Post-anthropocentric aesthetics: towards biohybrid systems

Abstract

This research project is an interdisciplinary research involving the areas of arts, natural sciences and communication and information technologies. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the relationship between technoscience, nature and society has been reconfiguring, radically transforming certain paradigms and cultural practices that have been constructed throughout modernity, especially those that support the separation of human, technique and nature. Information systems become pervasive and, at the same time, take on a global scale, reaching superhuman capabilities in data processing (big data) and pattern recognition and prediction (Artificial Intelligence). These transformations call into question local and global sociopolitical stability (Benjamin Bratton) of the power structures (communication, social control, political representation, economics, and governance) forged in modernity. At the same time, the perspectives drawn by Donna Haraway and Jason Moore put information technologies at the center of discussions on climate change and Capitalocene - a geological era in which capital determines planetary geography. In this context, the present research has the general objective of discussing the relationships between the most recent information systems, based on mass data processing and artificial intelligence, the living systems that make up the planetary ecosystem and the symbolic objects produced in the field of art - in particular, experimental artistic practices that take technology and science as media for their artistic procedures. Methodologically, the research is divided into three fronts of action. The first depart of a review of critical perspectives on the anthropocentrism of modern humanism (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, Boaventura Souza Santos, Marisol de la Cadena, Henrique Cunha, Brian Massumi and Vilém Flusser), questioning how this emerging thinking repositions the relations between technique, nature and human existence. This theoretical aproach seeks to provide critical parameters for the second front of action, centered on the analysis of the artistic production of the last two decades that is dedicated to the issues raised here, as cut short by this project. The theoretical and analytical discussions will be improved from a dynamic feedback process with experimental artistic practice. In this third action front, we start with the creation of "biohybrid" systems based on Artificial Intelligence, sensing of living systems and digital construction, in search of the elaboration of artistic works that formally and sensitively articulate modes of existence that respond to the new articulations between technique, nature and humanity. (AU)