BODYNET-KHORÓS LAB 2

1st Metahuman Futures Forum – Lesvos 2022

¿Can we create a liveable Future?

Facing the extinction challenge.

Trash-human and Metahuman studies: Extinction and Planetary Health

  • 1st-2nd October: SYMPOSIUM at the University of the Aegean, Mytilini, Lesvos, Greece
  • 25th-29th September: WORKSHOP in Skala Eressos, Lesvos, Greece

Poster-Flyer – pdf

FULL PROGRAMME BOOKLET – (64 pages) – pdf – updated 19Sept

 

 

 

Fully hybrid Symposium: on-site and online, with some online speakers and streamed in its entirety:

SYMPOSIUM – PUBLIC STREAMING YOUTUBE LINKS:

https://www.facebook.com/metabody.project/posts/3318614651719714

https://twitter.com/MetaBodyProject/status/1570363605778042880

Organised by:  Reverso Trandisciplinary Association  &  Metabody Institute – Jaime del Val

Hosted by:The University of the Aegean,Department of Cultural Technology and Communication – Prof. Evi Sampanikou

Part of the Bodynet-Khorós project, cofunded by the European Union and coordinated by Reverso.

Part of the Metahuman Futures Forum Series.

Metahuman Futures Forum Associated networks: the Metabody Network, the Beyond Humanism Network, the  World Posthuman Society, the Global Posthuman Network, The Posthuman Lab, UCM and other networks and universities from 30 countries – Full list and board annouced soon.

Metahuman Futures Forum Advisory Board: Yunus Tuncel, Cagdas Dedeoglu, Evi Sampanikou, Jan Stasienko, Stefan Lornez Sorgner, Francesca Ferrando, Yvonne Förster, Kevin LaGrandeur, Sacha Kagan, Mark Coeckelbergh – Coordinator: Jaime del Val

Associated Publication: Journal of Posthumanism: Upcoming Special Issue & CFP  for 2023 – more information HERE.

Cover/poster by Elisavet Kelidou, PhD Candidate and Graphic’s Instructor at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of teh Aegean – Booklet Edition by Reverso,  Jaime del Val – This booklet has 64 pages, incidentally this coincides with the number of Hexagramms of the Chinese Book of Mutations, I Ching, and with the number of phrases of Bach’sD minor Chacconne for violin. Booklet Texts by Jaime del Val unless stated otherwise.

WORKSHOP INFO HERE

Metahuman Futures Manifesto – Draft for discussion in the Lesvos Assembly

Ontological Therapies – Draft questionnaires for use in the Lesvos Symposium

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1. SYMPOSIUM 

Metahuman Forum – 1st-2nd October– at University of the Aegean in Mytilini, Lesvos – including EU project presentation + book presentation.

The symposium will be an up to 60 speakers and attendants physical event in Lesvos, (also with possibility of hybrid online format strictly for people not being able to attend. – NOTE: there will be a separate online Metahuman Futures Forum in July, more info soon). ABSTRACT AND TOPICS BELOW.

Please send your proposals for the Symposium by July 1st to metabody [at] metabody.eu

    • Abstracts for papers (20min + questions) and round table proposals welcome.
    • Workshop and performance proposals are also welcome, in connection to the EU Project Bodynet-Khorós.
    • Round Tables discussing the main topics of the conference will be proposed, following the format of Ontological Therapies.

See below for TOPICS and here for Trash-human/Metahuman Studies fields.

Papers may be sent as REPLY to the following TEXT that is proposed as PROVOCATION FOR DISCUSSION, (Pdf accesible in the link below):

        • Del Val, Jaime. 2022. “Trash-Human Unhancement and Planetary Health. Undoing the Planetary Holocaust by Reinventing Movement and the Body: A Manifesto for Cosmic Response-Ability and the Future of Life”. Journal of Posthumanism 2 (1). London, UK:3-30. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v2i1.1876.

OPEN call announced in April, deadline extended to 15th July, acceptance end July.  No Fee!

Associated to upcoming Special CFP in the Journal of Posthumanism for 2023 – information HERE.

 

2. WORKSHOP 

Metahuman Lab – 25th to 29th September in Skala Eressos, in the Western side of the island, linked to local community and the fight against speculation and the queer community  – EU project related workshop with students, local participants as well as internationalparticipantsincluding final street performance.

WORKSHOP INFO HERE

 

All potential activities related to the forum involving food will be VEGAN.  The event expects to connect to communities of refugees, local communities fighting urban speculation, queer communities, university dog communities and biodiversity. Gathering/foraging  techniques will be proposed in the island where Aristotle initiated biology.

 

2022 SYMPOSIUM TOPIC:

 ¿Can we create a liveable Future?

Facing the extinction challenge.

Trash-human and Metahuman studies: Extinction and Planetary Health

This event is the first of the new Metahumam Futures Forum Series that proposes to deepen a ruthless reflection on the deepest problems of our times and their interrelated nature, problems that are vastly ignored in most exiting forums, that we will summarise under the topic of Extinction.

Extinction, as implying the so called Holocene Extinction or 6Th Great Mass Extinction, is the process started by human action since over millennia, at least since the birth of agriculture, linked to overpopulation, domination, technical expansion and sedentary living. This event proposes to fully address, and stop ignoring the biggest evolutionary challenge ever to have been faced on the planet.

Over the past three years we have seen an exponential accumulation of planetary-scale conflicts that make visible more than ever a multiplicity of extreme critical processes, that are all part of the broaderExtinction process. In 2020 there was the pandemic, in 2021 we saw, along the pandemic, the increasingly visible effects of climate change, and in 2022 we have the onset of a WWIII and a hard return of devastating imperialism with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and renewed threat of nuclear war. This happens along with unprecedented refugee crises, unprecedented species extinction rates, while the pandemic has exponentially accelerated dystopian technological control, enforced on a global population that continues growing, very soon beyond 8 billion, while nearly 100 billion sentient being are in lifelong confinement and abuse in concentration camps called farms.

The current extinction of course affects the human, but also all other 8 million species and even threatens the possibility of future life on the planet. Apparently the extinction rates caused by human action are now happening at far quicker rates than those of previous mass extinctions and will get far more dramatic in coming decades. Replies tend to be an increase of the very systems of control that are causing the extinction in a never-ending flight forwards (to the metaverse and space) propelled by relentless Human Supremacy.

The conference proposes on the one hand a diagnosis, putting together data that are often separated to see the broader picture of Extinction and the historical sources un Human Suprematism, and a prognosis and response: what replies are we to give, and (how if at all) can we create a liveable future that is absolutely not granted?

The Metahuman alternative will be proposed as new approach to a mutation of the species in diametrically opposed direction to transhumanism/hyperhumanism/trash-humanism, while exceeding  critical posthumanism (thatis often still too humanist). The Metahuman alternative proposes the need to embrace indeterminacy and variation as symbiotic principle of evolution.

A ruthless challenge to Human needs to get done by addressing questions such as:

  • Do we absolutely need to reconsider human reproduction till reaching pre-agricultural levels of 1 million?
  • Do we need to undo the failed evolution of dominant civilizatory “progress” causing an extinction and suicide and go back to gatherer cultures?
  • Do we need to criminalise industrial farming and all non-vegan options, just like we criminalise the killing of humans?
  • How to mutate and stop being an excessively self-aware, self-obsessed, fearful, atrophied creature dominated by a rationalising tendency to reduction of the world in semiotic abstractions, numeric quantification and causal relations?

We invite an open reflection on all possible diagnoses of, and replies to the Extinction crisis.

There will also be an ongoing metareflection on how to afford a sustainable event (including vegan food, transportation or housing).

This event launches a NEW & DOUBLE STUDIES FIELD:

  • Trash-human and Extinction studies: the study of trash-humanist processes leading to extinction and diagnoses of all aspects of the extinction process, implying not only the mass species extinction and threat of human extinction but all current critical processes threatening present and future life on Earth, that can be also referred to as Planetary Holocaust or Holocide.
  • Metahuman and Planetary Health studies: the study of alternatives to current technohuman civilization, ways of living and overpopulation, towards a restoration of planetary health and the flourishing of future life

The following TEXT is proposed as PROVOCATION FOR DISCUSSION, (Pdf accesible in the link below):

  • Del Val, Jaime. 2022. “Trash-Human Unhancement and Planetary Health. Undoing the Planetary Holocaust by Reinventing Movement and the Body: A Manifesto for Cosmic Response-Ability and the Future of Life”. Journal of Posthumanism 2 (1). London, UK:3-30. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v2i1.1876.

More on the need for a metahuman alternative to posthumanism and away from transhumanism here:

Round tables will be proposed following a novel format of Ontological Group Therapy.

 

Topics& provocations for debate:

  1. Defining & diagnosing extinction & planetary health
    1. Extinction:
      1. Extinction as planetary and civilizatory collapse.
      2. Aspects of extinction.
    2. Planetary health:
      1. Non anthropocentric accounts of planetary health.
      2. Planetary health as conditions for proliferation of biodiversity.
      3. Geological and cosmic conditions for biodiversification.
    3. Calling things by their names:
      1. Are “progress” and “civilization” implicitly implying extinction?
  2. (Why) is every form of imperialism and colonialism implicitly leading to extinction?
    1. New modes of imperialism: the digital metaverse and space conquest as two new extinction trends?
  3. Technological singularity or extinction singularity? What are we really running towards?
    1. Transhuman, Hyperhuman or Trash-human? What is the more accurate name for the dominant powers?
  4. Can there ever be a sustainable digital-colonial culture?
    1. What does the metaphor of “the cloud” conceal?
    2. How is control society evolving in times of the metaverse and quantum computation?
    3. Why there is no planet B nor space escape: undoing cosmological ignorance.
    4. Hate algorithms, polarisation, antisocial media and atrophied bodies: can we combat hate without regaining sensibility?
    5. Should dystopian control and governmentality powers such as Facebook and its companies (now Meta) be criminalised? How are these different from the Chinese social credit system that could perhaps colonise the world?
  5. The culture of immobility and our dependency on technological systems that creates a trash-covered planet.
    1. Rethinking the role of movement and the body.
    2. Is the future in regaining the joys of sensing and moving with the world?
    3. Does decolonizing the Earth mean decolonising the body from millennia of geometric reductions and their will to control?
    4. Is the reply not in control but in regaining indeterminacy in movement?
    5. Is acceleration grounded on an impoverishment of experience?
  6. Age of pandemics: shall we keep increasing dystopian control and human immunity or shall we care about the disruption of planetary health that underlies pandemics?
    1. Immunity or orgy? Evolution is fundamentally a bacterial-viral orgy. Where is immunity taking us?
  7. The climate crisis and the need for a radical renewal of our relation to the Earth.
    1. ¿(How) can the human contribute to biodiversity instead of killing it?
  8. The overpopulation problem: why is it such a taboo and how to face it?
    1. Can there ever be a liveable future with this population, and growing?
    2. Are we to criminalise human reproduction for a century till we reach pre-industrial levels?
    3. Is the future in non-heternormative families and trans-species kinships?
  9. Can there ever be a sustainable future with this sedentary and consumer ways of living?
    1. Is the future in gatherer cultures, abandoning the false comforts of atrophied culture, regaining the joys of moving, developing unprecedented architectures and modes of Body Intelligence?
  10. 100 billion animals per year spend their lives in concentration camps before going to the slaughterhouse: what do we do with this Planetary Holocaust?
    1. Is it necessary to criminalise any type of animal product and farm?
    2. Is a radical vegan culture simply meaning a non-criminal, non-extinctional culture? Towards a global radical vegan culture?
    3. Towards a lobal nudist culture that stops neglecting the body and making us dependent on unsustainable textile industries?
  11. Defining the metahuman alternative.
    1. Towards a non paternalistic relational ethics, and why individual ethics is far from enough: how are our minutest daily gestures entangled with planetary scale disruption?
    2. If the limits to our freedom are in the freedom of others, how is this other to be conceptualised: the planet and all its life forms?
    3. other related proposals: Ahumanism
  12. Neurodiversity, decoloniality, (post)queerness/metasexuality, ecology/meta-speciation … the list of becomings is long and each one implies disalignments.
    1. Neurodiverse futures – somatodiverse, sensorimotor-diverse…
    2. Decolonial futures – indigenous, mestiza, migrant…
    3. Metasexual futures – ecoqueer, postqueer, ecosex, veganarqueer…
    4. Metaspecies futures – eco-vegan, general animal liberation…
    5. Metahuman futures – becoming molecular swarm – BI R/evolution…
  13. Can the human open up its narrow sensibility, stop seeing only the tree of short term profit and start seeing the forest behind? And how?
    1. Can we learn animal ethics of co-sensing instead of splitting and abstracting ourselves?
    2. Is the future in AI or in BI (body intelligence)?
    3. Body technologies and improvisation practices: towards a Dionysian politics of life.
  14. Is there a human or many humanities? Or metahumanities: symbiotic processes of becoming that we need to claim?
    1. Stop pretending to be human: Species stryke?
    2. “Crime against the earth is now the worst crime. Remain faithful to the Earth”: Nietzsche as precursor, and other precursors back to Lucretius, the Presocratics and beyond.
  15. Metatopics
    1. On the intrinsic relation between how we move and how we think, and the inseparability of theory and/as practice. Rethinking our relations and modes of knowledge production.
    2. Metaforum: how to define our modes of relating, communicating, exchanging. How to relate in more sustainable manner, the environmental cost of going to places, and of videoconferencing, the formats, the media, vegan food…
    3. Defining the Trash-human and Extinction Studies field.
    4. Workshops, spaces and actions for non-rational, neurodiverse, animal and other bodily ways of thinking.
    5. Performances, metaformances, other.
    6. Book presentations and networks.

 

 

 

 

 

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.