The Reenchantment of Modernity: Animation, Animism, A.I.

Environmental Philosophy, 2020

In this paper, I establish the plausibility of one aspect of animism, namely the experience of other-than-human (including so-called inanimate) beings as exhibiting a kind of inaccessible interiority. I do so by developing a parallel between Husserl's account of our experience of other conscious beings and our experience of non-conscious as well as socalled inanimate beings. Animism is defined here through the notion of other-than-human personhood. Such personhood is partially understood through the experience of others as only present qua absent or as possessing an inaccessible interiority. In order to show how the experience of such interiority is constituted for non-conscious beings, I draw on Derrida's insistence on the irreducibility of context (designated through the notions of différance and the trace). This allows me to show how this structure of presence qua absence characteristic of our experience of conscious others emerges in our experience of non-conscious beings as well.

The life of images has taken a new decisive turn in our time, which transvisuality is called upon to address and reveal the facets of this complex phenomenon. This article aims to address one of the thorniest subjects of transvisuality: the anthropogony as transgenic and cloning. Taking further Belting's line of thinking and his anthropology of image, the article approaches the subject in connection with the essence of anthropos and its substance-to deinon, that is, the awesome and duplicitary power of man given by technè. The first part is devoted to prometheia, the mythical origins of art as technè, and the violent origins of anthropogony. It moves into the analysis of the transformations of image in the era of bio-cybernetic reproduction, showing how scientific acts become aesthetic projects, art in itself, the latest expressions of technè. Extreme science generates extreme art-the transgenic. The transgenic shows how by closing the gap between human and transhuman, transvisuality radically departs from the classical models of ontology and visuality emerging into a new field. I call it transvisuality in extremis, the transhuman facet of anthropogony. This is the new staging of prometheia in history, the expression of unsurpassed human imagination and creativity. Sing, clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. … Be gracious, Hephaestus, and grant me success and prosperity! (Hymn To Hephaesus) The current revolutions in genetic engineering and cybernetics reflect persuasively the latest achievements performed by homo technicus, raising intense philosophical questions about the very meaning of life. In his 2003 Iconic Turn lecture, suggestively entitled "Real Images and False Bodies-Erroneous Ideas about the Future of Humankind," the theorist of image Hans Belting made a astonishing remarque on the newest human invention, the gene technology, which he saw as both a "new variant of the longing for

This lecture starts a conversation between anthropologists and animators. Both anthropologists and animators are critical constructivists; they build up their pictures of the world in a certain way in order to make people think again about how the world is organized. They aim to shake up some habits of thought and to create new ways of understanding human experience. There is a common history of deploying modern technologies to critique modernity often in a playful or ironic way. There is an interest in the magic hidden in rational intentionality. While with animation complex concepts and intuitions are mixed and embedded technically in the uncanny reality of the animator's film-world, in anthropology it is the other way round--ethnographic fieldwork exposes the ethnographer to 'strange ideas'; it is the anthropologist's job to give these an explicit status in their theoretical depiction of what it means to be human. Finally, both anthropology and animation have a complex, deliberately peripheral and questioning relationship with their overall fields-- film-making and social science. Both of them are 'anti-disciplines' in a certain sense.

2022

The article is an extended review of the recent Stefan Lorenz Sorgner's book Philosophy of Posthuman Art (2022) that explores the content and the aesthetic values introduced by the author as well as his shift to Critical Posthumanism, while he also keeps the philosophical essence of his own approach to Transhumanism, the main ideas of his contribution to Metahumanism and the desire of convergence of Trans-and Posthumanism. Sorgner's insight to contemporary art surpasses the boundaries usually set by art historians and underlines the artists' worldview and the philosophical meaning of their works in the context of the several trends of Posthumanism including social and cultural views and politics. Visual arts and music are studied in parallel with the evolution of posthumanist theories and arguments, while the issues of non-dualities, technology, religion, truth, ethics, reason, leisure, the western philosophies of the past and moreover "the need to coin new terms" are the crucial points of Sorgner's discussion with the readers. The book is more than valuable for its commitment to the notion of the philosophical meaning of contemporary artworks as well as for its opening to a new understanding of Posthumanism.

Leonardo, 2001

ost-human development will likely proceed rapidly in the coming century. Research in genetic and medical engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, and computer science will no doubt soon be translated into applications within the human body, with the integration of information systems and the brain, at the neural level, forming the horizon of possibility. Conceived as a machine whose every process is amenable to intervention, reconfiguration, and replication, the organism beckons to research and development units with the promise of a vast new market to divide and conquer, a frontier zone whose outlines are drawn now in science fiction. While the genetically-engineered human, the cyborg, virtual consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the autonomous robot are still in primitive, exploratory stages of development, their appearance on the cultural agenda portends, if not the completion, then the closure of the modern West's historic project of self-description. To "understand" a phenomenon, whether in nature, society, or the mind, has meant to be able to construct for it a corresponding symbolic machine; and in this manner, everything, at one level or another, has been described-that is to say, represented by a set of symbols combining themselves according to a finite set of algorithms that allow for a certain statistical predictability, a neutralization of future uncertainty. What arises now, however, is the question concerning the import of this procedure for contingent and mortal creatures like human beings, and what this accumulation of descriptive models entails; as Don Byrd points out, "if the model corresponds precisely to the original, it is not clear what has been gained. The locus of the object is changed." [1]. Today, as the human object fades into the statistical blur of the post-human, the strategy of simulation that has long constituted our self-knowledge reaches its ironic reductio ad absurdum. The vertiginous space opened is a model with no earthly referent, no common location of "thereness." As Jean Baudrillard writes, "It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational" [2]. Of course, for many purposes traditional modeling procedures will continue to prove immensely productive or as the engineers say, robust. Although one may find fault with the sterility of suburbs and shopping malls, the blandness of fast-food, or the puerility of Hollywood, these represent the historically unprecedented material success of a certain model of human production-of the very idea of taking production as an end in itself, and modeling its processes solely in terms of efficient input-output ratios. And while one may be dismayed by environmental degradation, saddened by extinction of species, maddened by automotive congestion, or frightened by ultra-destructive weaponry, these too are

Leiden Elective Academic Periodical, 2022

Chiasmi International, 2023

In contemporary art, a growing number of artists experiment with non-humans in their actual artworks. This paper examines the issues related to such practices with reference to Jakob von Uexküll’s analyses of the configuration of meaningful worlds by non-human animals, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze-Guattari’s interpretations of Uexküll’s ideas. Uexküll maintained that every living being lives in a world with meaning; Merleau-Ponty understood this claim as situating the beginning of culture in the creativity of non-humans; Deleuze and Guattari emphasized the melodic and rhythmic dimension of this creativity, mainly interpreted as territorialization processes. These elements are paramount to understanding what is at stake with artworks featuring non-humans: considering projects proposals from Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Tomas Saraceno, Ana Maria Lopez Gomez and other contemporary artists, the conclusion is that an artwork featuring an encounter between two territorializing movements has the potential to transform the human range of perception.