Author: Nire

PRESENTATION DECK:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cPPR8hYR3b0oAD_mSMG24I5TcbNT8Zs0gJDa2Jc24jA/edit?usp=sharing

NON-HUMAN SONGS FROM POD SCAPE:

POD GUIDE:

DESCRIPTION:

I first became interested in exploring what “Posthuman” was about a year before I came to ITP. The name is evocative, sounds paradoxical and kind of annoying. Once I started my research I became more confused before getting a firmer understanding that “Posthumanism” & “Transhumanism” are not the same thing and sometimes get used interchangeably. I wish I came across Cary Wolfe’s book earlier, where Donna Haraway praises him for making clear what Posthumanism is. But I think it was important for me to tread through the confusion like I’m sure many do, when approaching this area of thought. 

“Tranhumanism” is the enhancement of humans through technology, also call “H+” and supports anthropomorphism. My working definition of “Posthumanism” is: Disrupting ideas of what humanism means in western culture for about 500 years and how that also affected relation to nonhuman entities. Critical race theory, postcolonial, gender, queer theory have already been doing this, along with human de-centering ideas of theorists in last century. Some artists, certain communities and individuals have been creating this shift for years. Not a shift to only nonhuman forms but including an embrace of multiple perspectives that include non-human beings; creatures and ghosts / spirituality. Attempt to approach post-duality. The technological extension of humans and other species in Posthuman theory, is relevant within Posthumanism, since it shapes our consciousness and effects our bodies, and is now its own entity in the world. 

I’m drawn to this idea of a word that attempts to hold space for for non-dominant voices figuratively and literally, and this area of study is vast. In my research I zeroed in on the more metaphysical aspects of this exploration; healing, exploring temporalities through speculative narratives and poetry rituals, and how these ideas are put into practice by various artists. Underlying all of my work is healing – and healing is ultimately space-time travel, we can access what we are healing from, individually, through visualizing and active engagement with the nonlinear, and get in touch with the physicality of the past living in our bodies/nervous system and our minds, and non-direct physicality through resonance. We can’t time travel on the linear aspect of our experience but we can engage in nonlinear spacetimemattering through active presence and engagement from our position in linear experience/perspective. Engaging with our individual and collective ghosts, or energetic imprints or the lack of something. Building on & appreciating established global traditions, how can we explore new ways?

I think the powerful ability of poetry to hold the most painful experiences & find beauty in perceived hell & its ability to to time travel, like healing and sci-fi / speculative fabulation, is central to this piece. The power of sci-fi to write stories & new possibilities into existence and its wide holding space to address the intra-connection of life and systems, is what has always drawn me to it as a comforting (not only in a utopic sense but as a space holding), hopeful & exciting beacon, and as a potential mystical act.

The accompanying art project will be ongoing and is a song book – songs and tracks with different chapters, one chapter I finished is about songs from non-human perspectives and another is poetry rituals from the future (will be part of future creation). The song book will be set inside a pod system which are the gestation period of various ghosts of the anthropocene (people, animals, plants etc). In order for them to reincarnate physically further or not (one is not superior to the other in this setting), the person interacting must hold space for their pod song/recording/story. The pods might be virtual or a physical installation.

RESOURCE LIST:

Online Resources:

https://www.are.na/nire-erin/posthuman-ism-exploration

Books:

(will have this in completion tomorrow)

FINAL REFLECTION:

It’s been really beautiful process researching these ideas and putting them into practice, specifically during the 7 day practice, making songs and imagining myself embodying the pod guide and thinking of FAQs and making answers to them.

I cried about once a week, (which made me think I was on the right path for me, right now), reading about all different aspects of Posthumanism and looking for artists that are speaking non-dominant voices into existence, in various ways. Becoming intimate with an idea(s) and thinking about where my personal inquiry lies within that frame, made me feel like I was connecting with it energetically through attention and resonance – people, plants, animals, fungus, things. It felt comforting to find so many people who are dedicated to untangling dominant ideas that are oppressive and destructive – macro paradigms all the way to quantum physics to ghosts. It’s also lead me to speak with people in person that was really fulfilling and grounding and felt very supportive.

I would love to explore this project further possibly in a physical installation of the pod scape. I think building a performance with the system would be interesting. I’d like to ask various people to make their own pod story, so that there are various downloads. 

I chose to sample a bird I had heard when I was in the Amazon, my friend Angelina Efua Karlsson and I would imitate this bird and it would respond, you can kind of hear it in this video below:

It’s called Oropendola and makes various water sounds such as an amplified droplet hitting water. I was in love with the different sounds it made. I couldn’t find my field recordings today unfortunately, but I found some online.

https://www.audubon.org/news/this-bizarre-bird-master-choreography

4 week exploration- 3 page excerpt

I wanted to attempt an embodiment of Posthumanist perspectives of specifically non-human creatures. I’m drawn to the idea of trying to break out of the very heightened human exceptionalism that we currently find ourselves in, although I think we can’t fully, as the embodied human experience we are in, see completely outside of ourselves. But there are levels of extremity – which can afford more harmony or more violence. Even though we are running on so many mind programs that were formed from nurture, society, genetics – we have seen countless times & places, that paradigm fluidity is possible, even though it can sometimes be slow & initially (or repeatedly) be met with hostility and violence.

A first exploration of putting this topic exploration into practice that I felt comfortable with, especially at the stage of research I’m in, is to make sound pieces including non-human perspective – an imagining of what I’d feel like as specific different species, with an inevitable infusion of myself – so maybe better put – duets with myself and my interpretation or impression of that particular creature.

This is also just a fun way to try to embody non-human creatures and i do think we are more than our conscious, so maybe part of the practice is more “successful” on other levels.

My constraints are:

Use my analog synth Prophet Rev2 – no layering (modern technology with ancient creatures)

Use words to write from perspective of creature or sample actual sounds

Find examples of a specific aspect of the creature to explore

So far in 5 day practice, I’ve made 2 songs:

1 – Bee Orchid singing to the bee that’s going extinct (from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet example)

2 – Paired Gibbon monkey songs with synth, pitched down and over time up.

3 – I was researching interesting known symbiotic relationships and found the relationship between the Honeyguide and Yao people of Mozambique – where there is 2 way communication that results in the Honeyguide leading the people to bee hives, where the people smoke out the combs so the bees become calm, and the people can take out the comb without being stung. The people will leave parts on the ground for the birds. I have the birds calling the people “fire starters” – I was thinking if I was an animal, that would be a distinct intriguing human feature.

I have an existing song that inspired this project that’s called “DIEZOME” from a project I did with Sam Hains & Camilla Padgitt Coles. Camilla co-wrote the lyrics to the song. Concept of the project was made by all of us and is a game show screening process that leads to a utopian rhizomatic society.

Inspired by Anna Tsing’s “Unruly Edges: Mushroom as Companion Species” article, I wanted to have a mushroom spirit signing about monocrop invasion, but that was kind of hard to get the right tone. That night I had mushroom pizza to help with embodiment, but I guess the idea wasn’t ready to come through or maybe not meant to flower in that form.

I haven’t decided on today’s theme but am thinking maybe something with bacteria or stones.

I started an are.na site for resources around this project:

https://www.are.na/nire-erin/posthuman-embodiment

Dr. Francesca Ferrando, who has taught at NYU, is working on a book called “Posthuman and Transhuman Bodies in Religion and Spirituality” (working title) – so I will be adding her to my list of experts to contact.

Posthumanism vs. Transhumanism:

Some people make a distinction between “Posthuman” and “Posthumanism”, and some people, if there is a distinction between those 2, confuse it with “Transhumanism” – it’s not clear yet if they are actually 3 or 2 terms.

I’ve heard “Posthuman” is the idea of inserting human consciousness into machines somehow and “Posthumanist” emphasizes that humans are not singular ones, but part of larger humanity, it means to expand past an exclusive human exceptionalism to include non-human creatures and an attempt towards a non-dual perspective.

I’ve heard that Donna Haraway distanced herself from the term “Posthumanism” because of the relation to “Transhumanism” and prefers “Companion Species” – need to look into when that was distinguished etc. I do feel as though “Posthumanism” is sort of a name holder – and understand the confusion is incites – my impression of  Posthuman thought so far is, its emphasis is not only on non-human consideration, but for a deeper human to human consideration, and approaching a paradigm that can’t have one without the other.  It’s a recent term that I find is still knowing itself but draws from ancient cultures and current situations, or maybe there’s another term being born from “Posthumanism”.

A thought that has come up a lot lately is the name “Posthuman” sounds like an emphasis on non-human creatures (which is only one facet of it, as I understand), and glosses over all the people that are not treated as human as humans in positions of privilege. I then found this argument highlighted specially around race on the Posthuman wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumanism

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

“Questions of race, some argue, are suspiciously elided within the “turn” to posthumanism. Noting that the terms “post” and “human” are already loaded with racial meaning, critical theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that the impulse to move “beyond” the human within posthumanism too often ignores “praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people”,^[31] including Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire to Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten.^[31] Interrogating the conceptual grounds in which such a mode of “beyond” is rendered legible and viable, Jackson argues that it is important to observe that “blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or disruption” which posthumanists invite.^[31] In other words, given that race in general and blackness in particular constitutes the very terms through which human/nonhuman distinctions are made, for example in enduring legacies of scientific racism, a gesture toward a “beyond” actually “returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged”.

“Posthuman” when I first heard it was interesting to me because it sounded sci-fi and paradoxical. Continuing the tradition of using “Post” is very western academic, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate aspects of it, I think. It implies a very linear history on the surface to use that word, and that something is dead maybe?

******

Timothy Morton – Paraphrasing ideas from 2 talks I listened to this week (will include citation)

“Nature as a human made construct”

“Best way to help ecology, fight racism” 

Human beings are trembly chameleons

Who love to be seduced by sounds colors textures

We are caught in intersecting patterns of undulation

Isn’t the same as static silence

Art allows things to be still not static

Can be still and vibrating

B/c aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension

Things can only affect other things indirectly

A thing is an anarchist commune where parts are autonomous

Anna Tsing  – “Our use of the term Anthropocene is to describe a time in which business as usual is likely to kill us.”

Jane Bennet – 

“…both human and nonhuman entities (including inorganic matter) are composed of ‘vibrant matter’. In Bennett’s view, matter that we consider ‘dead’ such as fossils and stones is not actually dead but very much alive and is constituted by a lively and energetic play of forces. Following a long tradition of thinkers who have sought to decentre ‘the human’ (e.g. Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault), Bennett’s emphasis on non-human matter challenges the ontological privileging of ‘the human’. However, her notion of ‘distributive agency’ creatively affirms the necessity of human embodiment, understood as one site of agency within and across a multiplicity of other material bodies and formations.”

*********

(POSTHUMANISM & ANTHROPOCENE, CAPITALOCENE, XTHLOCENE)

*********

“Posthuman Glossary” – Rose Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova

“If art, science, and the humanities have shared one thing, it was their common engagement with constructions and representations of the human. Under the pressure of new contemporary concerns, however, we are experiencing a “posthuman condition+?; the combination of new developments-such as the neoliberal economics of global capitalism, migration, technological advances, environmental destruction on a mass scale, the perpetual war on terror and extensive security systems- with a troublesome reiteration of old, unresolved problems that mean the concept of the human as we had previously known it has undergone dramatic transformations. The Posthuman Glossary is a volume providing an outline of the critical terms of posthumanity in present-day artistic and intellectual work. It builds on the broad thematic topics of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, eco-sophies, digital activism, algorithmic cultures and security and the inhuman. It outlines potential artistic, intellectual, and activist itineraries of working through the complex reality of the ‘posthuman condition’, and creates an understanding of the altered meanings of art vis-� -vis critical present-day developments. It bridges missing links across disciplines, terminologies, constituencies and critical communities. This original work will unlock the terms of the posthuman for students and researchers alike.”

Question

How can we embody a posthumanist perspective to cultivate care as a liberating force against post-colonialism? Can technology be re-appropriated from corporations to support this embodiment or aid in proliferation of care?

Hypothesis

Embodying posthumanist perspectives can act as a liberating tool against the post-colonial effects on humans, non-human beings, spirituality, sexuality and love.  Technology can be a powerful tool to aid…… (?)

I’m still trying to narrow down the technological aspect of the hypothesis because, it’s vast.

Mind Map thus far:

LOVE & CARE

In Anna Tsing’s “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species”, she claims “Domination, domestication, and love are deeply entangled”. In plantation system she references the absence of human to human and human to interspecies love, ” …they invest everything in the superabundance of a single crop.  But one ingredient is missing: They remove the love.  Instead of the romance connecting people, plants, and places, European planters introduced cultivation through coercion.[xxvi]   The plants were exotics; the labor was forced through slavery, indenture, and conquest.  Only through extreme order and control could anything flourish in this way; but with hierarchy and managed antagonism in place, enormous profits (and complementary poverties) could be produced.  Because plantations have shaped how contemporary agribusiness is organized, we tend to think of such arrangements as the only way to grow crops.  But this arrangement had to be naturalized until we learned to take the alienation of people from their crops for granted.”

And on patriarchal family unit and love politics:

“The boundaries of the home became the expected boundaries of love.  With the fetishization of the home as a space of purity and interdependence, extra-domestic intimacies, whether within or between species, seemed archaic fantasies (the community, the small farmer) or passing affairs (feminism, animal rights).  Outside the home, the domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests reigned. Moreover, this kind of family fetish reappeared in mid-20th century U.S. mass culture—and once again in our times now—as the United States assumed a global leadership that allowed it to draw from older regimes of colonial culture.   Here love is just not expected outside family walls. Within the family, other species can be accepted; pets are models for family devotion. But the model of the loving and beloved pet does not spread love; it holds it tight inside the family.  

U.S. publics learn to imagine themselves as compassionate, moral people because they love their children and their pets.  They learn that this love makes them “good people”—unlike terrorists, who only hate. They imagine that this love equips them to make decisions for the whole world; it creates a moral hierarchy in which American “goodness” is qualification for global leadership. Other peoples, and other species, are judged by their ability to live up to U.S. standards of domestic intimacy.  If they are properly engaged with family love, they may deserve to live. Others risk becoming “collateral damage” in U.S. projects to improve the world; to eliminate them may be unfortunate but not “inhumane.” Under this tutelage, our species being is realigned to stop Others at home’s door.”

http://tsingmushrooms.blogspot.com/2010/11/anna-tsing-anthropology-university-of.html

I saw Kim TallBear speak over the weekend as part of the Posthuman series with Donna Haraway – where she briefly presented her project “Making Love & Relations Beyond Settler Sexualities”

TIMES, TENSES & TECH?

There’s a way in which ideas of “love” are seen as non-intellectual and I really like when I see things that are deemed “non-academic” in academia – since that qualification is directly linked to Eurocentric colonial mindset. Which is also why I want to include magic and spirituality into my exploration — and by not including aspects of it, I’d be complicit in erasure – since I’m approaching this topic broadly.

A question within this that keeps popping up is “what are the non-linear possibilities of tech? vague but persistent – the closest thing I’ve found to addressing this, in the way I’m imagining it, is Ricardo Dominguez’ of The Electronic Disturbance Theater, below:

“The Electronic Disturbance Theater has referred to the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) as an example of Science of the Oppressed, an approach that is informed by forms of knowledge production that are marginalized by the rational focus of digital. [10] The fundamental operations of digital technology, AND, OR and NOT, are derived from George Boole’s development of Boolean logic which was first described in the pamphlet Mathematical Analysis of Logic published in 1847. [11] While the Boolean logic that is the basis of digital technology is based in western systems of reason, Science of the Oppressed includes concepts such as Mayan Technology, proposed by Ricardo Dominguez to signify non-linear causalities and technologies such as the stick the little mayan boy waves at the Mexican army helicopter to make it go away.”

http://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/local-autonomy-networks-post-digital-networks-post-corporate-communications/

 

PEOPLE TO CONTACT:

Still compiling list:

Zach Blas

Vandana Singh

Jonas Oppenheim

Ricardo Dominguez

StarHawk

Rupa Marya

Kim TallBear

Anna Tsing

Korakrit Arunanondchai

 

SPIRITUALITY / MAGIC

Dr. Rupa Marya’s map of Colonization omits spirituality, but she references it in another place below. This idea I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, that somehow people don’t realize all cultures have an indigenous past and the systematic erasure of European pre-Christian spirituality – which, accompanied by whiteness’s default to appropriation, is another reason why white people have engaged in other culture’s spiritual praxis in ways that are extractive – in part because they are so unaware of their own spiritual history. (insert the book on witches here)

How can Reconnecting to “magic” that was systematically suppressed during Christian colonialism?

How can we connect to magic / spirituality and embody a posthumanist perspective to cultivate care as a liberating force against post-colonialism?

Healing by reclaiming stories and making new ones

 

GHOSTS & DEATH

The element of death in newness

The more destruction on earth of land people and all creatures – breeds more hungry ghosts 

Ghosts of the Capitalocene

How we live with ghosts

 

COMMUNITY MODELS

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215118/who-s-afraid-of-ideology-ecofeminist-practices-between-internationalism-and-globalism/

 

EXPLORATIONS:

What kind of communities could emerge post capitalist ruin

What kind of communities can exist now

Community models

Rhizome – implementations?

Should Utopía be a goal? Are idealist goals too binary?

Speculative narrative song cycle / collection 

Embodying plants etc

“Ferocious Storytelling”

Songs – Deep Listening

Makings

Spiritual praxis

Trauma work

Liminality

Care

Autonomy under oppression

Gender expression

Queerness – softening hardlines

Wyrd web guide – strings of fate, weavings, stories as weavings and time threads

Commitment to neglect – Maria

Governance of bodies and borders specifically in posthumanism

going inwards to softness

Passive vs. deep presence – “deep listening”

When we are faced with demise – where can we find beauty?

 

 

PROTOTYPE 1

 

 

Incomplete post TBC……….