The Large Glass Presents a Range of Approaches
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Cover: Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, Episode 1: Ben, 2017 HD Video, 12’52’’ (detail) Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions (with footage The from the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA) Large Glass No. 27 / 28, 2019 CONTENT: 4 Tihomir Topuzovski: Intoduction - Visibilities of becoming POSTHUMAN CORPOREALITY 93 Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Joerg Blumtritt: Posthumanism, 7 biopolitics and contemporary art Josephine Berry: How to Explain Pictures to a Dying Human: On Art in Expanded Ontologies 97 Eduardo Kac: BIO ART 20 STELARC: Contingent and Contestable Futures: Zombie,Cy- A LENS ON THE RADICAL HORIZON borg and Phantom Bodies 110 30 Saul Newman: Postanarchism and the posthuman horizon Extending and creating new corporealities: Interview with STELARC by Tihomir Topuzovski 117 Chantal Mouffe: Critical Artistic Practices: An Agonistic 33 Approach Slavcho Dimitrov: Ron Athey and Acéphale in Skopje 120 37 Sarah W. Sutton: Thinking Differently, with Creativity, Curiosity Nicole C. Karafyllis: Posthumanism does not exist and Courage 39 123 Igor Grubic: Do Animals...? The MoCA’s Pavilion in Venice Biennial 2019 Nada Prlja Subversion to Red 44 Jeff Rasel 126 Vlad Morariu: Nada Prlja: the Left, Language and Writing A LANDSCAPE OF ANXIETY 129 48 Blanca de la Torre: Relocating Red Narratives Jeff Diamanti: Heliotropism at the Terminal Beach of Critique 132 The MoCA’s exhibition: Skopje Resurgent: International- 57 ism, Art, and Solidarity, 1963 - 1980 Susanna Hertrich: Haunted Lands 134 62 Contributors Amanda Boetzkes: Posthuman Planetarity 72 Gligor Stefanov: A Conversation with Material and Space 78 Chris Salter: In the Haze of the Technosphere 83 Amanda du Prezz: Do Astronauts Dream of Post-Earth? Tihomir Topuzovski The traces of posthumanism form a discursive framework as a move beyond the bi- naries of humanist and modernist traditions and it offers a prospect of philosophical, Intoduction political, environmental, cultural and artistic turn. I attempt to orient posthumanism within new fields of transdisciplinary knowledge1 across a spectrum of modes of communica- Visibilities of tion, interactions and social significations, close to the Deleuzian notion of becoming, the becoming very dynamism of change and impermanence. Thus, in this edition posthumanism is con- sidered in the wider multidisciplinary context of ideas, including a variety of themes, from questioning the boundaries and identity of the human subject upon which the idea of hu- man has been constructed too inconsistently to serve as an axis for reflection,2 to non-an- thropocentric frameworks in which the human being is dismantled into the phenomenon emerging through affect to initiate “a way towards deformations, towards becoming the other, becoming new”.3 Further, the issue involves wide-ranging questions ranging from the transposed hybridity of the human that embedded the boundary between nature and rapid technological expansion, to the everyday work practices in accord with the “in- teractions between socioeconomic and environmental conditions and biological and physiological or physical processes.”4 Another crucial point of this discussion are topics from “the global circulation of goods, data, capital, bits and bytes of information frames the interaction of contemporary subjects ”5 to the “unforeseen mutations, trajectories of illness or distress, patterns of global climate change, or the vagaries of the international economy, the open systems or ecological perspective”.6 Many authors have developed these intentions in their work, inquiring into the very possibility of an “environment ma- terially and conceptually reconstituted in ways that pose profound and unprecedented normative questions”.7 Considering these lines on a new level, this volume of the Large Glass presents a range of approaches. My main aim here is to recognize posthumanistic themes mediated through a set of relations relevant to other forms that rest in “a non-dualistic understanding of nature– culture interaction”.8 The focus is on the work of authors accomplished within contem- porary culture that expresses a posthumanist sensibility and an ethical and visual recon- figuration of our perceptions. At this point, artists might imagine different relations that express a concern for the status of the human “within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the socioeconomic structures”.9 This determines a range of challenges and modalities for participating in political life. What I have composed is a kind of collection of works of authors that range across a spectrum moving from humanist approaches to posthumanism (or anti-anthropocen- trism), including a range of thematic discussions, artistic projects and essays discuss- ing, contextualizing and criticizing various issues that bring together scholars of cultural studies, art history, politics, geography, philosophy and related disciplines together with artists, allowing for a broad range of insights into the topic both historically and in the contemporary context. The volume comprises three key sections linked directly or tan- gentially. I first present the work of authors whose works relate to what I conceive asposthu - man corporeality, concerning a radical transformation of the perceptual capabilities and cognitive orientation of bodies, visualizing their various demarcations. Along with some theoretical reflections and conceptual claims, the work of artists summarized as being in “increasing agreement here that all bodies, including those of animals (and perhaps cer- tain machines, too), evince certain capacities for agency”10 as significant participants in existing dynamics. The contributors come to various ways of understanding the ‘corpore- al’ in which subjects are caught up in constitutive, different and unconventional relations. This involves in some cases a new experience of the body enhanced by technology, or considering how we can extend it, or resist the “production of a biopolitical body” that “is the original activity of sovereign power”.11 Seeking to contribute in this direction, some of the texts illustrate how posthuman relations function and are under scrutiny as anchored near to Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology and a mode of revealing where the idea is that technological things have their own novel kind of presence in engagement 4 with the human body and connections among parts and totals. Other crucial elements of this section explore issues underlying the current hierarchy, such as sexuality and gender ascription, and artistic expressions in a very specific sense regarding the disintegration of the body symbolically and materially – or a corporeality of decay. The second section consists of a compilation of approaches and a synthesis of visual materials regarding anxieties about the landscape and thematic ideas about environmental ecology, the conceptualization of the earth, heliotropism and surroundings that take many diverse forms. What we can focus on here are the modes and relations created in interac- tions within a material world attending to artistic imaginations as well as “transformations in the ways we currently produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment”.12 These thematics do not refer to some conventional domain of the landscape; instead, the authors create a combination of distinctive characteristics of new materialist ontologies – climatic, geological, planetary, cultural and so forth – displaying mutual relations towards a posthuman terrain. These works disrupt the neat boundaries between lifeworld and var- ious environmental contexts that express a common concern, even cognitive panic, in the face of unbalanced conditions on earth. References: The third and final section highlights thematic discussion on the necessity of expanding 1 Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for non-binary perspectives engaged in the very act of politics, ethics and culture. With a spe- the Critical Posthumanities,” Theory, Culture cific focus on themes that are mutable in the political context, contingent and in a constant and Society 36, no. 6 (2009), pp. 31-61. process of becoming within networks of relations, this leads to the idea of postanarchism, 2 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in which has appeared as an effective possibility in contemporary radical political thought. Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New Equivalently, in this section there is a discussion that artists have initiated, opening paths York: Pantheon, 1984) p. 44. by which their practices can play an important role in societies in which every critical 3 Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, “Materiality of gesture is quickly recuperated and neutralized by the dominant instances of powers within Affect: How Art Can Reveal the More Subtle Realities of an Encounter,” in Rosi Braidotti and globally structuring systems. Rick Dolphijn, eds., This Deleuzian Century: Art, These points are echoed in the work of many authors in their posthuman orientation. Activism, Life (Leiden and Boston: Brill and Ro- My aim is to provide a preliminary framework for this combination of contributions to the dopi, 2014), p. 176. posthumanities and primarily to explore their cultural and artistic implications. I attempt to 4 Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), show that posthumanist debates are interrelated and thus require much more assembling, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Pol- and in that sense this issue of the Large Glass is an inherently interdisciplinary venture, itics (Durham NC and London: Duke University which