COURSES
Becoming Creature (Fall 2024)
𓅻 A class of philosophical & embodied explorations of our creature worlds. Co-facilited with Kyle Barnes. Fall 2024 in New York City.
Course website
Eyes as Big as Plates by Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth
Why become a creature?
"The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal." - Melanie Challenger
We are each constantly embedded in a web of interdependent creatures, from the microbes in our gut to the plants we consume to the ecosystems we inhabit. Becoming Creature is a pedagogical experiment in exploring these webs and our place within them. We’re curious to learn from non-humans (beetles, walruses, sea otters, mold, mycorrhizae). Are you? We find them capable of spectacular, awe-inspiring, and often troubling ways of being. Academic talk might call this non-human phenomena.
Humans have seemed to develop various theories for how to sense-make of such phenomena. How does it happen? Why does it matter? What relationship(s) ought we cultivate? We call these nature-based ideologies. They guide us through conceptual and ethical frameworks that interweave capital “N” Nature with our unfolding human drama: past, present, and future. As newcomers to some of these ideologies, we find ourselves lost in a philosophical mess, especially as new technology thrusts us into complicated entanglements with carbon and silicon alike. At their root, these ideologies speak to a relationship with non-human phenomena.
A practice of embodying creatures can help us better understand what that relationship is and can be. Our take: we are all already creatures, we just need better practices for becoming them.
What we will explore
Fellow creature participants will join us in exploring the following questions through readings, discussion, and creature play:
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If science lets us talk to plants, what rights do we owe them?
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How do different creatures experience time? How do we?
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Are computers creatures? What about cyborgs?
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How do creatures terraform? What does it mean to remake the Earth in their image?
Some creature phenomena we may learn from: Metamophosis, Ecological Memory & Time, Non-human Communication & "Language," Biocyborgs and chimeras, Inter & Intra Coalition-Building.
Some ideologies we may explore: Donna Haraway and her intellectual lineage (New Materialism), Indigenous Pluriversity, Rights of Nature, Technogaianism, Ecological Socialism, Cyborg Ecology & Synthetic Sacred, Effective Accelerationism.
Course website
𓅻
Play Studies (Summer 2024)
Course website
Play Studies was a very serious class I faciliated with Andrew Blevins on the nature of play.
Course website