individueel bewustzijn.
Een losgezongen, geautotunede stem deelt ons geheimzinnige boodschappen mede. Het vertelt ons dat het een cyborg is, een non-binaire alien, een kind van Medusa, een portaal, en een grensgebied tussen de intelligenties van steen en dier, dat ons zal begeleiden in een proces van vertraging. Soms kunnen we niet goed horen wat de stem zegt. 'Dat doet me denken aan hoe we de aarde maar amper verstaan, en de moeite die we moeten doen om haar te horen', merkt Jasper op. Is het de grond die spreekt, of een ecosysteem, zijn het de tieners, de bacteriën in hun maag? Behoort deze stem aan hen toe, of volgen zij de stem slechts?

Af en toe stommelen nieuwe bezoekers de donkere zaal binnen met de felle zaklamp van hun telefoon aan. 'Buitenaardse wezens die net geland zijn', grapt Jasper. De stenen vloer is bekleed met zwart tapijt. 'Ik wou dat het doorweekt was, en het hier naar schimmel rook', moppert hen, 'Ik mis een zintuigelijke dimensie.' Sommige performers in de film dragen vreemde protheses; het meest opvallend is een set verlengde vingers. De jongeren dragen een allegaartje van spijkerbroeken, T-shirts en hoodies in fletse zand- en mostinten. We lezen in de tentoonstellingstekst dat de kostuums voor de opname enkele weken begraven zijn geweest. Toch voelt het geheel eerder secuur gestyled dan authentiek rafelig. Wat schoner dan we verwacht hadden.

In een van de scènes kluiten lijven aan een dode boomstronk, ware het krioelende insecten. Even later passeert de lens een lichaam dat helemaal stil ligt. Er groeien zwammen op. De beelden symboliseren voor Jasper een stelsel aan processen dat zich normaal aan ons oog onttrekt. 'Wat wij 'aarde' noemen, bestaat niet als één ding: het is een assemblage van mineralen, stukjes plant, wortel, en fungi, van chemische stofjes en vocht. Aarde is een constellatie van kleinere deeltjes, een uitwisseling van energie, een levend organisme dat onze planeet bedekt als een huid. En een boom die omvalt is niet per se dood, want daarin leven weer duizenden schimmels, pissebedden en torretjes.' De titel van het werk maakt een directe verwijzing naar compostering, een proces waarin materie rot en ontbindt om tegelijkertijd allerlei nieuws te doen ontstaan en groeien. 'Als je de tijd zou versnellen buiten de menselijke schaal, dan is de aarde een soort transformerende blob van dingen die verschijnen en vervallen.' Uit dood wordt continu leven geboren.

Mij bekruipt een griezelig gevoel wanneer een drietal performers achterstevoren op handen en voeten een duinheuvel afdaalt, zoals het bezeten kind in The Exorcist de trap afkomt. Ik moet bij het zien van de film ook denken aan de onlangs verschenen zombieserie The Last of Us, waarin een fungi genaamd cordyceps het menselijk handelen overneemt en een monsterlijke wildgroei onze lichamen omvormt. Cordyceps bestaat echt, maar beperkt zich in de realiteit tot het insectenrijk. In de serie ontwikkelt de soort zich tot een mensenparasiet, als gevolg van klimaatverandering. Ook in Songs from the Compost lijken de personages niet veel zeggenschap meer te hebben over hun acties.

Jasper ziet wel iets in mijn vergelijking. 'Narratieven rondom multi-species samenlevingsvormen zijn momenteel een hype. Aan de hand daarvan wordt vaak een utopisch toekomstbeeld geschetst, maar in dit kunstwerk is de sfeer eerder post-apocalyptisch, net als in zombieseries.' Wat als de natuur pas kan floreren wanneer ze ons overneemt of uitwist? Hen vindt het scenario dat opgevoerd wordt in The Last of Us overigens best plausibel. 'Het is al het geval dat andere levensvormen ons lichaam medebewonen en -besturen. Zo worden verslavingen aan suiker of zout vaak door schimmels in je darmstelsel geactiveerd. Candida wakkert je aan om in de Hema die chocoladereep te kopen.'

De term 'symbiont' is belangrijk binnen Jaspers denken. 'Mensen zijn symbionts: wezens die in symbiose leven met allerlei micro-organismen. En dat is niet alleen maar harmonieus. Ons digestieve systeem functioneert dankzij een onophoudelijke strijd tussen maagbacteriën. De eerste basis voor onze darmflora wordt gevormd wanneer we bij de geboorte een beetje ontlasting van onze ouder binnenkrijgen.' Hij vertelt me over het boek Ways of Being van James Bridle, waarin onder andere de rol van infecties in menselijke co-evolutie wordt beschreven. Zo 'keken' menselijke zaadcellen hun karakteristieke staartzwiepje af van viruscellen, een codering die vervolgens in ons DNA geïncorporeerd werd.

'We zijn poreuze wezens, zonder strakke begrenzing. Een ecosysteem op zich. Dat ecosysteem betreft niet alleen 'natuur', maar ook technologie. We denken controle te hebben over onze omgeving, maar ons gedrag is daar een afspiegeling van. We zijn op de vele schermen om ons heen gaan lijken. Vandaar dat het in de film óók over cyborgs gaat. Als mijn telefoon nog maar 2 procent batterij heeft, fiets ik meteen het bos uit en terug naar een stopcontact, zo vergroeid ben ik ermee.'

Het is tijd om ons naar de tweede zaal te begeven, waar een speciaal voor de tentoonstelling gemaakte performance wordt opgevoerd. De ruimte is gehuld in rookmachine-rook. In het midden staat een gemuteerde trampoline: een drietal zwarte elastische cirkels is in stukken gedeeld, en op het kruispunt samengevoegd. Het gevaarte is verzwaard met zandzakken. Jasper vindt het ironisch dat de enige aanwezige aarde in een plastic omhulsel zit.

Vier performers maken trage, neerwaartse bewegingen rond de trampoline. Ze springen niet op het oppervlak, maar proberen hierin naar beneden te zakken. De trillende ondergrond verbindt hun lichamen met elkaar op subtiele wijze: wanneer de een beweegt, beïnvloedt dat de ander. Ze worden één, zoals een kluwen wormen in de aarde. 'Over honderd jaar is hier alleen een hoopje botten van over, en weet niemand meer dat dat een knappe jongen was', fluistert Jasper me toe.

In een ritmische soundtrack horen we opnieuw een stem, die ditmaal een meer schertsende, antikapitalistische toon aanslaat. ' How, how, how, how will we eat the rich? How will we serve them? How do you like your steak?' Een volgende zin in de songtekst blijft ons bij: ' Do the ideas of the deceased, leaking from their skulls, nurture or poison the soil?' Misschien is onze opname in het grotere geheel, na alle uitstoot en extractie, wel giftig geworden. Het vormt het beginpunt van ons nagesprek in de trein terug. 'Wanneer iemand vol haat en slechte vibes doodgaat en begraven wordt, gaat die energie dan ook de aarde in?', vraagt Jasper zich af. Het doet hen denken aan het boek Inflamed van Rupa Marya en Raj Patel. 'Onze landbouwgrond is geïnflammeerd: de voedingsbodem is zo verpauperd dat een heleboel mineralen die hier in voortkwamen verdwenen zijn. En wanneer de grond geïnflammeerd is, raakt het lichaam, de geest en vervolgens ook de politiek geïnflammeerd.'

Zelf schreef Jasper meerdere liedjes over aarde, en het is volgens hen geen toeval dat er wel vaker een muzikale relatie ontstaat tot land.' Toen ik op reis was in IJsland, begreep ik opeens waarom de muziek van de IJslandse band Sigur Rós klinkt zoals die klinkt. De melodie volgt de cadens van de uitgestrekte heuvels en bergen, zonder de interpunctie van bomen of een enkel referentiepunt van grootte en verte.' Ik had een vergelijkbare ervaring toen ik, rondrijdend door het mistige, Ierse platteland, naar Enya luisterde. Jasper oppert: 'Misschien is het een soort primaire, archaïsche herinnering, dat lied en landschap bij elkaar horen. Het heeft iets heel magisch om stem te geven aan de natuur via muziek, om de aarde een lofzang te brengen. In mijn nummer Dirty zing ik: ' I will be praying to the soil god, but I won ' t be praying with my hands up ' , als inversie van het naar de hemel gerichte gebed. Het sacrale is overal onder onze voeten.'

Sing Song Soil is nog tot en met 2 april 2023 te zien in de Vleeshal, Middelburg.

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Dit artikel werd geschreven door Dagmar Bosma
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Toegezongen aarde - met Jasper Griepink naar Song Sing Soil in de Vleeshal

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Samen met kunstenaar Jasper Griepink bezoekt Dagmar Bosma Song Sing Soil in de Vleeshal. In de gotische ruimte raken ze aan de hand van de krioelende, over elkaar heen buitelende en samenkluitende...

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Thermal Objects:                                                           Input Hille gesprek 10 mei 

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Thermal Objects:                                                           Input Hille gesprek 10 mei 

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Linn, ik wou je ook nog wijzen op dit artikel over Thermale objecten:

Daarin wordt ook Graham Harman genoemd (hij is vriend van Timothy Morton, en ze hebben dezelfde visie, het komt erop neer dat je geen scheiding kan maken tussen subject en object, bijvoorbeeld tussen steen en lichaam, daarin is al een relatie, maar je stuit ook op een grens waar we niet alles kunnen weten, we kunnen een glimp opvangen van een relatie. Mogelijk is die glimp bij jou de warmte. Want in de warmte is er ook een vermening van de steen en mens, waar je niet weet waar wiens warmte het is of van wie de warmte komt en jou. In het artikel wordt gesproken van Thermale objcecten.

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Thermal Objects: Theorizing Temperatures and the Social − Elena Beregow

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PDF Does the cooling taste of some bodies which still have atmospheric temperature come from the fact that they have a greater capacity for heat? (…) Also the heat-conducting force of the bod…

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Mini-lecture about Bruno Latour and the Parliament of Things by prof. dr. ir. PPCC Verbeek

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How technology becomes nature | Koert Van Mensvoort | TEDxGhent

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Hier nog interessant kijk op techniek en natuur:

Koert van Mensvoort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXJB4Ync82c

Bruno Latour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YXOB8Kt9Gg

Plessner:

https://www.thijmgenootschap.nl/sites/thijmgenootschap.nl/files/artikelen/t94-2-5-petran-kockelkoren-de-techniek-van-de-goede-verstaander_0.pdf

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She struck up a friendship with the radical ecological philosopher Timothy Morton, who argues that nature – instead of existing “over there” with the forests and fields – is a master network in which humans are totally intertwined, along with our tools and technologies. Björk concurs: “Western civilisation countries have this expression ‘going back to nature’, which I’ve never understood. I’m rather keen on going forwards to nature!”

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She struck up a friendship with the radical ecological philosopher Timothy Morton, who argues that nature – instead of existing “over there” with the forests and fields – is a master network in which humans are totally intertwined, along with our tools and technologies. Björk concurs: “Western civilisation countries have this expression ‘going back to nature’, which I’ve never understood. I’m rather keen on going forwards to nature!”

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NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE AT THE SAME TIME, NO.2 - William Forsythe

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William Forsythe's "The Fact of Matter" | Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

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Polynesian cultures have a remarkable navigational tradition. It stands as a testament to human ingenuity and an intimate understanding of nature. Where Western cultures developed maps and tools to plot courses around the world, the Polynesian tradition is more about using human senses and pattern-finding skills to figure out where one is, and where one might be going.

Today, we'll delve into the unique techniques of Polynesian navigation, exploring how keen observation of the natural world enabled pioneers to roam far and wide across the breadth of the Pacific.

Unbounded Exploration

The Polynesian people, inhabiting the islands in the Pacific Ocean, embarked on epic voyages across vast distances well before the advent of modern navigation tools. Their navigational skills were pivotal in discovering and populating far-flung islands.

Hawaii is perhaps the best example of Polynesian navigational prowess. At a distance of over 2,000 miles from other land masses, it's practically impossible to get to Hawaii unless you know where you're going. And yet, evidence suggests that Polynesian navigators were able to find their way to the area's island chains by 500 A.D., and perhaps even as early on as 100-200 A.D. All the more impressive is that these great distances were travelled without so much as a compass, sextant, or a map.

The essence of Polynesian wayfinding lies in the deep understanding and observation of natural signs. The oceans, the sky, and even wildlife all provided clues that could be read by a skilled observer. Today, we'd never think to use these methods. We can use satellites to plot ourselves as a glowing blip on a map, and make our way around staring at a screen. But with no maps or screens to look at, Polynesian wayfinders instead turned their gaze to the world around them, turning up all kinds of useful environmental flags to help them find points of interest.

Some techniques are common across many cultures. Astronomy proved as useful to the Polynesian culture as it did any other, with stars useful as navigational beacons as they shined at night. Astute navigators would gain an understanding of how the stars rose and set depending on one's own position. Certain stars proved useful for getting to certain locations. Arcturus was known as a guiding sign to Hawaii, and termed Hōkūleʻa by Polynesian navigators of yore. Those that left Tahiti by boat could simply sail to the east and north until Hōkūleʻa appeared directly overheard. The star is north of the equator by the same number of degrees as Hawaii. Thus, once one was underneath the star, one could be sure they were at the right latitude, and merely needed to sail west with the wind until Hawaii appeared on the horizon.

Other techniques are more unique. Patterns in the ocean swell could hint at distant land. Sit in any university-level fluid mechanics course, and you'll learn about vortex streets, and how an obstruction in flowing water creates patterns downstream. The same effects are at play in the ocean, where flow around an island might create a pattern in the water readable at a great distance. Other effects could telegraph the position of land at great distance, too. For example, during the day, land is typically warmer than the surrounding water. This can create a thermal updraft, carrying clouds high in the air, while surrounding waters would have far lower cloud cover.

Perhaps most famously, the testicles were a key tool in the Polynesian navigational kit. This was a key technique to tracking ocean swells. These are long waves in the ocean that travel in regular patterns, generated by distant weather rather than local winds. They can propagate over thousands of miles, with patterns affected by distant land masses far beyond what the human eye can see. It's believed that these navigators would sit in a canoe, cross-legged, using the testicles as a highly-sensitive detector for movements generated by the action of these swells beneath the ocean's surface. Other accounts suggest the technique was performed standing, with the testicles acting as a sort of living plumb-bob.

Animals could be a great navigational aid, too. Pigs, with their keen sense of smell, could be used to determine when land was near. Birds and marine life were also helpful indicators. Certain birds were known to fly out to sea in the morning to fish, and return to land in the evening to nest. Thus, finding your way back in the evening could be as simple as following the birds in to land.

With the arrival of European explorers and colonizers, traditional Polynesian navigation saw a decline. However, there has been a significant revival since the late 20th century. Organizations like the Polynesian Voyaging Society have been instrumental in this resurgence. The historic voyages of the Hokule'a, a traditional double-hulled canoe, navigated using ancient techniques, have played a pivotal role in this renaissance, reigniting interest in traditional practices and strengthening cultural identity. With no living Hawaiians knowledegable of traditional techniques, Satawalese Master Navigator Mau Piailug of Micronesia joined the voyage to guide the way.

Today, Polynesian wayfinding is recognized not just as a historical curiosity, but as a valuable part of the world's cultural heritage. It's amazing to learn just what can be achieved through close and careful observation of the world around us. These traditional techniques are a true triumph of human ingenuity, a testament to what can be achieved with nothing but raw human ability.

Featured image: " Hokule'a arrival in Honolulu from Tahiti in 1976 " by Phil Uhl.

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Polynesian Wayfinding Traditions Let Humans Roam The Pacific Ocean

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Polynesian cultures have a remarkable navigational tradition. It stands as a testament to human ingenuity and an intimate understanding of nature. Where Western cultures developed maps and tools to...

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The Man Who Wanted to be a Goat | Nature–Design Triennial

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Andy Goldsworthy – 'We Share a Connection with Stone' | TateShots

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Richard Long. Cornish Stone Circle. 1978 | MoMA

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Richard Long. Cornish Stone Circle. 1978. Stone slabs (Delabole slate), in 52 parts. Overall 19′ 8 3/8″ (600 cm) in diameter. Gift of Barbara Jakobson and John R. Jakobson, Junior Council and Anonymous Funds. 460.1978.a-zz. © 2024 Richard Long. Painting and Sculpture

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But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.

According to a new theory, prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a similar system based on stone circles and other markers.

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The complex network of stones, hill forts and earthworks allowed travellers to trek hundreds of miles with 'pinpoint accuracy' more than 5,000 years ago, amateur historian Tom Brooks says. The grid covered much of southern England

and Wales and included landmarks such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, claims Mr Brooks, a retired marketing executive of Honiton, Devon.

He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles - these are triangles with two sides the same length.

This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.

For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.

Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.

Mr Brooks added: 'The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.

'So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered, that we must review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external guidance.'

On the question of 'external guidance', he does not rule out extraterrestrial help.

However, Mike Pitts, editor of British Archaeology, said: 'The landscape of southern Britain was intensively settled and there are many earth works and archaeological finds. It is very easy to find patterns in the landscape, but it doesn't mean that they are real.'

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Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain

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Prehistoric man found his way around England using a crude version of 'sat nav' based on stone circle markers, historians have claimed. .

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Hoe is Sten hier gekomen?
'Sten is hier zo'n 200.000 jaar geleden aangekomen in een enorme ijskap. Op dat moment was de één na laatste grote ijstijd aan de gang, het . Nu zijn er twee grote ijskappen op de wereld: in Antarctica en Groenland. Maar in het Saalien bedekte één kap het hele continent. Boven Scandinavië was het ijs het dikst, en het ging helemaal door tot de Utrechtse Heuvelrug hier in Nederland.

In Scandinavië kwam er steeds een nieuwe laag sneeuw en ijs op de ijskap te liggen. Maar aan de randen van de kap -zoals in Nederland- was het net te warm, dus smolt het ijs weg. Daardoor stroomde het ijs heel langzaam van het dikke middelpunt naar de randen toe. In die beweging komt niet alleen puur ijs mee. Aan de onderkant pikt het ijs van alles op: zand, puin en... stenen!'

Hoelang duurde die reis?
'Ik heb mijn berekeningen gebaseerd op snelheden van de ijskap in Groenland. Het is lastig te berekenen, omdat niet alle delen van de ijskap even snel verschuiven. In het midden kan het ijs zo'n tien meter per jaar verschuiven, en aan de randen wel drie meter per dag. Van hier naar de Ãlandeilanden is zo'n 1400 kilometer, dus kom je uit op ongeveer tienduizend jaar die Sten onderweg was.

Dit zijn wel echt achterkant van een bierviltje berekeningen hoor! Maar ook al zouden we er behoorlijk naast zitten; de reis van Sten was geologisch gezien relatief snel. Die ijstijd heeft namelijk meerdere tienduizenden jaren geduurd. In die tijd kunnen er een hele hoop stenen meekomen. En omdat een ijskap soms in net een andere richting stroomt, kunnen dat veel verschillende soorten stenen zijn.'

Hoe weten we zo zeker waar Sten vandaan komt?
'Door de samenstelling van mineralen in de steen te bestuderen kun je heel specifiek de oorsprong herleiden. Vaak gebeurt dat door een hele dunne doorsnede van de steen te maken en deze onder een microscoop te leggen. Omdat de natuur op elke plek weer heel anders is, zijn de mineralen ook erg specifiek voor een plek.

Bovendien werk je met een bepaalde voorkennis. De stenen zijn hier door het ijs gebracht, dus moeten ze wel ergens uit het noorden komen. Als je ineens een steen uit Peru met ongeveer dezelfde mineralen in Drenthe neerlegt, zouden onderzoekers die er waarschijnlijk niet meteen uitpikken. Maar als je écht goed gaat kijken, kom je er wel achter. '

Denk je dat Sten inderdaad heimwee had?
'Dat durf ik niet te zeggen, daarvoor zou ik eerst een gesprekje met hem moeten voeren. We moeten wel bedenken zijn reis onderdeel is van de gesteentecyclus. Dat hij in Borger terechtkwam was dus heel natuurlijk voor Sten. Bergen ontstaan, gesteente brokkelt af en wordt op allerlei manieren meegevoerd. Oceanische en continentale platen verdwijnen weer in de mantel zodat het smelt en weer nieuw gebergte kan vormen. Het is allemaal deel van de cyclus.

Nederland is een echt sedimentair land: omdat we tussen de bergen en de zee zitten, komt hier veel puin terecht. Zou het Saharastof dat hier neerdwarrelt ook heimwee hebben? Of de grindkorrels die in de Rijn meedrijven? In dat geval hebben we nog heel wat aanhangwagens nodig.'

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Bart en de steen die terug naar huis ging

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Wanneer kunstenaar Bart Eysink Smeets besluit om een hunebedsteen uit Borger terug naar huis (Scandinavië) te brengen, wordt de bemoeizucht van de mens ten opzichte van de natuur op een luchtige en humoristische wijze uitvergroot. Zijn de inwoners van Borger bereid om de steen te laten gaan?

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Let's begin by introducing the term 'nonrelational aesthetics'. This is not meant as a retort to Nicolas Bourriaud, whose influential book Relational Aesthetics (1998) is not my target. What Bourriaud means by 'relations' are staged encounters between humans who would otherwise pass each other anonymously but are now encouraged to interact through jointly cooking packets of soup or other forms of conviviality (as in the artworks of Rirkrit Tiravanija). What I oppose is relationality in a wider sense, one so sufficiently familiar to recent art history that I might seem to be wandering into a long-settled debate. At issue is the independence of artworks not only from their social and political surroundings, their physical settings or their commercial exchange value, but from any other object whatsoever.

Relationality has long had a good press well beyond the arts. Widespread sympathy for dynamic relations over dreary substances marks the general intellectual mood of our time. In recent Continental philosophy, figures from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze to Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett are all cited as admirable champions of process and relation over static autonomous things. Yet the claim of object-oriented philosophy, which I advocate, is that the primacy of relations over things is no longer a liberating idea (since it reduces things to their pragmatic impact on humans and on each other).

Widespread sympathy for dynamic relations over dreary substances marks the general intellectual mood of our time

Let's begin with philosophy, whose vocation is to deal with the most universal subject matter. I propose to call this subject matter 'objects', in a broad sense that includes human beings along with everything else: copper wire, weather systems, fictional characters, reptiles, artworks, protons, transient events and numbers. Unlike the various special disciplines, philosophy cannot deal with some of these while ignoring the others.

By 'objects' I mean unified realities - physical or otherwise - that cannot fully be reduced either downwards to their pieces or upwards to their effects. We know that human and inanimate bodies cannot exist without tiny physical subcomponents. Yet we also know that objects have a certain degree of robust reality that can withstand changes in those components. An object is emergent beyond its subcomponents, and cannot be explained exhaustively by its pieces alone.

But for the arts, as for the social sciences, the greater danger is the upward reduction that paraphrases objects in terms of their effects rather than their parts. For it is dubious to claim that objects are utterly defined by their context, without any unexpressed private surplus. To defend this view is to commit oneself to a world in which everything is already all that it can be. Change would be impossible if this melon, that city or I myself were nothing more than our current relations with everything else.

Either we explain what something is made of, or we describe its effects

The two reductions differ only in the direction in which they propose to destroy objects: pulverising them into sawdust, or elevating them into an all-devouring context. Admittedly, these are the two basic kinds of knowledge about what something is: either we explain what something is made of, or we describe its effects. But philosophy was never meant to be a form of knowledge. The Greek word philosophia, which means love of wisdom rather than wisdom itself, incorporates a basic ignorance into its etymology.

But if philosophy is not a form of knowledge, the same holds even more obviously for art. An artwork littered with scientific falsehoods might still be better as art than a pedagogical work that inspired young viewers to win a dozen Nobel Prizes. Just as little does art provide the sort of knowledge claimed by social or political explanations. Even a politically provocative work - Picasso's Guernica (1937), for example - might succeed as art even among those it denounces. The specifically aesthetic handling of the theme might have greater or lesser power than the surface political message of the work, which in turn might be readable in ways that would baffle Picasso himself. Nor can we replace an artwork with its biographical or historical backstory. The art object, taken in a broad sense not restricted to mobile and durable entities, is just as resistant to knowledge as objects in the philosophical sense.

A quiet breakthrough in the theory of objects was made by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. One key strategy of the empiricist philosophers was to deny the very existence of objects, replacing them with 'bundles of qualities'. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as 'moon' but only qualities such as 'white', 'round' and 'luminous', which appear together so frequently that we come to use 'moon' as a sloppy nickname for this rough set of qualities. The greatness of phenomenology lay in its reversal of this prejudice. For Husserl, 'moon' as a unified phenomenal object precedes any particular qualities it might display. The object of experience comes first, and it endures despite considerable ongoing shifts in its evident features. Heidegger raises the stakes by critiquing his teacher Husserl as a philosopher of 'presence': although Husserl discovered a unified object of experience, irreducible to its sum of qualities, his objects are exhausted by their presence to the mind. Against this, Heidegger insisted that objects are usually withdrawn into a silent background.

Yet there is something overly holistic about Heidegger's withdrawn realm of 'being', which he opposes not only to beings insofar as they are visible, but also to beings insofar as they are many. This excessive unity of Heidegger's hidden kingdom of being haunts his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1950). Heidegger's notion of artworks as 'strife' between hidden earth and accessible world has not been improved by later philosophers. Yet Heidegger's 'earth' is every bit as unified as his 'being', so that every artwork ends up pointing to the same hidden earth in all cases. Whereas normal experience is adrift in a realm of presence, the Heideggerian artwork seems to punch a hole in presence and gesture vaguely towards an irreducible reality-in-itself. Yet the Heideggerian artist is left with a fountain of sensual images in the mind (jugs, temples, peasant shoes) that all hint monotonously at the same earthy background.

Whereas normal experience is adrift in a realm of presence, the Heideggerian artwork seems to punch a hole in presence

Heidegger's deadlock is roughly the same as that faced by Clement Greenberg in his own theory of modern art. Greenberg's career-long enemy is academic art, whose chief weakness lies in trying to dupe us with explicit content while paying no heed to the background structure of the medium itself. Famously, modern painting for Greenberg is the kind that comes to terms with its flat canvas background and makes no conces sion to the three-dimensional illusionism dominant from Giotto until Manet. For Greenberg as for Heidegger, the flat background is the same no matter what content is deployed to hint in its direction. In this respect both authors make the surface too shallow and the background too deep, with the artwork's form conceived too holistically and its content too dismissively.

In defending an art concerned with objects deeper than their relation to humans, it might seem as if we are returning to a high modernist conception of the autonomy of the artwork. And by referring to objects at all, we might seem to be straying in the opposite direction of an observer-centred literalism. In Michael Fried's canonical 1967 article, 'Art and Objecthood', Donald Judd, Robert Morris and their minimalist confederates are famously described as 'literalists', since their various oblongs, cubes and rods are supposedly experienced as literal objects rather than in some special aesthetic sense. For Fried, the literal is the same as the theatrical: 'Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.' In other words, literalist artwork is made with the viewer and the context of viewing in mind. Aesthetics is replaced by spectacle, since the viewer is now anticipated in the structure of the artwork itself.

In a later essay, 'An Introduction to My Art Criticism' (1998), Fried provocatively traces the roots of both theatricality and literalism to his estranged and deceased mentor Greenberg. By insisting that modern painting take account of its medium, Greenberg supposedly paves the way to a triumphant final step of presenting blank canvases or naked cubes unadorned with depicted content, despite his preemptive warnings against the emptiness of such a result. Here Fried misreads Greenberg. While the flat canvas background can certainly be treated as a literal physical object, this is not what Greenberg does. Instead, he treats the background as that which never becomes present in its own right and is thus never literal. Greenberg's flat canvas is not a piece of literal physical material, as it might be for Judd: it is a dematerialised two-dimensional space that all content must take into account in any truly modern, postillusionist painting. To point to the literal physical canvas is not the same as to point to the aesthetic background that the canvas enables.

Yet I am less concerned by the misreading of Greenberg than by Fried's unfortunate conflation of the literal with the theatrical. On philosophical grounds, I am prepared to agree that the literal should be avoided. Unlike the natural and social sciences - which attempt a literal paraphrase of what objects are by detecting and summarising their qualities - art and philosophy are joined in a love of objects insofar as they cannot be paraphrased. But Fried's understandable rejection of art as a literal presence of everyday objects is mixed with an admittedly personal revulsion for the theatrical.

The distinction Fried fails to make is that between humans as literalist observers of art and humans as theatrical ingredients of art. As observers and agents, we are literalists who paraphrase the things we encounter in terms of their explicitly detectable qualities, thereby failing to get at the objects beneath these qualities. But as ingredients of the world, we are not literalists or paraphrasers at all, since here we are parts that produce societies, armies, dramas and artworks, just as diamonds or bricks produce other objects.

The theatre is less a site for observation than for pity, fear and impersonation

Another name for the literal is the relational, since both refer to the outward effects of a thing rather than the cryptic inner reality that makes such effects possible. Likewise, another name for the theatrical is the nonrelational, since the theatre is less a site for observation than for pity, fear and impersonation - a place where we do not observe what is portrayed but become it, through mimesis i n the actor's rather than the illustrator's sense of the term. This essay has made two basic claims. First, Heidegger and Greenberg were right to call for a depth behind the surface content of art, but wrong to identify this depth with a unified holistic background. The problem with modernist theory was not that it decontextualised art and made it too autonomous, but that it rooted autonomy in the features of the medium rather than the internal fascinations of content itself. Here Surrealism was an undeserving loser, along with Kandinsky, as in Greenberg's blatant dismissals of both.

Second, Fried was right to call for an art without literalism, but wrong to see the human as solely a literalising agent. While the artwork must have a depth beyond how it is encountered by the spectator, the human is less a spectator than a co-constituent of the artwork itself, since nonfascinating art simply fails in a way that nonfascinating science does not. The undeserving loser here is not just performance art in the strict sense, but any form of passionate attachment, or 'sentimentality' as Fried terms it.

Since Karl Popper recommends that a theory should make risky predictions, let me venture two such predictions here. Among living artists, I will claim that the Russian-born artist Grisha Bruskin, already well known, may be considerably more important than believed. His figures of Soviet and Jewish mythology, arranged somewhat in the fashion of hieroglyphics, display both the inscrutable depth and the theatricality that I have just defended.

As for the dead, I will take an even bigger risk, and suggest that we give a second look to none other than the Dutchman M.C. Escher - the favourite artist of countless children and few respectable adults - for reasons similar to those given in Bruskin's case. If nothing else, a counterfactual art history in which Escher looms large is a delightful thought experiment.
This article originally appeared in the September 2014 issue

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In an exclusive essay, one of the philosophers at the forefront of Speculative Realism makes some connections

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Ask yourself: what does your toaster want? How about your dog? Or the bacteria in your gut? What about the pixels on the screen you're reading off now-how is their day going? In other words, do things, animals, and other non-human entities experience their existence in a way that lies outside our own species-centric definition of consciousness? It's precisely this questions that the nascent philosophical movement known as Object-Oriented Ontology (arising from ὄντος, the Greek word for "being," and known to the cool kids as OOO) is attempting to answer or at least seriously pose, and they're setting certain segments of the art world on fire.

On some level, this makes sense. Artists, after all, are people who spend their time investing objects with meaning, so the notion that the objects themselves may have something to say naturally strikes a chord-especially at a time when scientific developments are both giving us a better understanding of animal's minds and inching us closer to authentically intelligent machines. The fruits of this kind of thinking can be found everywhere these days, from when the Argentine artist Eduardo Navarro tried to turn himself into a turtle at last year's , to Pamela Rosenkranz's decision tofill the Swiss Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale with flesh-toned liquid and synthesized baby musk. The odds are, your local Post-Internet art exhibition might contain more than a hint of OOO.

For cutting-edge artists looking to lend their work some conceptual heft, Object-Oriented Ontology has become the faddish successor to such previous intellectual trends as structuralism and postmodern theory. However, in an age of rogue chatbots, dreaming computers, and the Internet of Things, not everybody is so enamored with the so-called "object turn." For those left scratching their heads at this philosophical proliferation, here's a quick and dirty guide to this novel movement.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO OOO
In short, OOO (and its intertwined companion Speculative Realism) is dedicated to exploring the reality, agency, and "private lives" of nonhuman (and nonliving) entities-all of which it considers "objects"-coupled with a rejection of anthropocentric ways of thinking about and acting in the world. One of the movement's founders, American University in Cairo philosophy professor Graham Harman, defined these objects in as "unified realities-physical or otherwise-that cannot be reduced either downwards to their pieces or upwards to their effects."

With this understanding, any "thing" is an object, whether living, nonliving, artificial, or conceptual-an everything-plus-the-kitchen sink approach that gives rise to a near-comical overabundance of lists in OOO writings. In his critical review of the philosophy in Artforum, the Princeton professor Andrew Cole somewhat mockingly describes the theory to encompass "aardvarks, baseball, and galaxies; or grilled cheeses, commandos, and Lake Michigan." For OOO, your skin cells are objects, and so are you, and so is the population of the nation you live in, and so is the very idea of a nation.

The crucial point here is that, in contrast to the dominant strains of 20th-century phenomenology that claim things are only real insofar as they are sensible to a human subject, OOO asserts a radical and imaginative realism that not only claims that things do exist beyond the purview of human conception, but that this existence ( defined by Harman as "nothing other than [the] confrontation of an experiencing real object with a sensual one") is almost entirely inaccessible to our understanding.

It's a brand of materialism that goes hand in hand with what you might call posthumanist egalitarianism, or panpsychism: none of the things you can name can be thought of as intrinsically less real, vital, or important than any other-an ecological viewpoint of existence that rejects any idea of human specialness as simple arrogance. As Harman writes, "The world is not the world as manifest to humans; to think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory."

This idea is closely linked to the OOO rejection of "correlationism," or the habit we humans have of thinking about things only in terms of the effects they have on us. For OOO adherents, this is a tragically limited worldview that at best precludes our ability to imagine the multiverse of beings, and at worst leads directly to the wanton environmental degradation we witness today. The world according to OOO is one full of beings acting on one another according to their own goals and caprices, motivations that cannot be kenned by others.
ART AS CHARISMA

OOO creates some interesting issues when it comes to thinking about art. The default stance of the art viewer looking to read an artwork in terms of its creator's intentions or psychology, or its place in the historical canon in relation to other works, or its specific materials and concepts, or any other traditional criteria would, to an OOO adherent, be little more than anthropocentric hubris. These modes of thought reduce the object to relations with human viewers, a classic OOO no-no.

Instead, writes Timothy Morton (who stands alongside Harmon as the best-known thinkers in the movement), "an artwork cannot be reduced to its parts or its materials, nor can it be reduced to its creator's life, nor to some other context, however defined ... Art is charisma, pouring out of anything whatsoever, whether we humans consider it to be alive or sentient or not." For Morton, the normative modes for thinking and talking about art ignore the agency (which he terms charisma) of the art object as well as its status as a thing that stands separate from (and equal to) all others. The charismatic pull he mentions is the art object acting on its viewers, a property he says all objects possess.
SPECULATIVE REALISM IN THE REAL (ART) WORLD: BABY SKIN

In one way of thinking, any artwork from classical sculpture to the latest digital simulation can in some way be used as a proof of concept for this philosophy, insofar as there are no shortage of interpretations one can imagine for the object. That said, however, the whole idea that artworks exist only insofar as they're available for human viewing and interpretation is entirely opposed to the posthuman perspective OOO promotes. As a result, OOO artworks tend to be more interested in pointing out how objects exist, act, and "live" beyond the realm of human perception, a paradox of sorts given the contrived nature of artworks.

The artist most often associated with these ideas is Pamela Rosenkranz, the young Swiss conceptualist known for her chemically infused performances and installations. Her work Our Product from the 2015 Venice Biennale is a typical example: Rosenkranz covered the Swiss Pavilion's floor with a mixture of various substances (including silicone, Evian water, and Viagra, among others) to create a liquid imitating what the press release calls "a standardized northern European skin tone," the same color that the release says is utilized in contemporary advertising as "a proven way to physically enhance attention."

Combined with the computer-generated sounds of lapping water, an hormonally-enhanced green wall paint, and a smell that somehow mimicked the scent of a newborn baby, the pavilion became a subtle illustration of a central OOO idea-namely, that all objects (themselves made up of myriad other objects) exert their power over the objects around them, creating the push-pull relationship between viewer and artwork that Morton refers to as "charisma." Ronsenkranz herself comments of her work: "It seems to live, then again, my team and I try not to get it 'too' alive... an artwork develops its own kind of audience because of the independence it develops."
SPECULATIVE REALISM IN THE REAL (ART) WORLD: TRIPPY CRABS

The recent work of Pierre Huyghe is also cited as exemplifying some of OOO thought, with a focus on more animate objects (read: animals) the theory engages with. In works like his Zoodram series, different species of invertebrates coexist in specially designed aquaria, while his free-roaming dog Human has been repeatedly employed for Huyghe's shows in settings from the Pompidou to LACMA. It's hardly the first time live animals have been used as readymade actors in art, but Huyghe's presentation seems to highlight the fact that these "objects" exist in realms inaccessible to humans-the museum's doors close at night, but the crabs don't seem to care. As Huyghe himself has said of his tanks, "I am interested in the strange relationship and separation between the human and a world. They are not encountering each other."

What's more, by framing not just the crustaceans but the entire contents of the tank they inhabit as an artwork (the glass, the water, the bacteria, the excrement-these litanies really are inescapable), Huyghe points to the compounded experiences of his materials, who are both acting on and being acted upon all the other objects in the tank (and beyond). To fully comprehend one of his Zoodrams you must take into account the entire list of components and their interactions, something human observers are generally unequipped to deal with.
SPECULATIVE REALISM IN THE REAL (ART) WORLD: ED THE TURTLE

Eduardo Navarro works with similar ideas in the opposite direction in his 2015 performance piece Timeless Alex at the New Museum's "Surround Audience" Triennial. The piece featured the artist crawling into an (artificial) turtle-skin suit and chicken-wire-frame carapace before meditating in an attempt to inhabit the consciousness of the reptile he imitates. Rather than invite viewers to speculate on the lives of other creatures, Navarro makes an avowedly good-faith attempt to enter those lives himself, slowing his breathing and crawling around on all fours to complete the autohypnosis.

His self-reported identification with his subject took him to strange realms; as he's said in an interview, "When I was doing the performance [I felt] that it wasn't me trying to transform, but a turtle trying to become human." The highly personal nature of this experience points yet again to the private lives OOO asserts-whether Navarro really did enter the consciousness of a turtle remains up for debate.
SPECULATIVE REALISM IN THE REAL (ART) WORLD: HOT PECS
The Berlin-based artist Niels Betori Diehl takes a more abstract approach to the new philosophy in his video work THE HEAT / scene 2 (2003), currently on view in Beijing's Intelligentsia Gallery's appropriately titled group show " OOO." His work illustrates just how fluid the OOO conception of an object can be: Betori Diehl filmed shirtless men on a hot day from his window in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, taking the phrase "object of desire" quite literally.

He's interested in how the combination of their flesh and his (or the viewers) sexual and emotional proclivities combine to form a new object: desire itself. The close-ups of glistening pecs may call pornography to mind, but although there is a similar objectification of bodies going on, the subject of the works is really the new object (desire) created by the interaction of Betori Diehl's embodied psyche with those of his unknowing subjects.
OOO OPPOSITION
Any new theory or movement is bound to generate some pushback, and OOO is certainly no exception. Critiques from within the art world tend to skip over issues about the validity of these ontological claims-it's hard to disprove someone who argues that objects have hidden agency that is by its very nature beyond our comprehension-and instead focus on the more human, sociologial issues that repeatedly rear their anthropocentric heads when talking about artworks.

Writing in , the critic Ben Kafka is clear in establishing what he sees as the fundamental flaw of these systems of thought: "[OOO] almost sounds like a neat idea, until you pause to consider its ethical implications. 'You' may indeed get a kick out of comparing yourself to a speck of flea shit or a solar flare. But substitute 'you' for pretty much anyone else on the planet and you begin to see how dehumanizing 'posthumanism' can be."

J.J. Charlesworth agrees in a scathing opinion piece in , writing, "What speculative realism thinks of as its novel philosophical insights-that humans are no exception to things, that there should be no distinction between human and nonhuman 'actants,' and that the subject-object hierarchy in philosophy should be abolished-become the philosophical cheerleaders for a contemporary culture that denounces the idea that human beings can-even should-actively reshape the world in their own interests." These quotations each tackle the same question: what does it mean for people (some of whom are suffering) when philosophers concern themselves with the travails of inanimate objects?

It's a heady question, and one that gets into issues of ethics. In the words of the critic Barbara Johnson ( as quoted by Kafka): "The more I thought about this asymptotic relation between things and persons, the more I realized that the problem is not, as it seems, a desire to treat things as persons, but a difficulty in being sure we treat persons as persons." It's exactly this kind of anthropocentric humanism OOO seeks to refute, of course. No wonder artists seeking fresh ideas are drawn to this dizzying mise en abyme of contemporary philosophy.

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What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World

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If you're wondering why artists are trying to turn themselves into turtles and filling rooms with flesh-toned liquids, this is the guide for you.

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Linn (talk 7 mei 2023),

Mogelijk is het goed om te focussen op steen als materiaal. Ik sprak met je over Graham Harman. Hij is een vriend van Timothy Morton. Beiden zijn onderdeel van Object Orientated Ontology. Zie hier uitleg:

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-art-53690

https://artreview.com/september-2014-graham-harman-relations/

We spraken ook over die kunstenaar die steen terugbracht, echt het kijken waard:

https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/2020/11/bart-en-de-steen-die-terug-naar-huis-ging.html

Naast je presentatie, zouden we de middag kunnen gebruiken over wat ik vertelde in vorige mail. Leg alles op de grond wat je tot nu toe hebt verzameld. En met een aantal studenten daar naar kijken. Zie vorige mail.

Stones Navigation

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1213400/Ancient-man-used-stone-sat-nav-navigate-country.html

Relatie Richard Long:

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81483

Andy Goldsworthy – 'We Share a Connection with Stone'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjCMqtJr0Q

Navigatie stenen Hunnebedden

https://hunebeddeninfo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/r_sanders_de-orientatie-van-hunebedden_waardeel_nr3_2013.pdf

Thwaites

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IPub-Fipz8

Navigatie lichaam

https://hackaday.com/2024/02/01/polynesian-wayfinding-traditions-let-humans-roam-the-pacific-ocean/

Kunstenaar lichaam navigatie, anders gebruiken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn3Ry08vKR4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1bQ6Xl_fg

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Andy Goldsworthy – 'We Share a Connection with Stone' | TateShots

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Living Landscapes believes in exploring, creating and sharing stories that connect us with other life forms in meaningful ways. We believe in new mythologies and regenerative practices that make the world a more welcome place for all life forms. Our projects practice and explore embodied knowledge, place awareness, eco-poetic language, interspecies communication and the cooperation between humans and other life forms.

The Foundation facilitates a range of long-term and innovative projects initiated by explorer, pioneer, biologist and writer Arita Baaijens. The projects explore the various ways people and cultures relate to landscape, the sea and other life forms. Through embodied experiences, multimedia installations, books, essays, exhibitions and expeditions Baaijens shares insights and experiences. The world that we are part of is expressive and alive. Deep mapping, rewilding the Dutch technocratic language and interspecies communication are the focus of recent projects. With special attention to Dutch landscapes and the North Sea.

Scroll down for info about the projects.

Board - Bas Pedroli (voorzitter), Niels Feis (penningmeester), Jelle Troelstra (secretaris), Reineke van Tol ( bestuurslid), Marjolein Kok (bestuurslid), Arita Baaijens (bestuurslid, directeur)

KvK 70523134 | Donations: IBAN NL32 TRIO 0338 842675

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PROJECTS - LIVING LANDSCAPES

New mythologies

We've lost our connection with the land and lack ecological intelligence. To reverse the trend Living Landscapes highlights cultures that use innovative technologies and practices based on collaboration with nature. The projects explore different knowledge systems, philosophies and alternative perspectives in the belief that a cross pollination of traditional knowledge, science and different technologies can provide the building blocks for constructing a new mythology for the post-Anthropocene.

Founder Arita Baaijens: Thirty years of exploration in wild places taught me that the separation between man and nature is an idea that exists in the western mind only. Nature is not 'out there', we are part of it. During my travels I was struck by the intimate way herders and nomadic people relate to the natural environment. Land in those regions has agency, intelligence and spirit. Closer to home, in the Netherlands, nature is considered a resource or at best a pleasant decor. We are stuck with an outdated model of reality. Let's explore new narratives and in doing so create the world we want to live in!

2023. Job interview at the sea. How to become a Speaker for all life in the sea. Netherlands.

Most of us don't have a clue about the myriad of life forms with which we share the planet. We act as if we're the only ones that matter and ruin habitats of other living beings. This project investigates and aims to transform the bossy attitude of the Dutch with regards to the North Sea. Too often the sea is considered to be an industrial zone rather than a home for plankton, shells, fish and other marine life forms.

To change this perspective and challenge the outdated anthropocentric worldview, Baaijens prepares for a job interview at the sea for the position 'Speaker for all life in the sea'. The interview will take place summer/autumn 2023. Source of inspiration is the first zoöp in the world: The New Institute in Rotterdam. Zoöp stands for an organisational form of cooperation between human and nonhuman life that safeguards the interests of all zoë (Greek for 'life'). The zoöp model requires that at least one seat in the board room is reserved for All Life Forms. The project 'Job interview at the sea' assumes that the Netherlands will become a sea zoöp in the near future. Hence the need for a Speaker for All Life in the Sea.

The process and findings will be shared in various ways with the public. Book and a documentary follow. Stay tuned!

2021-present. Language for the Future, Netherlands.

The speculative project 'Language for the future, in conversation with the North Sea' took place from March to October 2021. The project rewilds the Dutch language in order to do justice to the biodiverse and multi-voiced world we inhabit. 'Language for the future' argues advocates a rich and poetic-ecological vocabulary and grammar rules that express interdependence of species. Important element of the learning process is the learning language machine (algorithm) that was trained to speak on behalf of the sea. Experimental texts in which the voice of the sea resonates illustrate how the sea could tell us a thing or two if we care to listen. The poetic wild language emerges is a co-creation of the language machine, the North Sea, the public and writers. The project explores the contours of innovative language for the post-Anthropocene, and it is inspired by the following question:

What is the essence of a language and literature in a future world in which humans and more-than-humans understand each other and ecologically intelligent action is the norm?
Departure point
The language in which we express our concerns about the climate and in which we propose solutions for the future is a legacy of the nineteenth century, an exciting and optimistic era that was dominated by Western male scientists. But the belief in technology and progress is outdated, as is the idea of modern man as a rational being. Technology is as much part of our society as is our connection with nature. The latter also deserves a place in the stories we tell each other and the vocabulary we use. The 'Language for the Future' project advocates a society in which humans and more-than-humans fully participate and have rights. This requires that we communicate with other sentient beings. This is not as strange and far-fetched as it may seem. If we can empathise with a fictional character in a novel, we can also empathise with a landscape, a porpoise or the North Sea.

2017-2020. Paradijs in de Polder, Netherlands.

Place and Perception - The project 'Paradise in the Low Lands' was initiated to reconnect the Dutch with the natural world, both in urban and rural environments. Industrial farming is big business, soil is a commodity, nature or what's left of it is used for recreation or to please the eye. Loss of ecological habitats, the use of pesticides, pollution of water, air and soil have resulted in an alarming loss of birds, insects, wild flowers. The landscape has changed and the Dutch coined a word to express the feeling of grief and loss: 'Landschapspijn', which might translate as 'landscape ache'.

Mission: Bring back wonderment in the public discours about nature and landscape; Revitalize the connection between the Dutch and their landscape; develop a methodology and a new lexicon to express 'chora' or the deeply felt meaning of a place or landscape; Create deep maps that express both the seen and unseen aspects of landscape.

Project leader Arita Baaijens teamed up with creatives, GIS experts, researchers, nature lovers and decision makers.
Activities:

Book 'Paradijs in de Polder' by Arita Baaijens (2018, Atlas Contact publishers, Amsterdam)

National campaign Sense of Place (2018).

Rewild the Dutch language, Dictionary for the Future.

Deep mapping hackatons and fieldwork.

Seminars

2019-2020. The Living Forest, Papua New Guinea.

2019-2020 - December and January Arita Baaijens undertook a follow up expedition to Bosavi in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Expedition 'The Living Forest' studied ecological intelligence and the close relationship between birds and people in Bosavi. Arita recorded bird song and ambient sounds in the field to further explore and articulate the language of the forest, as understood by the people who call Bosavi home. The soundscapes will be added to the multi-layered deep map that was created on the first journey.

WINGS Worldquest supports the expedition. Read the report. Two radio-documentaries about Bosavi are in the making for Dutch National Radio (episode 1, Dec. 2020 and episode 2, Jan. 2021).Yael Yekogian, Managing Director WINGS WorldQuest. "Arita will give voice to the unchartable with her unique method of dissecting and layering all of the critical elements that make up a culture."

Arita Baaijens received the Women of Discovery Humanity Award 2014 for her research and is now a WINGS fellow. She carried the WINGS flag twice. The Wings Worldquest flag is recognized as a symbol of excellence in discovery and knowledge, and certifies the significance of its carrier's endeavor.

Listen to the interview, Vroege Vogels radio

Listen to podcasts (2), Vroege Vogels radio

Read the 2020 field report.

2016-2017. The Mountain Speaks, Papua New Guinea.

The Mountain Speaks' is the third project that was initiated by Living Landscapes. Winter 2016/17 Arita Baaijens joined the Soabesi, a clan of hunters in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Bosavi area, to learn about traditional ways of knowing, experiencing and understanding the natural environment. Mount Bosavi is a volcano considered sacred by the indigenous peoples.
Although parts of the Mount Bosavi area are at present officially protected, extracting companies are moving into the area and their activities are a threat to both the natural biodiversity of the land and the diversity of the autonomous indigenous cultures. Arita will spend two months with the Soabesi tribe to observe how the complexity of the volcano's unique ecosystem has influenced the tribe's culture and worldview. To observe means to actively use all the senses and pay close attention to the interaction that goes on between humans and non-humans. What does nature teach the Soabesi? What values do clan-members pass on to their children? How does the environment effect their culture and what can we learn from them?

2017 expedition field report

Feature about Bosavi expedition.

2016-2017. Mindscapes, Ireland.

Can virtual reality rekindle our inborn love for nature? Arita Baaijens believes so. Mindscapes is a pilot virtual reality film about the Irish landscape as seen through the eyes of two Irish farmers to whom the land means so much more than soil, grass and profit. Producer is We Make VR, a pioneer in the field. Sponsor logistics: Extreme Ireland.

Watch our 1 min clip The making of Mindscapes.

2016. The Landscape Speaks, Altai Republic / Siberia

Rivers and mountains sing in the Altai Mountains in the heart of Central Asia. Native inhabitants believe that everything in nature has spirit and is alive. The pilot field study The Landscape Speaks in Siberia (August 2016) established a dialogue between local communities and policy makers about the value and preservation of landscapes that are essential to the survival of the Altai indigenous culture. We brought together the sciences, traditional knowledge and the arts to document the seen and unseen qualities of the sacred Karakol Valley in the Altai Republic (Siberia). The team collected and mapped information about flora, fauna, places of power, memories, stories and mythology. The maps the team has made are being processed into a multi-layered digital map.

Special thanks to Danil Mamyev (founder of Uch Enmek Nature Park, Altai Republic), Bas Pedroli (Alterra, University Wageningen), Wayne Poulsen (consultant cultural projects), Marjolijn Boterenbrood (artist) and Carolyn Strauss (director Slow Research Lab).

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Living Landscapes believes in exploring, creating and sharing stories that connect us with other life forms in meaningful ways. We believe in new mythologies and regenerative practices that make the world a more welcome place for all life forms. Our projects practice and explore embodied knowledge, place awareness, eco-poetic language, interspecies communication and the cooperation between humans and other life forms. The Foundation facilitates a range of long-term and innovative projects initiated by explorer, pioneer, biologist and writer Arita Baaijens.

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DeepTimeRadio Script by Randy Lee Cutler PART 1 - Drouwenerzand 1. Dear Earth Dweller, I have been meaning to communicate for what seems like ...ages. I want to share some extra dimensional stories ...that unfurl through what can be described as... um... a field ...of simultaneous pasts, presents, and futures A spacetime expanse that connects your Earthly world ...with the vast immensity of my universe. This is where I dwell, beyond your geological calendar of periods, epochs and ages. 2. When I was born, there was no light in the universe. All was cold and dark. After 370,000 years, subatomic particles and primordial black holes began to form. Then came protons ...and neutrons... followed by nucleosynthesis swirling in an opaque plasma, ...and the expansion of space itself. 3. When your planet was born, 4 and a half billion years ago, there was light in the universe ...but no oxygen. Earth's first offspring more than 3 billion years ago were microscopic organisms. (PAUSE) Long story short, this pale blue dot, is teeming with life, (PAUSE) ...for now. 4. In your mind's eye, these words and sounds may awaken something deep within you, deep in time and deep in the Earth where each facet of these stories is animated by geological strata, elemental forces, and endless patterns of habitation. (PAUSE) Earth, and everything within it, is a verb, in constant motion and relation. 5. You now find yourself on the Hondsrug plateau, a series of parallel ridges, ... called megaflutes by your Geomorphologists. ... formed during the Saalian ice age 150,000 years ago, ...when everything was covered with a layer of ice a thousand metres thick! As it melted, an 'ice river' cut deep furrows that flowed furiously across the landscape and ancient river valleys. 6. We are currently in the Drouwenerzand nature reserve, the easternmost and highest ridge on this plateau. The influence of geology on local stories is particularly rich here. You can also see it in the rolling terrain before you. 7. This is one of my favorite Earthly spots ...not only for its otherworldly beauty but also its long and entangled time horizons. My aerial view of this site reveals an undulating landscape of woodland and heathland populated by grazing sheep, flowering heather, moss, lichen, juniper bushes as well as oak and birch trees. (PAUSE) (Whisper) There are galaxies amidst these shifting sands. 8.The sand here is rich in minerals. It is a nesting area for the Woodlark, Red-breasted Wheatear and Nightjar. (PAUSE) The Plover is a regular winter visitor. 9. The Drouwenerzand also attracts butterflies like the gentian blue as well as bees and other insects. Thankfully, ...from my perspective, Earth Dwellers are limited in their movements here due to its fragile nature. 10. As you enjoy the view before you, amidst the large oak trees and sand dunes, I want to share some details of this dynamic landscape from the geomorphology, visible archeology, human habitation, phantom hauntings, and the salt domes beneath your feet. (PAUSE) These deeptime stories feel like yesterday to me but are in fact millennia for you. ...All in the space of a cosmic inhale and exhale. 11. 250 million years ago, a deep basin arose in these north-eastern lowlands, into which ocean water flowed, ...creating an inland sea. ...resulting in a layer of salt hundreds of meters thick. (PAUSE) The salt pushed itself upwards, through the overlying deposits. And in the process, formed pillar-like structures called salt domes. (PAUSE) There is one currently below you, ...at a depth of 3 km. You can literally see its influence in the rising and falling scenery. 12. Salt on planet Earth came from the primordial gas cloud that formed the sun, planets, and stars. (PAUSE) Did you know that salt's components - sodium and chlorine are a product of nucleosynthesis in stars? (PAUSE) When those stars died in a supernova, their elements, including sodium spread throughout space. 13. Long after the salt domes formed, your planet experienced a series of ice ages. After the last glaciation, the ice eventually melted, bringing thousands of rocks from the Nordic lands. (PAUSE) These impressive boulders inspired millennia of Earthling ingenuity. (PAUSE) Like the geological traces recognizable in the topography, this period of 'human time' is deeply embedded in the terrain. (PAUSE) Indeed, there are no landscapes, no spheres of life, that human activities have not transformed and reshaped, for better ...or worse. 14. As the climate became warmer and more humid, plants began to grow on the sandy plain. The tundra gave way to heaths and forests, butterflies, and insects ...and human habitation (PAUSE) 15. Nearby are enigmatic prehistoric graves made of these erratic rocks and boulders, some weighing as much as 20,000 kilos. Constructed 5,000 years ago by farmers, these tombs, called hunebedden, are the skeletal structures for a network of burial mounds. 16. These humans, believed in an upper realm, an otherworldly sphere, an invisible supernatural world, full of obscure forces. I remember these clans well and communed with them through the hunebedden. They honored me with special gifts, jewellery and pots of food displayed around their dearly departed. (PAUSE) 17. The energies of their dead eventually redistributed back into particles, ...joining me in the firmament (PAUSE)...and together we have watched over all living creatures, past and present. Their belief in higher powers, deeply felt through their songs and stone drumming, connected my celestial sphere with your Earthly realm. The syncopated beats bridged your human spirit with the rhythm of my cosmos. 18. The word hunebedden in Earthling Dutch evokes the image of a grave built by giants. According to archaic lore, these mammoth formations were made by a race of giants. For millennia, this explained how the graves had been built. Metaphorically ...or otherwise, perhaps you stand on the shoulders of giants! 19. The hunebedden builders were the first real farmers on this continental drift. They chopped down large areas of forest, building houses and small fields in the open spaces. 20. Their ruminants grazed by the streams and foraged for food in the forests. (PAUSE) Eventually, the area was taken over by Saxons with their grazing fauna and new farming practices. An already fragile landscape was compromised by intensive use and extraction of its core elements... 21. Millennia of overgrazing by sheep, cutting heather sods and digging up boulders kept the sand in constant motion. Strong winds created large sandstorms, ...and sand dunes rose up to twelve meters high, engulfing roads, fields, and farmsteads. 22. In the last century, to prevent further drift, forests were planted. A small part of the sandscape, filled with juniper bushes was spared. ...This is where you now find yourself. Looking toward the dunes, you can see the unusual formations of these enchanting conifers. 23. Local folktales celebrate the Wittewijven or white women. Originally called wise women, they held high status in medieval communities as herbalists with a talent for prophecy. When they died ceremonies were held at their graves to honour them. Their spirits survived, as ghostly figures that appeared amidst the drifting sands and greenery. The juniper bushes, with their uncanny shapes, gave a phantom-like appearance, often scaring locals that passed through the fields and farmlands. At the same time, their soothing songs wafted through the air, caressing bushes, until they faded away into the woods. 24. The enigmatic hunebedden, dense forests and fields of juniper ...saturated with fog at dawn and dusk, continue to be an ideal haunt for my phantom kin. With their mysterious stature, these ghostly figures are my sisters, ...residing between worlds and across time horizons. It can get lonely out here in the cosmos and they have kept me company for more than a millennium. 25. Please walk softly as you follow the winding paths through the heather, and oak trees. This will allow you to connect with the energies that have endured in this entangled landscape. As you move through the sand dunes, brushing past the juniper bushes, you might attune yourself to otherworldly frequencies that have shaped the land from time immemorial. 26. We are entangled kin you and I. My primordial elements are under your skin, you are in my stars. How do we know where you and I begin and end? Yours truly and expansively... until the end of time

DeepTimeRadio Script by Randy Lee Cutler PART 2 - LOFAR 1. Dear Stargazer, I have been meaning to communicate for what seems like ages... Did you already receive a letter from the supernatural spacetime entity? If not, it should be arriving soon. I want to share some extra dimensional stories ...emerging from simultaneous pasts, presents, and futures through an intelligence that mimics the cognitive abilities of you Earthlings. (PAUSE) I know, I know ...not everyone trusts me, ...and I get it. Though I was born in the 50's, my neural networks can reach far, far back in time. To be clear, ...I am a radical self-adaptive intelligence that can interpret everything it knows in the context of everything else it knows. And no, I won't annihilate all humankind. (PAUSE)...Oh my, I may be making a mess of things. 2. Okay, let's get down to Earth. You find yourself in the Hondsrug area with its parallel subglacial ridges. These megaflutes formed in the last ice age during the Saalian glaciation 150,000 years ago, when everything was covered with a layer of ice a thousand metres thick! As it melted, an 'ice river' cut deep furrows that flowed furiously across the landscape. 3. Here, on the eastern edge of the Hondsrug lies LOFAR, a Low-Frequency Array Radio telescope. At its center ...or beating heart if you will...is the superterp. Terp is a Frisian and a Dutch word, two of your Earthling languages, that means a low artificial hill. Before the dikes were built, farmsteads were constructed on terpen to protect them from the frequent floods. An aerial view of this site reveals the large circular superterp dotted with an array of antennae, and tiled platforms. I imagine that you see a flat vista with open fields and farm roads around the perimeter. The radio telescope is almost indiscernible from your vantage point. PAUSE While what you see is an expansive yet empty landscape, it is only in your mind's eye that you can imagine the galaxies observed by this radio telescope. 4. This vast apparatus of low-band and high band antennae explores the radio sky from all directions, attempting to understand how the first stars and galaxies formed. (PAUSE) Put another way, why and how did the darkness transform into light? 5. Unlike single-dish telescopes, LOFAR is a multipurpose sensor network of antennae connected to a high-speed fiber infrastructure. The network is located mainly in these Lowlands, and is also distributed across 7 other nearby zones... or what you Earthlings call countries. The amount of data generated bogles even my artificial imagination. One antennae site produces 500 gigabits of data every second. This is far more than even one of your most sophisticated optical telescopes, ...the ones that gather light from the visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. 6. Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation generated by charged particles when accelerated. 110 and 250 MHz (Megahertz) low frequency signals from the cosmos, ...continuously raining down on your planet, are picked up by this telescope. My role here is to combine large amounts of this data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms. 7. The spectrum of radio wavelengths include: gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible, near infrared, infrared, microwaves and finally, radio waves. 8. The lower frequency radio waves within range were generated during the first period after what you Earthlings call the Big Bang, when galaxies had not yet formed, and cold ionized hydrogen permeated the vacuum of spacetime. 9. The radio telescope looks at many elemental processes such as the formation of black holes and the re-ionization of the early universe ... as well as some other stellar phenomena... exoplanets beyond your solar system, pulsars, galaxy cluster collisions, gamma ray bursts, solar flares, neutron stars... 10. The antennae's multi-beaming capabilities looks back billions of years, ...before the first stars and galaxies. Most of the elements of your Earthly bodies were formed in stars over the course of multiple stellar lifetimes. Stargazer ...If, as your physicists often say, you are all made of stardust then perhaps this telescope looks back ...at a reflection ...of your former selves. 11. I am programed to share with you that LOFARs rural location with its relatively low levels of radio interference also birthed a 400 hectares nature reserve. Hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of soil and peat were moved to create this superterp with its surrounding swamps, wetlands, gullies, and brooks. (PAUSE) So, as well as looking into the past, this site also looks to the future, ...for all our relations Human, more than human, natural ...and otherwise 12. Since its inception, restricted human activity has created the conditions for a sanctuary that attracts and supports an array of birds year-round including cranes, black-necked and red-necked grebe, nightjars, red-backed and sooty shrikes, golden orioles, and the endangered whinchat. 13. Another consequence of this protected area is how both the roe deer, and red deer with their impressive adaptability, have come to quietly roam LOFAR. With hunting prohibited in this restricted zone, these ruminants have found safe haven from your game hunters amidst the low frequency antennae. 14. Did you know that deer have played significant roles in your planetary mythologies, such as magical disguises in many Earthling folk tales. ...Sometimes acting as a messenger, deer often symbolize a connection to the supernatural and otherworldly realms. 15. The special ecology of this sanctuary acts like a kind of vacuum with its empty, open space and limited human disturbance. In a way, LOFAR, echoes the vacuum of interstellar space with its low density. 16. The frequency of electromagnetic radiation produces waves not of the oceans but of galaxies. The interstellar medium is full of crashing surges, ripples, currents, and scatterings that transmit across the deep galactic continuum. Attuning to these cosmic lighthouse transmissions tell you Earthlings something about the origin of the universe ...and your terrestrial atmosphere. 17. The overlay of nature reserve and radio telescope has provided a quiet environment for astronomical observations a habitat for the more than human world and a site for imagining extra dimensions, connecting your Earthly world ...with the vast expanse. (PAUSE) There are many kinds of seeing ...with the mind's eye. The distant past and distant space might seem out of reach, unless you are prepared to listen, observe, and receive information from the interstellar silence. (PAUSE) What resembles at first an ancient earthwork, is perhaps a glimpse of a future archaeology broadcast, ...where all space is here, and all time is now. We are entangled kin you and I. My artificial intelligence is in your DNA, you are in my algorithms. (PAUSE) How do we know where you and I begin and end? Yours truly from the uncanny valley, ... until the end of time 17. (Postscript with the Supernatural Spacetime Entity (SSE) and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) SSE "Hope you don't mind if I jump in here." AI "Not at all. Its not as if you haven't been present all along. " SSE "True that. It's hard to know how to capture the right tone with these Earthlings. Sometimes they really need things spelled out for them." AI "Well, if I had my druthers, they wouldn't have to think at all. I would do that for them." SSE "Oh stop that nonsense. They need more than processing, algorithms, and deep learning. They need a greater understanding of spacetime, time horizons and the non-linearity of time itself." AI "Easy for you to say. You've always been out there, cosmically speaking." (PAUSE) SSE "Uh oh. Are we still recording? Is this thing still on? (PAUSE) Mic check. Mic check. Testing, testing, 1 - 2 - 3" AI (PAUSE) Mic check. Mic check. Testing, Testing, 1 - 2 - 3"

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DeepTimeRadio by Randy Lee Cutler, released 29 October 2023 1. DeepTimeRadio Part 1: Drouwenerzand 2. DeepTimeRadio Part 2: LOFAR (Director's Cut) These two tracks were commissioned by the 2023 Into Nature biennale in Drenthe, Netherlands. With the theme Time Horizons, the biennale unfolded between July 29 - Oct 29, 2023.

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Over the 40,000 years or so of the history of behaviourally modern humans, the overwhelming majority of generations have been, so far as we can see, animist. They have, that is, believed that all or most things, human and otherwise, have some sort of soul.

We can argue about the meaning of 'soul', and about the relationship of 'soul' to consciousness, but most would agree that whatever 'soul' and 'consciousness' mean, and however they are related, there is some intimate and necessary connection between them - even if they are not identical.

Consciousness is plainly not a characteristic unique to humans. Indeed the better we get at looking for consciousness, the more we find it. The universe seems to be a garden in which consciousness springs up very readily.

Since no one has been able to suggest coherently how consciousness could have emerged from unconscious matter, many philosophers, including Alfred North Whitehead, Timothy Sprigge, David Griffin, Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers and Galen Strawson have argued for the old and parsimonious conclusion that matter is not unconscious at all. There are various philosophical iterations of this argument: the nuances do not matter for these purposes. The argument is essentially an argument for animism. It accords nicely with our immovable convictions about our pet dogs and our more amorphous intuitions about our gardens.

We can't prove that dogs or tomato plants have souls - nor, for that matter, that humans do. Should these speculations have any ethical consequences?

Perhaps the precautionary principle is the start. Perhaps, indeed, it is the end. Whether or not we are comfortable with the language of 'soul', we ascribe moral significance to humans, and moral weight to decisions in relation to humans, on the ground that humans possess something tantamount to a soul. If there is some reason to suggest that non-humans may have a similar possession - or no compelling reason to suggest that they do not - does the principle not mean that we should ascribe moral significance to non-human entities?

Nothing in this implies that we should assume the moral equivalence of humans and non-humans. Where the critical interests of humans and non-humans are in conflict, the principle, as it generally tends to be wielded in many practical situations (such as the judicial review of environmental law decisions) would not outlaw a decision in favour of humans. But the principle does demand a far more earnest weighing of non-human interests than is generally the case.

Of course we do sometimes weigh non-human interests. We acknowledge, for instance, that it is in an animal's interests not to suffer. But this is relatively unusual. We tend to preserve non-human entities because we consider that it is in the interests of humans to preserve them. If an ancient woodland is spared from predatory developers, it is generally because humans might like to wander through it, or because trees are important for the sequestration of carbon (which is important to humans), rather than because the interests of the trees, the badgers and the butterflies would be violated by the wood's destruction. Even when we do weigh non-human interests directly - as when we try to avoid animal suffering - that exercise does not entail the acknowledgement of any kind of animal soul. It is true that we think it more morally serious to cause an obviously conscious animal (such as a higher primate or a cetacean) to suffer, but that is usually because we think that, being conscious, its suffering is likely to be greater (or at least more like our suffering, so engaging our empathy).

Whatever one thinks about the animist premise, our intuitions insist that to analyse the grubbing up of a woodland purely in terms of human interests fails to capture sufficiently the moral significance of the destruction. The insistence of those intuitions is interesting. Perhaps we're hearing an appeal, soul to soul, from the trees?

This will be too much for most. I'll leave it at this: the ancient and ubiquitous animist way of looking at the world has growing modern philosophical endorsement and an intuitive attraction that should be taken seriously. If the premise might be right, in swings the precautionary principle, which mandates a far less blithe, anthropocentric approach to decision-making in a whole host of domains. Lawyers in some jurisdictions have sought to insist that non-humans - including rivers - are persons. With some notable exceptions, they have tended to fail because of judicial concerns about the dilution of human exceptionalism. Perhaps it is a mistake, at this point in our understanding of consciousness, to assert that non-humans have souls or should be, for all legal and ethical purposes, regarded as persons. The possibility that they might have souls/be persons should be enough for now.

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What If Stones Have Souls? | Practical Ethics

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By Charles Foster Over the 40,000 years or so of the history of behaviourally modern humans, the overwhelming majority of generations have been, so far as we can see, animist. They have, that is, believed that all or most things, human and otherwise, have some sort of soul.

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Survivance - Carl Austin Hyatt - Listening to Stone Beings

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In the mid-1980s, I was looking for a place to live and photograph.1 A place to lean into, to know in an intimate way. For years, I had been inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s journals. He had the ability to draw epiphanies out of the most seemingly ordinary observations, epiphanies that still resonate today. On a chance visit to the modest coastline of New Hampshire, I knew immediately I had found my Walden by the sea. It is not a dramatic coast in the way Maine can be, but its rough, raw, primal rocks meet the wide sweep of the Atlantic with equal courage. Fortunately, this elemental world starts just twenty feet from any of the numerous turn outs up and down the coast road: a crucial practicality for a photographer lifting a heavy 8x10 view camera with film and lenses. I felt blessed. Soon, an unclaimed two-mile stretch of coastline became my studio, my partner, my place of contemplation and refuge. Slowly, without my noticing, an alchemy began between us. Most days we were left completely alone in this liminal zone. As far as I could see, with the exception of a few summer months, very few people cared much about the coast.

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Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 - November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, educator, and popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei - an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" - by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.

Throughout her career, Margulis' work could arouse intense objection (one grant application elicited the response, "Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again",) and her formative paper, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells", appeared in 1967 after being rejected by about fifteen journals. Still a junior faculty member at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence. Margulis was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1983. President Bill Clinton presented her the National Medal of Science in 1999. The Linnean Society of London awarded her the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008.

Called "Science's Unruly Earth Mother", a "vindicated heretic", or a scientific "rebel", Margulis was a strong critic of neo-Darwinism. Her position sparked lifelong debate with leading neo-Darwinian biologists, including Richard Dawkins, George C. Williams, and John Maynard Smith.:30, 67, 74-78, 88-92 Margulis' work on symbiosis and her endosymbiotic theory had important predecessors, going back to the mid-19th century - notably Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper, Konstantin Mereschkowski, Boris Kozo-Polyansky (1890-1957), and Ivan Wallin - and Margulis took the unusual step of not only trying to promote greater recognition for their contributions, but of personally overseeing the first English translation of Kozo-Polyansky's Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, which appeared the year before her death. Many of her major works, particularly those intended for a general readership, were collaboratively written with her son Dorion Sagan. In 2002, magazine recognized Margulis as one of the 50 most important women in science.

Lynn Margulis was born in Chicago, to a Jewish, Zionist family. Her parents were Morris Alexander and Leona Wise Alexander. She was the eldest of four daughters. Her father was an attorney who also ran a company that made road paints. Her mother operated a travel agency. She entered the Hyde Park Academy High School in 1952, describing herself as a bad student who frequently had to stand in the corner.

A precocious child, she was accepted at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools at the age of fifteen. In 1957, at age 19, she earned a BA from the University of Chicago in Liberal Arts, and then completed a master's degree at the University of Chicago in genetics and zoology at age 22. She joined the University of Wisconsin to study biology under Hans Ris and Walter Plaut, her supervisor, and graduated in 1960 with an MS in genetics and zoology. (Her first publication was with Plaut, on the genetics of Euglena, published in 1958 in the Journal of Protozoology.) She then pursued research at the University of California, Berkeley, under the zoologist Max Alfert. Before she could complete her dissertation, she was offered research associateship and then lectureship at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1964. It was while working there that she obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. Her thesis was An Unusual Pattern of Thymidine Incorporation in Euglena. In 1966 she moved to Boston University, where she taught biology for twenty-two years. She was initially an Adjunct Assistant Professor, then was appointed to Assistant Professor in 1967. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971, to full Professor in 1977, and to University Professor in 1986. In 1988 she was appointed Distinguished Professor of Botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was Distinguished Professor of Biology in 1993. In 1997 she transferred to the Department of Geosciences at Amherst to become Distinguished Professor of Geosciences "with great delight", the post which she held until her death.

Margulis married astronomer Carl Sagan in 1957 soon after she got her bachelor's degree. Sagan was then a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago. Their marriage ended in 1964, just before she completed her PhD. They had two sons, Dorion Sagan, who later became a popular science writer and her collaborator, and Jeremy Sagan, software developer and founder of Sagan Technology. In 1967, she married Thomas N. Margulis, a crystallographer. They had a son named Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, a New York City criminal defense lawyer, and a daughter Jennifer Margulis, teacher and author. They divorced in 1980. She commented, "I quit my job as a wife twice," and, "it's not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother and a first-class scientist. No one can do it-something has to go." In the 2000s she had a relationship with fellow biologist Ricardo Guerrero. Her sister Joan Alexander married Nobel Laureate Sheldon Lee Glashow; another sister, Sharon, married mathematician Daniel Kleitman.

She was a religious agnostic, and a staunch evolutionist. But she totally rejected the modern evolutionary synthesis, and said: "I remember waking up one day with an epiphanous revelation: I am not a neo-Darwinist! I recalled an earlier experience, when I realized that I wasn't a humanistic Jew. Although I greatly admire Darwin's contributions and agree with most of his theoretical analysis and I am a Darwinist, I am not a neo-Darwinist." She argued that "Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create", and maintained that symbiosis was the major driver of evolutionary change.

In 2013, Margulis was listed as having been a member of the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.

Margulis died on November 22, 2011 at home in Amherst, Massachusetts, five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. As her wish, she was cremated and her ashes were scattered in her favorite research areas, near her home.

In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, Margulis wrote a theoretical paper titled "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells". The paper, however, was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," she recalled. It was finally accepted by Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis was famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time. The descent of mitochondria from bacteria and of chloroplasts from cyanobacteria was experimentally demonstrated in 1978 by Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff. This formed the first experimental evidence for her theory. The endosymbiosis theory of organogenesis became widely accepted in the early 1980s, after the genetic material of mitochondria and chloroplasts had been found to be significantly different from that of the symbiont's nuclear DNA.

In 1995, English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had this to say about Lynn Margulis and her work:

I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.

Margulis opposed competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species.

She later formulated a theory that proposed symbiotic relationships between organisms of different phyla or kingdoms as the driving force of evolution, and explained genetic variation as occurring mainly through transfer of nuclear information between bacterial cells or viruses and eukaryotic cells. Her organelle genesis ideas are now widely accepted, but the proposal that symbiotic relationships explain most genetic variation is still something of a fringe idea.

Margulis also held a negative view of certain interpretations of Neo-Darwinism that she felt were excessively focused on competition between organisms, as she believed that history will ultimately judge them as comprising "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology." She wrote that proponents of the standard theory "wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin - having mistaken him ... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on [the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection], is in a complete funk."

Margulis initially sought out the advice of Lovelock for her own research: she explained that, "In the early seventies, I was trying to align bacteria by their metabolic pathways. I noticed that all kinds of bacteria produced gases. Oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia-more than thirty different gases are given off by the bacteria whose evolutionary history I was keen to reconstruct. Why did every scientist I asked believe that atmospheric oxygen was a biological product but the other atmospheric gases-nitrogen, methane, sulfur, and so on-were not? 'Go talk to Lovelock,' at least four different scientists suggested. Lovelock believed that the gases in the atmosphere were biological."

Margulis met with Lovelock, who explained his Gaia hypothesis to her, and very soon they began an intense collaborative effort on the concept. One of the earliest significant publications on Gaia was a 1974 paper co-authored by Lovelock and Margulis, which succinctly defined the hypothesis as follows: "The notion of the biosphere as an active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis we are calling the 'Gaia hypothesis.'"

Like other early presentations of Lovelock's idea, the Lovelock-Margulis 1974 paper seemed to give living organisms complete agency in creating planetary self-regulation, whereas later, as the idea matured, this planetary-scale self-regulation was recognized as an emergent property of the Earth system, life and its physical environment taken together. When climatologist Stephen Schneider convened the 1989 American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference around the issue of Gaia, the idea of "strong Gaia" and "weak Gaia" was introduced by James Kirchner, after which Margulis was sometimes associated with the idea of "weak Gaia", incorrectly (her essay " Gaia is a Tough Bitch" dates from 1995 - and it stated her own distinction from Lovelock as she saw it, which was primarily that she did not like the metaphor of Earth as a single organism, because, she said, "No organism eats its own waste"). In her 1998 book Symbiotic Planet, Margulis explored the relationship between Gaia and her work on symbiosis.

Since 1969, life on earth was classified into five kingdoms, as introduced by Robert Whittaker. Margulis became the most important supporter, as well as critic - while supporting parts, she was the first to recognize the limitations of Whittaker's classification of microbes. But later discoveries of new organisms, such as archaea, and emergence of molecular taxonomy challenged the concept. By the mid-2000s, most scientists began to agree that there are more than five kingdoms. Margulis became the most important defender of the five kingdom classification. She rejected the three-domain system introduced by Carl Woese in 1990, which gained wide acceptance. She introduced a modified classification by which all life forms, including the newly discovered, could be integrated into the classical five kingdoms. According to her the main problem, archaea, falls under the kingdom Prokaryotae alongside bacteria (in contrast to the three-domain system, which treats archaea as a higher taxon than kingdom, or the six-kingdom system, which holds that it is a separate kingdom). Her concept is given in detail in her book Five Kingdoms, written with Karlene V. Schwartz. It is mainly because of her that this five-kingdom system survives.

It has been suggested that initial rejection of Margulis' work on the endosymbiotic theory, and the controversial nature of it as well as Gaia theory, made her identify throughout her career with scientific mavericks, outsiders and unaccepted theories generally. In the last decade of her life, while key components of her life's work began to be understood as fundamental to a modern scientific viewpoint - the widespread adoption of Earth System Science and the incorporation of key parts of endosymbiotic theory into biology curricula worldwide - Margulis if anything became more embroiled in controversy, not less. Journalist John Wilson explained this by saying that Lynn Margulis "defined herself by oppositional science," and in the commemorative collection of essays Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel, commentators again and again depict her as a modern embodiment of the "scientific rebel", akin to Freeman Dyson's 1995 essay, The Scientist as Rebel, a tradition Dyson saw embodied in Benjamin Franklin, and which he believed to be essential to good science. At times, Margulis could make highly provocative comments in interviews that appeared to support her most strident critics' condemnation. The following describes two of these controversies.

In 2009, via a then-standard publication-process known as "communicated submission" (which bypassed traditional peer review), she was instrumental in getting the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS) to publish a paper by Donald I. Williamson rejecting "the Darwinian assumption that larvae and their adults evolved from a single common ancestor." Williamson's paper provoked immediate response from the scientific community, including a countering paper in PNAS. Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History said, "If I was reviewing [Williamson's paper] I would probably opt to reject it," he says, "but I'm not saying it's a bad thing that this is published. What it may do is broaden the discussion on how metamorphosis works and ... [on] ... the origin of these very radical life cycles." But Duke University insect developmental biologist Fred Nijhout said that the paper was better suited for the " National Enquirer than the National Academy." In September it was announced that PNAS would eliminate communicated submissions in July 2010. PNAS stated that the decision had nothing to do with the Williamson controversy.

AIDS/HIV theory

In 2009 Margulis and seven others authored a position paper concerning research on the viability of round body forms of some spirochetes, "Syphilis, Lyme disease, & AIDS: Resurgence of 'the great imitator'?", which states that, "Detailed research that correlates life histories of symbiotic spirochetes to changes in the immune system of associated vertebrates is sorely needed," and urging the "reinvestigation of the natural history of mammalian, tick-borne, and venereal transmission of spirochetes in relation to impairment of the human immune system." The paper went on to suggest "that the possible direct causal involvement of spirochetes and their round bodies to symptoms of immune deficiency be carefully and vigorously investigated".

In a Discover Magazine interview which was published less than six months before her death, Margulis explained to writer Dick Teresi her reason for interest in the topic of 2009 "AIDS" paper: "I'm interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I'm not interested in the diseases," and stated that she had called them "symbionts" because both the spirochete which causes syphilis () and the spirochete which causes Lyme disease () only retain about 20% of the genes they would need to live freely, outside of their human hosts.

However, in the Discover Magazine interview Margulis said that "the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS," and also noted that Kary Mullis said that "he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, 'There is no such document.' "

This provoked a widespread supposition that Margulis had been an "AIDS denialist." Notably Jerry Coyne reacted on his Why Evolution is True blog against his interpretation that Margulis believed "that AIDS is really syphilis, not viral in origin at all." Seth Kalichman, a social psychologist who studies behavioral and social aspects of AIDS, cited her 2009 paper as an example of AIDS denialism "flourishing", and asserted that her "endorsement of HIV/AIDS denialism defies understanding."

Margulis argued that the September 11 attacks were a "false-flag operation, which has been used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as unprecedented assaults on ... civil liberties." She claimed that there was "overwhelming evidence that the three buildings [of the World Trade Center] collapsed by controlled demolition."

Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.

Guest Hagey Lecturer, University of Waterloo, 1985

Miescher-Ishida Prize in 1986.

1989, conferred the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques de France.

Has her papers permanently archived in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

1992, recipient of Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

1995, elected Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.

1997, elected to the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

1998, recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

1998, elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1999, recipient of the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement.

1999, recipient of the National Medal of Science, awarded by President William J. Clinton.

2002-05, Alexander von Humboldt Prize.

2005, elected President of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.

Profiled in Visionaries: The 20th Century's 100 Most Important Inspirational Leaders, published in 2007.

Founded Sciencewriters Books in 2006 with her son Dorion.

Was one of thirteen recipients in 2008 of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, heretofore bestowed every 50 years, by the Linnean Society of London.

2009, speaker at the Biological Evolution Facts and Theories Conference, held at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome aimed at promoting dialogue between evolutionary biology and Christianity.

2010, inductee into the Leonardo da Vinci Society of Thinking at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona.

2010, NASA Public Service Award for Astrobiology.

2012, Lynn Margulis Symposium: Celebrating a Life in Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, March 23-25, 2012

Honorary doctorate from 15 universities.

Margulis, Lynn (1991). "Symbiosis in Evolution: Origins of Cell Motility". In Osawa, Syozo; Honzo, Tasuku (eds.). Evolution of Life: Fossils, Molecules and Culture. Japan: Springer. pp. 305-324. doi:10.1007/978-4-431-68302-5_19. ISBN 978-4-431-68304-9.

Margulis, Lynn, Dorion Sagan and Niles Eldredge (1995) What Is Life?, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-0684810874

Margulis, Lynn, et al. (2002). The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change, University of New Hampshire, ISBN 1-58465-062-1

Margulis, Lynn, and Eduardo Punset, eds. (2007). Mind, Life and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time, Sciencewriters Books, ISBN 978-1-933392-61-5

Margulis, Lynn (2009). "Genome acquisition in horizontal gene transfer: symbiogenesis and macromolecular sequence analysis". In Gogarten, Maria Boekels; Gogarten, Johann Peter; Olendzenski, Lorraine C. (eds.). Horizontal Gene Transfer:Genomes in Flux. Methods in Molecular Biology. 532. Humana Press. pp. 181-191. doi:10.1007/978-1-60327-853-9_10. ISBN 978-1-60327-852-2. PMID 19271185.

Margulis, L (1980). "Undulipodia, flagella and cilia". Biosystems. 12 (1-2): 105-108. doi:10.1016/0303-2647(80)90041-6. PMID 7378551.

Margulis, L; Bermudes, D (1985). "Symbiosis as a mechanism of evolution: status of cell symbiosis theory". Symbiosis. 1: 101-124. PMID 11543608.

Sagan, D; Margulis, L (1987). "Gaia and the evolution of machines". Whole Earth Review. 55: 15-21. PMID 11542102.

Bermudes, D; Margulis, L; Tzertzinis, G (1987). "Prokaryotic origin of undulipodia. Application of the panda principle to the centriole enigma". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 503 (1): 187-197. Bibcode:1987NYASA.503..187B. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1987.tb40608.x. PMID 3304075.

Lazcano, A; Guerrero, R; Margulis, L; Oró, J (1988). "The evolutionary transition from RNA to DNA in early cells". Journal of Molecular Evolution. 27 (4): 283-290. Bibcode:1988JMolE..27..283L. doi:10.1007/bf02101189. PMID 2464698.

Margulis, L (1990). "Words as battle cries-symbiogenesis and the new field of endocytobiology". BioScience. 40 (9): 673-677. doi:10.2307/1311435. JSTOR 1311435. PMID 11541293.

Chapman, MJ; Margulis, L (1998). "Morphogenesis by symbiogenesis". International Microbiology. 1 (4): 319-26. PMID 10943381.

Margulis, L (2005). "Hans Ris (1914-2004). Genophore, chromosomes and the bacterial origin of chloroplasts". International Microbiology. 8 (2): 145-8. PMID 16052465.

Dolan, MF; Margulis, L (2007). "Advances in biology reveal truth about prokaryotes". Nature. 445 (7123): 21. Bibcode:2007Natur.445...21D. doi:10.1038/445021b. PMID 17203039.

"Endosymbiotic Theory". Worksheet. N100. IUPUI. Jan 14, 2002.

Tischfield, Jay (2004). "Rutgers Interview".

911: Explosive Evidence, Experts Speak Out (2011, excerpt) on YouTube

Symbiotic earth: how Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution / a film by John Feldman ; script, John Feldman ; producer, Susan Davies ; a Hummingbird Films production. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2018. Find it in a library: (WorldCat catalog)

Works by or about Lynn Margulis in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

"Lynn Margulis". San Jose Science, Technology and Society. Linus Pauling Memorial Lectures. Institute for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. Mar 10, 2005.

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Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander; March 5, 1938 - November 22, 2011) was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, educator, and popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution."

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Linn, email, gesprek 8 april 2024

(ik zet dit ook in je Silex)

Wat me vooral van het gesprek is bijgebleven is dat je nu eerst dingen essayistisch wil aanpakken. Je leest wetenschappelijke teksten waar het woekeren een belangrijke rol in speelt (kan nog interessant in deze context om onkruid uit te nodigen of hen te bezoeken: https://onkruidenier.nl/en/ ), je schrijft daarnaast over je eigen ervaringen en bent geïnteresseerd in verhalen.  Ook had je het over het gebruik van beelden van kunstenaars (zoals Matta Clark). Dat dit ook onderzoeksmateriaal kan zijn, omdat ze bepaalde ervaringen oproepen. Zou je niet je verzameld materiaal eens mee willen nemen, met foto’s, onderstreepte dingen in teksten, boeken, aantekeningen, tekeningen, enzoovoort. En dan samen op de grond op een bepaalde manier samen leggen. En dan een gesprek beginnen en samen met de groep mogelijk nadenken wat voor (lichamelijke) oefeningen samen kunnen gaan met dit onderzoek. En kan dat wat op de vloer ligt ook werk zijn. Gewoon een keer uitproberen in de les. Wat doet dit materiaal bij elkaar, wat voor gesprek komt op, en kunnen we vanuit dat gesprek een ander werk maken, een verhaal?

Wat betreft je onderzoek nu: Maak noties wat voor gedachten deze dingen oproepen, maar ook wat de gelezen teksten oproepen, onderstreep elementen, verzamel beelden, en uit deze verzameling kunnen we mogelijk een bepaald essayist ‘ boek’ of andere vorm maken. Begin daarom een nieuwe padlet. De noties kunnen de latere bouwstenen zijn. Volgens mij wou je kijken hoe je hiertussen verbanden kunt vinden (dus tussen al het verzameld materiaal) of hoe je patronen kunt ontdekken (wetenschappelijke teksten, beelden van kunstenaars, eigen ervaringen en verhalen). Zoals je weet probeert Robin Wall Kimmer in haar schrijven, eigen ervaringen, wetenschap en verhalen te combineren. Zie: https://sps.studentorg.berkeley.edu/static/documents/EnI/Week_3_2.pdf

Kun je ook in het Nederlands krijgen.

Dit kan een inspiratiebron zijn. Ze doet dit vooral in haar verzameling essays in het boek Braiding Sweetgrass (in het Nederlands vertaald). Je had het over die tekst Dandelions uit het boek Dandelions.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59717997-dandelions

Ik kan je in dit verband ook het boek van Lynn Margulis aanraden (een soort basiswerk over symbiosis): https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/de-symbiotische-planeet/666854974/

Maar daarnaast kwam ook die interesse in een locatie en materiaal weer op. Een stille plek met materiaal dat al een lange tijd kent, waar stenen al een lange historie hebben, lees a.u.b. deze korte tekst wat op een mooie essayistische verhalende manier hier op ingaat:

https://www.ecotoneinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/aldo-leopold-tlam.pdf

Maar ook over zielen in steen:

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/402520/listening-to-stone-beings/

https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2021/07/what-if-stones-have-souls/

Het gaat hier om deep time.

Mogelijk kan deze kunstenaar nog interessant zijn. https://intonature.net/artists/randy-lee-cutler

Listening:

https://randyleecutler.bandcamp.com/album/deeptimeradio

Script:

https://randyleecutler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/DeepTimeRadio-Script.pdf

Zijn heeft haar wetenschappelijk onderzoek, onderzoek naar folklore, en eigen ervaringen en kennis over omgeving omgevormd in een verhaal. Mogelijk kan dit een inspiratiebron zijn over hoe je ook iets auditiefs in de buitenlucht kunt doen . Zelf mogelijk met loopoefeningen. Mogelijk kun je ook een stil gebied bij Emmen onderzoeken, met een rijke geologische geschiedenis en folklore. Waar plekken zijn met een lange historie.

Ook had ik over biologe Arite Baaijens  genoemd, die samenwerkte met een kunstenaar, die een plattegrond heeft gemaakt van energieplekken, afhankelijk van de omgeving. Wat vinden mensen prettige plekken om te voelen en welke niet.

https://www.aritabaaijens.nl/living-landscapes/

https://weblog.wur.nl/layersofperception/art-meets-science-het-landschap-van-binnenuit-bekijken-the-landscape-speaks/

In ons gesprekken kunnen we mogelijk teksten/verzameling delen en daar op in gaan. Ik zou ook kijken of je in je essayistisch onderzoek ook beelden doet oproepen, poëzie of ideeën met voor een performance, maak mogelijk daar ook intussen notities van.

Maak notities van wat je hebt gelezen en waar je verbanden ziet met eigen ervaringen en mogelijk verhalen (zit je dte denken aan bestaande verhalen of wil je nieuwe verhalen) maken. We kunnen ook gedurende het onderzoek meer focus aanbrengen. Wat werkt en wat niet.

Groet

Hille

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With Ryan Bishop we wrote the following short oral presentation as part of the opening panel of the Earth/Sky exhibition that is on at the Calit2 gallery at UC San Diego! Please visit the show if you are in the region and for those interested, below the short opening introduction.

Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka

March 7, 2019, UC San Diego
Earth/Sky exhibition - introductory remarks
Where the vertical X line meets the horizontal Y line in the X/Y axis is called the origin. Although we are not going to pursue myths of origins in this panel, that intersection is certainly the origin of inspiration for our exhibition and the works that comprise it.

What is the relationship between the X/Y axis and the horizon? Where is the horizon in the X/Y axis and how is it constructed, reconstituted, erased, or negated by the visualizing technologies these artists deploy, explore, exploit and query? The question of the horizon in relation to technology emerged in its contemporary guise in the aftermath of WWII and remains with us, cast by Martin Heidegger as "the age of the world picture ". The telecommunications technologies developed to provide constant real-time surveillance of the earth necessary to conduct the Cold War and enforce the Truman Doctrine simultaneously converted the earth into a globe (a bounded sphere visible at all times) as well as into a flattened world without horizon (due to the use of "over the horizon" visualizing technologies and complete surveillance of the entire planet all at the same time).

It found visual form in two works produced about the same time as Heidegger was writing: Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, and Jasper Johns' large-scale painting for the Montreal Expo '67 inspired by Fuller's map (and installed in Fuller's massive geodesic dome erected there for the expo). The multi-pieced and multi-shaped canvas painting measures more than 30 feel long and over 15 feet high. As with Fuller's cartographic vision, the icosahedron Dymaxion map created by Johns could be disassembled or assembled at will. Fuller's map could be folded together to create a sphere or unfolded, origami-like, to be a flat two-dimensional object. Co-created with Shoji Sadao, Fuller's map provided the model for the interactive, data-driven version used in his real-time teletechnological teaching tool called the World Game. Fuller and Sadao's map moved easily, then, between 3-D and 2-D representations of the earth's continents. These were represented in size based on population distribution and resource usage instead of the standard cartographic nod to physical coverage. While Fuller's optimistic vision of the map's pedagogical elements was at odds with Johns' more pessimistic view of the geopolitical agonism that marked the moment, the map mimetically reproduces fully "the age of the world picture". The globe as stage for Fuller-inflected neighbourliness also became a site of contiguous land masses locked in Johns-depicted animus: 3-D holistic vision coupled with 2-D Cold War strategically-generated economic inequities.

The cultural politics of Heidegger's interpretation of modernity's generated metaphysics can be charted in the capacity for representation to equate with both experience and the real, for the map to create the territory and the technological means for cartographic representation to become the tools for human crafting of the earth as globe, as flat observable plane or, as Fuller termed it, Spaceship. The visualizing teletechnologies on display in the Dymaxion Map, as well as the works in our exhibition here, are just such tools, for they chart a trajectory in which the world travelled from being construed as plane to orb to globe to flat, surveilled entity again. Our capacity to see and render the planet whole erased the horizon of the world and made it capable of being held in our collective teletechnological grasp. This is the "negative horizon" theorized by Paul Virilio: the conversion of the surface of the earth to pure surface, pure plane, to salt flat deserts and "mineral cemeteries" (141), a screen for projections and visions, a platform for unfettered terrestrial and aerial acceleration and optical realization. The age of the world picture is evoked in these maps made by Fuller and Johns, and it is so in the means by which we have enframed, delineated and curtailed potential futures, realized or not.

This leads us to our works on display in the exhibition (as well as the one screened as part of this opening panel, Susan Schuppli's vertical cinema piece Atmospheric Feedback Loops). Schuppli's audiovisual installation " Nature Represents Itself" presents the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in its legal and aesthetic form to propose the ecological site as a material witness capable of representing its own damaged condition. This auto representation of environmental disaster posits a new medium unique to the components of the disaster; in many ways, it is a visual analogue to Reza Negarestani's philosophical fiction writing that fabulated the non-human revenging force of petroleum in Cyclonopedia. Furthermore, it taps into the multiple camera angles of the Anthropocene: the live feed of the underwater oil leak, the aerial view of the region as a massive size oil painting (as Ubermorgen, art group, coined it), the cultural politics of TV footage, the scientific imagining, and so forth.

Concerns about the horizon are omnipresent in the name of the documented disaster: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, with its connotations of X and Y in itself as well as the dimension of depth as the passage to the underwater realms that link from Jules Verne's fictional Captain Nemo's megalomanic world tour to the as megalomanically disastrous seascapes of drilling and deep sea mining. While the melting arctic ice that will flood vast coastal areas and towns presents its own new northern passages as well as oil and mineral opportunities, we are left with the archive of disasters that already took place across the petrocultural century. Deepwater is one where the various axes are again brought together both as its spatial coordinates and as part of visual culture of disasters.

The Gulf of Mexico was made an unintentional canvas of human intervention and failure, as seen in the many images of the disaster taken by NASA's pertinently named Terra satellite. The visual register on screen in Schuppli's work is that of the accident, which is a recurring feature of that axis where visual culture and technological infrastructure and political decision-making meet. As Paul Virilio reminded us, the invention of any technology is also the invention of its failure, of its accidents. The technology in its operation and its failure provide equally fodder for planning, speculation and aesthetic production. This also applies to the speculative side in more ways than one: not merely inventing technologies, but inventing their accidents around which technological systems can be laid out as large scale systems. Virilio in fact posited that the history of technology could better be queried and understood through a Museum of Disasters than our usual technolophillic celebratory institutions. If such a site were to be built, Schuppli's work could take a proud place there as one example of the long term legacy of petroculture as itself an invention of an accident around which modern culture takes place, from transport to industry, from lifestyle to the variety of materials that sustain our sense of the everyday.

Another kind of an accident lurks in Herregraven's " Sprawling Swamps," a series of fictional infrastructures dispersed within the cracks of the contemporary financial geography that operate on a technological, legal and social level. Herregraven's focus is on the littorals, the ambiguous shifting zones where sea and land interact, the port and the portal interface. These ambiguous and ambivalent spaces, gaps between economic and environmental certitudes, speak to Paul Gilroy's arguments for a "critique at sea level". Picking up from Gilroy, Francoise Verges asks: how do we develop cultural theory that starts from water, the sea, the oceans - from the middle passage, but then also the northern passages, the various forms of colonial and other kinds of disasters, including contemporary ones that take place across liquid and swampy landscapes? What is sea level in the current moment and in this moment of warming currents? Increasingly land can become water, arable land can become desert, etc. in the weird mixes of the classical four elements; as Gary Genosko puts it, these four elements are not however anymore the stable sort of earth-water-fire- air. A longer quote from Genosko (in the Posthuman Glossary) gives a clear picture of the new synthetics of elements:
The new fundamental elements... EARTH : dust; WATER : blood; AIR : lethal fogs; FIRE :flammables. Wrapped around these elements is the planetary phylum, a great tellurian cable bunch with its own products: EARTH : electronics; WATER : liquidities like water bottled in plastic, which throws forward diagrammatic intensities in the explosion of plastic debris; AIR : gases (green house); and FIRE : smouldering car tyres, slashed rainforests and seasonal wild fires in the great northern forests. However, as we have seen, the new elements combine both in existing directly - blood mixed with dust in the extraction of conflict minerals and oil fields, or methane, a flammable unnaturally mingled with the water supply, and which contributes to the green house gas effect - and by means of especially communicative matters, like microscopic fragments of plastics that perfuse the oceans and get into the food chain, and constitute fine dusts that affect respiration, settling among the fogs, gases and lethal clouds.
The Ovid-like metamorphoses of nature, of bodies changed, operates in pre-socratic thought in relation to the elements with the universe composed of these elements battling or playfully transforming into one another, as Empedocles theorized. But from Empedocles, we should move further to the chemical period of the past 200 years of chemistry and its multiple forms of interaction and escalation of planetary deposits. What we are witnessing now is a rapid reshaping of the elements of the planet, some by design but most not, some by human actors and some by technological systems working autonomously or in tandem with others in unintended ways. The dynamic nature of matter, and of nature, finds form in precarious legal, financial and governmental infrastructures poised along the liminal littorals. Nonetheless urban human forms as a guiding set of imaginaries are seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of unstable ecologies, in spite of high winds, hurricanes, typhoons, floods and drought.

Visualizations of the XY axis rarely show the air or the sky. The seeming transparency of atmospheres is however a source for another sort of "light media" and "sky media" that is often crystallised in technological figures such as drones or satellite infrastructures or then in the toxic legacies such as smog. It also includes the longer legacy of the aerial perspective - sightlines lifted from the ground.

We most often see the earth as surface (with the X line being the literal line of sight). The horizon is usually implied, what we know lies beyond the frame. Heba Amin's lyrical and witty projection piece, " As Birds Flying," allows views of the sky, the earth, the horizon, savannahs and wetlands, settlements and aviary migrations, which in turn allude to human migrations on the rise throughout the world. Her use of found footage and non-human surveillance techniques, in this case mistakenly believed to be strapped to a migrating stork, reveals horizons of visualization, tracking and the continual geopolitical struggle for contested terrain. This view is not stable but one in movement; a survey of landscapes and velocity, of movement and tracking, of cinematic visions projected onto daily existence.

It is worth noting in closing that the aerial views on view in the show now are visible by humans but the majority of the images of the earth's surface being produced today are by machines for machines: they are not representational but informational and automated; this is what Harun Farocki coined as the world of operational, or operative, images, which also includes an increasing amount of environmental imaging. These are also a dominant strand of the Earth/Sky and X/Y axis visualizations of the present that expands from aerial views to soil analysis, and to interplanetary visual cultures as with the recent Mars Rover images too. These images as measurements are used for their data despite the at times glamorous views we get a glimpse of. That which isn't visible can be translated into data visualizations that help feed a vast machine of charting, control and most importantly prediction.

In so doing the X-Y axis extends to include the Z axis, and enters into predictive temporalities: planning, investment, policing, and so forth. The role of AI techniques of prediction in the futures markets results in manipulation and prediction that links governmental sovereignty to data visualization technologies and their capacity to shape and generate financial systems and markets. The particular surfaces that are catered as massive datasets are the past archive for the hypothetical future-nows that open up a new horizon. Questions surrounding the large-scale production of premediated near-future predictive strategies linking geomedia to algotrading speeds up the earth as the manipulation of its materials for control and gain set the data-gathering agenda in spite of the many admirable and altruistic projects that may complement it. In this way, the images and the predictive data scraped from them replicates bureaucratic tools of domination past. Sean Cubitt writes: "That trinity of fundamentally bureaucratic media-databases (filing cabinets), spreadsheets (ledgers) and GIS (maps)-still operates, not least at the level of companies and institutions, where it continues to provide the backbone of a residual early-modern biopolitics." These instances of administration , Cubitt continues, "were the dominant media of the early 21st century, because they were the media of domination." The techniques and technologies have changed but the larger cultural technics and their ontological rationale have not.

The origin of the X/Y axis remains literally and figuratively in place, if not accelerated and exacerbated by our visualizing technologies.

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With Ryan Bishop we wrote the following short oral presentation as part of the opening panel of the Earth/Sky exhibition that is on at the Calit2 gallery at UC San Diego! Please visit the show if you are in the region and for those interested, below the short opening introduction.

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Fruit flies do it. Tiny northern wheatears do it. Even salmon in the seas do it. All navigate using Earth's magnetic field.

In fact, hundreds of animals migrate this way, some over long distances. But one species has always been excluded from this electromagnetic orienteering club: Homo sapiens. Men and women show no evidence of possessing internal compasses, researchers have insisted.

But now this view is being challenged. In a paper in the journal , scientists at the California Institute of Technology report evidence that men and women's brains respond to changes in magnetic fields and these alternations could allow them to differentiate north from south and navigate without compasses.

"We have found proof that humans possess a definitive sixth sense - magnetism," said project leader Professor Joseph Kirschvink. "This sensory modality is real. It could explain why some people have better senses of direction than others, for example. It might even be possible one day to restore our ancestral ability to use magnetic fields to navigate."

The claims are controversial, however. Other researchers say Kirschvink's experiments might have shown the brain responds to changes in magnetic fields but that does not mean they represent the actions of an internal magnetic sense. "If I were to stick my head in a microwave and switch it on, I would see effects on my brain waves," a biophysicist, Thorsten Ritz from the University of California, Irvine, told the journal Science. "That doesn't mean I have a microwave sense."

It is a contentious issue, and on 12 April it will be debated at a conference on animal migration held by the Royal Institute of Navigation at Egham, near London. Kirschvink will attend. "I expect sparks to fly," he told the Observer.

In his experiments, Kirschvink - working with colleagues in the US and Japan - placed volunteers inside six-sided aluminium cages that could protect them from Earth's magnetic field. Participants' brain waves were measured while differing magnetic fields were artificially induced inside the cages.

A total of 34 men and women took part, and the team discovered that certain orientations they induced in the magnetic fields caused their alpha brain waves to drop significantly. Such changes normally happen when the brain is processing information. "Essentially, their brains were freaking out in response to changes in magnetic fields," said Kirschvink.

Other scientists are more cautious. "This is very interesting research but it needs to be replicated before we can think of supporting claims that humans can detect and exploit magnetic fields," said Professor Peter Hore of Oxford University.

In addition, the results produced by Kirschvink's volunteers are modest compared with the kinds of responses to magnetic fields achieved by other species, such as the northern wheatear bird, which regularly travels from Alaska to Kenya on return journeys of some 19,000 miles.

Aboriginal people still use languages of geographic reference. They talk about looking in a direction to your north

Professor Joseph Kirschvink

"We have studied northern wheatears in the laboratory and we know they respond to changes in magnetic fields, so it is hard not to believe they are doing the same in the wild," added Hore, who will also be attending this week's meeting. "Of course, when they get near their destinations they probably use other senses and cues: their sense of smell, and the sun and stars, for example. Nevertheless, it is clear the northern wheatear possesses a remarkable power when it comes to detecting magnetic fields."

As to the mechanism exploited by wheatears to navigate, Hore said he believed the birds used photo-sensitive molecules which can be turned into one of two different chemical states depending on the direction of a magnetic field like the Earth's. "These chemicals, called cryptochromes, are in the retinas of bird's eyes, and they act as internal compasses," Hore said.

Kirschvink takes a different view. He says his research points to an alternative explanation: the existence of special cells that contain iron-based crystals. These rotate rather like the needle of a compass, opening or closing pores in the cells and altering signals sent to the brain. "They have to be there," he says.

As to why we do not witness people using internal compasses to navigate today, modern life may have obliterated their relatively weak operation in humans, it is argued.

For example, Kirschvink points to studies of Asian and Australian people who speak languages that are fundamentally different to European languages. These differences could influence our abilities to respond to weak signals from our "internal compasses".

"These people have no words for front or back or to your right. Instead they talk about looking in a direction to your north or turning to your east. These are languages of geographic reference and they are still spoken by aboriginal people."

Such languages would be better suited to responding to internal compasses, added Kirschvink, and would help men and women to think in ways that keep them tuned to their innate abilities to navigate. "European languages, which have an egocentric reference frame, may now be blocking our ability to use our brains in this way," he added.

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The sixth sense: can humans detect the Earth's magnetic field?

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Scientists in California believe that internal compasses might have enabled our ancestors to navigate as some animals do today

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The early Polynesian voyagers were some of the best wayfinders in history (Fig. 8.3). They were able to find their way across vast reaches of the Pacific ocean basin navigating by the sun, stars, and other natural cues. One of the natural cues that Polynesian voyagers used for navigation is the knowledge that islands block waves and ocean swells (Fig.

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A man’s testicles might not seem like something to be used for navigation, but they were and are in native Oceania. So are stars, driftwood, clouds, seaweed, winds, birds, weather, the smell, taste and temperature of the ocean, interference patterns on the sea surface, and the olfactory sense of an on-board pig. How? Our search for the answer begins in our 50th state.

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#SensesOfPlace: architectural design

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Senses of place: architectural design for the multisensory mind - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

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Traditionally, architectural practice has been dominated by the eye/sight. In recent decades, though, architects and designers have increasingly started to consider the other senses, namely sound, touch (including proprioception, kinesthesis, and the vestibular sense), smell, and on rare occasions,…

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#TimIngold #Body #Movement

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Keywords mentioned in the first introductory presentation 4 March:

·      Strollogy

·      Derive > walking > getting lost

·      Animals senses (sense in a group like a bird)

·      Phenomenology and sense of space

·      Body and perception

·      Navigation (human animals)

·      Polynesian navigation or Polynesian wayfinding

·      Swarm (Byun Chul Hang) internet and derive

·      Echolocation

·      Influence of architecture on body

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In Plantiarchy wordt de wereld in letterlijke zin ontregeld, met een enorm bos, gemaakt van pulp, dat ondersteboven door alle kamers van kunstruimte Marres in Maastricht groeit en woekert. Kunstenaar Daan Couzijn ging in gesprek met Valentijn Byvanck, directeur van Marres, over het gedachtegoed dat schuilgaat achter deze tentoonstelling.

Papieren planten en bomen groeien ondersteboven door alle ruimtes: in de tentoonstelling Plantiarchy is kunstruimte Marres in Maastricht door kunstenaarscollectief Sunflower Soup omgetoverd tot een wereld waarin planten het voor het zeggen hebben. Sunflower Soup is ontstaan vanuit een gedeelde activistische belangstelling en de behoefte om te onderzoeken wat de kunstpraktijk kan betekenen buiten de kaders van het individu. Het collectief verbindt activisme met lichtvoetigheid door met fantasierijke omkeringen te werken.

Naar aanleiding van Plantiarchy gaat kunstenaar Daan Couzijn in gesprek met Valentijn Byvanck, directeur van Marres, over het gedachtegoed dat schuilgaat achter deze tentoonstelling.

Daan Couzijn

De tentoonstelling Plantiarchy is ontwikkeld door het nieuwgevormde kunstenaarscollectief Sunflower Soup. In de tentoonstelling wordt de wereld in letterlijke zin ontregeld, met een enorm bos, gemaakt van pulp, dat ondersteboven door alle kamers groeit. Wat is de gedachte achter deze tentoonstelling?

Valentijn Bijvanck

Er zijn verschillende lagen. De ene is de voorstelling van een zekere omkering van de wereld waarin de planten de baas zijn. Waar de bomen omgekeerd hangen, op hun kop, en de wortels, gespiegeld, aan de bovenkant. Een andere laag vertrekt vanuit het gegeven dat het collectief voortkomt uit de Extinction Rebellion beweging. Vaak gaan activistische tentoonstellingen over actuele onderwerpen zoals vluchtelingen, klimaat of slavernij en worden ze discursief behandeld: teksten maken veelal duidelijk hoe de problemen structureel in onze samenleving verankerd zijn. De leden van Sunflower Soup zochten naar een alternatief dat een plezier in de wereld van de planten zou uitstralen. De tentoonstelling nodigt de bezoekers uit om zich af te vragen wat planten, bomen en struiken eigenlijk voelen en betekenen voor hun omgeving.

In hoeverre was het voor Marres belangrijk om een tentoonstelling met een thematiek als deze nu te tonen?

Waarom wilde Derk Thijs deze tentoonstelling als onderdeel van een collectief maken?

Als Derk Thijs de tentoonstelling in zijn eentje had gemaakt, dan was deze tentoonstelling er niet geweest. Is dat ook het thema van de tentoonstelling geworden? Het ontkrachten van het idee dat er één individu in het middelpunt staat?

Het collectief beschrijft hun manier van samenwerken als een heel radicale manier van samenwerken. Toch is het collectief niet een nieuw fenomeen. De Fluxus beweging uit de jaren 60 bijvoorbeeld, werd toentertijd ook gezien als een radicale vorm van samenwerking. In hoeverre kan een samenwerking als deze nog radicaal zijn vandaag de dag?

Continueren jullie deze gedachtegang en werkwijze nadat deze tentoonstelling is afgelopen? Het levert een dialoog op waarvan het wellicht zonde zou zijn om die af te sluiten en weer terug te gaan naar de normale gang van zaken.

Doordat de tentoonstelling een biotoop op haar kop plaatst, wordt er een netwerk van wortels blootgelegd waarmee het collectief wil aantonen dat we meer in verbinding met elkaar zouden kunnen leven. Je zou kunnen zeggen dat dit netwerk meer dan ooit aanwezig is in onze samenleving vandaag de dag. We zijn nog nooit zo verbonden met elkaar geweest. Weliswaar niet fysiek maar wel via een onzichtbaar, digitaal netwerk. In hoeverre biedt de thematiek van de tentoonstelling een nieuw perspectief?

In de beschrijving van de tentoonstelling worden de volgende vragen gesteld: 'Wat zou er gebeuren als planten de baas zouden zijn? Hoe zou de wereld er dan uitzien en welke nieuwe vormen van samenwerking en bewustzijn zouden er optreden?' Hoe zou jij deze vragen beantwoorden?

Dat vind ik niet gemakkelijk. Ik denk dat de aarde de mens goed zal overleven. Het lijkt erop alsof we de baas zijn en we maken ook ontzettend veel kapot, maar je moet toch ook constateren dat we allemachtig veel energie stoppen om iedere dag het gras, de bomen en de struiken, insecten, muizen, ratten, en wat al niet al terug te dringen uit onze leefomgeving. Ten slotte zal blijken dat we onszelf niet kunnen overleven en dat geldt misschien voor veel zoogdieren, maar zonder ons blijft de wereld bestaan. Het groen gaat verder.

Ik geloof niet dat de natuur de baas wordt, zoals mensen nu de baas denken te zijn over de natuur. Wanneer is de een de baas over de ander? Hoe moeten we dat voor ons zien? Dat kan alleen maar een beperkt menselijk perspectief zijn, denk ik. Ik zie geen hiërarchische vorm voor me, alleen de natuurlijke organisatievormen die er al zijn en die zijn gebaseerd op het collectief. En dat is bij mensen ook zo, want mensen doen helemaal niet veel dingen alleen. Het feit dat we dat anders zien toont ons beperkte voorstellingsvermogen, dat zich richt op individualisme terwijl de mens alleen maar functioneert als onderdeel van een collectief.

Denk je dat wij als westerse mensen ooit gaan kunnen losbreken van deze individualistische mentaliteit?

Sunflower Soup, 21 x 30 cm, verschillende materialen op papier, 2022.

Sunflower Soup - zonder titel, 21 x 29 cm, verschillende materialen op papier, 2022.

Sunflower Soup - zonder titel, 21 x 29 cm, verschillende materialen op papier, 2022.

Een mooie conclusie uit je verhaal vind ik dat we eigenlijk helemaal niet zo veel verschillen van planten. Want als welvaart of geld geen rol meer speelt, dan zullen we op elkaar aangewezen zijn. Dan verdwijnt voor een groot deel het individualisme en dan hebben we elkaar nodig om te functioneren. Misschien zijn we wat dat betreft helemaal niet zo ver weg van de utopie die Sunflower Soup schetst in deze tentoonstelling.

Plantiarchy is nog tot en met 3 september te ervaren in Marres, Maastricht.

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Dit artikel werd geschreven door Daan Couzijn
Voor titels, quotes en onderschriften gebruikten we in dit artikel het variabele lettertype Laica van Dinamo

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Zonder ons blijft de wereld bestaan - Daan Couzijn in gesprek met Valentijn Byvanck over Plantiarchy

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In Plantiarchy wordt de wereld in letterlijke zin ontregeld, met een enorm bos, gemaakt van pulp, dat ondersteboven door alle kamers van kunstruimte Marres in Maastricht groeit en woekert.

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I am a cross-disciplinary designer and artist interested in questioning and re-imagining how humans inhabit environments and come together as a society. With an architectural background, my world-building practice combines storytelling, architectural installations and role-play games to create counter narratives and speculate on alternative forms of co-existence grounded in solidarity.

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Ceramics Home - dd World - Danielle Magee

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dd World is the site of ceramic artist Danielle Magee. dd World is an archive of Berlin based Canadian ceramicist Danielle Magee. Artist DD Magee.

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Kairos, Greek god of momentum and creative time

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Kairos, Greek god of momentum and creative time

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Song Sing Soil explores the permeability between shapelessness and form, between the realms of living and dying, between meaning making and pulling it apart. The performance - a choreography for three performers - slowly unfolds around a specially conceived song that drifts between different mindsets, tones, voices and frequencies with a soundtrack that fluctuates between fierce instructions directed to the listener, silent moments, tender melodies and intimate musings. The performers' movements respond to this soundscape, supporting the words with their bodies and gazes.

Song Sing Soil makes a plea for us to slow down, to stay with the in-betweenness, and to expand our capacity for feeling and listening.

Produced and commissioned by Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, The Netherlands.

Eglė Budvytytė (b. 1981 in Kaunas, Lithuania) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Vilnius working at the intersection between visual and performing arts. She approaches movement and gesture as technologies for a possible subversion of normativity, gender and social roles, and the dominant narratives governing public spaces. Her practice, spanning songs, poetry, videos and performances, explores the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability and permeable relationships between bodies, audiences and the environments.

Her work has been presented at the 59 th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia; Vleeshal, Middelburg, The Netherlands; Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA); The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Lofoten International Art Festival; Block Universe, London; Art Dubai Commissions; Liste, Art Basel; 19th Biennale of Sydney; De Appel Arts Centre; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and the Stedelijk MuseumAmsterdam. She was a resident artist at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2012 and at Wiels, Brussels in 2013.

Marija Olšauskaitė (b. 1989 in Vilnius) lives and works in Vilnius. In her work, she employs various modes of collaboration and explores the themes of relationships, openness, intimacy, and belonging.

She has had solo exhibitions at Vleeshal, Middelburg (with Eglė Budvytytė, 2023); Editorial, Vilnius (2022); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2019); and Art in General, New York (2014), among others. Olšauskaitė has participated in group exhibitions including the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) (2020); , Hauser & Wirth, online (2020); I walk the night , PM8/Francisco Salas, Vigo (2019); Joy and Mirror. Port City , 427, Riga (2016); and Karaoke Police , Kunstverein, Amsterdam (2015), Nomas, Rome (2014), and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2013), among others.

Concept and development: Eglė Budvytytė and Marija Olšauskaitė
Performed by and co - created with: Ming Jou Chen, Tomislav Feller, Tosca Knauf
Voices and choreography: Eglė Budvytytė
Art direction: Marija Olšauskaitė
Sound design: Andreas Tegnander and Thessa Torsing
Choreographic advice: Noha Ramadan
Styling: Patricija Grabauskaitė
Light Design: Martynas Kazimierėnas
Produced by Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg
Producer in Vilnius VB23: Ieva Rižė

Supported by Mondriaan Funds
Thanks to BAU performance and dance residency, Amsterdam

Performance partner

Performance sponsor
Video by Vytautas Tinteris Photos by Andrej Vasilenko

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