Category Archives: Posthumanism

Asia Culture Center (ACC) is pleased to announce the international open call for ACC Residency 2022. Applications are currently being accepted online with a submission deadline of June 13, 2022.

Under the theme of Post-COVID-19 Era, Posthumanism, ACC Residency 2022 seeks to interrogate issues such as the fourth industrial revolution in the contactless era, the changes in the notion of labor brought about by the digital transformation and the new relationship between humans and things (the post-human).

The Residency consists of five categories: Art & Technology, Visual Arts, Design, Theater, and Dialogue and is opened to all creators and researchers who have experience and capability to propose and implement a project exploring the theme.

ACC will support selected participants with workspaces, accommodation, a grant of 2,000,000KRW per month, and research/project funding up to 10,000,000KRW for Researchers and up to 50,000,000KRW for Creators. In addition, ACC will offer various resources from seminars, workshops to consulting sessions with experts as well as production facilities and audio-visual equipment in ACT Studio. ACC will work closely with the each participant and projects developed throughout the 5-month residency will be presented through showcase, exhibition and performance in December.

For more information and to apply, please visit ACCs website. The selection process will consist of two steps, application document review and interview through which around 27 individuals/teams are expected to be selected. The announcement will be made in July through ACC website.

Practical informationApplication period: May 23June 13,2022 (6:00pm KST)Apply onlineTheme: Post-COVID-19 Era, PosthumanismResidency period: August 2022December 2022 (5 months)Categories: Art & Technology, Visual Arts, Design, Theater, DialogueEligible applicants: Individuals/groups who have experience and potential and are actively involved in the relative fieldsSupportsGrant, project/research fund, and supporting programs.Presentation at group exhibition/showcase/academic event.Workspace, accommodation, and ACT centerAirfares for international participants

Materials to submitApplication form (including Personal Information Collection and Usage Agreement) in a provided form (.pdf)A project (or research) proposal in a provided form (.pdf)A portfolio in a provided form (.pdf, maximum 30 pages including the cover, not exceeding 50MB)A letter of recommendation (only for international applicants)

About Asia Culture Center and ACC ResidencyAsia Culture Center (ACC) located in Gwangju, South Korea, is an international arts and culture organization committed to bringing together and fostering exchange among different regions and disciplines. As one of its year-round programs, ACC Residency is a platform for research, creation and production that brings together creative talents from around the world to share their knowledge, technological insight and experience. Since 2015, it has supported the cross-disciplinary, inventive, and bold projects of more than 740 creators, designers, artists and researchers.

For more information, please visit acc.go.kr.

Original post:

Open call: 2022 International Residency - Announcements - e-flux

Fungi could perhaps be considered immortal because of the way they absorb nutrients from the living flora and fauna around them. Yet, we know so little about these organisms living among us.

In a quest to be more attuned to these natural phenomena, comparative literature instructor Laura Hunt ventures deep into mycology, literature and environmental science with her interdisciplinary class, Thinking with Fungi: Literature and Ecomedia in Conversation (CPLT 202W).

The class integrates science with literature, hoping to explore fungi and its uniqueness as a fully co-dependent species. Its less about learning how to identify various mushrooms or forage for fungi and more about shifting perspectives and to actually think and observe the natural world, Hunt said.

I hope this class will help inspire a worldview that would privilege the care for other beings, other life than just ourselves, she said.

Lullwater Park. (The Emory Wheel.)

Specifically, the impending and ongoing environmental crisis forces humans to challenge the narrowmindedness of the human worldview. Hunt uses fungi to question what it means to be an individual, or how an individual is defined. Mushrooms operate in a mycelial network, dependent on trees and plants that all communicate together to grow.

People often overlook fungi as part of the ecosystem, not understanding or even seeing the role they play, Hunt said. Much of our anthropocentric understanding of the world is based on power structures and dynamics, with a strong notion of independence and individualism, whereas fungi enter a symbiotic relationship with forests.

Aliyah Cook (23C) took Hunts inaugural class last year. Cook said her obsession with mushrooms from painting, drawing, photographing and collecting them was magnified after this course.

Life is so much more connected to itself than we understand, Cook said. Posthumanism makes us consider that we are not as special as we think; other beings exist in this world as well.

Posthumanism is complicated, but the general idea is that human agency goes beyond the individual, and many aspects of the world are not necessarily under human control.

Anna Bayuk (24C), another avid fungi enthusiast who took the class, asked that if humans survival is dependent on other species, like gut bacteria, are we really individuals?

Something fungi enthusiasts call the wood-wide web, a play on world-wide web, aptly describes the intertwined life of mushrooms and the environment around them. Understanding mycelial networks and the collaborative, facilitatory nature in which they flourish is crucial to reevaluating our social structures and determination to reach the top.

Not viewing natural resources as commodities requires a lot more focus and intentional observation. Thus, when the pandemic put a pause on our lives, Hunt decided to learn to forage and fuel her passion for fungi.

Mycelia infected my brain, and I was roped into the web, Hunt said. Its magical.

For her, discovering fungal networks and picking mushrooms to cook and eat was a re-enchantment of the world, and she said that she learned to be amazed by so many things she had previously taken for granted.

Unlike industrialized agriculture that allows us to eat whatever we want whenever we want, mushrooms cant be purposefully grown in a greenhouse or in our backyard like tomatoes or oranges.

If I want strawberries in December, they are in the store, Hunt said. But, with the mushrooms, they dont work that way.

Fungi are codependent on trees, the weather, the seasons and the functioning of the ecosystems around them.

Unfortunately, failing to see the natural world as consisting of reciprocal relationships, we manipulate nature to best aid our survival rather than accepting our lack of knowledge to recognize the way nature has survived and thrived without us for hundreds of years.

Fungi are completely the opposite of our go big and grow fast mentality; instead, they are small, slow and patient. Instead of racing through life as fast as we can, accumulating as much as we can, Hunt said, we should know who we are as something small, one of the many beings in the universe. To understand and be willing to embrace how small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things is a frightening feeling, but perhaps necessary.

Hunt referenced the story of matsutake mushrooms in author Anna Tsings book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins to explain the intertwining of mushrooms with nature. After the bombing of Hiroshima, forests were desecrated and destroyed. In an effort to repair the forest, people replanted a species of lodgepole pine that allowed matsutake mushrooms to flourish. Today, they are a highly sought after ingredient in Japan, further emphasizing the persistence and beauty of unity within the environment.

Kate Stevens (24B), who took Hunts class last year, said the course changed her world outlook.

After learning about how networks of underground fungi called mycelium provide channels between every plant for miles, you really will believe everything is connected, Stevens said.

Bayuk used mushrooms as a segue into a broader conversation about interdependence and the lack of empathy for difference. She gave the example of womens rights to illustrate her point.

The suffragette movement was accomplished through proving women could be like men, Bayuk said. Empathy came from proving similarity and not through embracing difference.

Bayuk also mentioned the South River Forest in Atlanta, which is being destroyed to create Cop City, a police compound for training officers.

We dont place enough value on the natural world, and we dont see the woods as having something valuable in them, Bayuk said. Were just running around looking for meaning and disconnected from all of it.

Hunt hopes her students will come away with more curiosity, questions and ideas and a greater sensory awareness of the world.

I never used to notice mushrooms very much, but since taking the class, I see them everywhere, Stevens said.

She also mentions @mushroomsofemory, an Instagram account dedicated to discovering mushrooms on campus grounds. While the owner has elected to remain anonymous, the account has drawn a large fanbase across the University. Many people share mushrooms from their hometown or places theyve visited, which also get posted regularly.

In a post-globalized world, we tend to forget about everything not immediately in our reach. But, the implications of our actions stretch beyond what we know, and the consequences ripple further than we can see or understand.

When asked why we should ultimately care about mushrooms, Hunt said we have to.

We should care in a way that doesnt involve terror and dread, but the celebration of life that makes you want to do better for the earth, Hunt said.

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More than just mushrooms: fungi class expands students worldview | The ...

With an increasing glut of water-themed exhibitions, the artworld is taking a compelling, aquatic turn

The ocean provides a model to accommodate change and unpredictability, to sway back and forth between, and ultimately to transcend, numerous disciplines, writes curator Stefanie Hessler in her essay Tidalectic Curating (2020). Proffering a radical premise for an alternative artistic practice, one that looks towards an aquatic, rather than telluric, form of posthumanism, Hessler invokes a term first coined by Barbadian writer and poet Kamau Brathwaite to describe a singular ontology linked to the oceans tidal movements in his words, the ripple and the two tide movement, which leads, above all, to a rejection of the notion of dialectic (and its three-part structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis). More importantly, Brathwaites thinking allows for a construction of identity that moves away from traditional anchors in time and place, to propose a new, fluid form that crossed oceans and continents. Its this thesis that thinkers and curators like Hessler gravitate towards. As she says, by following the thought of Brathwaite one may find oneself immersed in a hybrid worldview from the oceans, with their surfaces as much as in their depths.

Hesslers exploration of what has become more generally termed critical ocean studies or blue humanities, by scholars such as Elizabeth Deloughrey (who, along with Hessler, spoke at the Oceanic Imaginaries conference held in March at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) and Philip E. Steinberg, signals a compelling, aquatic turn in posthumanist critique of the last decade, and one that had been absent throughout large swathes of twentieth-century theory outside the narrow purview of the environmental activist movement. But the current exothermic transformations to the worlds hydrosphere have drastically rewritten the material imaginary of water and its relation to the terrestrial bios. Such changes are clearly visible in the aquatic-themed works of contemporary multimedia artists such as Superflex (Flooded McDonalds, 2009, and Dive-In, 2019), David Gumbs (Water & Dreams, 2014), Julien Creuzet (mon corps carcasse, 2019) and Elise Rasmussen (The Year Without a Summer, 2020).

Critical ocean studies water-borne imaginaries, however, have ventricles that stretch back far beyond a twenty-first-century eco-poetics. In fact, much of the current artistic fascination with these imaginaries is indebted to a premodern worldview, in which climate was often associated with a sublime, and leaky, volatility. In Gumbss experimental film, for example, a fluid collage of vivid, computer-generated colours and effects overlaid on video of tide pools and slow-motion droplets of liquid produces a sensation of immersive virtuality what might be called the image of digital wetness. Yet Gumbss techno-uterine fantasy is largely indebted to Gaston Bachelards 1942 text of the same name, in which the mercurial French philosopher conceives of a water mind-set that distinguishes between an ancient Heraclitean flux, and the Socratic metaphysics that dominated Western thought for centuries. [Water] is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth, he writes. [It is an] element more feminine and more uniform than fire, a more constant one which symbolizes human powers that are more hidden, simple and simplifying. For Gumbs, as for Bachelard, the water mindset is closely linked with an atavistic and maternal reverie, an experience that precedes the moderns emphasis on conscious thought and contemplation.

Despite its reputation as an urtext on water (Bachelards Water and Dreams is the second in a four-part collection he published on the elements), the philosophers work is not ahistorical; rather, it is rooted in a Romantic tradition of climatology and hydrophilia, which often employed the theme of water to blur the edges between artistic innovation and private fantasy. This lineage includes the Surrealist-inspired, painterly films of Jean Painlev, Jean Vigo and Jean Epstein; the proto-Oulipo novels of Raymond Roussel; the nautical, poetic-prose of Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Michelet; as well as the musical impressionism of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Lili Boulanger. They helped to prologue what Deloughrey (2020) would describe as critical ocean studies rich maritime grammar of swirling interdisciplinarity.

Rasmussens film The Year Without a Summer is similarly rooted in a Romantic-era history of water and climate, drawing comparisons between the global crisis of the Anthropocene and the colonial-era crisis instigated by Mount Tamboras 1815 eruption on the island of Sumbawa. The subsequent anomalies in aerosols, cold temperatures and rain lingered over Earth for years, with food shortages reaching as far afield as Ireland and Switzerland, while inadvertently helping to inspire the late-Gothic tradition in literature and painting. The emergence of murky seascapes and cloudscapes, like Caspar David Friedrichs Two Men by the Sea (1817) and J.M.W. Turners 181618 sketches (later published as The Skies Sketchbook), created at the height of Tamboras atmospheric fallout, show how the centurys increasing fascination with a water mindset was softening boundaries between traditional landscape and colour field, figuration and abstraction. This would reach its culmination in the liquiform abstractions of James McNeill Whistlers Thames nocturnes and the lacustrine impressionism of Claude Monet.

[Maritime mythologies] show us that the 19th century was an epoch of great speculations about the elements, German theorist Peter Sloterdijk writes in Neither Sun nor Death (2011). He points to the expansion of colonialism and the technologisation of shipbuilding for the eras changing relationships to the sea, in which the sublime was remodeled into the Titanesque [A]n ocean appears as a giant matrix, an immense test tube, as an immeasurable incubator. It is this contest between Titanic mastery and dissolution that characterised a Romantic poetics of water, or what cultural historian Howard Isham (2004) calls oceanic consciousness. As the paradigm of that mastery, the ship appeared not only as an image of colonial-era technology but also that of safe enclosure, a finite habitat against the vast, liquid unknown, according to Roland Barthes (1957), for whom Vernes Nautilus submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) is mans ideal, seaward living room.

In this sense, the iconography of the ship continues to appear in contemporary works like Superflexs mesmerising Flooded McDonalds, a film in which a fast-food restaurants self-contained interior is slowly submerged in water, sending all of its trademark scenography, food and plastic wrappings into a swirling vortex. As a miniature parable of a cataclysmic weather event, it also evokes the Romantic fantasy of the sinking ship on turbulent seas, a particularly popular Dutch subgenre of painting further dramatised by both Turner (The Wreck of a Transport Ship, 1810) and Friedrich (The Sea of Ice, 182324). Or in the followup, Dive-In, the group erects a coral reef-like megalith in the water-parched Coachella Valley and projects underwater images taken from onboard Dardanella (the research ship of TBA21-Academy, founded by art collector and activist Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, and of which Hessler was a curator, 201619), thus creating a cinematic aquarium on the desert floor. While the project suggests both the deep history of the valleys Lake Cahuilla and the future ruins of an apocalyptic sea-rise, it also recalls eighteenth- and late-nineteenth-century panoramic devices like the Eidophusikon (which often exhibited seascapes) or Hugo dAlesis Marorama. DAlesis protocinematic tourist attraction was erected for the 1900 Paris Exposition and allowed visitors to sit in a lifesize cruise ship, where they could view a hydraulic backdrop of the Mediterranean shore scrolling across the deck accompanied by artificial fragrances and mechanical soundscapes of sea travel. Like Vernes vision of the Nautilus, dAlesi aspired to craft a floating living room for the Romantics oceanic consciousness.

Vernes descriptions aboard the Nautilus also hinted at the nineteenth-centurys orientalised visions of Eastern waters. In the second section of Twenty Thousand Leagues he writes of the Indian Oceans surface as largely uninhabited by ships or sailors except for a floating graveyard of bodies that flows from the Ganges. Despite this, the sea itself is filled with plentiful treasures waiting to be discovered; and sharks, from which Captain Nemo saves a helpless Indian oyster diver, declaring him an oppressed compatriot. This depiction by Verne was based upon a prevalent, Eurocentric travel narrative that reduced the Afro-Asian worlds cultural and commercial infrastructures to an undifferentiated tribal paradise ripe for harvesting. In fact, the Indian Oceans trade winds and early shipping technologies had created a littoral network that contested European imperial power in both size and innovation, and contained its own oceanic imaginaries. It was only by the nineteenth century that European traders, buttressed by vast militaries and indentured labour, were able to gain control of South Asian shipping routes and attain global dominance of the oceans. Not coincidentally, the nineteenth century also saw the invention of the historical category of the Indian Ocean by Europeans, according to Indian Ocean studies scholar Rila Mukherjee (2013). It is along these same lines that creative mapmaking works like Yonatan Cohen and Rafi Segals Territorial Map of the World (2013) and Izabela Plutas Oceanic Atlas (vanishing) (2020) reimagine the apparatus of Western cartography in stratifying the borders between land and ocean, home and antipodes, West and East.

The European ship was also deeply implicated in the abhorrent activity of the Atlantic slave trade, which reached its zenith at the end of the eighteenth century but contributed to much of the wealth, technology and ideology of the nineteenth-century nation-state and those banana republics of the Caribbean archipelago that served as colonial fiefdoms. The Romantics oceanic consciousness contained the repressed memory of African bondage. This is examined in French- Caribbean artist Julien Creuzets video mon corps carcasse, which uses digital animation to simulate the ongoing poisoning of Martiniques tropical landscape through the contemporary plantation system, imaging the fluid absorption of toxins through the populations bloodstream. Here, the microscopic liquidity of the black colonial body draws an explicit link between what Hessler, citing both British theorist Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and queer studies scholar Macarena Gmez- Barriss The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), describes as the Wests extractive capitalism and the historical dispossession of the Middle Passage, in which millions of Africans were forced across the Atlantic as chattel slaves. In Creuzets film, as in the work of fellow French-Caribbean poet and critic douard Glissant, the Romantic water mindset must shed its Western fantasies of fixity and power, and embrace an archipelagic ethics of creolisation if it is to become truly tidalectic.

Critical ocean studies absorbs all of these rivulets of water-based imaginaries in an effort to reconsider their place in the contemporary, terrestrial world. With the increasing glut of water-themed exhibitions and scholarship, it appears the nineteenth-century oceanic consciousness has reemerged as a twenty-first-century water mindset. But the formers fantasies of immersion and abstraction have also prefigured the impending climatological crisis and a new, drowning mindset in which the human ship floats precariously on a rising sea.

Elise Rasmussens The Year Without a Summer (2020), Izabela Plutas Oceanic Atlas (vanishing) (2020) and Superflexs Dive-In (2019) are on show in Oceanic Thinking, at the University of Queensland Museum, through 25 June

Erik Morse is a writer based in Texas

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Why Artists Are Returning to 'Oceanic Thinking' - ArtReview

TAB BENOIT

Here is a roundup of arts events taking place around the state, through June 9.

MUSIC

After having had to skip two years because of the pandemic, Michael Arnones Crawfish Fest whose history dates back to 1989 will be back at the Sussex County Fairgrounds in Augusta, June 3-5, with Samantha Fish, Tab Benoit, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentlemen, Big Sams Funky Nation, Bonerama, Ally Venable and many others performing on three stages. Of course, for many attending the festival, the authentic Louisiana food boiled crawfish and jambalaya and po boys and so on is as much of an attraction as the music. This is also a camping festival: Overnight camping begins on June 3, and there will be nighttime music for campers only, June 3 and 4.

The Jersey City Jazz Festival takes place June 4 from noon to 6 p.m., and June 5 from noon to 8 p.m., with jazz, salsa, flamenco music and more on two stages, plus food trucks and a beer garden. Enter on Warren Street, between Morgan and Steuben streets. The June 4 lineup is Little Johnny Rivero, Svetlana, Santi Debrianos Arkestra Bembe, Andreas Arnold Quintet, Winard Harper & Jeli Posse, David Kikoski Trio, Lezlie Harrison and Nation Beat. Performers on June 5 include Johnny Rodrguez & the Dream Team, Julian Lage, Aurora Nealand & the Royal Roses, Gonzalo Bergara, Walter Parks & the Unlawful Assembly and Sounds of A&R.

Members of the groundbreaking hip-hop group The Sugar Hill Gang, best known for their 1979 hit Rappers Delight, will talk about their music and their career, and give a brief musical performance, at the Grammy Museum Experience at the Prudential Center in Newark, June 3 at 7 p.m. The talk will be moderated by Mark Conklin, the Grammy Museum Experiences director of artist relations and programming.

KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES

Coldplay performs at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, June 4-5.

Coldplay brings its Music of the Spheres World Tour to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, June 4-5 at 7 p.m., with H.E.R. opening. The tour is named after the bands 2021 album which has yielded the hits My Universe, Higher Power and Let Somebody Go and represents one of the rock worlds most ambitious attempts to mount an environmentally aware megatour, with 12 Sustainability Initiatives that you can read more about here.

The Atlantic City Beer and Music Festival takes place June 4-5 at Bader Field, with musical attractions including Alkaline Trio, Thrice and Goalkeeper, June 4 from 2 to 6 p.m.; and New Found Glory, Four Year Strong and Be Well, June 5 from noon to 4 p.m. There will also be an smaller stage with Away Game, Cult Tides, Last Minet and Suburban Sensi, June 4; and Cat Manning, All Systems Go, Familiar Things and Dylan Calvelli, June 5.

Camden Countys free Sunset Jazz Series at Wiggins Waterfront Park in Camden begins June 6 at 8 p.m., with Kenny G. Upcoming offerings in the series include Danilo Prezs Global Messengers on June 20, Corinne Bailey Rae on June 27 and Ruthie Foster on July 18, with more to come later.

In a show postponed from March because of COVID, It Was Fifty Years Ago Today taking place at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, June 8 at 7:30 p.m. will feature an all-star group playing songs from The Beatles Rubber Soul and Revolver albums, plus their own hits. The band will include Todd Rundgren, Christopher Cross, Jason Scheff (formerly of Chicago), Badfinger (featuring Joey Molland) and Denny Laine (formerly of The Moody Blues and Wings).

CRISTINA ARRIGONI

WILLIE NILE

Willie Nile will headline the free Woodbridge Summerfest, taking place June 4 at Merrill Park in Colonia. Nile will perform at 8 p.m., after sets by the David Bowie tribute Starman, the Bruce Springsteen tribute Saints in the City, Southern Steel, Shore Soundz and The Dead Cowboyz. The family-oriented festival will also feature food vendors, a beer truck, and childrens activities.

Veteran disc jockey Bruce Cousin Brucie Morrow will host Tommy James & the Shondells, Little Anthony and The 1910 Fruitgum Company in a free concert at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, June 9 at 7:30. The show is being presented by The Garden State Arts Foundation, which has been organizing shows like these since 1999. Tickets to the show are free and will be mailed; to get on the mailing list, call (732) 442-9200.

The virtuosic bassist Victor Wooten, best known as a member of Bla Fleck & the Flecktones, will appear in a three-part benefit for the Elizabeth-based Institute of Music for Children at Enlow Recital Hall at Kean University in Hillside, June 3, that will feature a master class (open to musicians at all levels, and not just bassists) at 4:30 p.m., a concert at 8 p.m., and a VIP after-party (including hors doeuvres, wine, beer and signed copies of Wootens book, The Spirit of Music) at 9:30 p.m.

Mars Junction, a cover band featuring Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss the twins who were both played by Armie Hammer in the 2010 movie, The Social Network will plays songs by bands such as The Killers, Blink-182 and Rage Against the Machine at The Wonder Bar in Asbury Park, June 9 at 7 p.m.

CHRISTIAN McBRIDE

Eight-time Grammy-winning jazz bassist, bandleader, composer, educator and producer Christian McBride will be roasted at a June 6 fundraiser at NJPAC in Newark, with proceeds going to NJPAC and the Montclair-based educational organization, Jazz House Kids. McBride is NJPACs jazz advisor and is also the artistic director of Jazz House Kids, which his wife, Melissa Walker, founded. Comedians George Wallace, Jeff Ross and Amanda Seales will be among those doing the roasting McBride, who celebrated his 50th birthday on May 31.

THEATER

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey opens its 2022 season with Enchanted April, which begins previews on June 8, officially opens on June 11, and runs through June 26. The play, which will presented at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre at Drew University in Madison, was adapted by Matthew Barber from Elizabeth von Arnims 1922 novel The Enchanted April, about four British women vacationing together in Italy.

The Two River Theater in Red Bank will present playwright Madeleine Georges new translation of Anton Chekhovs classic family drama Three Sisters, with previews starting June 4, the official opening night on June 10, and the last show on June 26. We want to introduce this play to new audiences and reintroduce it to old ones by putting out a hand and saying, come with us this isnt a museum piece, says director Sara Holdren, in a press release. It isnt even truly a period piece. Its a playground and a rock concert and a comedy and a tragedy. Welcome aboard.

Remember Jones, whose Meat Loaf tribute recently sold out three shows at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal, will return to the theater to appear as the pop idol character known as Teen Angel in the musical Grease, which has a preview on June 3, and then shows on June 4-5, 8-12 and 15-19.

COLIN JOST

COMEDY

Colin Jost, who co-hosts Weekend Update on Saturday Night Life and has served as an anchor on more Weekend Update installments (173) than anyone else in the shows 47-season history will bring a rare standup tour to the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, June 2 at 8 p.m., and the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, June 8 at 8 p.m. The tour was originally planned to coincide with the release of Josts 2020 memoir, A Very Punchable Face, but was postponed because of the pandemic.

The Carteret Performing Arts Center has a new performing space, The Underground, located on its lower level and offering table seating, plus food and drinks. It will be used as a comedy club in a series that launches with former Howard Stern Show staff member Shuli Egar, June 3 at 7 and 9 p.m., and continues with She Got Jokes Too (featuring Vanessa Fraction, Jo Jo Collins and Monique Latise), July 14 at 7 p.m.; Jackie The Joke Man Martling, July 16 at 7 p.m.; and Aunt Mary Pat, July 29 at 7 and 9 p.m.

Former United States senator, best-selling author, podcaster and former Saturday Night Live writer and cast member Al Franken will make an appearance at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, June 3 at 8 p.m., as part of his The Only Former U.S. Senator Currently on Tour Tour. Franken won five Emmy Awards for his work on Saturday Night Live and 1977s The Paul Simon Special, and Grammys in the Comedy Album and Spoken-Word Album categories. His film work includes 1995s Stuart Saves His Family, based on his SNL character, self-help guru Stuart Smalley. He served as a senator from Minnesota from 2009 to 2018, resigning after being accused of sexual misconduct.

A photograph of The Notorious B.I.G. by Ernie Paniccioli.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Grammy Museum Experience at the Prudential Center in Newark opens A Hip-Hop Life: Five Decades of Hip-Hop Music, Art, and Culture, on June 3, and it will run through Oct. 30. The exhibitions features photographs by Ernie Paniccioli from throughout hip-hop history, of Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Naughty by Nature, Lauryn Hill, The Fugees, Ice-T, Chuck D, Queen Latifah and others.

DANCE

The Peak Performances series at Montclair State Theater presents the world premiere Curriculum II, by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, June 9-10 at 7:30 p.m., June 11 at 8 p.m. and June 12 at 3 p.m. at the Kasser Theater. The piece, co-choreographed by Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong, is described as immersive theater, with seating on the Kasser stage. It was originally commissioned as a film project but is being reimagined as a live performance, with the focal point coming (according to the Peak web site) from Louis Chude-Sokeis treatise The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, which explores the connection between race and technology from minstrelsy, music production, cybernetics, to artificial intelligence and posthumanism.

REVIEWS

Theda Sandiford: Joyful Resistance at Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster. (Through June 4)

Exposed at Black Box Performing Arts Center, Englewood. (Through June 5)

Tenacity & Resilience: The Art of Jerry Pinkney at Montclair Art Museum. (Through June 26)

Ecstatic Decrepitude, works by Peter Schumann at ArtYard, Frenchtown. (Through July 31)

CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET

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Top 20 NJ Arts Events of the Week: Crawfish Fest, Coldplay, 'Three Sisters,' 'Grease,' more - njarts.net

Marchmont House Creative Spaces Courtyard, 05/11/2020:.Photography for Marchmohnt Ventures from: Colin Hattersley Photography - wwww.colinhattersley.com - cphattersley@gmail.com - 07974 957 388...

Marchmont House Open Studio Weekend

14-15 May. Free. Marchmont Studios, Marchmont Estate, Greenlaw, Duns, TD10 6YL.

The Open Studio weekend at Marchmont House, right, gives visitors the chance to meet artists and makers whilst exploring the expansive sculpture collection at one of Scotlands great stately homes. There will also be a 10-stall Makers Market, as well as print and clay workshops. Some of the artists include stonecutters and sculptors Michelle de Bruin and Jo Crossland, as well as rush-seat chairmakers Sam and Rich, among others.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk

Wildlife Art Exhibition

7 May - 5 June. Free. Scottish Ornithologists Club, Waterson House, Aberlady, EH32 0PY.

This exhibition presents work from experienced wildlife artists Kittie Jones and Wynona Legg, below. Their works come primarily from their direct observation of animals in the wild, aiming to capture their movements and the constant change of nature. Some of the work was created during various lockdowns where both artists had to adapt to new ways of working, which makes for some interesting viewing.

https://www.the-soc.org.uk

Hosting Stillness

11-14 May. Free. Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD.

This work explores the magical forms of the minor gesture in response to time, site, audience and its relationship to themes within care, ableism and posthumanism. It examines vulnerability as well as celebrating some limitations within the body. This exhibition acts as evidence of the development of the project as a whole, including a video discussion between artist and curator.

https://www.cca-glasgow.com

ReCollection

7 May. Free. 40 Fox Street, Glasgow, G1 4EQ.

Emerging artist Alison McCoys first exhibition, titled ReCollection, is on display in Glasgow. Her body of work showcases abstract and figurative paintings relating to memory more specifically her memories of growing up in the 1970s. Using memories of scenes from her childhood holidays she produces large, abstract paintings.

Story continues

http://www.alisonmccoyart.co.uk/

Legacy of an Invisible Bullet

7 May. Free. Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD.

For the past 10 years, BAFTA nominated filmmaker Doug Aubrey has been making short films and exploring a personal archive dating to the 1970s. This exhibition explores Aubreys inward experiences and reflects on the film-making process.

https://www.cca-glasgow.com

Searching for Life: Photography from Syria

7-30 May. Entry Free. The Glasgow Gallery of Photography, 57 Glassford Street, Glasgow, G1 1UB.

The Glasgow Gallery of Photography returns this month, giving visitors a taste of some great photography at their brand new gallery on Glassford Street. This month marks the start of a month long solo exhibition from Syrian photographer Khaled Akacha.

https://www.glasgowgalleryofphotography.com/

Street Photography Exhibition

7-30 May. Entry Free. The Glasgow Gallery of Photography, 57 Glassford Street, Glasgow, G1 1UB.

Another exhibition marking the opening of the Glasgow Gallery of Photographys new studio is this Street Photography exhibition. Taking place in the lower gallery, this exhibition showcases some of the contributors greatest street photography shots.

https://www.glasgowgalleryofphotography.com/

Studio Bizio

Monday - Saturday. Entry Free. 20A Raeburn Place, Stockbridge, Edinburgh, EH4 1HN.

Studio Bizio is a photography gallery which specialises in 20th century and contemporary photography, with the occasional venture into other areas of the specialism. This new gallery supports fine art photography artists and collectors by providing collectors with access to some of the best fine art photography from the last century. Theres plenty of interesting work to explore at this gallery which is currently showcasing artist Ateliere O Haapala.

https://www.studiobizio.com/

The Living Legacy of William Morris

7 May - 16 July. Free. Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT.

Running alongside the exhibition The Art of Wallpaper, explore the artist through the gallerys balcony display. Discover more about Morris revitalisation of the art of tapestry, as well as the studio he founded at Merton Abbey in London. Follow his journey to Scotland and the legacy for Scottish tapestry that he created.

https://dovecotstudios.com

A Passion for Art

7-28 May. Free. Macrobert Arts Centre, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA.

Matilda Hall has been a collector of Scottish art for over half a century. She helped to collect for Stirling University and was later an important part of the founding of charity Art in Healthcare. This exhibition showcases some of the works from collections influenced by her, including pieces from Joan Eardley and Janka Malkowska.

https://macrobertartscentre.org

CHARLOTTE COHEN

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Galleries round-up: Wildlife artists bring nature to life...and the magic of Morris - Yahoo News UK

July 13 @ 8:00 am - July 14 @ 5:00 pm

An International and Interdisciplinary ConferenceJuly, 13/14th 2022Groer Senat, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, Tbingen

We are interested in the intellectual mindset of todays post-human cyberculture which concerns the human being, society, technology and politics. Historically, the rise of this way of thinking is rooted in the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley with its spread of disruptive technologies in the beginning of the 21st century. Since then, this Silicon Valley metaphysics also unfolded outside the Californian hi-tech industries and gained adherents all over the world.

For our conference What is left of being human? On the Anthropology of Trans- and Posthumanism we are interested in the co-evolution of human and technological development which is one central pillar of the post-human cyberculture. In this regard, we posit the presence of the following three conceptual aspects: There is firstly a libertarian individualism which stresses self-ownership and the exclusive control of ones choices, actions, and body, indedependent of societal contexts. There is secondly a technological optimism suggesting that all human deficiencies can be overcome by continual technical innovations. The justification for this technological optimism is eventually grounded in an utopian pragmatism: Tecnological growth will allow the removal of the diagnosed deficiencies and human fallibility all together.

For all of these three aspects trans- and posthumanist thinking plays an integral role. In this conference we invite both proponents and critics of trans- and posthumanism. Together we aim to unveil its (metaphysical) assumptions and want to shed light on the transhumanist idea of human being from a scientific, philosophical and religious point of view.

Read this article:

What Is Left Of Being Human? On the Anthropology of Trans- and Posthumanism - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

The Milk of Dreams at the Arsenale opens with Simone Leighs huge bronze bust of a womans head and torso, Brick House (2019) a work that, shown alongside enigmatic figurative paintings by the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayn, announces this exhibitions emphasis on painting and sculpture, as well as its thematic love of the mythic, the monumental and the mysterious. The Milk of Dreams boasting more than 200 artists from 58 countries, the majority of whom are female or gender non-conforming derives its title from a short story by Leonora Carrington, whose surreal paintings of dreamy interiors and ecstatic landscapes are also included here and serve as a sort of precis. In her curatorial statement, artistic director Cecilia Alemani claims that many artists are imagining a posthuman condition that challenges the modern Western vision of the human being especially the presumed universal ideal of the white, male Man of Reason as fixed centre of the universe and measure of all things. Thankfully, many of the works slip out from the confines of the shows somewhat academic remit, offering a nuanced perspective that, at times, transfixed me.

Ali Cherri,Titans, 2022, installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. Courtesy: the artist; photograph:Vincenzo PINTO / AFP via Getty Images

Combining the animal and the human, Ali Cherris Titans (2022) three figurative sculptures made of mud and based on Assyrian Lamassu and other ancient gods is a particularly strong evocation of the biennials theme of the earthy surreal. They appear adjacent to Cherris three-channel film Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), which lyrically considers our lives in relation to water, mud and stars. At one point, a voiceover in the film announces: If the gods made us in their own image, then the gods, too, must have been made of mud. The image of interspecies life fashioned byTitans suggests that our own bodies are more entangled with the natural world than they might seem. Wall text relates the work to Donna Haraways notion of slime from When Species Meet (2007), which she defines as a substance that lubricate[s] passages for living beings and their parts. While the artist has quoted this text before in relation to his work Where do Birds go to Hide (2018), I was not entirely convinced of its inclusion here as a description of Titans. Mud is durable yet vulnerable; slime is often alive, creeping, a goo of microscopic life when it is offered a humid corner of the planet. But to an extent, the ideas that govern The Milk of Dreams seem to lead the selection, organization and explanation of many of the artists to mixed results. Often, the works are more generous and arresting than the language used to box them in.

Emma Talbot,Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?, 2021, acrylic on silk, detail view. Courtesy: the artist, La Biennale di Venezia and Petra Rinck Galerie; photograph: the artist

On leaving the small, dark room screening Cherris film, Igshaan Adamss enormous tapestry of painted wood, plastic, bone, beads and more Bonteheuwel / Epping (2021) greets you. The work is inspired by the desire lines, or unplanned paths, created by the foot-traffic among communities Apartheid South Africa wished to keep apart. It is a gorgeous counterpoint to Cherris sculpture while drawing from a similar poetics of shaped earth. There are numerous physically imposing works in the show and, unlike in many past biennials, here they are given room to breathe. Delicate, subtle installations by Emma Talbot Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? (2021) and Kapwani Kiwanga Terrarium (2022) are not stuffed into corners, as might be expected in a show with such large painting and sculpture; they occupy significant parts of the Arsenale, provocatively interrupting the flow of largely wall-based works.

Gabriel Chaile, installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. Courtesy: the artist, La Biennale di Venezia, Barro Gallery, Buenos Aires, ChertLudde, Berlin and Ammodo; photograph: Roberto Marossi

A sequence of Jamian Juliano-Villanis paintings appears toward the end of the Arsenale, a curious albeit welcome inclusion in an otherwise fairly staid show. They are funny, weird, crass. A goat in Ugg boots stands in a pink, chequered room appended with advertisements for beer and bars in Lets Kill Nicole (2019). A blurred traffic light reads shut up in Shut Up, the Painting (2018). They are perhaps the most graphically dynamic paintings in the show, which tends otherwise toward the austere, sombre and subtle. But I loved the moments of levity Juliano-Villani afforded. Louise Bonnets Pisser Triptych (202122) is another instance of comic brilliance, though yet again you are failed by the wall texts mouthful of artspeak. Three nude female figures huge, shapely, redolent of futurist sculpture urinate great golden streams of piss: one flows behind a figures back, another sprays from a vagina like a spotlight, and yet another arcs upward in conical shape. Its a fucking weird painting, which is why I liked it so much. Yet, without a touch of irony or humour, we are told the work references humans cycles of consumption and excretion taking up and transforming raw materials, only to ceaselessly spit out waste on the other side. There must be precious few instances outside biology or anthropology where pissing has been so studiously described. And the dripping, leaking, body-horror sculpture of Mire Lee Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022) is almost a send-up of the seriousness of the terminology deployed throughout the show. A work described as suggesting the tension of states of aliveness is more of a Cronenbergian torture chamber of squirming, rib-cage-like body parts, all of them oozing and leaking on an elevated platform. Paul Thek would have marvelled. I found it a bit hilarious, actually.

Simone Leigh, Brick House , 2019, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and the High Line Plinth; photograph:Timothy Schenck

I raise the issue of the wall text so often because it suggests a central problem with an otherwise free-flowing, surprising installation: the ideas that ostensibly inform The Milk of Dreams posthumanism, cybernetics, etc. lag the work included in the show. In a room titled The Seduction of the Cyborg, for instance, we are told what a cyborg is (a human that has become integrated with an artificial technology), with a requisite citation from Haraway, and that this idea of a technological or prosthetic mediation has been of interest to artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Certainly. But the actual work included by Regina Cassolo Bracchi, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Rebecca Horn, Kiki Kogelnik and Louise Nevelson, to name a few rarely seems so compelled by the terms used to bring it together. Instead, we glimpse the playful erotics of puppetry and surrogacy, from the Weimar-era costumes of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt to Anu Pders mannequins. Lost in the slick, academic notion of the cyborg (at least as it is presented here) is the coarse and expressive humanity of these works, the obvious handiwork that constructed the hats and prosthetics and costumes, the folkloric influences of what might be identified as a Dionysian element of modernism.

Louise Bonnet, Pisser Triptych, 202122, oil on linen, triptych dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and La Biennale di Venezia, with the additional support of Gagosian; photograph: Roberto Marossi

But it isnt all about the human and post-human, of course. Many of the artists here situate nature and the animal at the centre of their work. From Gabriel Chailes creaturely evocation of family membersto Jessie Homer Frenchs maimed landscapes (Burning, 2020) to Precious Okoyomons weedy garden (To See the Earth Before the End of the World, 2022), the non-human, or the not-quite-human, threads throughout The Milk of Dreams. Sometimes, these moments are appropriately inexplicable and surreal, as in Raphaela Vogels diagrammatic sculpture of a cock being led by a troop of giraffes (Ability and Necessity, 2022) a truly weird piece that lives up to the spectre of Carrington hovering over the Biennale. I was also moved by a small, subtle, two-channel film installation by the Norwegian artist Liv Bugge. Shot on 16mm, Play (2019) shows huskies romping in the snow. They nibble and paw one another, roll over, cuddle. It is a scene at once common (go to the lawns of the Giardini, if you dont have a puppy of your own) and completely mesmerizing. Animals at play with one another, unbothered by the human or the posthuman or the cyborg at the door.

For additional coverage of the 59th Venice Biennale, seehere.

Main image:Raphaela Vogel, Knnen und Mssen (Ability and Necessity), 2022, polyurethane elastomer, steel, brass, anatomical model and cart, 2.2 1.4 10.3 m. Courtesy: the artist and MEYER*KAINER, Vienna

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'The Milk of Dreams' Tests a Theory of the Posthuman - frieze.com

Tony Vinci's students will soon get to explore life in an apocalyptic Africa, in a North American technological utopia, in a world without animals, in a Japanese-American vision of romance and intimacy after civilization collapses, and much, much more.

Creating this course is Vinci's intellectual reward for earning one of OHIO's University Professor awards for 2022-23.

The course, Apocalyptic American Fiction: Trauma, Intimacy, and Ethics After the End of the World, will explore how narratives about the end of the world might help people grapple with three fundamental but elusive features of contemporary American life: trauma, intimacy and ethics.

"The world is always ending, isnt it? As individuals and communities, we are always in a state of losing ... versions of ourselves, people we love, memories we cannot quite hold on to. All transformations are in some way apocalyptic; all change requires an end to a certain way of thinking or living. But those are just the internal apocalypses, personal losses that alter us," said Vinci, associate professor of English who teaches at OHIO Chillicothe.

"Lets think of real, historical apocalypses: animal extinction, Indigenous American genocide, the trans-Atlantic slave tradesuch events mark the end to certain worlds, certain versions of the world. Just look at some of the place names in Southern Ohio: Chillicothe, Shawnee, Ashtabula. These names are ghosts, pointing to people and worlds that no longer exist. For millions, what we call the world has already ended. And none of this considers the present or future apocalypses we might experienceecological catastrophe, impending war, rampant social injustice. Its no wonder apocalyptic fiction entrances American writers and audiences."

Vinci has some experience with ghosts, at least of the literary genre.

In 2020 he published his second book, "Ghost, Android, Animal: Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human," (Routledge 2020). In the book, he establishes how post-WWII American novels engage the unstable realities of victimization, violence, and loss by experimenting with critical posthumanism, an interdisciplinary field of study that challenges the notion that the human is the central agent on planet Earth.

While he specializes in contemporary American literature and film, Vinci says much of his teaching lives at the crossroads of popular culture and American literary history. His classes bring HBOs Game of Thrones into conversation with Holocaust literature, juxtapose young adult fantasy literature with literary modernisms, and understand androids in film through African American literary theory.

The timing of the apocalypse course while war rages in Ukraine is somewhat happenstance, but Vinci says the topic has been bubbling in his consciousness for some time.

"Weve always had apocalyptic literature, and for as long as weve had film, weve had apocalyptic movies. But something special has happened in the last few decades that amplifies the volume and intensity of this work that I want to study with my students. Theres something ... soft about many of our apocalyptic texts, something intimate and sublime that shivers beneath the surface of these stories. The tales were going to study invite us to rethink who we are, how we live, and what the word 'world' might actually mean beyond our little realities," he said. "Im so excited to see how students think with these strange and diverse stories.

Throughout the class, Vinci will ask students to consider: How might apocalyptic stories narrate hopes and anxieties about social (in)justice, violence, environmental calamity, and other large-scale concerns that often instigate trauma, create cause for intimacy, and challenge our ethics? How might they deepen our awareness of individual and collective experiences with intimacy, grief, and trauma? How might tales that liberate characters from the normalcies of American life encourage us to discover new forms of intimacy while learning to live more ethically?

"If we do our jobs well and read these texts with care, perhaps we will learn what many characters in apocalyptic American fiction learn: We are connected by precarity, and it is through our vulnerabilities that we may foster innovative visions of kinship and community with the endless array of lives, both human and nonhuman, with which we share the planet," he notes in the syllabus.

Vinci's 3-credit course, Apocalyptic American Fiction: Trauma, Intimacy, and Ethics After the End of the World, will be cross-listed as UP 4901U and ENG 4900 and will be taught on Tuesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. It will be taught in-person on the Athens campus for the fall 2022 semester.

Vinci's powerful and persuasive teaching has been recognized before. He was awarded an OHIO Presidential Teacher Award in 2019. But his real reward might be the energy that happens in his classroom.

"At the core of my teaching burns the belief that students ought to demonstrate a way of thinkinga way of beingby participating in intellectual and creative procedures that inspire a deep and abiding curiosity. Beyond learning the known and accepted, their curiosity should lead them to develop something novel, something innovative, something of lasting importboth to themselves and to their communities. Why are they here? What are the current limits of their values, skills, and perceptions? How might they transcend them? What do they dare themselves to learn? Such questions seek to empower students to steer their educations in directions both pragmatic and transformative," he said.

"I compel students to view the study of the liberal arts and humanities to be an act of risk, impelling them to engage the unruly interactions between culture and artistic production, language and experience, and individual thought and social action. I turn my students and their academic productions into the 'real' texts of each course I teach. By positioning studentstheir questions, their ideas, their curiositiesat the very center of a course, they learn to be responsible for transforming their communities through the rigorous practices of researching and writing. Within such an environment, knowledge is not solely taught by a professor but created by a community of learners from diverse backgrounds and with varying levels of academic preparedness. I find that this approach prepares students to interact deeply with course material while challenging their own assumptions and preparing them to advance their own independent research," Vinci said.

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Tony Vinci's apocalypse course takes students beyond the end of the world to find... - Ohio University

Cardinal Gerhard Mller, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, speaks with students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana Oct. 27, 2021. (CNS photo/Matt Cashore, University of Notre Dame, courtesy Today's Catholic)

Editors note:This essay was first published in German at kath.net on March 16th, and was translated into English, with the permission of the author, by Frank Nitsche-Robinson.

Vatican (kath.net) The Christian-humanistic conception of man is to be replaced by the atheistic-evolutionistic one. This conception of man represents a dualism according to which the body and the spirit are separate. The body is regarded as a thing, as a legal object, so that man becomes a legal subject only when he has spirit only then does man become a legal subject who can dispose of rights, especially human rights.

This splitting of man into a legal object and a legal subject has consequences for the human right to life that must be seen as a paradigm shift in the view of a persons life. It is no longer the human being as such who is protected by law, but only the human spirit, which is manifested in self-reflection and formal self-determination. We want to address this change and illuminate the consequences in the abortion law of clusters of cells or gestational tissue, as unborn human beings are referred to in the atheistic-evolutionist view of human beings. We asked Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mller, whom Pope Francis recently called a master of Catholic teaching, for comments.

Lothar C. Rilinger: The atheistic-evolutionist conception of man is based on the dualism of body and spirit. Can this conception of man be accepted from a Christian point of view?

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mller: The strict dualism of mind as a thinking thing (res cogitans) and the body as an extended thing (res extensa) goes back in this form to the French philosopher Ren Descartes. He did not understand himself as an atheist at all and even presented an impressive proof for the existence of God, which would result as a necessary idea evident from our self-consciousness.

Only the materialists of the Popular Enlightenment like Baron dHolbach, Helvetius or La Mettrie reduced man to matter. Man, they argued, was nothing but a machine, to be explained entirely by the laws of mechanics. Or man was only the sum of his social conditions, as Comte and Marx put it, and therefore had first to be created into a new man by improvement.

The atheism of the criticism of religion in the 19th and 20th centuries by Max Stirner and Feuerbach, in connection with Darwinian evolutionism, could no longer recognize in man a difference in essence between animal and man. For Nietzsche, man was the not yet determined animal that had developed into the higher man only in a few specimens, while the broad masses represented a surplus of the wayward, the sick, the degenerate, the infirm, the necessarily suffering. For the deterioration of the European race by the re-evaluation of the weak to the strong and of contempt for the suffering to compassion for them, Nietzsche this philosopher of nihilism and herald of the death of God, whom the eugenicists and racists of the 20th century rightly or wrongly invoked blames Christianity in his writing: Beyond Good and Evil (cf. 62). Man was only the intermediate piece between the animal and the coming superman, who was so dear to Nietzsches heart.

The current transhumanism or posthumanism follows the siren song of its prophet gone-mad: Well! Take heart, you higher men! as he exclaimed, Only now does the mountain of the human future begin to work. God has died: Now we desire that the Superman live! (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Part IV. The Higher Man, 2, [Leipzig 1923], 418). Herein the globalist elite of today feels addressed, indulging itself in all privileges, and prescribing to the dull masses of billions, which Nietzsche called the rabble, the horse cure of self-decimation and to the rest of humanity the happiness of grazing cows (cf. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative. For a Better Future, 2022). But whereas equality before God was one that spurred effort, the equality of the last men is one of notorious comfort, because there is nothing left worthy of effort, nor is there anyone left to claim it. (Herfried Mnkler, Marx Wagner Nietzsche. Welt im Umbruch, Berlin 2021, 222).

Precisely here is the fault line between the conception of man as the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27; Psalm 8:6; Romans 8:29) and the naturalistic reduction of man to the accidental product of evolution, sociology, and genetically enriched man as a future hybrid of biological organism and artificial intelligence, the homunculus or cyborg. For us, the revealed truth about man applies: Because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. (Romans 8:21).

Rilinger: Is it ethically justifiable to call a creature of God, as which an unborn child, too, is regarded, a matter or thing, which after all is to be veiled by the qualification as a heap of cells or pregnancy tissue, obviously in order to not let the full truth be revealed to the population?

Card. Mller: Every human being owes himself in his real physical existence to being begotten and conceived by his father and his mother. The parents do not produce a tissue which would then accidentally carry out a kind of transformation into a human existence. From the beginning of conception, every human being possesses a distinctive DNA as the physical basis of his personal identity. Every human being, as a person of spiritual-bodily nature, is from eternity willed, loved and destined by God for salvific communion with Him without end; For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. (Romans 8:29)

Rilinger: Pregnancy is obviously seen as a disease in the new conception of man, the term reproductive health as a synonym for abortion cannot be interpreted otherwise. Can pregnancy be regarded as a disease and therefore abortion as restoration of health?

Card. Mller: Pregnancy is nothing else than the bodily symbiosis of the child begotten by a man with the woman who is and will remain his mother until death. Pregnancy offers the child the cradle of life and its growth until the day when the child sees the light of day in birth. Illness, on the other hand, means the restriction and the threat to life, bodily functions or mental and spiritual integrity. Procreation of a child, pregnancy, birth, care of the infant, its being nourished with the mothers milk, the mothers kisses and tears, the care for the healthy growth of the child are anything but a malfunction that calls into question the functioning of a technical product.

The procreation of a new human being in the womb is not a reproduction of an object of pleasure or an object of use, but a participation of the parents in Gods plan of creation and salvation. Jesus, the Son of God, made children come to Him to bless them and to commend them to us in their simplicity and incorruptness as the model of our sonship with God. (Mt 18, 1-4). He is thus the archetype of Gods kindness towards children. He gives us food for thought when he says: When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world. (John 16:21).

Rilinger: Since sexuality is often detached from the procreation of a human being and thus serves personal gain of pleasure rather than the continuation of society, pregnancy is sometimes seen as an impairment of pleasure. Could this impairment be regarded as a disease?

Card. Mller: Not every sexual union of man and woman leads to pregnancy. But it must also not be fundamentally separated from it in order to use the mere sexual pleasure without personal love as a drug against the experience of the meaninglessness of existence or as a mortification or increase of self-esteem.

Marriage is a holistic unity of man and woman in love that takes the two partners beyond themselves in the experience of Gods unconditional love, which is our eternal happiness. The conjugal act is sometimes meritorious and without any mortal or venial sin, as when it is directed to the good of procreation and education of a child for the worship of God (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians, Ch. 7), even if effectively without the exclusionary intention of the parents no new human being comes into being.

Rilinger: In the new conception of man, the unborn human being is regarded as a thing. Is this legal qualification of an unborn human being as a thing intended to achieve the possibility of being allowed to kill the unborn up to the last logical second of pregnancy, without there being a homicide offense?

Card. Mller: A thing is an inanimate being like a book, a car, a computer. But a human being in the embryonic state of his development is a living being with the human organs that enable him to think and act in a truly human way.

A woman also does not give birth to a thing, but to a child, which she hopes to be able to take into her arms healthy and alive.

An argumentation against this inhuman way of thinking towards a child in the womb is superfluous, because the being human of the child in the womb is evident and its denial is the justification of the most heinous crime against life. To declare a child in the womb to be a thing is just as perverse as making people slaves and then declaring them to be things in order to justify this horrendous crime against humanity.

Rilinger: The European Parliament adopted the so-called Matic Report in the summer of 2021, according to which abortion should be considered a human right. Can you imagine that the refusal to observe this newly invented so-called human right will have civil or criminal consequences?

Card. Mller: When these neo-pagan atheists and agnostics speak of human rights and European values, they grudgingly admit that there are ethical standards.

Even if, in their metaphysical disorientation resulting from the loss of faith in the almighty God, our Creator and incorruptible judge of good and evil deeds, they reject objective and universally binding moral norms, they must, however, at least acknowledge as an ethical minimum the limit of self-determination in the body and life of the other human being.

Whoever thinks that the powerful, the healthy and the rich have more right to life than the weak, the sick and the poor, convicts himself as a disciple of social Darwinism, which led to millions of victims of political ideologies in the 20th century. It is not enough to invoke ones anti-fascism and anti-Stalinism, one must rather renounce their inhuman principles in thought and action. In spite of all appeals to the emancipation from the Decalogue or appeals to the majority decision in parliaments or the changed feeling of the people, the natural moral law shining forth in the reason and in the conscience of every human being is valid. Those who are so criminally frivolous with the lives of others scream the loudest when as can be seen in the war crimes trials they themselves get it in the neck.

The Second Vatican Council, in the conciliar decree Gaudium et Spes, called for respect for the human person, saying, everyone must consider his every neighbor without exception as another self, taking into account first of all His life and the means necessary to living it with dignity, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for the poor man Lazarus. In our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord, As long as you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it for me (Matt. 25:40).

It goes on to state: Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator. (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, 27)

Rilinger: May as is demanded in the new conception of man a doctor be forbidden to refuse to kill an unborn human being against his moral conscience?

Card. Mller: To force a person to act against his conscience is already immoral in itself. To punish him for this is the sure sign of a perversion of justice in a totalitarian derailed polity, which has lost its claim to the rule of law, even if it would still formally present the appearance of a democracy.

Rilinger: Can a doctors refusal to perform a prenatal killing be regarded as a gender-specific violence against women as called for in the atheistic-evolutionist conception of man?

Card. Mller: Abortion is a gender-specific violence against a woman as a mother and her daughter or son.

Rilinger: Is it compatible with our legal system that every hospital, including a Catholic hospital, must perform abortions?

Card. Mller: One cannot arbitrarily-positivistically declare to be right what is ethically wrong.

Rilinger: In the case of pregnancy, human rights of the mother and the unborn child can collide if the life of the mother is endangered by the pregnancy. In this case, must a balancing of interests be carried out, so that the physician must decide between the life of the mother and that of the unborn child?

Card. Mller: No doctor has any right at all to dispose of the life and death of another human being. Rather, his task is to save lives. In an extreme case, when only one life can be saved at the expense of another life, no one can decide from the outside. Here begins the logic of greater love, as in Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (Jn 15:13). I know women who were willing to sacrifice their life for their child in this hour, who died in the process, and others who survived despite doctors predictions to the contrary, and who today thank God for this grace.

Rilinger: Abortions for whatever reason are to be included in the benefits catalogue by health insurance companies and health insurers. Can the community of the insured be expected to pay for abortions that are not medically indicated and are, in fact, general contraception in character?

Card. Mller: From the point of view of the natural moral law and the Christian conception of man, compulsory participation in every form of abortion, euthanasia and other forms of elimination of allegedly life no longer worth living is to be rejected with all emphasis and on every condition. It is, of course, a fact that in totalitarian dictatorships and also in states in the democratic West certain ideological groups right up to the parties represented in parliament coerce fellow citizens into financial cooperation in the killing of innocent people. Christians are often publicly defamed, discriminated against and even prosecuted for this.

Rilinger: The Matic report does not have any legal consequences, since the European Parliament has no legislative competence for abortion law. Nevertheless, this report has an impact in the political discourse. Is this decision intended to show what we should regard as European values, so that, as President Macron has already demanded, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights must be amended?

Card. Mller: To demand abortion as a human right cannot be surpassed in its inhuman cynicism. This is what Pope Francis will say to the French president, who publicly claims to be his friend.

Rilinger: Your Eminence, thank you very much!

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Cardinal Mller: Demanding abortion as a human right is unsurpassable in its cynicism - Catholic World Report

ICAS 2022

Seventh Annual Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference in Arts and Science

Human, All Too Human: Posthumanism and the Anthropocene

Thursday 27th January 7-9pm ~ Friday 28th January 7-9pm ~ Saturday 29th January 12-2pm

Southern Regional College, Newry, Northern Ireland

Call For Papers: Conference

Keynote Speakers: Abby Jaques, Stanford University and Rune Graulund, University of Southern Denmark

Existence is entangled, symbiotic, hybrid. There are no clearly defined borders which allow fixed notions of being (Ferrando 2014, p.168). The growing turn away from Humanism, and thus ideas centring on human exceptionalism, arguably begins with Nietzsche and his concept of the Ubermensch but quickly develops towards the disavowal of a series of human constructions that whilst appearing to offer innate human truths, such as freewill, are, inevitably, deconstructed as being bolstered by non-human supplements such as writing, art and, technology fundamental materials from which we derive our anthropocentric history. The posthuman begins with a pre-Humanist reflection: what is human? and in our attempts to answer this question, we have come to revise our ontological individuality towards ideas that acknowledge our existence amongst a network of interactions, species and landscapes. We are intra-agency, fluid, future potentials, and evermore, non-human.

Thus, ICAS 22, asks: Have we surpassed the time for manifestos for cyborgs (Haraway 1985) and evolved into a more inclusive ontological network of being?

We welcome any presentations that reflect the overall theme of the conference.

Please submit a 100 word proposal on your presentation by Friday 3rd January 2022 in Word or pdf files to: finniganl@src.ac.uk

All papers will be given consideration by the conference committee. Notification emails will be sent by 10th January 2022.

Due to current Covid restrictions, all papers will be delivered virtually.

Questions? Contact Dr. Liz Finnigan at: finniganl@src.ac.uk

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