Post-humanism is best understood as several overlapping and interrelated fields coming out of the traditions of anti-humanism, post-colonialism, and feminist discourse. But the term remains contested, both by those who wish to overturn, or even destroy, the ‘humanism’ after that decisive hyphen (post-humanists), and those engaged in the project of maximising their chance of merging with technologies, and reaching a supposed point of transition, when the current ‘human’ has been augmented, upgraded, and surpassed (transhumanists). For both those who wish to move beyond ‘humanism’, and those who wish to transcend ‘the human’, there remains a significant, shared, problem: the supposed originary separations, between information and matter, culture and nature, mankind and machine, singular and plural, that post-humanism seeks to problematise, and transhumanism often problematically ignores, lead to the delineation of ‘the human’ as a single, universalised figure. This universalism erases the pattern of difference, which post-humanists see as both the solution to, and the problem of, the human paradigm. This thesis recognises this problem as an ongoing one, and one which – for those who seek to establish posthumanism as a critical field of enquiry – can never be claimed to be finally overcome, lest the same problem of universalism rear its head again.

To tackle this problem, this thesis also enters into the complex liminal space where the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ confuse and interrupt one another, but rather than delineate the same boundaries (as transhumanists have done), or lay claim over certain territories of the discourse (as post-humanists have done), this thesis implicates itself, myself, and yourself in the relational becoming posthuman of which we, and it, are co-constituted. My claim being, that critical posthumanism must be the action it infers onto the world of which it is not only part, but in mutual co-constitution with.The Practice of Posthumanism claims that critical posthumanism must be enacted in practice, and stages itself as an example of that process, through a hybrid theoretical and practice-based becoming. It argues that posthumanism is necessarily a vibrant, lively process being undergone, and as such, that it cannot be narrativized or referred to discursively without collapsing that process back into a static, universalised delineation once again. It must remain in practice, and as such, this thesis enacts the process of which it itself is a principle paradigm.After establishing the critical field termed ‘posthumanism’ through analyses of associated discourses such as humanism and transhumanism, each of the four written chapters and hybrid conclusion/portfolio of work is enacted through a ‘figure’ which speaks to certain monstrous dilemmas posed by thinkers of the posthuman. These five figures are: The Phantom Zone, Crusoe’s Island, The Thing, The Collapse of The Hoard, and The 3D Printer (#Additivism). Each figure – echoing Donna Haraway – ‘resets the stage for possible pasts and futures’ by calling into question the fictional/theoretical ground upon which it is predicated. Considered together, the dissertation and conclusion/portfolio of work, position critical posthumanism as a hybrid ‘other’, my claim being that only through representing the human as and through an ongoing process (ontogenesis rather than ontology) can posthumanism re-conceptualise the ‘norms’ deeply embedded within the fields it confronts.The practice of critical posthumanism this thesis undertakes is inherently a political project, displacing and disrupting the power dynamics which are co-opted in the hierarchical structuring of individuals within ‘society’, of categories within ‘nature’, of differences which are universalised in the name of the ‘human’, as well as the ways in which theory delineates itself into rigid fields of study. By confounding articulations of the human in fiction, theory, science, media, and art, this practice in practice enacts its own ongoing, ontogenetic becoming; the continual changing of itself, necessary to avoid a collapse into new absolutes and universals.

AN EVALUATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY: DIGITAL CULTURE, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, THE INTERNET, THE WEB By David Abrahamson Northwestern University Prefatory Note: What follows is a discursive compilation of more that four-hundred-and-fifty items, most of fairly recent authorship, united by a common -- though ve

with: Jean-Marie Boyer, Ewen Chardronnet, Nicolas Maigret, Daniel Rourke, Erin Sexton; moderated by Ryan Bishop

Disnovation Research is a project inquiring into the mechanics and rhetoric of innovation. Considering the "propaganda of innovation" as one of the ideological driving forces of our era, it aims to explore the notions of technological fetishism and solutionism through speculations and diversions by artists and thinkers.

The performance Drone-2000 presents a bestiary of autonomous flying systems powered by dysfunctional algorithms. Here, trusting the autonomy of the machine is not only a discursive concept but a real-life experience shared with the audience, triggering visceral and psychological reactions.

The Disnovation panel highlighted a few outstanding projects on this issue, with Daniel Rourke introducing the #Additivism speculative research project – a collaboration with artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari – followed by Ewen Chardronnet presenting the fifth issue of the Laboratory Planet newspaper.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt Thursday, 4 February 2016

Part One

by Daniel Rourke

"The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel."

- Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website

In 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper section and nine abstract Bachelors in its lower. Duchamp took oil, lead, varnish and dust and sandwiched them between panes of glass. The Bachelors encounter their Bride in the presence of a large, gorgeous, chocolate grinder whose drums revolve in motions which seem to reach up, across the divide, to touch the ethereal Bride in her domain.

In 1936 Duchamp 'fixed' the broken Bride by repairing, rather than replacing, the shattered panes of glass. He claimed to like it better that way.

Today progenies of Duchamp invest time, thought and often a great many dollars in their own artworks. The successful ones amongst them package those artworks up in foam, plaster and cellophane to be moved, shipped and re-exhibited in multiple gallery spaces again and again. Without dwelling on the commodification of the artwork I want to build my own scheme for understanding these movements. I want to rest a little and draw the lines of desire that artworks traverse; the paths they take that human intent had nothing to do with; the archives they carry within themselves. For every map there are points we must plot, spaces and places in real space and time that require isolation and signification. We grab a GPS device and codify the crossroads where St. Martin's Place meets Trafalgar Square, marking carefully the precise angle via which Madonna on the Rocks will be fed through the clamouring crowds into the The National Gallery's mouth. Artworks live in motion, just as readily as they live in the gallery. In the dark recess of transit they sketch a hidden, secret life away from the viewing eye, becoming not 'art', but 'object' – traversing the gap between these concepts as they travel.

The Bride now rests out her Autumn years in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, waiting for gravity to release her chocolate grinder once again from its sandwich of (un)shattered glass.

Through Plato's writing we know that Socrates maintained a deep mistrust of the art as object, distinguishing three realms through which art must move before it was realised. In Book X of The Republic Socrates develops the metaphor of the three beds. The ideal bed, made by God, the carpenter's bed, a mere imitation of God's idea, and the artist's bed, again made in imitation, but this time of the carpenter's creation. The art-object is twice removed from 'truth'. It is a model of a model; a mimetically charged, displaced falsehood. Like a black-hole emitting virtual particles in space, the realm we long to peer upon is always hidden, allowing only those particles escaping from the object to catch our gaze.

Ever since Socrates we've aimed to stretch, like Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, across an invisible divide into the realm of the absolute. Like Duchamp's Bachelors, ever removed from their beloved Bride, it is the network, the movement of the Earthly chocolate-grinder, that throttles our attention. We believe in an 'other' place, attempting to represent it in our paintings, our sculptures, novels and poems but we will never reach it - transfixed as we are on the material realm around us. Should we instead forget the Bride, and concentrate on the cracks beneath-which the chocolate-grinder forever whirls? Forget the 'ideal' bed and ponder on the imperfections the carpenter ensures in his work, as the hammer and nails meet in a blur?

* I will not talk here of the other exhibits in Altermodern – and elsewhere – that took me on similar discursive journeys. I will instead lend you a series of hyper-links, a network of possibilities, for you to travel.

A new breed of artist believes so. They make art that realises a network of possibilities, rather than a final imperfect solution. Artist's such as Walead Beshty, whose Installation of FedEx Sculptures echoes, in its shattered cubes, the 1927 incident when Duchamp's Bride was disfigured.

Beshty's FedEx Sculptures are a series of shatter-proof glass cubes broken in transit. What makes these boxes different from mere badly wrapped art-objects is the intent behind their destruction. The boxes are shipped by FedEx, rather than professional art-object shippers, from Beshty's studio to each new gallery. Their constant destruction sketches their character as meaningful objects. Each crack a palimpsest of movement, of random intent gathered in transit - between exhibitions. The boxes were exhibited as part of Tate Britain's Triennial, Altermodern, * earlier this year, where I had the opportunity to see them. Peering through the cracked panes, into the voids contained within each cube, I felt like a cartographer tracing lines made by movement and time to the source of an endless ocean.

Like the shattered panes of Duchamp's masterpiece, or the unique voids contained within Walead Beshty's FedEx Sculptures, time and movement have oft been deceived by our perceptions of art. For every artwork, whether considered whole or disfigured, is riddled with tell-tale cracks.

Throughout his second voyage to the Pacific (1772-75) Captain James Cook was accompanied by William Hodges, an ambitious artist whose landscape paintings would serve as a living archive of the expedition. Hodges was amongst the first people from Europe to see the Rapanui monuments of Easter Island, to sail The Cape of Good Hope or shake hands with the Maori of New Zealand. Hodges’ keen memory for light and atmosphere were responsible for much of the romanticism an enthused Europe would languish on Captain Cook’s expeditions.

Some of Hodges’ more unusual paintings were recently x-rayed in the lead up to an exhibition of his work at London’s National Maritime Museum. As well as revealing a wealth of archival information about the artist’s processes, x-ray images of his View in Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay exposed something far more spectacular. There, beneath the painted surface of the luminous rainforest canopy were two giant, white formations stretching up and out of a black swathe of ocean. Hodges, for reasons we will never fully understand, had chosen to paint over the first ever visual record of the Antarctic. The icebergs, having hidden for over 300 years under layers of oil paint, were freed by the roving, radiographic eye of the x-ray machine. The canvas usurped by its own regolithic layer; the history of the event ebbing over an invisible event-horizon like separated virtual particles.

Understanding that the archive is not contained solely in the document does not come naturally. To fully sketch the mimesis of art-objects we must devise better ways to peer beneath their surface. As I write this I am aware of what I am trying to say, and what I am actually saying. There is a gap between, a significant chasm that this text will never bridge. The art-object carries with it a history of its making, a memory of its movement. The art-object is vast in its potential to be seen and re-seen. Whether by accident, or intent, there are always cracks on the surface of an art-object. Some of these cracks may only be breached with new technologies – such as the x-rays that pulled across the void William Hodges' lost vision of the Antarctic. Some of these cracks are allowed to creep onwards by artists who long for their art-objects to develop lives of their own.

In this article I have concentrated on the movement inherent in art-objects. Scupltures and paintings are traditional fodder for this kind of exploration. But what of the text? How is the modern writer, aware of the networks of intent that spiral from her art-writing, best to shatter her work into life? How can we make the text move and encourage it to crack? And how will we read its movements upon its return?

This is a question I currently ponder. A question I hope to explore in Part Two of this article (to be published on Monday, 2nd of November).

by Daniel Rourke

machine says: What traditional libraries need is a more networked, discursive interface.I love the British Library. I spent half of my study time there last year, searching for specific books in the database and picking them up from the collection desks to study at my leisure. Imagine if once I had a book, once I had read, studied and digested its contents, I could go back to the database and enter my own '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata">metadata</a>' into the system! Suddenly the library has a crowdsourced, upper-most layer, and searching for material becomes a process of gliding through the network of possibilities that literature represents, rather than linearly trawling through limited text searches.Crowdsourced databases are multi-dimensional, and self regulating. In a traditional system, when I search for 'Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong' <a href="http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/KIGCXDV86V3FIRI9DP74XA7UA56GFLCF64F95G8PJH8P8M6DTE-30204?func=full-set-set&set_number=014333&set_entry=000019&format=999">I get a listing</a> separated into a few, limited subjects:- Language and culture.- Oral tradition.- Writing.- Oral-formulaic analysis.In a trans-grapholectic system, I might be able to add and/or discover a multitude of 'extra' information added by knowledgeable readers. Perhaps I have never heard of Ong's text and I am interested in theorists writing in the early 1980s, or authors who were born in Kansas City, Missouri, or writers on literacy who came from a Roman Catholic background, or books with chapters about 'Plato and Computers', or containing comparisons between the works of A.R.Luria and Julian Jaynes. In a normal library I may spend years studying these specific issues and never come across Ong's book. In a crowdsourced library a search would lead me down the right path much quicker, and allow me to get down the the important business of reading.There are other, more ethereal realms of information that crowdsourcing the library would uncover. A crowdsourced book would be completely searchable, after a time, so that the library database became like an extended appendix, index and bibliography for every book, all at once, and infinitely interlinked.I love libraries, and the methods of research that are carried out within their walls, models and databases, but I do believe that the networked library would be a more advanced kind of research tool, incorporating everything that makes books and libraries THE repositories of knowledge, but adding new layers of value and meaning. Socrates <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_%28dialogue%29#Discussion_of_rhetoric_and_writing">spoke at length</a> about the horrors of writing, about how it would become a crutch to true philosophical thought, about how it would distort debate, memory and logic. Plato wrote down his words, gave them structure. Further writers added footnotes, appendixes, contents and bibliographical bedrock to Socrates' words. Have we not benefited from these 'crutches'? Would not a database, searchable, tagged and crowdsourced version of Socrates' speeches be even more useful?The library WILL eventually be supplemented by the cloud. And I look forward to it.

A discursive model of praxis has developed within the critical art context over the last twenty years. It is the offspring of critical theory and improvised, self-organized structures. It is the basis of art that involves the dissemination of information. It plays with social models and presents speculative constructs both within and beyond traditional gallery spaces. It is indebted to conceptual art’s reframing of relationships, and it requires decentered and revised histories in order to evolve.