posthuman aesthethics

Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar of science fiction, writes that “Native slipstream,” a subgenre of speculative fiction, “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like a navigable stream.” The immense possibilities inherent to this genre, she continues, allow “authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures.” 

Biidaaban (Dawn Comes) (2018), a short stop-motion film by Vancouver-based Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong, illustrates the political possibilities of Indigenous slipstream, and Indigenous science fiction more broadly, to envision liberatory futures in the face of forces that naturalize the current destructive, capitalist, and colonial order.This paper takes as its starting point a problem posed by cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who suggested that capitalism has become so naturalized that it is nearly impossible to imagine an alternative future. Concurrently, I consider the arguments made by Dené political theorist Glen Sean Coulthard that dispossession of land is the foundation of capitalism and colonialism and that the politics of recognition reinforce settler colonial structures of domination.

With these premises, I read a number of writers on Indigenous science fiction and Indigenous political resistance alongside Biidaaban in order to demonstrate how the film’s marriage of anti-colonialism and refusal of settler recognition provide an answer to Fisher’s dilemma. The concepts of biskaabiiyang (Anishinaabemowin, “returning to ourselves”), intergenerational time, grounded normativity, and resurgence are all antidotes to capitalist realism. 

These related terms refer to political strategies that counter colonial power through land-based practices, experiential knowledge, and a rejection of the politics of recognition. Biidaaban and Indigenous slipstream denaturalize capitalism by placing equal emphasis on the past and the future as on the present, the primary domain of capitalism. Similarly, since the control of land, human bodies, and non-human animals are paramount for colonialism and capitalism, this form and representation of resistance counters the very foundation of domination.This paper serves as the foundation of a larger research project that investigates how the spatial and temporal practices in Strong’s film represent the aforementioned concepts of Indigenous resistance towards colonialism and Enlightenment epistemologies. Strong’s hybrid documentary/fiction films blend traditional stories, time travel, oral history, and contemporary life, drawing on both fine art and film practices.

For this reasons, this research draws on the history of art (particularly contemporary Indigenous art, performance art, feminist art, and ecological practices) and film studies (emphasizing Canadian animation) to offer a nuanced reading of Strong’s work. Methodologically, this project is guided by Indigenous feminist thought, posthumanist theory, and ecocriticism to understand the complex web of relationships between the human and non-human worlds that are integral to Biidaaban and Strong’s other work.

This presentation explores the cultural imaginaries of machine vision as it is portrayed in contemporary science fiction, digital art and videogames. How are the relationships between humans and machines imagined in fictional situations and aesthetic contexts where machine vision technologies occur?

We define machine vision as the registration, analysis and generation of visual data by machines, and include technologies such as facial recognition, optical implants, drone surveillance cameras and holograms in this. The project team has selected 335 creative works, primarily games, novels, movies, TV shows and artworks. We have entered structured interpretations of each work in a database (http://machine-vision.no/knowledgebase). We have identified situations in each work where machine vision technologies are used or represented. For each situation, we identify the main actors involved, and specify which actions each actor takes. For instance, the scene in Minority Report where eyedentiscan spider-bots scan Anderton's newly-replaced retina to identify him involves the character John Anderton, who is evading and deceiving the machine vision technologies. The machine vision technologies biometrics and unmanned ground vehicles (the "spyders" or spider-like bots that crawl through the apartment building to find Anderton) are searching, identifying and deceived.

Many contemporary games and narratives have key characters who are machines, cyborgs, robots or AIs, ranging from the Terminator to contemporary figures like the emotionally awkward SecUnit in Martha Wells' Murderbot novels, or the android player-characters in games like Detroit and Nier: Automata. Our analysis of 36 such characters finds that their actions in relation to machine vision can be grouped around three key action verbs: analysing, searching and watching. Interestingly, the watching cluster has two distinct sides, where one set of related actions seems to cluster around communication and social activities, with verbs like hiding, impersonating, confused and feeling, while the other side shows the passive and uncomfortable ways these machine characters engage with machine vision, as they are disabled, overwhelmed and disoriented. Of course, all these machine characters are imagined by humans, and their very positioning as focalisers, narrators and protagonists in narratives and games tends to lend them human qualities.

The 235 human characters we analysed use machine vision and are affected by machine vision in many different ways. Humans are watched, identified and scanned, and they are scared. The most frequent action taken by humans in relation to machine vision is evading it, but the next more frequent action is to attack using machine vision technologies. There is of course far more nuance in the material than this might suggest, and human characters also use machine vision technologies for activities such as deceiving, embellishing and killing. Our quantitative analysis will be qualified using close readings of excerpts from the works we have analysed.

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century advances in physiology – in particular the discovery and characterisation of the autonomic nervous system, an adaptive physiological mechanism that carries out life-sustaining functions entirely automatically – led to growing awareness of the central role of automaticity in human survival.

Reflecting this growing awareness, French physiologist Claude Bernard observed that, despite appearing 'free and independent', humans largely rely on automatic processes for their survival, just like their evolutionarily more ancient precursors. Further emphasising Bernard's idea, at the turn of the century American philosopher and psychologist William James estimated that ‘nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of [human] activity is purely automatic and habitual'. These and similar observations suggested that, whilst intuitively appearing defined by individual agency and free deliberate choice, humans are, to a large extent, dependent upon evolutionarily ancient automatic physiological mechanisms.

Human thought, action, and survival itself, are largely a matter of habit. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century progress in the understanding of the central role of automaticity and habit in human physiology was paralleled by growing interest in the role of automaticity and habit in literature and art.

Some of the physiological observations on automaticity elaborated in the medico-scientific literature were assimilated into and mobilised by avant-garde art in ways that challenged the understanding of the human as voluntary agent. For example, echoing James's claim that most human activity is 'purely automatic’, French poet André Breton proclaimed Surrealism to be '[p]ure psychic automatism'. Surrealists strove to free their work from rational restraints by becoming spectators of their own subconscious, relinquishing control over their own selves, and turning into passive vessels for creative forces.

In an attempt to access the 'superior reality' of the automatic thought, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists developed techniques of automatic writing, drawing, and painting, which effectively integrated physiological insights on the centrality of habit in human survival, thought, and behaviour, and mobilised habit for its creative potential.

In my paper I will explore specific aspects of this integration of physiological insights on automaticity and creative mobilisation of habit, by examining ways in which the resulting literary and art-practices (e.g. automatic writing, automatic painting) challenged contemporary conceptions of the human individual, author, artist, and spectator as free independent agent defined by voluntary choice and action, and capitalised instead on the idea of humans as physiological organisms, largely deterministic and dependent upon fixed automatic habit.

I will suggest that the result is an ante litteram posthuman (because deterministic, mechanical, and automatised) aesthetics, rooted in prehuman (because evolutionarily ancient) physiology

We are living-with our embodied and embedded lives now-here. Our entities are entangled not only with other (human and non-human) entities but also in the present time and local space, which are never only present and local. They should be rather considered as the assemblage of past-present-future with various forms of the glocality.

Merging Timothy Morton's notion of hiperobjects with Karen Barad's onto-epistemology turns us towards the posthuman aesthet(h)ics. According to our living-with now-here, I argue that we cannot differentiate ethics and aesthetics. We rather need to re-lecture Jacques Ranciére's concept of the distribution of the sensible in a posthuman manner.

For this purpose, I propose to analyse the novel "Drach" by Szczepan Twardoch. It is one of the most important contemporary Polish novels. It was translated into German (translation awarded with Brücke Berlin Literatur Award) and French. It is an Upper Silesian saga of two families, but the book's essential part is the narrator – the title character, Drach. They are a synonym of Earth, they have no gender, they speak all languages (so actually the book is written in Polish, German, and Silesian languages), they are in everything, and they are everything. Places and times do not matter to Drach, as well as the lives and deaths of human and non-human entities.

In Drach's perspective, everything happens here and now. The stories of Magnor and Gemander families are comparable to the history of subsequent generations of deer from nearby forests. I would like to propose the eco-logical reading of the novel, which means reading throughthe-oikos, through-the-home, or through-the-Earth. I would like to ask how a reading of Szczepan Twardoch's "Drach" can change our perception of the Earth, the time, space, and the living. Understanding the novel's multi-layered message can bring us closer to appreciating the rules of the posthuman community.

I point out that the concept of Drach is close to Gaia or Medea hypotheses, but I argue that Szczepan Twardoch has created a new notion – "the Drach hypothesis", which can be fundamental for comprehending the posthuman aesthet(h)ics.