Superhumanity

Superhumanity

Author: Nick Axel

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 650

ISBN-13: 1452957886

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A wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev.


Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity

Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity

Author: Nick Axel

Publisher: Actar D, Inc.

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1638409455

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Focused on post-labor, psychopathology, and plasticity of human mind and body, this book introduces insight, critiques, and propositions in the area of “self-design,” ranging from design and architecture to science, media, history, philosophy, and contemporary art. The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Faced with the fourth industrial revolution, this book shed light on the necessity to recognize that manmade, artificial objects are continuously reshaping our daily lives, and thus to rethink the intimate and fundamental relationship between design and what it means to be human. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea, MMCA, organized the Superhumanity Symposium in Korea, consisting of lectures and panel discussions by experts from diverse disciplines. With contributions by Chin Jungkown, Common Accounts (Igor Bragado & Miles Gertler), Arisa Ema, Hong Sungook, Yuk Hui, Kim Jaehee, Catherine Malabou, Hannah Proctor, Erik Rietveld, Mark Wasiuta


The Superhumanities

The Superhumanities

Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-09-23

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0226820246

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A bold challenge to rethink the humanities as intimately connected to the superhuman and to “decolonize reality itself.” What would happen if we reimagined the humanities as the superhumanities? If we acknowledged and celebrated the undercurrent of the fantastic within our humanistic disciplines, entirely new cultural worlds and meanings would become possible. That is Jeffrey J. Kripal’s vision for the future—to revive the suppressed dimension of the superhumanities, which consists of rare but real altered states of knowledge that have driven the creative processes of many of our most revered authors, artists, and activists. In Kripal’s telling, the history of the humanities is filled with precognitive dreams, evolving superhumans, and doubled selves. The basic idea of the superhuman, for Kripal, is at the core of who and what the human species has tried to become over millennia and around the planet. After diagnosing the basic malaise of the humanities—that the truth must be depressing—Kripal shows how it can all be done differently. He argues that we have to decolonize reality itself if we are going to take human diversity seriously. Toward this pluralist end, he engages psychoanalytic, Black critical, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and ecocritical theory. He works through objections to the superhumanities while also recognizing the new realities represented by the contemporary sciences. In doing so, he tries to move beyond naysaying practices of critique toward a future that can embrace those critiques within a more holistic view—a view that recognizes the human being as both a social-political animal as well as an evolved cosmic species that understands and experiences itself as something super.


Superhumanity

Superhumanity

Author: Andrew Gladman

Publisher:

Published: 2017-03-12

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9781520609799

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Superheroes - individuals with incredible powers and incredible lives, dedicated to protecting the world, no matter what the cost. Superhumanity offers seven tales that delve into the conflict-ridden lives of humanity's defenders, taking an intense look into the soul of the superhero.The collection includes:Boom - An origin tale in a dystopian world.How to Save the Day and Screw up Everything Else - A day in the troubled life of a teenage superhero.He Saved, She Saved - Can a double life be a shared life?The Light in the Shadows - A dark adventure for a spectral hero.Old Fashioned Values - A retired superhero struggles to find his place in the modern world.Sunset - A gruelling battle that will push one hero to her limits and beyond.Giants Walk Among Us - A powerless crusader must learn what it means to be a hero.


Are We Human?

Are We Human?

Author: Beatriz Colomina

Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783037785119

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The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina's and Wigley's field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.


More-Than-Human Choreography

More-Than-Human Choreography

Author: Moritz Frischkorn

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 3839464501

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In the global context of the Great Acceleration, things and people have been on the move more than ever before. Moritz Frischkorn takes a fresh look at recent performing arts practices that deal with everyday objects on and beyond the stage. Contrasting these practices with the business field of logistics, he examines the aesthetic and ethical concerns of moving things. Drawing on concepts from performance as well as Black studies and philosophy, and based on an artistic-research methodology, the book formulates a notion of more-than-human choreography as an ecologically informed, infinitely indebted practice of living within the material world.


Gladiator

Gladiator

Author: Philip Wylie

Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand

Published: 2023-06-09

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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Gladiator, first published in 1930, tells the story of Hugo Danner, who is given superhuman speed, endurance, strength, and intelligence by his father as an experiment in creating a better human. We follow Hugo throughout his life viewed from his perspective, from childhood, when Hugo first discovers he’s different from others, to adulthood, as Hugo tries to find a positive outlet for his abilities around the time of the first World War. Gladiator has been made into a 1938 comedy movie, and is thought to be the inspiration for the Superman comic books—though this has not been confirmed.