Digital Exhibition Fabulation for Future

How to Become a Posthuman

The digital exhibition How to Become a Posthuman is part of the collective artistic research project Fabulation for Future, which is based on the call for deputies to form the fictive International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation. The international committee deputies …

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How to Become a Posthuman

The digital exhibition How to Become a Posthuman is part of the collective artistic research project Fabulation for Future, which is based on the call for deputies to form the fictive International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation. The international committee deputies met online for the first time in September 2021: during an online symposium Intra-Activity: the Posthuman, Fabulation and Matter and an online workshop, the deputies unfolded fabulative concepts and intertwined their approaches. These were sympoietically developed further in a subsequent 9-month project process and are now presented in the digital exhibition.

Due to the interrelated ecological, pandemic and economical crises we perceive humanity and its anthropocentric way of life on a damaged planet as in urgent need of change. How to Become a Posthuman invites the viewer to engage with diffractive possibilities of modification: how can we rethink the earth as a habitat for all species with differing spheres of life? And how can we reconnect these species and spheres in a non-anthropocentric way? The kaleidoscopically presented and often processual artworks and texts project initial speculative ideas of how the critical, posthuman being might reconceive the self. Necessary forces of artistic and philosophical action in social, political, economic and extra-societal contexts are conceived, tested, formulated, designated or designed with the involvement of human, non-human and more-than-human actors and relations. The digital exhibition How to Become a Posthuman is dedicated to fabulations, projections and thoughts that open up possibilities for agential performativity – an explicit “call for action”. The future is not something that happens, but something that we shape in the present!

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Christine Reeh-Peters, Fee Altmann

International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation

A call in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic to form a fictive international committee as a method of forming a “we.”  A “we” that matters as a socio-political reality; that has the potential to form a sympoietic, transdisciplinary network; able to transform the future and to formulate real performative possibilities. We, of course, did not know what would happen in the world of the “as if.” Immerse yourself in the assemblage of edited speeches by the committee deputies who met online in September 2021.

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The Circle

The consequences of the Anthropocene challenge the survival of all species on planet Earth. In this regard, the circle becomes the central form of posthuman resilience in the online exhibition. The circle symbolises a shared living place. Whether as an agora, a meeting forum or a theatre, whether as a stadium, a campfire, a chorus or a circus – the circle is a basic form of social gathering, a collective space of sympoietic experience, a site for entangled intra-actions where everything is connected. At the same time, the circle is one of the basic forms of bio-construction found on the biological nanoscale; for example, in the formation of bubbles, living cells or water molecules.

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Earth, Fire, Water, Air

The exhibition contributions place the four basic elements of earth, fire, water and air in a posthuman perspective. They are examples of figures of thought on the subject of “nature” and “being”that stem from the Ionian origins of Western philosophy. This pre-Socratic thought was influenced by several ancient cultures, such as Babylon and Egypt, and developed in parallel with the Chinese concept of the five elements as movements. As well in many indigenous cultures, elements such as earth/plants, fire, water and air are interconnected and, often along with many other elements, form the very balance of the sphere of nature.

The iconic symbol representing the International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation refers to the four elements. Their reference is meant as an impulse and a starting point, a conundrum: if they were once categorical criteria for grasping the world and understanding what it is made of, we propose to rethink them today in the context of climate catastrophes and the agency of nature. Fabulation for Future stands for thinking in motion, conceiving of all entities and beings as multiply interconnected, unfolding in an interdependent entanglement of becoming.

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Performativity

“The Circus is on Fire” is a metaphor for the state of the endangered planet Earth and its multi-species life forms, presented by committee deputy and circus artist Marie-Andrée Robitaille. How to Become a Posthuman proposes the circus as a hub of performative action and establishes the form of the circle as an elementary symbol. The circle thus becomes a sign with an affirmative character that calls for performativity and responsibility in the acute situation of upheaval.

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Coexistence

The exhibition contributions adopt a posthuman perspective through speculative fabulation. They propose to rethink the dichotomies of human-animal, human-plant, nature-technology as well as the human-human relation in a transversal way. Instead of a dualistic worldview, the principle of intra-active entanglement of all entities, including the human, becomes important. This post-anthropocentric principle potentiates spaces of thought as kaleidoscopic diffractions rather than reflections. Because: “Everything you touch also touches you. Everything that touches each other changes each other.” (after Octavia E. Butler)

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Agential Performance

In the digital exhibition, 20 reports performed by the deputies of the fictive International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation and 27 project contributions are intertwined, both in form and content, and refer to each other. Agential performance is hereby an elementary principle which generates intra-activity. Because: “There are no pre-existing individual objects with determinate boundaries and properties that precede some interaction,” rather, they “are enacted through specific intra-actions, where phenomena are the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies.” (Karen Barad)

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Diffractive Action

Performativity is one of the conceptual key motifs of Fabulation for Future. The aim is not to describe, reflect or depict the world; rather, to allow the productive forces of the arts and artistic research to become diffractive and to shape the new as a kaleidoscopic event. “In contrast to reflecting apparatuses, like mirrors, which produce images—more or less faithful—of objects placed a distance from the mirror, diffraction gratings are instruments that produce patterns that mark differences in the relative characters.” (Karen Barad) Different forms of knowledge produce actual presence and diffractively entangle thinking with action.

Sanja Andjelkovic: 10,9,8,7,6… © 2022
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Sanja Andjelkovic

10,9,8,7,6…

In a (post)-pandemic world we meet Dula (the daughter of late Arum from Different Kind of Heaven), who is unfolding her thoughts and experiences with entities while undergoing general anesthesia, while gently going through a period of technocracy set in a place of computer-generated images.

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Raquel Felgueiras – Are we there yet?

Raquel Felgueiras

Are we there yet?

Rethink how we move back and forth, how we perceive time, and the role of individual and collective memory. Digging and burying, storing and discarding are part of the fabric of time. Layers of movements that could be seen as opposing, but are in fact interwoven, weaving different paths through infinite repetitions. Are we there yet?  

Becoming, Alisi Telengut
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Alisi Telengut together with Tim Rumpf and Armi Salli

Becoming

Becoming can mean reflowering a barren landscape under a starry sky with a luminous multitude of plants and mushrooms. Becoming can mean fabricating a virtual reality to cultivate a sensitivity and a form of perception that enables a relationship with the more-than-human world.

Reclaiming She-Wolf’s Skin
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She Wolf Skin

Roksana Niewadzisz

She-Wolf Skin

A re-imagined She-Wolf folktale focuses on the liminality of the border through audio-visual means; skin and language become sites of transformation, questioning the ways in which intersecting ecological, political and social crises affect the bodies of wolves/women.

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Szi-ka-go-Pa-kr-el

Szi-ka-go Pa-kr-el

Future Archeology

Szi-ka-go Pa-kr-el is a space; a polyvocal archeologist of the future; a stitched-together body; a hybrid, semi-robotic creature; a computerized thought that emerges from a rhizomatic and fabulous media collaboration. The blended corpus of audiovisual artefacts is found footage from the past, left behind to be found, discovered, excavated and visited. The fundamental question is: What went wrong? What was left behind? Forms, hopes and memories—detached, deterritorialized, beyond time and place; artefacts floating in a virtual space; an imaginary future.

Life on Earth
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Stacy Lo, Sanja Anđelković

Life on Earth?

After taking the newly developed elixir of life, Sola flies to Mars without bidding a farewell to her loved ones. Forever banished from Earth, she manages to establish contact with them via satellite communication. As each of them dies naturally, the now immortal Sola watches her loved ones reincarnate into different organisms and attempts communication with them in their native languages.

Dating a Tree
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Dating a Tree

Doerte Weig, Roksana Niewadzisz

Dating a Tree – Dating a Composition

Have you ever dated a tree or explored human-tree relationalities or shared stories about engaging with tree beings? Come and experience how dating a tree is grounded in ecosomatic practice and earthly discoveries. 

Vital Fluids, Stacy Lo
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Stacy Lo

Vital Fluids

The viewer’s flight of fancy into the universe and back to Earth. A freefall into water marks the moment of “taking the plunge,” literally and metaphorically, upon re-entry into planet Earth. Maybe the most important resource for humans, water is now believed to exist in its original pristine condition on other planets, notably Mars.

Lisa Walder
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Lisa Walder

Oscillating as many, just as one

Hybrid creatures encounter each other in a digital space, creating visual noise and noisy kinship. They explore their own and each other’s bodies, moving within and through one another. In constant diffusion they become familiar with their inter- and intra-connectedness—oscillating as many, just as one.

I Moss You
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Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard

I Moss You

Three moss species and a rotifer are sent into space for human menstrual care. Moss as a celestial body could be a projection of man’s perspective and desire to control and dominate nature in space. What might the cohabitation of moss, rotifer and vulva tell us about caring for life on Earth?

Radicale Territory
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Vanessa Graf

radicle territory

Please note: The rights to display this video have expired. To access the video please contact the artist: vanessagraf.at

The animated short radicle territory explores the Internet as growing entity, sprouting out of, around, inside and over older infrastructures and technologies. A chorus of humans and machines speculates (or advertises?) what this strange plant could look like, reading a text co-produced by both artist and algorithm, while glitchy and DIY aesthetics lure the viewer into colorful visual imaginaries reminiscent of the early Internet. The visual language reflects both the broken and misadventurous path to the creation of the film, as well as the Internet’s materiality, culture and collage-like multifacetedness that overgrows the glossy and highly curated images of the digital age today. Created partly on a dying computer, partly in the Cloud, the piece pose questions of individual, collective and technological agency right from the beginning of its creation, and continually captures the trouble in this radicle territory (re: root domain).

Belen Cerezo
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Belén Cerezo

Notes for the Persistance of Things

Following in the footsteps of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) a polyphonic film explores the interrelation among humans and non-human beings and entities such as technologies, phenomena, environments and things. Recorded footage in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, the place itself as much as the camera equipment become sensual co-creative agents, fabulating tools in the artistic work-in-process. It takes us (along) into a vibrant tactile world in which ordinary things are in the foreground.

garden
Hertzian Tails: Bela Usabaev
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Bela Usabaev

Hertzian Tails

In the misty glow of artificial light, two women appear—figures. Their braids are shaped into horns, which they explore—dancing—like unknown head extensions. An open dance explores the sensual form through movement and gives new shape toward something that points beyond what we know of ourselves—embodied. Performing knowledge as if… as if one can be partly animal, a mythical creature, fabulating being part of nature.

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Lichen Manifesto

Dovile Aleksaite, Sanja Andjelkovic, Roksana Niewadzisz, Alisi Telengut, Dörte Weig

Lichen Encounters

Being can mean being particularly curious about bodily experiences of othering with plants and fascinated by the specific hybrid nature of lichens as composites of fungus, algae and cyanobacteria. A new perspective may emerge by exploring how such processes of co-bodying can contribute to generative human futures and symbiotic cohabitation.

Effacements
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Kika Nicolela

Effacement

During a stay in the village of Calce (France), known for its production of natural wines, the “Effacements” (Erasures) were developed: through the encounter with the inhabitants of the place, who share their beloved landscapes with us, we dive into a reflection on the relationship and connection between man and nature, between landscape and time, between place and memory. Fabulation is a future narrative.

The Covers Are The Eyelids
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Dani Landau, Anouk Hoogendoorn, Madhuja Mukherjee, Sanja Särman, Joshua Wagner

The Covers Are The Eyelids

Double vision simultaneously sees what is and what will be and maintains an impossible stance where both a treasure and its loss are keenly felt as sources of value. A golden paper accordion plays the role of a treasure before which eyelid after eyelid is closed in a zigzaging blindness which forebodes one’s inevitable immersion in the decay of Nature. Encompassing both what was once eternal and what will forever be gone unless we act in an impossible field of vision, double vision gently invites us to reshape the present.

Of Speeds and Slownesses
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Florian Goeschke

Of Speeds and Slownesses

A giant snail of the species Achatina fulica was invited to collaborate in a computer-generated composition. A body in motion. Collaborating with another species encourages reconsidering one’s own time and temporality.

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Prudence Gibson

The Plant Contract

“The Plant Contract” postulates that visual and performance art can change our perception of the vegetal world and enables us to return to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human dissociation from the natural world.

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Marie-Eve Levasseur

Swiping compressed filtered love (et enfin, permettre l’incontrôlable)

Strategies of encounter using the filters of an algorithm beyond language. A fictive extension gives the filtered flirtation an uncontrolled dimension by simulating hormonal emissions.

Weather in Me
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Dovilė Aleksaitė

Weather in Me

Inspired by a subjective reading of the Beaufort wind force scale and David Hawkins’ emotions map, a digital thirteen-part scale system fabulates on how weather and emotions are interconnected. Their entangled relation is now expressed through various soundscapes, spoken words and 3D visuals.

Marie-Andree Robitaille
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Multiverse
© Einar Kling Odencrants

Marie-Andrée Robitaille

Multiverse

As I walk in the MULTIVERSE, the performative site is filled with images of planetary constellations, minerals, elemental-biological ecological beauty and devastation, life and extinction; a universe folding and unfolding in and out of itself in which I am not the master but instead a responsible part of the whole. MULTIVERSE is neither an achieved nor achievable fixed circus act but rather a “material-semiotic experiment,” a mutable live fable that composts and re-composes each time.
The last human on Earth is a Circus Artist.

Syrma
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Gusztáv Hámos / Katja Pratschke

SYRMA

SYRMA is one of nine sample cities. The poetic narrative is an important element of city descriptions. That which cannot be photographed is written down. That which cannot be said is photographed. Text and images are in dialogue with each other. The process of de- and reconstructing using cinematographic means allows and fuels thinking in paradigm shifts—visible in the photo works as new urban potential spaces.