Where Do We Find Ourselves?

Within a confluence of technical mediation, evolutionary processes, and pluralistic values, it can be jarring to try to determine where “we” are and who that “we” is in the first place. As the world becomes more relational, it is itself becoming embroiled in issues of meaning and access that seem to be constantly changing. How are notions of the individual, the organism, and the group shaped? What roles do the tensions created by evolutionary processes, human cultural shifts, and computational abstraction play in the creation of those notions?

Musicologist Gary Tomlinson discusses the Anthropocene through the lens of human biological niche construction and in relation to the migratory movement of human populations. Cultural scholar Luciana Parisi challenges the principles of evolution based on the image of the human and nature as a given, asking: How does automated reason reshape ideas of what the human can be? Literary scholar Louis Chude-Sokei explores the conditions that lead processes of becoming other.