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Posthuman Studies Lab

Symposium and Workshops: Posthumanism and Worldbuilding
Framework By Sepideh Majidi

Program 2021

● Workshops and Conversations:

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Francesca Ferrando: Posthumanism and Worlding

October 9th- 10 am PST

Webinar Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87298487940

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David Roden: Goodman and the World Behind the Schemes

October 10th-10 am PST

Webinar Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82974304854

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● Reading Group and Workshop:

 

"Ways of Worldmaking" by Nelson Goodman

 

Session-1. September 25: 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐬 R𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Main Reading:

“Words, Works, Worlds”. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Ch. 1

 

Session-2.September 26: 𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐲𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬 B𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬

Main Reading:

“On Rightness of Rendering”. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Ch. 7

instructors for the workshop: Cássia Siqueira & Sepideh @Worlds and Models Lab

EXHIBTION & publications:

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LIMITROPHY @ TheSpace.Gallery

POSTHUMAN LAB: COLLABORATIVE EXHIBTION BOARD

LIMITROPHY Main Page

● Artist Presentation/Panel Series:

October 2nd | 9am - 4pm

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Outimaija Hakala: Ants – more than human languages

Magda Vicini: The time fragmentation/unification/relativization 

Mafe Izaguirre: Hybrid Spiritual Systems: Self-Hacking and Cognitive Alteration.

Ana Ruiz Valencia: Sounding the continuum

D.Priyanka Bajaj: UNIFIED THEORY OF COMBINED SCIENCES

Rodrigo Gutierrez: Agents of Multisensory Experience

Paige Emery: Fluid Relations For Endurance 

Sutirtho Roy: Toys, Animals and Nature: An Eco-Critical Gaze into the World of Play

Buket Yenidogan: Ritual of Rejoin | Becoming Ocean

Simin Azarpour: The cosmogenesis, or the multiversal evolution/involution

Hallidonto:  Sanctum Cyborgia

Gagan Singh: drawings and stories

Tiny Domingos: Limitrophy as transformational process

Tara Mukund: Entangled in the Heterotopia

Ygor Anario: Intertwining Rhythm, Protoliths and Metamorphic Bodies

Divya Singh: Tachyon

 

 

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Sepideh Majidi
Symposium and Workshop: Posthumanism and Worldbuilding: More Details about the program and workshops The idea of Posthumanism and Worldbuilding has at least three facets: Renegotiation of our positions with regard to future intelligence, and looking at the critical and ethical concerns of posthumanism and methods of world building. The ability to make a different world than the one that has already been given to us, and in which we already live. An understanding of the posthuman location and its function in the context of a broader environment, or world. Here we are starting with a forensic approach to our world-building: How should we build this world? This is ultimately predicated on the kind of detective work we do in regards to the fabric that surrounds us within the context--it might be scientific, political, or it might be social, etc. But here, for us, the context is simply our world. How can we talk about the world coherently without relapsing back onto the Anthropocentric image? Here we need models--computational models, mathematical models, etc. However, when we get into scientific theorization we notice that things get messier as we move forward. As we explicate our concepts, we are refining the ways in which we distinguish an aspect of reality. We move toward more fine-grain snapshots of reality, but not only do they get more refined, they actually change their shape. Our notions by which we organize our perception of reality can also be changed--space and time, forms of intuitions. We can no longer see space and time as psychological, rather we see them in the physical sense, in the history of science or ..., So this project is a kind of reframing of a narrative of what enlightenment is about. We are starting by looking into the world. How can we do it? Looking into the world is not by any means an easy task. In the workshop we can go through a series of studies, combined with some writings--optional--but at the same time, this can be in conjunction with the presentation and further development of your personal project, through the lens of world-building. Part One: Each participant picks two or more sets of concepts; one relates to human and one to posthuman: Example: (Examples are suggested by participants) Human Identity vs. Posthuman Existence Dualism vs Post Dualism Bound vs Unbound Through examination and model making, we can renegotiate the construct of our reality and subjectivities. Also, we can look at the relationship between the posthuman models or archetypes and their environment through the construction of world models. Part Two: We started with two types of models. In this method, we detect two types of words that refer to human and posthuman intelligence as Bound and Unbound. Now we are dealing with the question of ethics, which starts at the impasse between Bound and Unbound. This problem is caused by our way of abstracting dialectical world models. Especially Aristotelian models, such as Kant’s. What is the unbound world of posthumans? Can we imagine these worlds? Or can it happen by way of perturbations in dynamic systems? Suddenly there is so much unfolding at this point, and we can get lost, or fall into another liberal point of view. We will tackle this problem with world-building, but I think it's best if we do a little studying at this junction and take a look at the debate between David Roden and Reza Negarestani. David Roden: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-3AO50cbMZdfEiE9BhawnJS_3c5liJkY/view?usp=drivesdk Reza Negarestani: Start at 21 minutes into the video: https://youtu.be/_1S1WX8KIQY Part 3: Reading of Ways of Worldmaking by Nelson goodman Part4:

Posthumanism and Worldbuilding

Philosopher,Founder,Programmer/Instructor

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Reza Negarestani

Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity

Philosopher- Contributor

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Kaushik Varma
Various thinkers of the past have addressed the quintessential role of ‘form’ in human perception. From Plato’s theory of forms to Heidegger’s Being and Time, the concept of form established itself as an essential part of being as such. It is only through the perception of forms that move into and out of being that we can talk about aesthetics or experience the world in any meaningful way. That is to say, subjectivity in itself seems to be enabled by our ability to conceptualize form. But is it the case that such a subjectivity is only limited to seemingly spontaneous organic beings? Could it be that subjectivity could be attributed to an inanimate object if it were to exhibit a mechanical cognizance of form? The following series of artworks pursues the aforementioned questions and explores the possibilities of machine conceived structures of form. Noema, a term introduced by Edmund Husserl to refer to the formal content of an intentional experience, manifests as a visible composition in the following artworks. The primary significance of this particular artistic manifestation is that the subject of the intentional experience is an inanimate one, an artificial neural network

Noema

Artist/Researcher

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Ana Ruiz Valencia
With a background in music performance and museum studies, my work deals with the role of language and communication in the creation of intersubjective realities. I assume language in a broad sense: textual, sonic, spoken, musical, mathematical, and/or body languages are intertwined, looking to unveil the intangible structures sustaining what we perceive as real. Sound functions as my main material of expression as much as the sonic experience constitutes my philosophical approach to the world. I approached noise both from a sonic and an epistemological perspective, especially around the notion of ruido pasito (soft noise). Recently, I became interested in sound performances that exceed the musical experience and the concert hall. This has taken me to exhibition venues, creating solo or collaborative performances that build up fictional narratives through translation, interpretation, and imitation. As a curator, I am interested in establishing links and conversations with artists, both through experimental processes and exhibitions at non-traditional venues. My curatorial and research projects are currently connected to the idea of domestication as a powerful and violent —yet silent— form of oppression.

Sounding the Continuum

Artist/Researcher

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Tiny Domingos
The meeting of water and land creates a territory in perpetual transformation where new identities are formed and metamorphoses occur.

Hybrid Togetherness: Reconnecting With the Living and the Mineral

Artist/Researcher

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Sutirtho Roy
The creator has shared an interesting relationship with the creation since time immemorial – the architect with the building, the author with the story, the child with the lump of clay that may have been shaped by his or her hands into an entity that only makes sense to that child but not to the more rigid world of adults. In building worlds – through stories, through revolutionary forms of architecture, through films, through Lego-scapes and even simply through the imagination, the creator has enjoyed a transcendental position of power over the creation, through a demonstrative ability to manipulate the creation as per their whims. The purpose of this study is to look at the very nature of world building itself, and attempt to embrace a post-human, post-dualistic relationship of the world with its builder which rethinks the power differentials. This research, therefore aims to look at critical and artistic works which testify to the same – including my own web comics (created through toy photography) and novels. My own work embraces an inter-connective relationality between disparate media and virtual spaces – photographs, written text, images, videos, memes and traced drawings – while the protagonists in my novel are post-human in the very way they attempt to see beyond the ‘Self’/’Other’ binary to attempt an existence in a Harroway-esque multi-species assemblage which consciously holds up a lens to critical animal studies in a post-humanist world. Therefore, my characters embrace post-humanism, which is a subtle adoption of the authorial intent, linking the creation and the creator in a manner that locates the creator in the creation, rather than above and beyond it. A popular debate is that one cannot separate the text from the author, and such seems to question the very dualistic nature of the creator/ creation boundary. I also hope, through my work and others, to highlight the conscious placement of author’s selves in their works, through cameo appearances and crossovers. This created self is the author himself or herself, and exists in a fragmentary liminal space as both, the creator and the created, a manipulated self that is self- sustained within the work. We are parts of the world we build, whether consciously or not – such may also be linked in authorial desires to immortalize the self or loved ones (as in Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Tennyson’s In Memoriam). Furthermore, this study seeks to use this entire scenario as an analogy to negotiate with the place we occupy in terms of any possible higher powers that may or may not exist. Finally, it looks at the linguistic and cognitive aspects which come into play while delving into the dialectics of such reality

The Creator in the Creation: Fractured Selves in a Liminal Space, Seen
Through a Meta-textual Lens of World-building

Artist/Researcher

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Tara Mukund
Entangled in the Heterotopia is a project exploring the existence of the posthuman within a world of its own: the heterotopia. The heterotopia is a concept coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, describing spaces where worlds exist within worlds, where existence is simultaneously physical and mental, where imagination constructs utopias. The notion of worlds folding into themselves, blurring the line of tangibility, is particularly essential to the envisioning of the posthuman. As such, I find that the heterotopia is a crucible, a seedbed for the posthuman. My project explores human-world entanglement, obligate mutualisms, and sites of techno-ecological memory as set in a posthuman heterotopia. It reconstructs and revisualizes the human, the biosphere, and the technosphere post-entanglement. It thus speculates on multiple avenues of the posthuman, wherein the human is both disentangled from tangibility, and inextricably woven into the world. A three part series, I explore these ideas in various forms. The first is an interactive, speculative art piece using the crater as a canvas for speculation. The crater––physically a revolved hemisphere––functions as a world of its own, almost existing in a vacuum, but existing nevertheless as a world within a world. Here lies a continuum of entanglement, with the state of the human fluctuating from inextricably entangled to entirely disentangled. The second is a sculpture. In form a spherical orb, the artifact connects with the simulacrum of the human in the crater. It is able to shift and change on its own, but is held in place as a spider is by its web. Finally, the third is an installation that envisions a garden of memory, reflecting on the role of technology in the weaving of heterotopias into entanglement. Entangled in the Heterotopia investigates worldbuilding, as represented within and across separate artifacts, as a means of envisioning posthuman entanglement.

Entangled in the Heterotopia

Artist/Researcher

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David Roden

Speculative and Unbounded Posthumanism

Philosopher/Instructor

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Francesca Ferrando

The Art of Posthuman Existence

Philosopher/Instructor

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Mafe Izaguirre
My work proposes a speculative approach to the posthuman cognitive condition, its poetics, its emergence, and implications. At the same time, it questions and poses the human being as part of a decentered multidimensional physical system, as an organism of hybrid nature. By implementing non-symbolic language within a dynamic system, I explore factors such as uncertainty, unpredictability, and radical otherness. As well as exploring the liminal space of language such as resonance, noise, and echo. In my work, the poetic supervention and the dialectical phenomenon are uncertain, as is the future. The system I created is based on a series of conditions that explore trajectories, their certainties, and uncertainties, within language. We can only grasp the aesthetic experience from the encounter with this alien, and only when the dialectical encounter is fully realized. Therefore, it is only in hindsight that full understanding of its impact is appreciated. My work integrates various cognitive dimensions as part of a new structure of general and common intelligence. I am an altered human that lives and evolves as a single organism with the machine, the humans belonging to the substrate, and other biological and technological entities.

Hybrid Spiritual Systems: Self-Hacking and Cognitive Alteration.

Artist/Researcher

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Rodrigo Gutierrez

The Stone and The Ripples

Artist/Researcher

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Mustafa Kemal Yurttas
Posthumanism is a historical and cultural perspective that extends from the present to five centuries ago and to the future. The body is an interdisciplinary concept that transcends the boundaries of this perspective. In this perspective, the body has been the subject of research in disciplines such as biology, anthropology, medicine, sociology and philosophy. However, art has evolved from the classical fine arts to contemporary art. In today's contemporary art, body interpretations have acquired post-humanist layers with new perspectives of digitalization as well as performance art. These layers first emerged with the mechanization of the body by the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the First World War in the art; since the middle of the 20th century, it has been influenced by artistic expressions such as happening and performance and with the development of information technologies until today, it has turned into digital art works.

Posthuman Body as an Interdisciplinary Concept in Today's Contemporary Art

Artist/Researcher

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Ray Brassier

Posthuman Pragmatism: Selecting Power

Philosopher/Instructor

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Magda Vicini
Art as existential posthumanism is constant transformation and revelation of multiple others that are there. It is the "being there", the "dasein", (Heidegger, Gadamer, Indigenous perspectivism, reciprocity) whose existence is modified as an aesthetic experience - there it is, there one lives, one lives together. This artwork is called "Time". In the clock world, time is not fully perceived. The clock "measures" the hours of our time. But we don't perceive time, perhaps because we "measure" time. And this same time is happening in the visible and invisible world ... each one in his time: "[...] time to plant, time to sow, time to reap [...]" (Ecclesiastes, 3). Nature time experienced by the Kaingang indigenous communities (Paraná, Brazil): time of the sun, the moon, the earth, the water, the wind, the clouds, the cooking, the cooling, the boiling, the fire, the hunting, the fishing ... everything has a meaning and a time of existence. Time of illness and time of cure, which is measured microscopically, but is similar to the time of the indigenous nature... we do not have absolute control. Everything has a meaning and a time of existence. Earth time, planet time, star time, meteor time, satellite time, whose time distances are measured in a macroscopic world. The meaning of each time is defined by human beings, in clock time. The meaning of each time is defined by beings of nature (including human beings) in the time of the original peoples. From the possible micro and macro world, time reveals itself in different ways The cosmological space reveals the expansion of rational and technological thinking on the planet under a white, capitalist and socialism vision; the cosmological space of the original peoples reveals the introspection of perspectivist thinking, intuitive to survival, coexistence, reciprocity, in Oceania, Asia, North, Central and South America; Europe, Africa. Hearing the time, feeling the time, being present in all human power when the sun rises, until the sun sets. Read the stars, the moon, the wind, the waters, the forest, the animals. Observed by technologies at all times, we are satellites, microscopes, of a planet earth of many differences, diversities. I feel these worlds coming closer, for healing, for sadness, for emptiness, for hope, for love, for the need to survive

The time fragmentation/unification/relativization

Artist/Researcher

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Hallidonto
Posthumanism deconstructs sociological narratives such as the anthropocene, and the impact Humans have inflicted onto the earth and ultimately ourselves. From this notion I observed my own background coming from a working-class background in Scotland, part of the UK. UK society is still permeated by the Class system and in conjunction with race added into the mix which as you could imagine has its own complexities of existence with the UK's society. From this premise, I saw the opera as a platform that was in need of change, new aesthetics, new narratives that reflect the world we are inhabiting. As an art form opera is pretty much inaccessible to 'working class' society' in all its guises of creed, colour and disability. I saw this as a call to arms, a punk statement in that of the posthumanist's deconstruction of the 'humanism (ist)' narratives of society.

Sanctum Cyborgia

Artist/Researcher

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Paige Emery

Fluid Relations for Endurance

Artist/Researcher

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Simin Azarpour
If the schizo is a delusion of union with the cosmos, just as he/she expresses by a narrative/non-narrative the paleontology of existence in molecular dimensions, he/she also finds in him/herself the history of metaversal evolution/involution and world creation in its molarity. The cosmos, this " deterritorialized giant […] Molecule" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 40) , brought into being by the "Big Bang", is a macro and dense schizophrenic cry that schizo rediscovers the traces and remnants of its pervasive rays in his psyche .The schizophrenic auditory illusions are vibrations of the cosmic sounds remained of this "primary darkness" and spread throughout the world, molecules that have turned into the suns and the stars; cellular moyens leading to the galaxies and the Milky Way. Schizo finds himself alone in the face of this infinite elegance, what can he/she do but turn him/herself into a wandering iota and write the memories of a mote floating in the galaxy (“a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”14): souvenirs and dangers; standing at the crossroads of ex-istence, at the intersection of wind, sun and sky; living flows in their most intense modes; the experience of the cosmos by incessant becoming and stopping “to be”, yes, schizo is already a full-fledged Heraclitian, and when we want to prevent him/her--by medication and neuroleptics--from his processual becoming, or to freeze the flux to bring him/her back to general intelligence, whether natural, artificial or social, we deprive ourselves from la gaya scienza of a cosmogenesis, of schizo-revelations, the receiver of cosmic radiations that can articulate all of species in a complex delusion. But we don’t learn Le schizo et les langues15 ; Talking with molecular trans-codes and the language of creatures, speaking at the level of gleams. Schizo-languages encounters the cosmo-languages and the consequence is the evolution/involution’s traces of the Pluriverse 16 in a hallucination-machine that a reason-particle accelerator generates. Schizo expresses the speed of thought or velocity within reason; the eye-flow that draws on the surface of being a molten intellect or the self-bypassing mind that, in its "transcendental empiricism", provokes the non-narrative of the archelogy of becoming (a devenir-logique)..

The Cosmogenesis, or the Multiversal Evolution/Involution

Artist/Researcher

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Gagan Singh
I see myself in possibilities between what is material, how do we understand depth and distance, what does it mean to walk in the city, and how do notions of eroticism, humor, and comic book stories function. I’m also interested in the spaces in between which artworks occur, where you ride a thought, travel with it, soak it in, research it through the fields of cognition, language, thought and all of this leads to some form of action, or many such active steps. My thoughts extended into the idea of depth in Line; from exploring through carving--making a line into an object such as piece of wood, to seeing lines in erotic comics and comics in general, to the shift of drawing in a sketchbook, to its projection on a surface. Also looking at line drawing works of artists considered as Outsiders, such as Art Brut artists. The past three months took me on a troubled journey which raised many questions: what is the scale of an object, how do I react to material, how do I react to sites in the city, and what is it that I am seeing, perceiving and the drawing. I'm less interested in the act of drawing, but rather on its outcome; the transformation when it is mixed into other formats. As an example, the drawing printed on a cloth, the drawing within software, in virtual space, the work carved or printed out on a 3D printer. What is this transformation of the line into its relation to a given medium? The Imaginary world from the drawing on paper finds new directions, new collisions with new materials. Through this comes the possibility for collaboration, and then the opportunity to see how that moves ahead. Maybe it leads to a reading on how gaming functions, how a character plays a Role, a character in the virtual world as an immersive experience, a work in which someone can walk inside of, to experience what sound, means for me.

Imagined Worlds

Artist/Researcher

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