This book offers intriguing philosophical inquiries into biotechnological art and the life sciences, addressing their convergences as well as their epistemic and functional divergences. Rooted on a thorough understanding of the history of philosophy, this work builds on critical and ontological thought to interpret the concept of life that underscores first-hand dealings with matter and experimentation. The book breaks new ground on the issue of animality and delivers fresh posthumanist perspectives on the topics addressed. The authors embark on a deep ontological probe of the concept of medium as communication-bridging and life-bearing. They also take on the concept of performativity as biotechnological art.
The book includes concrete, well-documented case studies and shows how certain narratives and practices directly impact ideas surrounding science and technologies. It will interest philosophers in art and technology, aesthetics, ontology, and the life sciences. It will also engage art practitioners in art and science, curators and researchers.
Author(s): María Antonia González Valerio, Polona Tratnik
Series: Philosophical Studies Series, 153
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 262
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
About the Authors
Part I: The Question of Life: An Ontological Stake
Chapter 1: Life in Medium: Rethinking the Possibilities of Art and Bio-Media from an Aesthetic Ontology
1.1 Art as Ontological Potency: Conditions and Trapdoors
1.2 Concepts that Do Not Explain Artworks
1.3 Strictly Not a Matter of Bio-Media but Life
1.4 Mapping the Intertwine of Art and Life: Avoiding Universals
1.5 Inquiring Being from BioArt: Mind Major Pitfalls
1.6 How Do History and Time Matter in Art?
1.7 The Real as Mediated Mediation(S): No “In-Itself” but “By-Other”
1.8 Mediations of Mediations: Becoming Through Other Here and There
1.9 Art in Its History or Art Today as Mediation of Mediation
1.10 Specific Mediations: The Complex Instead of the Simple
1.11 Where Do We Go from Here? Further Possibilities for the Intercrossing of Art and Science Through Mediations
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 2: On Technique and Spaces: A Question of Limits
2.1 Culture and Nature
2.2 Techniques, Materialities, Realities
2.3 Technique and Ontology
2.4 Art as a Technical Device
2.5 The City as Technique in the Era of Climate Change
2.6 The Question About Spaces
2.7 Subjects in Spaces
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 3: Microperformativity: Performance with Tissue-Engineered Cell Culture
3.1 The Presence of Life and Performative Intervention
3.2 Delayed Communication and Performativity as Instant Communication
3.3 Microperformativity as Communication Between Cell Culture and Humans
Sources and Bibliography
Part II: The Politics of Life
Chapter 4: Art as Intervention into the Politics of Life
4.1 The Art of Making Transgenic Humans
4.2 Releasing the Laboratory Products into the Wilderness
4.3 Conclusion
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 5: The Animal: Between the Sublime and Instrumental Rationality
5.1 Instrumental Rationality of Techno-science
5.2 The World of the Dragons
5.3 The Vampyroteuthic Sublime
5.4 The Mechanistic Ecological Perspective
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 6: Spaces and Organisms
6.1 Spaces of Species: The Axolotl in Šebjanič’s Lygophilia Series
6.2 I Have Never Eaten Axolotl (Historical Circumstances of Becoming Axolotl)
6.3 Narrating the Idea of the Axolotl
6.4 The Biological Episteme that Shaped the Axolotl
Sources and Bibliography
Part III: A Philosophical Inquiry into Animality
Chapter 7: Of Mothers and Dogs
7.1 Becoming Mother
7.2 Becoming Animal, Becoming Other
7.3 Biopolitical Resistance: Becoming Bare Life
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 8: The Animal as Ontological Strategy
8.1 Subjects, Humans, and the Philosophical Question about What there Is
8.2 The Bios of the Animal
8.3 The Human, the City, and the Anthropocene
8.4 A Kingdom that Needs Not to be Ours
8.5 What Is it that Makes an Animal, Precisely an Animal?
8.6 Thinking the Animal from its Surrounding World
8.7 Where Does the Human as Animal Take Place?
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 9: Breaking Through Animalities
9.1 Animality as the Product of the Anthropological Machine
9.2 The Limit from Whence the Human Can Be Produced
9.3 How Animality Disappeared from the Surrounding World
9.4 Becoming-Horse
9.5 The Non-Human Life of a Tick
9.6 Animality is Not Humanity’s Other. It is Simply Other
9.7 Reversing the Anthropological Machine
Sources and Bibliography
Chapter 10: Territories
10.1 The Animal and the Territory
10.2 Philosophers’ Encounters with Animals
10.3 Animal Mediation
10.4 Subjectivity Denied
10.5 Thinking by the Birds
10.6 Which Animals Will We Ask and Where?
10.7 Lived Territories
10.8 Multifarious Multiplicities for Embracing Animalities
Sources and Bibliography
Author Index
Index of Arts
Subject Index
