Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 21st February, 17:00-18:30
As part of Zoönomic Futures – an immersive workshop on ethics for a society that is no longer human-centric – The Posthumanities Hub researcher and artist Janna Holmstedt will present her talk Follow the Blind, Mimic a Worm, and Listen to the Tangle. The talk will be followed by a conversation with Anne van Leeuwen (board member at the Embassy of the North Sea) and Het Nieuwe Instituut researcher Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.
Read more here!
Zoönomic Futures is part of a series exploring Multispecies Urbanism, one of the themes of the Dutch contribution to the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Tag: interspecies
Where: the cinema [Bion] at Stockholms Dramatiska Högskola, Valhallavägen 189
If you missed the two events at Reaktorhallen in August, /Mis/communication/s/ and Interstellar Species Society Assembly, where artist Janna Holmstedt delivered a lecture performance and a talk on sonospheric communards, you now have a second chance to see them.
In a combined lecture performance and reading, Janna revisits neurophysiologist John C. Lilly’s interspecies communication experiments, carried out in the 1950s and 60s and partly funded by NASA, where dolphins were supposed to learn to speak English with their blowholes. At the centre of her session are tape recordings from language lessons with the dolphins, and a woman whom during 75 days tried to live under equal conditions with the dolphin Peter in a flooded house.
She will also talk about touching the matter of language, points of listening, and snuggle technologies.
The event is hosted within the framework of the independent course “Sound as Critical practice” at the Department of Film and Media at Uniarts/StDH.
Human nature is not the oxymoron we imagined it to be. In this new planetary age of the Anthropocene, defined by human-induced climatic, biological, and even geological transformations, we humans are fully in nature. And nature is fully in us. This was, of course, always the case, but it is more conspicuously so now than ever before: people are entangled in co-constitutive relationships with nature and the environment, with other animals and organisms, with medicine and technology, with science and epistemic politics. We live and die, play, thrive, and suffer by each other. For example, think of “mad cow” disease, where humans feeding cows with by-products from slaughtered sheep infected with the prionic disorder “scrapie” in turn generates prion disorders in cows that get transmitted to human beef consumers through a series of transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010) gestures across species. We can think, too, of pollen allergies and their increased prevalence as an index of our environed embodiment. Or how hormone-like substances seep from plastics into microorganisms, fish bodies, human infants in increasingly aggressive polymere ecologies. While culture and nature never were in fact separated but for academic divisions of labour, we live in a time when the so called “human mastery”, alterations, and especially the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) of these naturcultural relationships of embodied environments and environed embodiments appear to us more clearly. For such power-imbued yet generative relationships, we need a more-than-human humanities. We also need expertise on human differences; those between men and women; between men and men, or women and women; transgender, and internal to our, after all, not-so-fully rational human (and microbial) Selfhood. More-than-human and human differences (gender, class, race, nationality, age, sexual orientation, specie- or land relationality, etc) interplay in intricate ways, socially. Our work at the Posthumanities Hub, take such differences very seriously as we make our case for diverse feminist forms of the posthumanities (Wolfe 2003). Our starting points are diverse too; a love for science, art and philosophy, postnatural feminisms, technological empowerment, humanities disciplines like history, literature, philosophy, languages, the cyborg ontology and situated epistemology of Donna Haraway (1991), anti-racist justice movements and anti-colonial environmentalism, veganism, plant theory, and multispecies justice. All of these are critical and creative endevours that provide mind-sets and society’s psyche with new concepts to guide thought and practice. At The Posthumanities Hub, we embrace a feminist posthumanities that stands able to frame naturecultures unfolding and recalibrate humanities analytics for an Anthropocene of many differences. We aim for alliances and research worthy of our complex times, a humanities for our “postnatural” condition of human and nonhuman co-constitution of the planetary.