Simultaneously speculative and inspired by everyday experiences, this volume develops an aesthetics of metabolism that offers a new perspective on the human-environment relation, one that is processual, relational, and not dependent on conscious thought. In art installations, design prototypes, and research-creation projects that utilize air, light, or temperature to impact subjective experience the author finds aesthetic milieus that shift our awareness to the role of different sense modalities in aesthetic experience. Metabolic and atmospheric processes allow for an aesthetics besides and beyond the usually dominant visual sense.

American Cypher is a suite of projects that respond to American stories about race and DNA. The first module of this project was a sound installation commissioned by Bucknell University, inspired by Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd US president) and Sally Hemings (his slave and, as DNA tests confirm, mother to his children). The piece that we’ve made for the Download series is a performance score. The image in the video was recorded in the basement of Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Drawing on his book Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Ben Carver examines the figures and functions of evolution, isolation, and entanglement in the imaginary Utopias and Uchronias of speculative fiction, and plots some unsuspected paths between early counterfactual histories and the dark underworlds of contemporary conspiracy theory.

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission. A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi’s work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research ...

On the ledger and the herbarium: the settling of financial and botanical accounts. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the age of digital media and TCP/IP protocol architecture, the 1989 discovery of the manuscript of Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) in a locked safe perhaps appears more dramatic than the unpublished novel’s retrospectively tepid dystopian prophecies. Yet its narrator Michel Jérôme Dufrénoy’s employment in the banking house of Casmodage et Cie. provides unexpected insight into what it meant to keep the books in nineteenth-century France. The novel is set in a Paris of the 1960s, when literary culture was ...

This publication presents Peter Eisenman’s Biozentrum project, an expansion of Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, from 1987. In the competition brief, the program of the complex included biotechnology, molecular biology and biochemistry research laboratories and support spaces. The design process used biological concepts and procedures to generate the geometrical pattern that establishes the location, dimension and form of the complex. The iterations of DNA molecules in the production of the protein collagen were at the base of the fractal geometry guiding the project design. These pairs of figures, with a gap in between them, were the base forms Eisenman adopted ...

Dorian visits the stream to investigate gay frogs.

We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images—one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we ...

In a discussion of the epistemological questions that are central to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Milan Cirkovic insists that philosophical thinking is an indispensable part of astrobiology and SETI research.

A house is more than a home, it’s a part of you. Suburban absurdity meets posthuman horror in Maggie Siebert’s tale of an unusual episode in real estate.

Even in my dotage, I have never failed to mark the day that I felt compelled to distance myself from my first mentor, Francis Galton. In his day, he was a hero to his public, an intellectual giant amongst his peers, and the person I then credited with whatever learnedness I had achieved. During my youth, I was completely enamored of the conviction that Europe was unrelentingly progressing toward ever-greater prosperity and perpetual peace. This irresistible amelioration was fueled by science, engineering, and enterprise. The entirety of the earth, from the soil, to the animals, to humanity itself, could be ...

Life in all its variety and diversity is rapidly becoming the “property” of corporations through patents and “intellectual property rights.” A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention. Life, however, is not an invention. We can modify life-forms, we can manipulate living organisms. But we do not create life. The first patent on life was granted to General Electric for a genetically engineered bacterium. In 1971, General Electric and one of its employees, Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, applied for a U.S. patent on a genetically engineered Pseudomonas bacterium. Taking plasmids from three kinds of bacteria, Chakrabarty transplanted them into a fourth. ...