Category Archives: Posthuman

Writer and Director: Christos Callow Jr.

Mayuri, or The New Human is a challenging new play by Greek British writer and academic Christos Callow Jr. Mayuris hour-long monologue, in a polished performance by Liza Callinicos, aims to explore the intersection of Callows interests in Greek tragedy, anime, posthuman philosophy and cyborgs.

The monologue begins as a surreal sermon, a reading from the work of Mayuri, who has now achieved the status of a god. Callinicos is a compelling narrator of Mayuris journey from human to machine. I dont want to shock you, Mayuri begins. She befriends the android Riza, renounces her human life, and agrees to have her brain transferred into a machine. Slowly parts of her physical body are replaced with robotic equivalents.

Mayuri admits she is addicted to this transformation. She feels liberated from pain and pleasure. Disturbingly, she is indifferent to losing contact with her daughter. By this point the play seems to be asking the big question of what makes us human. But as it progresses, its harder to hear the answer. Riza, the android, drowns herself. Central Government spreads a virus. Later Mayuri dies and returns as a ghost. As the staging suggests, she has inspired a cult following who gather to hear her words. There is talk of our relationship to the cosmos. At one point Mayuri shouts coldly at the audience I disown you!.

Its a piece full of ideas, but as a drama it becomes increasingly impenetrable. Callinicos is a hypnotic presence throughout, fully committed to her strange journey. But its a essentially a chilly work which, in its abstruse musings, is in danger of losing its audience. In his publicity, Callow teasingly describes his work as Fleabag meets Fullmetal Alchemist meets Zorba the Greek. The reference to Fleabag implies wit, intimacy and above all a refusal to take oneself too seriously. Callows piece takes itself very seriously indeed.

Reviewed on 11 August 2021

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Mayuri, or The New Human Chelsea Theatre, London - The Reviews Hub

Breaking Walls has revealed its nature documentary-inspired narrative adventure about the life of a sugar glider, AWAY: The Survival Series, is heading to PlayStation 5 in late Summer 2021. This is in addition to the PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 versions set to launch simultaneously.

The PS5 version of the game offers the most immersive experience, supporting our highest graphical setting, Documentary Experience. It leverages the PS5s impressive specs to highlight every detail of a world designed to live and breathe and truly brings it to life.

To further add to AWAYs documentary feel, Breaking Walls has just revealed its Photo Mode. Freeze the sugar glider anywhere and move the camera while the rest of the world continues in ambient motion. Photography fans are sure to be pleased with the comprehensive settings including depth of field sliders and filters to ensure you get that perfect shot!

AWAY: The Survival Series lets you star in your own personal nature documentary as you glide through the forest, sneak past predators, and hunt down your prey, all while a narrator describes your every move. Set in a distant future where nature has reclaimed the planet, AWAY is a narrative-driven survival adventure where you embody a tiny sugar glider embarking on a quest to save your family. Soar across misty chasms, leap from tree to tree, and climb to the top of the forest canopy as you journey across the posthuman wilderness!

As you brave these untamed lands, you will have to hunt down small prey, fight larger enemies, and hide from apex predators. Jump, climb, and glide through your environments as you solve navigational puzzles and make your way through the dense jungle. Along the way players will uncover the mysterious remnants of a fallen human civilization. While most of the game is played from the perspective of the sugar glider, there are brief sequences where players can control other animals and insects, such as beetles, lizards, crabs, and more. The world of AWAY is vast and wild, and theres something new to discover around every corner.

Breaking Walls is composed of an all-star team of industry veterans who have worked on acclaimed series such as Assassins Creed, Prince of Persia and Far Cry. Additionally, Breaking Walls has partnered with Life and Planet Earth II composer Mike Raznick to create an enchanting orchestral score for AWAY: The Survival Series. The result is a natural world brought to life with stunning detail.

AWAY: The Survival Series offers players a unique perspective on the world, both because you embody a sugar glider and because youre in a wholly original world thats part nature documentary and part sci-fi parable, said Breaking Walls Co-Founder and Creative Director Laurent Bernier. Being able to bring AWAY to PlayStation 5 means we can realize this world in more detail than ever, offering a more immersive experience.

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Story-based sugar glider adventure AWAY: The Survival Series is coming to PlayStation 5 in late Summer - - Mygamer.com

A Brief Apology for a Catholic Momentby jean-luc marionuniversity of chicago press, 120 pages, $27.99

The manifest nihilism of our present moment and our headlong plunge toward a posthuman, post-political future is proving to be quite a stimulus to Catholic thought. The apparent rapprochement between post-conciliar Catholicism and liberal modernity seems to be falsified by events. The disintegration of the prevailing world order demands new reflection on Christian existence among the ruins.

Jean-Luc Marions slender new volume, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment, is a welcome entry into the fray. Author of profound studies in philosophy and philosophical theology, Marion is not known as an apologist or a political commentator. But more surprising than the fact of his intervention is the audacity of his central provocation: that despite appearances, this moment of disintegration and collapse may yet prove to be the dawning of a Catholic moment. Making deft use of Justin Martyr's defense of Christian faith in ancient Rome, Marion reprises the great apologist's claim that Christians are to the secular city the most useful of men. The Church nurtures a communion transcending politics, and only this release from the increasingly impotent mania of the political makes possible the restoration of the universal within a crumbling human society.

Marion seeks simultaneously to justify the Churchs continued existence in French society and indicate a way forward. He charts a course between the French heresies of progressivism and integralism, which he regards as a fantasy. For him, the so-called crisis of the churchmeasured by sociological criteriais really a reflection of the hopeless decadence of broader society. He focuses particularly on France, but his central pointthe contrast between crisis and decadencecould be extended more broadly. A society becomes decadent when the political power appears as an impotent fraud and it cant help but tell people that this is so by making them pay the ever greater price of its failure. The defining marks of decadence arepowerlessness and paralysis, the incapacity to make a decision that would inaugurate true reform. As citizens, Christians are by no means immune (or exonerated) from todays decadence, and yet the Church is founded by Christ and ever reforming itself in response to his call.

Against the backdrop of modern decadence, the Church appears, counterintuitively, as the only society that is not in crisis because it can practice freely its true crisis by deciding over and over again for Christ. Echoing Augustine, Marion argues that the Church makes possible a communion that is truly universal and therefore more than political. This prevents the sacralization of politics on either secular or integralist terms. It also allows Christians to remain loyal to the always imperfect city of man, for in contrast to progressive reformers who rage against the limits of what can be done, believers are not susceptible to this crisis mentality. For these reasons, Christians furnish society with its best citizens from the point of view even of the interests of the city of men.

Thus Marion argues against Frances paradoxically religious ideology of lacit, which has effectively become a blank check for the expulsion of Catholicism from public space, while praising the 1905 law mandating separation of church and state as an expression of the perennial teaching of the Churchand as a perennial contrast with Islam. The proper separation of political power and spiritual authority is a uniquely Christian achievement that alone can prevent us from making the state absolute; actuate the more-than-political communion necessary for real political community; and manifest the universality necessary for the realization of libert, galit, and fraternit. In order to become brothers, it is necessary to come from a father, from a common father who universally precedes each son. The attempt to manufacture this brotherhood on our own concludes in terror.

True, but one wonders if this is adequate to the demands of the moment. Marions argument has some limitations, the most important of which flow from the primacy of the phenomenological method in his philosophy. It is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to formulate an adequate social and political theory from a phenomenological analysis of experience. Arriving at a fully social and political vision will either require the addition of political, metaphysical, and theological elements extrinsic to the phenomenological method, or the final theory will omit indispensable considerationslike the natures of things.

In Marions book, theology seems at times like an extraneous, even pious add-on to his philosophical method, while his political and ecclesial analysis turns disappointingly sociological at crucial junctures. His concluding treatment of power and authority, which he calls un-powerand which moderns universally conflate, is important. It can help us rescue these concepts from their political captivity. Yet it remains partial. He does not consider how a proper understanding of authority, rooted in a Trinitarian metaphysic, might transform the meaning of power itself. He appears to take for granted the modern equation of power and force, and that modern political theory is the science of powerwhich implies a juridical or administrative state indifferent to nature, truth, and ultimate goods. Despite Marions political pessimism and unique style, it is questionable whether his conception of political order differs essentially from Murrays or Maritains.

The central problem is that Marion sidesteps the question of what politics owes to reality. He does not grapple with the question of whether political order should somehow bear the order of creation or partake in some way of the kingship of Christ. In championing separation, which he likens to the American First Amendment, Marion does not entertain the historical possibility that it was the desacralization of political order that led to making politics absolute. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in late modernity politics is sacralized as the science of power becomes the first philosophy. Conversely, Marion doesnt consider that a properly sacralized politics rooted in metaphysical reflection neednt necessarily conflate political power and spiritual authority, and that it could avoid idolatry and absolutism by relativizing politics within a supra-political order.

Marion is rightly suspicious of the political temptations that can easily accrue to such a theological vision, especially under conditions of social disintegration and hopelessness. Yet what Marion dismisses as nostalgia and integralist fantasy may have a necessary and renewing function as a kind of Augustinian memoria of the true city. Its practical impossibility is beside the point, or rather precisely the point. For in memoria and longing, the true city is manifest in its absence. Our longing might, indeed, be the very form that life in the Spirit takes in us, enabling the Christians partial contribution to the justice of the earthly city.

Marion is wrong to disavow metaphysics, without which it is difficult to give much cognitive content to the notion of universality. His definition is vague: Everything that transcends the specific conflicts among groups, the contradictory interests, the ideologies, and identities, everything that puts the unity of the nation in danger. This studied metaphysical restraint contrasts with how the Church stands virtually alone in defending universal human nature, indeed the principle of reality itself, from fierce biotechnical and ideological assault. Marions vision of universality seems long on caritas and short on veritate, when in the present moment it is precisely the Churchs defense of human nature and reality that needs to be infused with metaphysical depthand confidence.

Marion offers a genuinely speculative attempt, as Hegel says, to comprehend ones own time in thoughtin contrast both to the progressives, who exchange thinking for pastoralism and sociologism, and the integralists, who conflate thinking with archaeology. This is a welcome philosophical antidote to the relentlessly political character of contemporary Catholic thought on both the left and the right. His maxim, Politics, yes, but never first, is surely correct; for the nihilism of our political order is not at root a political problem. And it cannot ultimately be overcome by political means, by embracing the Polish or Hungarian models, however preferable these regimes may be to the rapidly decaying West. The Church can change the face of the world only by remaining itself. But it can remain itself only by changing itself (allowing itself to be changed) from generation to generation in accord with the call that it constantly receives. This is an important and indispensable insight. Yet defending the truth of creation and human nature is included in this call, and to answer it we will have to go beyond Marion.

Michael Hanby is associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America.

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Beyond Integralism and Progressivism | Michael Hanby - First Things

Even though the pandemic has accelerated the shift towards sustainability by using organic, recycled or natural materials, it is not enough for the fashion industry to be truly sustainable. The real challenge is to replace the majority of textiles and materials created with fossil fuels with biodegradable materials. In the early 2000s, Suzanne Lee introduced biodesign into the fashion industry through Biocouture, which started as an academic research project. It resulted from a conversation with a biologist that answered the question, how else can we create materials for a sustainable future?

Biocouture envisions future manufacturing systems that inevitably consist of biodesigned living organisms and forming engineered materials into biodegradable products. For a few years, we have seen the advancement of some alternative materials like Piatex, a natural leather made from fibres extracted from pineapple leaves and Mycelium, a network of interwoven thread-like polymers that constitute the vegetative part of mushrooms. Lets dive deep into biodesign processes and discover how Biomaterials are changing the face of sustainable production and consumption.

Nancy Diniz, a course leader of MA Biodesign at Central Saint Martins (CSM), describes biodesign as a means to incorporate the inherent life-conducive principles of biological systems, data and inter-species relationships into design thinking and making, with the aim of protection of natural resources, the environment and ecosystems. At CSM, they are training and teaching students to work with different types of biological specimens, including mycelium, micro and macro algae strains, pigmented and bioluminescent bacterium and moss, both in and out of their Grow Lab.

We collect samples of living specimens from natural and built environments, then we examine and propagate them. We teach about the biological, biochemical and biophysical processes which govern how living systems grow, interact and thrive. This understanding of complex interconnectedness of the organic and inorganic and amplification of inter-species relationships is a core component of our design thinking strategy, states Diniz.

Working With Mycelium

NEFFA, a Dutch Research, Design and Development company focusing on fashion innovation, is making waves internationally by working on the intersection of technology, microbiology and textiles. We caught up with their founder Aniela Hoitink to understand their unique approach. We focus on changing material and production techniques instead of changing human behaviour. We believe this is easier than changing our consumption behaviour, as it is older than our production techniques, she shared.

They are currently working on MycoTEX, a spinoff project that they want to bring to the market. It is an award-winning, all-in-one solution for fashion brands. We use an automated, seamless production technology to create custom-fit products out of sustainable, vegan textiles made from mycelium (mushroom roots).

Her quest to create innovative textiles and products based on personalisation inspired her to establish biodesigned production cycles. Gathering inspiration from the biological life cycle and how nature has its own consumptive behaviour, she further explains: While working with mycelium, I discovered we could re-think not only the material but also the production technique. Every year a tree sheds its leaves to get a new set. Could we make garments that can be grown and composted after wearing, just like the tree with its leaves? This is how the concept of MycoTEX was born.

Testing Out Biodesign

Acclaimed London-based photographer and artist Ram Shergill who is known for questioning the notion of identity, dress, and the power of performance, is merging biodesign in his work. Currently, he is in the third year of pursuing a PhD on The Critical Posthuman Carapace: Constructing Exoskeletal Hybrid Living Systems (a bioregenerative system). According to Ram, his research focusses on exploring the creation of forms of design, architecture, constructing a bioregenerative carapace (a protective covering), acting as a shield for the body for use in harsher environments such as the Moon and Mars, and to see how their application would be beneficial on Earth.

Ram is collaborations with space technologies that deliver algal experiments to the ISS. Using architectural design in combination with biochemical engineering, hybrid bioregenerative outputs are created, combining human with non-human organisms (microalgae) explicating a mode of critical posthuman practice, he explains. In his research so far, the work created by Ram in fashion has been the crux of his design aesthetic to develop his upcoming design strategies.

What Does All This Mean For Designers?

Aniela and her team believe that a combination of technologies can pave the way towards the future of design. She states that many companies focus on material development and the recreation of existing types of material. They are also working on improving different parts of the manufacturing processes. We feel that by bringing the two together and developing a new method from scratch, we can truly challenge the status quo and make improvements in terms of the environmental and economical footprint that are not possible when only focussing on single aspects of the fashion life cycle.

On the other hand, Ram believes that biomaterials combined with biodesign can enhance the future of fashion. Biodesign can support new ideas in fashion and can be incorporated with new materials. My research, which is focused on bioregenerative systems through speculative bio-integrated design could potentially be a future concept for fashion on planet Earth and beyond low Earth Orbit.

According to Nancy, biodesign is the future for all design disciplines. She feels that it is necessary to raise awareness about the positive impact of bio-based fashion apparel to see a change in the production systems and consumer behaviour. In designers and consumers, we already see a desire to have a less harmful impact on natural resources. The devastating impact on ecosystems and biodiversity caused by the fashion industry has to be addressed by stakeholders from a multitude of disciplines, including bio designers, she adds.

Recently, we have seen Phillip Lim team up with industrial designer Charlotte McCurdy to create a petroleum-free dress covered in bioplastic sequins. Stella McCartney has also showcased the worlds first garments made using Mylo, the mushroom-based vegan leather. Without a doubt, companies and designers will accelerate natural, renewable material sources and regenerative practices as solutions that will actively improve natures ecosystems rather than just do less harm.

Thumbnail: Courtesy of Stella McCartney | Banner image: Courtesy ofMycoTEX.

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Are Clothes Made From Mushrooms, Bacteria And Yeast The Way Forward For Fashion? - ELLE India

THE CROWD AT THE SMOLNY INSTITUTE had only just stopped applauding, the minority delegates having reluctantly ceded the floor, when the leader of the revolutionary congress grasped the sides of the podium and spoke the first words of a new era. We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order, Vladimir Lenin said: In Russian, the verb he used was stroit (), literally to build; in time, versions of the phrase would become a rhetorical rallying cry throughout the Soviet Union and its allied states, adorning the overpass of a dam on the Volga River, for example, and the side of an apartment block in Moscow. From its very founding, the political project of twentieth-century communism was married to the idea of building things.

Exactly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet experiment, and half a continent away, the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale has become a showcase for design cultures renewed interest in the buildings of historical socialism, with a handful of installations on related themes opening last month both inside and outside the official exhibition. The Venice cluster represents only the latest development in an ongoing trend. From books (Owen Hatherleys 2015 Landscapes of Communism, for starters) to museum shows (most memorably MoMAs 2019 Toward a Concrete Utopia: Learning from Yugoslavia) to a palpable influence on architectural practice (the revived interest in Brutalism especially), the discipline has been busily rediscovering the lost landscape of postwar Eastern Europe for some time now. Whats on display at the Biennale proves how pervasive that influence could yet become, as well as how richand how fraughtthe legacy of socialist-era design truly is.

As is often the case in Venice, some of the best work is being presented by the national delegations. (It should be noted that the central exhibition, curated by architect Hashim Sarkis, gave its lifetime-achievement award to the late Lina Bo Bardi, a designer with a long and complex relationship to communism.) Echoes of the Soviet past are discernible in the Russian pavilion, where an open-ended video game allows visitors to navigate a landscape of decaying Khruschevian housing blocks in a kind of postsocialist, postcapitalist, posthuman dreamscape. The Croatian pavilion features industrial and military detritusmost or all of Yugoslav provenanceculled from the streets of Rijeka, recast as items in an urban jungle gym. Brazils contribution includes a gorgeous photographic study of Rio's sprawling Pedregulho Housing Complex, as outstanding a monument to economic planning as can be found anywhere in the world. If none of this quite amounts to an open call to return to the political values and aesthetics of a half century ago, it certainly suggests a rapprochement.

Perhaps the most exciting (definitely the most imaginative) take on communist architecture after Communism comes from Hungary, where a curatorial team led by Dniel Kovcs has crafted a show of rare visual and intellectual concision. On one side of the pavilion are photographs and models of largely defunct buildings in Budapest constructed under the so-called Goulash Communism of Jnos Kdr. On the other side, proposals from contemporary Hungarian architects attempt to reimagine the same structures for the twenty-first century, navigating a fraught cultural and legal landscape in the process. Under its current municipal government, explains co-organizer Szabolcs Molnr, the Hungarian capital has made it prohibitively difficult to preserve midcentury buildings, slowly effacing the memory of the socialist period. To counteract this, pavilion contributors imagine playful, inventive proposals to bring life back to a defunct community center and turn a former power station into an indoor garden. The floorplan of the show is especially elegant, maintaining a precise symmetry between the two sections and inviting visitors to bounce back and forth between endangered past and speculative future.

If the Hungarians are looking ahead, a more reflective attitude is being struck over in the Serbian pavilion. Titled 8th Kilometer, its installation takes a searing look at an urban condition that predated the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but was intimately linked to the economic program of the Tito regime. Bor, a mining community in the countrys mountainous east, was founded in 1903 on the site of major copper deposit. In a process that accelerated after World War II, the town expanded straight south from the minehead, with each new phase of development marked by distinct building types: industrial followed by commercial followed by administrative and so on, in successive layers. The resulting forma linear city, as the curators describe it in one of the many pieces of literature accompanying the showwas a paragon of rational planning, a dream of progressive architectural thinking made real. It was also, as eventually became evident, an incredibly unpleasant and quite dangerous place to live, severely polluted and overdependent on the volatile copper market. The pavilion installation consists of an appropriately linear walkway encased in gleaming copper with a detailed sectional model on one side and a vast informational wall panel on the other. Step by step, kilometer by scale kilometer, the visitor sees the story of Bor unfold in all its promise, its ingenuity, and its tragedy.

But for sheer nostalgic power, nothing at Venice quite matches Skirting the Center, a small monographic satellite exhibition at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati. Its subject, Svetlana Kana Radevi, was a woman ahead of her time, conquering a field dominated (then as now) by men, and a designer who embodied the best of her time, turning out resorts and houses and monuments in a Brutalist-inflected idiom alive with vigor and optimism. Born in Montenegro in 1937, Radevi succeeded in becoming one of Yugoslavias most celebrated architects. Her achievements earned her international recognition, and the show documents her lively correspondence with the likes of Louis Kahn and Kisho Kurokawa; it also reveals her delightful knack for public relations, with archival footage from a 1980 Yugoslav-television profile in which she appears on a beach, chatting and tracing patterns in the sand, a picture of demure artsy femininity. It was, of course, a bit of an actbut what was not was Radevics belief in her countrys political mission. Kana was deeply committed to the social politics of the Yugoslav welfare state, says Anna Kats, who curated the show alongside Dijana Vucinic.Radevis masterwork, the Hotel Zlatibor, was built in 1981 as a center not just for tourists, Kats says, but for local community life. Everything about it, from the bracing vertical thrust of its exterior envelope to the elegant ballrooms and bedrooms inside, bespeaks an enduring faith in a singular social vision, the ability of a people to live together in equality and abundance.

Yet all of itor most of it anyway: the carpeted interiors, the hypermodern roller chairs, the stunning globular ceiling pendantsis now gone. The building itself still stands, but it was recently gutted by new owners; even if theyd preserved what was there before, the cultural context that gave it meaning had disappeared long before, swept away with the whole apparatus of socialist self-management as it existed during Radevis career. The architect died in 2000, and in the years since her work has fallen into relative obscurity. So what does it mean that her buildings, along with those of many of her contemporaries, are now getting a second look? And in Venice of all places?

No question, its a little funny that the Biennale should be the locus of such an intense outpouring of Marxian melancholia. Assuming its present form in the 1990s, the Venice show is practically a high holiday of orthodox neoliberal architecture, when, every two years, design-minded pooh-bahs of assorted descriptions private-plane in from Rotterdam and Baku, conjuring castles in the digital air while gawking at the yachts moored along the Grand Canal. Social responsibility has been in the air at least since the Massimiliano Fuksascurated edition in 2000, Less Aesthetics, More Ethicsbut the whole operation has largely been a stage on which elite consensus can strut and fret for a few months then go back to business as usual. That the current participants are looking somewhat harder at alternative modes of political economy (and thus of architectural production) is definitely a good thing, though whether its enough to change the overall tenor of the Biennale seems doubtful.

Then again, thats not necessarily the point. Obviously, this Biennale takes place against the background of an extraordinary resurgence in enthusiasm for leftist politics in the West. But the point of view afforded by the show in Venice is subtler than any endorsement of a particular platform. Theres one moment, in the Hungarian pavilion, that demonstrates the real potential for designers in exploring the vanished built environment of Communism: In a proposal from Ukraine-based MNPL Workshop, a looming 1960s apartment tower would be partially covered in a sort of sky-patterned tablecloth, complete with fluffy white clouds, in a way that that simultaneously masks its bulk and celebrates its soaring ambition. As a form of loving satire, its a pitch-perfect idea, skewering the megalomania that drove the socialist builders while defending their contributions from the megalomania of modern capital. Only architecture could manage this kind of critical cannibalism: building a new world within the shell of the old, while finding a place for the old world in the shell of the new.

Ian Volner

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Ian Volner on the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale - Artforum

Posthumanism marks a careful, ongoing, overdue rethinking of the dominant humanist (or anthropocentric) account of who we are as human beings. In the light of posthumanist theory and culture, we are not who we once believed ourselves to be. And neither are our others.

According to humanism a clear and influential example of which can be found in Ren Descartess Discourse on the Method (1637) the human being occupies a natural and eternal place at the very center of things, where it is distinguished absolutely from machines, animals, and other inhuman entities; where it shares with all other human beings a unique essence; where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of history; and where it behaves and believes according to something called human nature. In the humanist account, human beings are exceptional, autonomous, and set above the world that lies at their feet. Man, to use the profoundly problematic signifier conventionally found in descriptions of the human condition, is the hegemonic measure of all things.1 Posthumanism, by way of contrast, emerges from a recognition that Man is not the privileged and protected center, because humans are no longer and perhaps never were utterly distinct from animals, machines, and other forms of the inhuman; are the products of historical and cultural differences that invalidate any appeal to a universal, transhistorical human essence; are constituted as subjects by a linguistic system that pre-exists and transcends them; and are unable to direct the course of world history towards a uniquely human goal. In short, posthumanism arises from the theoretical and practical inadequacy or even impossibility of humanism, from the relativization of the human that follows from its coupling to some other order of being (Clarke 2008: 3).

Much scholarship has explicitly and extensively addressed different aspects of posthumanism in recent times; indeed, as Bruce Clarke has acutely observed, in the last two decades the theoretical trope of the posthuman has upped the ante on the notion of the postmodern (Clarke 2008: 2). In fact, in 2002 the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) announced in one of its newsletters that it was, given the growing interest, considering adding the subject term the posthuman to its influential MLA International Bibliography (Grazevich 2002: 6). The recent statistical information from the online MLA Bibliography provided by Richard Nash in his chapter on Animal Studies in this volume would appear to confirm that the MLA was unable to resist the rise of the posthuman. And the sheer range of academic disciplines in which posthumanist concerns have been addressed literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy, film studies, theology, geography, animal studies, architecture, politics, law, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, education, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, for example testifies to the ways in which posthumanism cuts across conventional disciplinary boundaries. Posthumanism belongs nowhere in particular in the modern university, in that it has no fixed abode, but its presence is everywhere felt.

But posthumanism is not merely an abstract academic affair, for popular culture has been crucial in the examination and expansion of posthumanist existence. Works of fiction such as William Gibsons Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Sterlings Crystal Express (1989), Richard Powerss Galatea 2.2 (1995), and China Mivilles Perdido Street Station (2000) have along with television series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and films such as Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii, 1995), and eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg, 1999) depicted humans and machines interfacing with and transforming each other in new, complex, provocative, pleasurable, and sometimes highly eroticized ways. To encounter such narratives is to see the certainties of humanism fade and to find bodies, minds, desires, limits, knowledge, and being itself reimagined in ways for which traditional anthropocentrism cannot possibly account. For instance, Galatea 2.2 refers at one point to the crumbling bastions of the spent, pre-posthumanist tradition (Powers 1995: 193). Upon these ruins dances posthumanism. That is to say, posthumanism is as much a matter of theory as it is a question of fiction. In fact, one of the recognitions of posthumanist culture has been that the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion (Haraway 1985: 66), for with the deconstruction of the opposition between the human and the inhuman also comes a waning of the conventional distinction between fact and fiction.

The timing of this flourishing has meant that the term posthuman often feels like a fairly recent invention, as if it were perhaps coined with the rise of online existence or the creation of the microchip. But post-Human (with the hyphen, subsequent capital letter, and italics) can actually be traced back as far as 1888, when it was briefly used in H.P. Blavatskys The Secret Doctrine, a strange and dense theosophical treatise (Blavatsky 1888: 2: 684).3 Blavatsky did not develop a detailed theory of the posthuman, however, and neither did the handful of writers Jack Kerouac among them (Kerouac 1995: 81) who used the term in passing at various points in the first half of the twentieth century. The signifier seems to have been born too soon and to have waited patiently for its moment to come.

That moment was almost certainly the publication of Donna J. Haraways A manifesto for cyborgs (1985). Although she did not actually use the terms posthumanism, posthumanist, or posthuman anywhere in her essay, Haraway proposed that a series of three interrelated boundary breakdowns (Haraway 1985: 68) have transformed the long-established and long-dominant figure of the human into a hybrid cyborg.4 Humanism, Haraway noted, has always relied upon firm and fierce distinctions between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical, but a host of dramatic modern developments (in science, science fiction, technology, capitalism, race and ethnicity studies, militarism, animal studies, and feminism, for example) had made such rigid, absolutist thinking unsustainable and politically dubious. By the late twentieth century, she wrote, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics (66). The human has become obsolete; the figure of Man has been replaced, and we cannot go back ideologically or materially (81).

Although Haraway notes that the cyborg has troubled and troubling roots in militarism and patriarchal capitalism (68), and although from one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (72), her essay argues powerfully for seeing hope and promise in a different reading of the cyborg. From another perspective, she continues, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints (72). A certain incarnation of the cyborg is to be embraced and celebrated, in other words, for its ability to expose the problems of thinking in essences and universals, and for the way in which it can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves (100101). The passage from humanism to a posthumanist cyborg condition need not alarm those whom Haraway calls progressive people (71), for it is in the pollution of the last beachheads of [human] uniqueness (68) that enchanting new possibilities for being and becoming, for ethics and politics, sparkle.

Posthumanism is not purely a question of high technology, however, and not merely because, as Hayles points out in How We Became Posthuman, technological rapture can all too easily shore up some of the most fundamental assumptions of humanist discourse.5 While it is true that a great deal of criticism and fiction has imagined the posthuman as a technological figure, other strands of scholarship have examined posthumanism in terms of architecture (Hays 1992), mathematics (Baofu 2008), intersex (Morland 2007), geography (Castree and Nash 2006), education (Spanos 1993), paleoanthropology (Mordsley 2007), sensation and cognition (Merrell 2003), rights (Baxi 2009), fetishism (Fernbach 2002), complexity theory (Smith and Jenks 2006), extraterrestrials (Badmington 2004a), botany (Didur 2008), autopoietic systems theory (Clarke 2008), and postcolonialism (Lin 1997).

One of the most striking and persuasive texts to argue in recent years for a posthumanism not reliant upon technology is Cary Wolfes Animal Rites, where the focus falls upon the unexamined framework of speciesism (Wolfe 2003a: 1) that underlies anthropocentric discourse.6 Wolfe begins by noting how literary and cultural studies are still dominated by speciesist assumptions, even though everyday American culture in the form of articles in popular publications such as Time and Newsweek, for instance has at least started to recognize that the humanist habit of making even the possibility of subjectivity coterminous with the species barrier is deeply problematic, if not clearly untenable (12; emphasis in original). Western humanism, Wolfe proposes, is founded and fed upon the hierarchical binary opposition between human and animal, and the aspiration of human freedom, extended to all, regardless of race or class or gender, has as its material condition of possibility absolute control over the lives of nonhuman others (7; emphases in original).

Drawing notably upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Animal Rites proceeds to offer productive ways to unsettle the sway of the discourse of species and to recognize that the human is not now, and never was, itself (Wolfe 2003a: 9).7 Humanism is a myth a remarkably powerful myth, certainly, but an untenable and dubious myth nonetheless. As long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, Wolfe concludes, in a powerful and convincing challenge to those who believe that politics and ethics cannot continue without humanism,

and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. (Wolfe 2003a: 8; emphases in original)

In the same year that Wolfes book shifted the terms of posthumanist debates, Donna Haraway published The Companion Species Manifesto, the title of which clearly echoes that of her earlier cyborg manifesto.8 But the book soon signals a certain unease with the cyborg, that figure which had, by 2003, so often been associated with Haraways name. I appointed cyborgs, she writes, to do feminist work in Reagans Star Wars times of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads for critical inquiry (Haraway 2003: 4). The reference to a herding dog gives a clue about Haraways shift of emphasis, for she continues:

So I go happily to the dogs to explore the birth of the kennel to help craft tools for science studies and feminist theory in the present time, when secondary Bushes threaten to replace the old growth of more livable naturecultures in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on earth. Having worn the scarlet letters, Cyborgs for earthly survival! long enough, I now brand myself with a slogan only Schutzhund women from dog sports could have come up with, when even a first nip can result in a death sentence: Run fast; bite hard! ( Haraway 2003: 45)

The reason for this move away from the cyborg and toward animals is pencilled lightly between the lines of the slender Companion Species Manifesto, but two texts published since 2003 make matters absolutely clear. First, in an interview published in Theory, Culture and Society in 2006, Haraway responds to a question about the term posthuman, about what the signifier means to her, about whether or not she finds it productive and enabling:

Ive stopped using it. I did use it for a while, including in the Manifesto. I think its a bit impossible not to use it sometimes, but Im trying not to use it. Kate Hayles writes this smart, wonderful book How We Became Posthuman. She locates herself in that book at the right interface the place where people meet IT apparatuses, where worlds get reconstructed as information. I am in strong alliance with her insistence in that book, namely getting at the materialities of information. Not letting anyone think for a minute that this is immateriality rather than getting at its specific materialities. That Im with, that sense of how we became posthumanist. Still, human/posthuman is much too easily appropriated by the blissed-out, Lets all be posthumanists and find our next teleological evolutionary stage in some kind of transhumanist technoenhancement. Posthumanism is too easily appropriated to those kinds of projects for my taste. Lots of people doing posthumanist thinking, though, dont do it that way. The reason I go to companion species is to get away from posthumanism. Companion species is my effort to be in alliance and in tension with posthumanist projects because I think species is in question. In that way Im with Derrida more than others, and with Cary Wolfes reading of Derrida.9 (Haraway 2006: 140)

Second, two years later, Haraways When Species Meet appeared as the third volume in the Posthumanities series edited by Cary Wolfe for the University of Minnesota Press. The opening chapter of the book, which builds as a whole upon the concerns of The Companion Species Manifesto, contains a striking statement about posthumanism:

I find [the notion of companion species], which is less a category than a pointer to an ongoing becoming with, to be a much richer web to inhabit than any of the posthumanisms on display after (or in reference to) the ever-deferred demise of man. I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences. I am not a posthumanist; I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind. (Haraway 2008: 1719)

Haraways recent work, in other words, has been marked by a notable anxiety concerning the term posthumanism. But her turn to companion species nonetheless retains the powerful resistance to humanism that informed her Manifesto for cyborgs. Human exceptionalism, she proposes at one point in When Species Meet, is what companion species cannot abide (Haraway 2008: 165), and in the ordinary, everyday relationships between humans and animals dwell the seeds for radically rethinking the anthropocentric discourse of species.

Cary Wolfe and Donna Haraway evidently disagree at the level of the signifier posthumanism, but their work nonetheless shares an insistence that the problematic reign of Man will continue until the familiar binary opposition between the human and the animal (the singular in each case is significant) is called into question. And texts such as Animal Rites, The Companion Species Manifesto, and When Species Meet have potent companions in scholarship by critics such Erica Fudge (2002, 2008) and Julie Ann Smith (2003, 2005) that examines how humanist speciesism fades in the face of ordinary encounters between humans and other animals. But there are also anxious voices. While a great deal of scholarship devoted to posthumanism celebrates the waning of humanist discourse Donna Haraway, for instance, famously ends her Manifesto for cyborgs by declaring that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess (Haraway 1985: 101) it would be a mistake to conclude that everyone who writes about the subject is in favor of posthumanist existence.

For instance, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama published a widely discussed book entitled Our Posthuman Future (2002), in which he proposed that the contemporary drift away from the principles of humanism was a dangerous development in need of urgent correction. Modern biotechnology, for Fukuyama, is a threat because it will possibly alter human nature and thereby move us into a posthuman stage of history. This is important because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species (Fukuyama 2002: 7). As humanism threatens to slide into the potential moral chasm (17) of posthumanism, Fukuyama calls for a defense of human nature, the transcultural common humanity that allows every human being to potentially communicate with and enter into a moral relationship with every other human being on the planet (9), and the natural differences between men and women (217). The final section of Our Posthuman Future, meanwhile, is entitled What to do and advocates strict regulation of biotechnology and an outright ban on the unnatural practice of reproductive cloning (207). Posthumanism, Fukuyama concludes, offers a false banner of liberty, and [t]rue freedom can only be achieved if humanism is preserved (218). In other words, while writers such as Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe have stressed the promising ethical and political possibilities that open up with the shift from humanism to posthumanism, Fukuyama sees only terrible loss in the fading of Man; the posthuman future identified in the title of his book is to be resisted at all costs, and politics, pace Haraway and Wolfe, cannot exist without recourse to Man.10

There is, in conclusion, no convenient consensus when it comes to questions of posthumanism: different critics have approached the term in different ways and have drawn different conclusions. And posthumanism is not the property or progeny of any particular academic discipline; on the contrary, it touches and troubles across the lines that conventionally separate field from field, mode from mode. One thing, however, is certain: posthumanism has become a major site of debate in recent years because anthropocentrism, with its assured insistence upon human exceptionalism, is no longer an adequate or convincing account of the way of the world. As N. Katherine Hayles reflected in 2005:

[T]he interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that I used to launch my analysis in How We Became Posthuman [in 1999] has already begun to fade into the history of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the debates are likely to center not so much on the tension between the liberal humanist tradition and the posthuman but on different versions of the posthuman as they continue to evolve in conjunction with intelligent machines. (Hayles 2005: 2)

Source: Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini. The Routledge Companion To Literature And Science. London: Routledge, 2012.

Notes1 For a concise, nuanced, and accessible overview of humanism, see Davies 2008.

2 An excellent account of the relationship between humanism and antihumanism can be found in Soper 1986. For a discussion of the relationship between humanism, antihumanism, and posthumanism, see Chapters 2 and 4 of Badmington 2004a.

3 I am not interested in establishing an absolute origin of the term posthuman; there may be uses that predate that of Blavatsky (although I have yet to find them). In the name of historical accuracy, however, it should be noted that Oliver Krueger (2005: 78) is completely wrong to claim that posthuman is present in Thomas Blounts Glossographia of 1656. Blount refers in his dictionary only to posthumian, a now-obsolete word which is taken simply to mean following, to come, or that shall be (Blount 1656: n.p.; spelling modernized).

4 Although cyborgs are often associated with the realm of science fiction (see Caidin 1972, for instance), the term itself was actually coined in 1960 by two scientists, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, to describe the technologically enhanced human being the cybernetic organism that they imagined safely exploring the dangerous depths of outer space. For more on the history of the cyborg, including a reprint of Clynes and Klines original article, see Gray et al. 1995.

5 The reading of Hans Moravecs Mind Children (1988) with which Hayless book begins is particularly insightful in this respect. Hayles points out that Moravecs apparently posthumanist drive to see human consciousness transferred into a computer relies entirely upon the classical humanist division between mind and body, in which the former is the immaterial, disembodied essence of the individual, while the latter is ultimately insignificant matter (Hayles 1999: 16).

6 For an excellent collection that acts as some kind of companion volume to Animal Rites, see Zoontologies (Wolfe 2003b). For an imagining of a posthumanism without technology, see Callus and Herbrechter 2007.

7 For Derridas most sustained engagement with the question of the animal, see Derrida 2006; related material is to be found in Derrida 2009. Although Animal Rites was published several years before the appearance of The Animal That Therefore I Am in either French or English, Wolfe regularly quotes from the unpublished typescript of David Willss translation.

8 Haraway acknowledges this connection in the first few pages of The Companion Species Manifesto, in fact, when she writes: This is not my first manifesto; in 1985, I published The Cyborg Manifesto to try to make feminist sense of the implosions of contemporary life in technoscience (Haraway 2003: 4).

9 Haraway is wrong to claim here that she uses the term posthuman in the Manifesto for cyborgs; perhaps she is thinking of a related text published several years later (Haraway 1992). 10 I have discussed at length what I see as the fundamental flaws in Fukuyamas book in Mapping posthumanism (Badmington 2004b).

10 I have discussed at length what I see as the fundamental flaws in Fukuyamas book in Mapping posthumanism (Badmington 2004b).

BibliographyAlthusser, L. (1965) For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, London: Verso, 1996.Badmington, N. (2004a) Alien Chic: posthumanism and the other within, New York: Routledge.(2004b) Mapping posthumanism, Environment and Planning A, 36(8): 134451. Baofu, P. (2008) The Future of Post-human Mathematical Logic, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Baxi, U. (2009) Human Rights in a Posthuman World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blavatsky, H.P. (1888) The Secret Doctrine: the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy, 2 vols,Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1952.Blount, T. (1656) Glossographia, Menston: Scolar Press, 1969.Caidin, M. (1972) Cyborg, London: W.H. Allen, 1973.Callus, I. and Herbrechter, S. (2007) Critical posthumanism or, the invention of a posthumanism without technology, Subject Matters, 3(2)4(1): 1529.Castree, N. and Nash, C. (eds) (2006) Posthuman Geographies, special issue of Social and Cultural Geography, 7(4).Clarke, B. (2008) Posthuman Metamorphosis: narrative and systems, New York: Fordham University Press.Davies, T. (2008) Humanism, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge.Derrida, J. (2006) The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. M.-L. Mallet, trans. D. Wills,New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.(2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. G. Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Descartes, R. (1637) Discourse on Method and Related Writings, trans. D.M. Clarke, London: Penguin, 1999.Didur, J. (2008) Postcolonial posthumanism in Kincaids Among Flowers: sniffing at the last post?, unpublished paper delivered at the Critical Posthumanism conference, 2729 March, Concordia University, Montreal.Fernbach, A. (2002) Fantasies of Fetishism: from decadence to the post-human, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Foster, T. (2005) The Souls of Cyberfolk: posthumanism as vernacular theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Foucault, M. (1961) History of Madness, ed. J. Khalfa, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa, New York: Routledge, 2006.Fudge, E. (2002) Animal, London: Reaktion. (2008) Pets, Stocksfield: Acumen.Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future: consequences of the biotechnology revolution, London: Profile. Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer, New York: Ace.Graham, E.L. (2002) Representations of the Post/human: monsters, aliens and others in popular culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press.Gray, C.H. (2001) Cyborg Citizen: politics in the posthuman age, New York and London: Routledge.et al. (eds) (1995) The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge. Grazevich, G.M. (2002) Emerging terminology in the MLA International Bibliography, MLA Newsletter, 34(1): 6.Haraway, D.J. (1985) A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s, Socialist Review, 80: 65107.(1992) Ecce Homo, aint (arnt) I a woman, and inappropriate/d others: the human in a posthumanist landscape, in J. Scott and J. Butler (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge, pp. 87101.(2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.(2006) When we have never been human, what is to be done?: Interview with Donna Haraway, interview by N. Gane, Theory, Culture and Society, 23(78): 13558.(2008) When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.(2005) My Mother Was a Computer: digital subjects and literary texts, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Hays, K.M. (1992) Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: the architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Kerouac, J. (1995) Selected Letters: 19401956, ed. A. Charters, New York: Viking Penguin.Krueger, O. (2005) Gnosis in cyberspace?: body, mind and progress in posthumanism,Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14(2): 7789.

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Categories: Cybercriticism, cybernetics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, posthuman, Science Fiction, Technocriticism, Technofeminism

Tags: A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway, posthuman, Posthumanism, Posthumanist Criticism, Posthumanist Theory

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It's the future and you're living on a space station in the great beyond! But the future is bad, and you're only a human consciousness in an failing artificial body owned by a corporation who want you back. That's how it goes in Citizen Sleeper, a sci-fi slice-of-life RPG announced this week by the creator of In Other Waters. I am certainly up for visiting a distant lawless space station to eek out a living, thwart a corp, and maybe even make some friends. Check out the announcement trailer below.

That looks great. One of the more exciting games I've seen at E3. Love a bit of dystopian posthuman living. And in the game etc.

It'll go day by day, with us deciding where to go, what to do, which systems to hack, who to talk to or help, and so on, with only limited time to spend each cycle and timers also ticking on the rhythms and events of other people's lives. You know, a bit like Persona but in the future and with the hounds of space capitalism nipping at your carbon fibre heels. It's tabletop-y enough for dice rolls too, which I think are rolled at the start of a cycle then we have to decide where best to apply that pool of numbers. I think?

Citizen Sleeper is coming to Steam in 2022, and that there store page explains more.

It's coming from Jump Over The Age, the one-man studio of Gareth Damian Martin. He notes that character art is from comics author Guillaume Singelin and music from Amos Roddy (who also composed for In Other Waters).

Alice Bee's In Other Waters review said it was "really very good", meditative and calming and "possibly exactly what you need right now." That was March 2020 and I honestly don't know how I'd update the sentiment for June 2021.

Disclosure: Gareth Damian Martin wrote about the uncanny palace of Echo for us a few years back.

See the article here:

Citizen Sleeper is a dystopian slice-of-life RPG on a space station - Rock Paper Shotgun

Tucson, Arizona duo Trees Speak (Daniel Martin Diaz and Damian Diaz) make cosmic instrumental music steeped in the komische sounds of Can and Neu!, prog, and '70s soundtrack music (from Morricone to Carpenter). The group have been on a prolific streak lately and are gearing up to release PostHuman, their third album in a year, on May 21in the UK (June 5 in the U.S.) via Soul Jazz Records.

You can get an early taste of the album via "Elements of Matter," a seriouslyspaceytrack led by groovy bass, skittering drums and atmospheric keyboards and guitars that add to the overall psychedelic feel. We've got the premiere of it's animated video, made byTen Years Time, which really adds to the song's otherworldly vibe. Watch that below.

Trees Speak's previous album, Ohms, was one of Neurosis co-frontman Steve Von Till's favorite albums of 2020.

Trees Speak - PostHuman1. Double Slit2. Glass3. Chamber of Frequencies4. Divided Light5. Elements of Matter6. Magic Transistor7. Scheinwelt8. PostHuman9. Synthesis10. X Zeit11. Incandescent Sun12. Healing Rods13. Steckdose14. Amnesia Transmitter15. Quantize Humanize16. Glserner Mensch17. Machine Vision18. Hidden Machine

Go here to see the original:

Trees Speak prep 'PostHuman' watch the trippy Elements of Matter video - Brooklyn Vegan

Splatoon 3 was unveiled at Nintendo Direct in February 2021 and booked a presentation in the trailer for the third entry in the beloved series.

The trailer gave fans a glimpse of a new setting, Splatlands. It shows a very different kind of place from the bustling cities and wacky and alien landscapes associated with previous games.

This deviation from the previous game was terrible and intriguing to us, but more familiar elements that new hub cities and traditional 4v4 competitive multiplayer fans know and love. It became a pair with. Theres still a lot to learn about Splatoon 3, but Nintendo has confirmed attendance and hopes to be able to answer some questions during E32021.

Below is a breakdown of everything we know about Splatoon 3 and what we want to see.

Splatoon 3 is the latest in the series, dating back to its first entry on the Wii U in 2015, followed by Nintendo Switchs Splatoon 2 in 2017. This series focuses primarily on multiplayer battles between inkings. Ability to transform into squid to swim colored ink.

This feature is closely related to Splatoons gameplay. Its flagship multiplayer mode, Turf War, tells two teams of four players to cover as much of the map as possible with the teams ink. This is achieved by the player loading out the weapon. While maintaining the family-friendly atmosphere of Nintendo, Splatoons weapons fire colored ink instead of bullets and can be used to cover the map or temporarily neutralize enemies, depending on the purpose.

Splatoon also has a very fun assortment of weapons. From rapid-fire splatter shots to literally giant paint rollers, each weapon comes with its own sub-weapon and powerful special weapons. Splatoon 3 seems to add a few more to the mountain, judging from the trailer. There is a huge bow on the central stage, and it seems to be a lot of fun to play around with.

Turf War is a great fun at a fast pace as each team fights to demand as many maps as possible while keeping their opponents away. Players are free to swim their teams ink and speed up traverses and surprise attacks. On the other hand, your opponents ink not only slows you down dramatically, but also damages you over time. Rounds usually last for three minutes, and each match becomes a desperate scramble as the music intensifies towards the end.

However, 4v4 multiplayer is not the only card on Splatoons sleeve. Each game boasts other substantial single and multiplayer modes. There is a story that accustoms players to different types of weapons while offering an obstacle course to traverse (and unique enemies to fight).

Splatoon 2 further enhances the available modes of the series with Salmon Run, a collaborative horde mode in which players collaborate to fight AI-controlled enemy waves. This was later joined by Octo Expansion DLC, a large and rewarding single-player mode full of additional missions and boss battles.

Splatoon 3 is expected to include the same kind of feature set for that mode. Also, Splatoon 3 may contain some new tricks of its own.

The announcement trailer gave us an idea when we could add Splatoon 3 to our game collection. The game will be released in 2022, but no more specific date has been given yet.

The worldwide release dates for Splatoon and Splatoon 2 were May 2015 and July 2017, respectively. Therefore, it is possible to see the release date of Splatoon 3 from late spring to early summer in 2022.

Nintendo says it wants to publish more information about Splatoon 3 by the end of 2021. Im not sure if this will be done in the form of a dedicated Nintendo Direct or as part of the E3 2021 presentation, but I hope it will be included in the new information. A solid release date before the new year.

The Splatoon 3 announcement trailer is the first time Ive seen the next game. It started with what looked like the first customization phase of playable inking and its companies. It looks like a salmon that stands out as an enemy in Splatoon 2s salmon run mode.

Interestingly, it seems that the previously gendered option (players can choose boy or girl inking) is gone. While the familiar hairstyles, eye colors, and legwear options remain, Nintendo seems to have abolished letting players choose between two genders. This is a clear plus in terms of inclusiveness, giving players access to hairstyles that were previously gender-locked.

From there, the trailer leads to something that looks like an easy glimpse of single-player mode. Our inking goes through an apocalyptic dry landscape. Someone seems to have puzzled the Eiffel Tower as the abandoned structure is buried upside down on Earth. Incling then board the train before arriving at Splatoon Building, Splatoon 3s new hub city.

The trailer concludes with a look at Splatoons familiar and competitive multiplayer. This looks almost unchanged, except for a few new weapon types and a new way to enter the arena at the start of the match.

E3 2021

ESA has confirmed that the E3 will be fully digitized in 2021. This took place between June 12th and June 15th, and Nintendo was confirmed as an attendee.

Nintendo seems to follow the usual direct stream approach, and while we havent yet seen what will bring to the table, we hope the show will include up-to-date information on Splatoon 3s progress.

The game was a bit of a surprise announcement this year, but it didnt show up very often, so the E3 2021 is a great place to extend what players can expect from the game and narrow down the 2022 release date.

Splatoon 3 hires level designers to integrate existing stagesNintendo has linked jobs for Splatoon 3 level designers through a Japanese Twitter account. The job description discovered and translated by Twitter user Oatmeal Dome seems to have some interesting responsibilities.

The work of Splatoon 3 level designers often requires typical fares, such as arranging stage objects and balancing weapon attributes. But even more interesting is another responsibility that requires refurbishment of the existing stage.

There are several ways to do this. Splatoon 3 has the potential to bring back the stages featured in the first two games, even with various twists and changes. Given that, this makes some sense. Following the Splatoon 3 chaos theme, you may witness the stage reimagined in this image.

However, this could mean that a new level of designers would consider the new stages developed for Splatoon 3 and polish them for release.

However, if the former is true, its still unclear whether these stages will be variations of single-player or multiplayer maps. The remixed hard version of the story mission were familiar with sounds fascinating, but does Nintendo get a path to recycle old content?

The stage in question is likely to be from Splatoons multiplayer suite. Here are some of the fans favorite stages that will look great with a more chaotic makeover. Reusing stages in this way is not unprecedented. Splatoon 2s story mode took over some maps from multiplayer for certain missions, giving them a slight visual overhaul in the process.

There are many things Splatoon 3 can do to improve its predecessor. Splatoon 2 was a solid follow-up to the original, offering a fun new mode, but it felt repetitive, as it was made to maintain the look of the Nintendo Switch. Given that Splatoon 2 is the ninth-selling Switch game to date, its not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel that Splatoon 3 can do much more.

MatchmakingFirst, there are real improvements that Splatoons matchmaking absolutely needs. The most important of these is to be able to play more reliably with your friends. If you can believe it, both Splatoon and Splatoon 2 did not allow players to line up for multiplayer matches with their friends in the online lobby.

Splatoon 2 introduced a league battle where players can participate in pre-made groups, but confusingly, this mode was only available at certain times. In both standard and ranked play, it was impossible to play with friends other than randomly encounter them online.

The only way for friends to play with each other was through local play or playing against each other in a private lobby. Splatoon 3 absolutely has to deal with this. Splatoon has no excuses when all the other multiplayer shooters on the market let us team up with friends.

Ax time limit modeSpeaking of the limited time aspect of a particular mode, if Splatoon 3 avoids this convention, we love it. It was present in Splatoon 2 League Battles and Salmon Runs. The latter is one of the best modes the series has ever introduced. It was only available on certain days for several hours at a time.

Nintendo needs to make such modes accessible to players at all times. This will give you longer play and ultimately a more enjoyable experience. Splatoon is an incredibly fun series-Nintendo shouldnt be looking for ways to reduce it.

Better single player modeSplatoon 3 has a richer range of single-player products available. Whats in Splatoon and Splatoon 2 is great, but the basic game story mode is very short and theres little reason to revisit them to ban some additional collectibles here and there.

The Splatoon 3 trailer longs for a more open-ended single-player experience. Interesting fact: The story direction seems to be inspired by the results of Splatoon 2s final Splatoon Fest. The team of interest was Order vs Chaos, which Chaos easily won.

As a result, the world beyond Splatoons hub city appears to be in dire straits. Since this series has already established itself to take place in the posthuman world, Splatoon 3 has every opportunity to explore the turmoil left by humans.

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Artwork from the Carrying the Thick Present: Fabulation exhibition at the Point of Contact Gallery. (Photo courtesy of Catherine Spencer)

Point of Contact Gallery is proud to announce the opening of Carrying the Thick Present: Fabulation, the 2021 Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) exhibition curated by Manuela Hansen. Featured artists include Katlyn Brumfield, Ellery Bryan, Jihun Choi, Alvin Huang, Catherine Spencer and Dahee Yun from the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

The exhibition will be on view at Point of Contact Gallery from March 30-May 21. Admission is free and open to the public by appointment only, with proper social distancing and face masks worn over the nose and mouth. Guided tours will be available virtually or upon request.

To book an appointment, visit puntopoint.org. Carrying the Thick Present is broken down into three central themes: intimacy, fabulation and trauma. Fabulation, on view at Point of Contact Gallery, features six artists exploration into the potentials of fabulation, that is, of fabricating the real through speculative storytelling and alter-worlding. Eerie environments and monstrous organisms emerge. Communal care, dancing with ghosts and grieving with others are forwarded as methods of bearing the weight of loss. Gaming and tales of multispecies kinship heighten awareness of our enmeshment within a multispecies landscape. Through the gesture and practice of fabulation, these artists works offer other configurations to dwelling with loss and open us into an appreciation of our entwined shared living and dying. Through fabulations, these works reimagine the thick present and its multiple past and future durations, disrupting habitual narratives about the self and about our ways of living together.

Katlyn Brumfield grew up in Madison County, Kentucky, and earned her bachelors degrees in art history and studio art from the University of Louisville. Her sculptural work draws from the material culture of Appalachian agrarianism to create ritual settings for ecological mourning. Brumfield has collaborated with scientific collections and conducted international fieldwork in her research and creative practice. By weaving scientific knowledge into elegiac and regional narratives her works embody the emotional dimensions of imminent planetary catastrophe.

Ellery Bryan is a nonbinary visual artist working primarily with loss, ritual and temporality. Their artwork manifests as tactile objects, written and verbal text, aural installations, film and video. They envision the potential for tangible media and everyday environments to perform as entrances for mysticism and transcendent futures. They are based on unceded Piscataway land currently called Baltimore, Maryland, and have shown their work at institutions such as the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Jihun Choi received a bachelor of arts degree in media studies and production from Temple University in Philadelphia in 2017. He uses video documentation of self-expression to illuminate social injustices that directly affect him, while also investigating and identifying the complexities of humanities and the side effects of a society compartmentalized by identity. He identifies this as social gaze; a product of social construction, that is a tainted lens that everyone subliminally looks through. Chois position as an Asian minority artist is to express the lost sense of belonging that was generated from his own experiences and exposure to the diverse culture.

Alvin Huang was born in New York, grew up in the U.K. and now lives in Taiwan. He earned a B.S. in life science in 2011 and now takes an interdisciplinary approach toward the computer art field. His works focus on fictional biodiversity, where he uses them as a figurative device to invite people to think through real-world issues.

Catherine Spencer from rural upstate New York uses a wide range of materials in her work. By transforming found objects beyond recognition, she offers her audience an alternative environment. These environments reference various forms of escapism as well as the distortion of emotional pain. She received a bachelor of fine arts in painting at Alfred University in 2013.

Dahee Yun was born in March 1991 in South Korea and currently works in Syracuse, New York. She is a filmmaker, painter and film educator and her films have screened at numerous international film festivals. Conceptually, Yun investigates blurring boundaries such as reality and dreams and questioning normality; furthermore, her works always talk about women and animals based on her autobiographical story.

About the Curator

Manuela Hansen is a Fulbright Fellow from Argentina pursuing an M.A. in modern and contemporary art: critical and curatorial Studies at Columbia University. Her field of research includes contemporary art with a focus on the posthuman turn, institutional critique and Latin America. Through a post-humanist feminist lens, her thesis focuses on works by Mariko Mori, Anicka Yi and Mika Rottenberg, and argues that they can be seen as challenging pervasive dualisms in Western thought. Hansen currently serves on the steering committee of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery; she has also served at MALBA Jovens steering committee (Young Friends Association of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires). She has worked as adjunct professor of Latin American and Argentinean art in Universidad del Salvador, Argentina (2016-19); as project manager of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires (2017-19); and as artistic director of Buenos Aires Art Week (2019). Manuela earned her bachelor of arts (with Honors) in arts management and art history at Universidad del Salvador Argentina.

Exhibition Venues:

This program is possible thanks to the support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Cultural Engagement for the Hispanic Community and the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

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Point of Contact Gallery Announces the Opening of 'Carrying the Thick Present: Fabulation,' Syracuse University's 2021 M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition -...