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  • TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED ENCOUNTERS WITH ‘NATURE’

    TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED ENCOUNTERS WITH ‘NATURE’

    I’m finally getting around sharing all the stuff that has happened in the last two years. A big milestone was publishing my work in a scientific journal [link to the article].

    The journal I chose was ‘Ethics and Information Technology‘ since they were running a special issue on conceptual engineering, which is basically the idea that the meaning of concepts can be modified according to the role we want such concepts to perform.

    Perhaps a good example of conceptual engineering in practice would be the concept ‘gender‘. A part of society feels like ‘gender‘ should mean the same as sex, and another part feels like ‘gender‘ should include all of the complexities and nuances of identity. Conceptual engineering doesn’t necessarily tell us which way we should go, it just explains how the process of engineering a concept happens.

    Screenshot of my publication

    The article I published makes a case for engineering the concept of ‘nature’ depending on the context in which we’re using it. I was particularly interested in exploring the ways that ‘nature’ helps mobilize people into political action. Some philosophers feel like the concept of ‘nature’ is totally outdated, but I’ve seen first-hand how it continues to inspire people into resistance. The clearest example I can think of is a demonstration that Greenpeace Aotearoa organized in Auckland last year. They called it the ‘March for Nature‘ and it was a reaction to the government targeting protected natural areas for mining. I had the privilege of helping with the march by leading chants with a megaphone. The march had huuuge turnout. The idea of protecting ‘nature‘ had mobilized people that were also working on the racial justice, Te Tiriti justice, animal liberation, and feminist movements.

    Some of the signs the team did for the March For Nature, Auckland 2024

    Chant sheet during the March For Nature, Auckland 2024

    Because ‘nature’ can be an important concept that motivates people to protect the planet, my article also reflects on the question of how our increasing use of digital technologies is changing the ways in which we make sense of the meaning of ‘nature.’ We spend lots of time behind screens, and we get to see all kinds of ecosystems, landscapes, or species on them. We also get to see the planet burn, we see extreme weather events, we see wars, and genocide. The arguments of how technologies influence how we think about ‘nature’ are too intricate to explain in this blog entry. You’ll have to give the 8,000-word article a chance.

    But be warned: conceptual engineering is quite an abstract field (and not at all my area of expertise). I’m not sure why I decided to write a piece on it. I think somehow I wanted to challenge myself by writing something so abstract. Like a rite of passage. Can I really be an academic philosopher?… Well, it turns out I probably can; but this article is probably the most philosophically dense and abstract piece of work that I’ll produce in a very long time.

    Luckily, I also found a couple of opportunities to visualize such abstract ideas. Just as I was publishing the paper, I was invited to contribute to two different art exhibitions. (I’m not an artist, and I don’t know how these kind of invitations happen, but they do. I will leave my reflections on participating at art exhibitions as a philosopher for a different blog entry).

    A picture from my first wheat paste poster wall exhibition

    Here, I will just say that I attempted to turn the ideas of my scientific article into a wheat paste poster wall, which you can see in the first and last images of this post. The process of turning my philosophical ideas into a poster wall was fascinating, and the result was… well… interesting; which is my way of saying I should probably end this blog entry about now.

    I hope you find the ideas in my article compelling. I’ve been thinking about explaining in more detail the arguments of my article in a 10-minute video. If you’d be interested in watching that, do let me know! It’d give me a bit more courage and motivation to record it.

    For now, thank you for reading, kind cybernaut ⋆˙⟡♡

  • INTERVIEW FOR SICKHOUSE MAGAZINE ♡

    INTERVIEW FOR SICKHOUSE MAGAZINE ♡

    I was super thrilled to have a featured interview in the second edition of Sickhouse’s magazine. Sickhouse is one of my top favorite projects in Enschede. They self-describe as a “playful art space that explores the transformations of our society through digital culture.” But more than that, they’re also a beautiful community and a home for a lot of us in the city. In conversation with my good friend Niels F. Rodenburg, I was able to reflect on my work, on what makes Sickhouse so especial, and why the theme of their yearly festival “Radical Joy Resistance” is so important today more than ever! (Tip: you can click on the images to enlarge them).

  • GIGGLING IN JAPAN

    GIGGLING IN JAPAN

    Last summer, I had the absolute privilege of traveling to Japan to join a conference from the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT). The trip came in the midst of an emotional rollercoaster, the result of a wildly unexpected turn of events that had me feeling like a character from a Jane Austen’s novel adaptation in 21st-century’s Netherlands.

    Because I was busy trying not to lose my sanity, I sort of forgot to prepare for my big trip, which is what I usually do whenever I go somewhere new. You know, learn a few words to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry I bumped into you’ to the locals; make sure I won’t unintentionally offend anyone, carefully assess what I must see and how I can get there to see it, etc. This time, I had no plans. Zero. Nul. I had a plane ticket, a few hotel bookings that my colleagues were kind enough to consider me in, and the thrill of my unfolding novel to drag along with me across all corners of Japan.

    My god, that country absolutely blew my mind. I landed in Tokyo and stayed there enough time to feel drunk by the overwhelming citynness of it. The signs! The sea of people’s umbrellas crossing the streets in all directions! Tokyo became a neon-lighted carousel of cocktails, karaoke, and late-night convenience-store onigiris. I then traveled to the countryside and witnessed the magnificence of the archipelago’s mountains and lakes. The way the bright, grey fog would softly meet the green hills! The thickness of the forest! The smell of the moss taking over every single little stone! I went to Kyoto and learned more about ancient Japanese culture. I felt the joy of holding a warm cup of matcha in my two hands; of smelling miso warming up on Ramen broth; of hearing the striking of strings from the koto. I arrived to the last city, Osaka. That city was so incredibly over the top in all the ways that make my heart jump inside of my chest. I don’t know. There were giant octopuses and crabs hanging from the top of the buildings; people queuing up in every corner to buy delicious food. I needed an extra pair of eyes to take it all in.

    After three weeks of adventures, I had learned more Japanese customs and phrases that I could’ve ever dreamed of. I came back to a last night in Tokyo, to a hotel where the reception was managed by robot dinosaurs. I’m not even kidding. A robot T-rex asked me for my passport. I took a walk around the neighbourhood and bought some of my favorite Japanese things to bring back home: A bunch of 7-Eleven Matcha donuts and a bottle of plum wine. I brought instant noodles to the hotel room, made a final mess in Japan, and slept with a smiling heart.

    A little note for the hotel staff.

    What an honor, really, to have witnessed those unbelievable sights and experienced those indescribable adventures, all while wearing my heart on my sleeve. I know now I would not have changed any of it. I wouldn’t have planned it any differently. I wouldn’t have rushed it or made it slower. The way it all happened was absolutely perfect.

    It’s been only a few months, yet it feels like I’ve changed quite a lot since that trip. The emotional rollercoaster ride is now more like a canoe ride on a slow river, and the experiences I once vividly embodied in Japan have turned into beautiful, hazy memories.

    The pictures I took do no justice to the actual beauty of the country, but I’ve still decided to showcase them all in a little corner of the world wide web. So now, if you are curious to see Japan through my cyborg eye, you can check out the gallery by following this link:

    https://giggling-in-japan.tumblr.com/

    p.s. the theme is a bit wobbly, so if you see pictures stacking over each other just refresh the page 😉

  • GOGBOT 2021 OPENING SPEECH

    GOGBOT 2021 OPENING SPEECH

    The following text is a speech I wrote for the opening of the GOGBOT Art & Technology festival in 2021. That year, the theme of the festival was “Infocalypse Now: Time to Recalibrate Reality.“ Infocalypse was conceptualized as an overwhelming stream of information that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. I delivered the speech after weeks of building an interactive installation with Extinction Rebellion Twente, the design collective ‘This Ain’t Rock N Roll,’ and Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion UK. You can see pictures of our installation throughout the blogpost.

    This is how the audience looked that day.

    The mass confusion created by the overwhelming amount of information that we’re subjected to every day is only possible because of how advanced and pervasive digital technologies are. While lies and propaganda have always been used for controlling societies, never in the history of human civilization have we been as suffocated with opinions, memes, videos, and all kinds of unending streams of data as we are today.

    Digital technologies and the information they feed us infiltrates every bit of our lives, sneaking into our political debates, shaping our closest relationships, and eliciting reactions to the multiple catastrophes and crises happening simultaneously around the world.

    And it seems like some of us can’t get enough of it. We keep unlocking our phones, coming back for more. We unlock it from our beds the moment we wake up; while we’re on the toilet; during our coffee break; before falling asleep, every single day.

    Yet it would be lazy to simply blame these ‘technologies’ as the root of all our problems, as these indestructible, out-of-control forces under which us, mortal humans, are doomed to be enslaved.

    We sometimes forget that even the most sophisticated algorithms and powerful AI systems depend on design decisions made on the basis of political and ideological goals. And we forget that, as users, we can turn technologies off, or around, or upside down.

    We shape the future of technologies just as much as technologies shape our future. And I think that it is under this understanding we could begin to ‘recalibrate reality.’

    In my branch of philosophy, some people argue that reality is actually performed. What that means is that reality is not something that exists apart from ourselves, that we then analyze from a distance, as if it is happening beyond our control. No, reality is being constructed by us, with what we say and what we do.

    Like David Graeber once wrote, “the ultimate, hidden Truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

    Extinction Rebellion’s + This Ain’t Rock N Roll installation

    And this is an incredibly powerful idea for activism because it reassures us that when we speak up for what we believe in, when we act as if we were in the society we want to live in, we are effectively changing the world. We are effectively recalibrating reality. And just like that, your words and actions have the power to recalibrate reality.

    Except there’s one problem. We all don’t just inhabit our own individual realities. We are sharing a collective one. We share it with our friends, who’ve got our backs and the best intentions; but we also share it with some very powerful, self-interested folks who wouldn’t think twice in harming the rest of us to get what they want.

    So, reality becomes this field of struggle with everyone shaping it, whether consciously or not. Take climate change for instance. A hotter planet is our current reality. Why? For starters, because some really influential and powerful people are making an economy based on fossil fuels the only possible reality. Climate reporter Emily Atkin said in an interview, “climate change is not something that is happening to us, it is something that is being done to us.”

    Likewise, the Infocalypse is not something that is just happening to us, it is something that is being done to us. There’s a fortune being made out of YouTube’s recommendations algorithms, which infamously push conspiracy theories. There’s a fortune being made through the economy of keeping your attention, scrolling, liking, and sharing. Someone is profiting immensely from it.

    So, the way I see it, we either consume and consume information uncritically, feeding into the mass confusion and the Infocalypse, or we take some control back and become accountable for the things we create, the things we put out there, and how those things shape reality.

    That’s my message for you today: turn digital technologies around, and focus on what you put out there. This is what Extinction Rebellion Twente and my dear friends, Clare Farrell, co-founder of the movement, and This Ain’t Rock n Roll tried to do with our installation at the Oude Market: a confrontation with our horrifying reality of mass extinction, but offering each one of us the possibility of creating a different reality.

    Workshops at Extinction Rebellion’s + This Aint Rock N Roll installation

  • IN THE FACE OF TOTAL COLLAPSE, LET’S TALK ABOUT MATERIALIZING A NEW WORLD

    IN THE FACE OF TOTAL COLLAPSE, LET’S TALK ABOUT MATERIALIZING A NEW WORLD

    NEXT UP! Wednesday DECEMBER 2nd, I will co-moderate, with the amazing Marie Janin, the symposium of THE OVERKILL FESTIVAL online edition 2020.

    During this symposium, we will host 4 speakers from all over the world: artists, designers, developers, and activists who are reinventing the ways in which we understand ecosystems and reorganize society through digital technologies.

    As a response to this year’s Festival’s theme “The End of the World as You Know It”, I consider this symposium a great opportunity to envision, along with our speakers, new worlds that materialize from human’s expanding ecoconcience in the digital age. Could it be possible that in these new worlds, humans are re-learning their position in the planet, connecting with digital technologies and other organic beings?

    Link to the Facebook Event
    Link to the Symposium WebPage

    ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

    ️ Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Natasha’s work explores the influence of fiction in our thinking of the future. She is interested in the notion of “manufactured fear” and horror as a method for public control. Her videos and performances often use macabre tones and challenge social tendencies of anthropocentrism and conformity with binaries.

    Her recent project “Pest to Power”, shown at The Overkill online exhibition, explores the future of the Earth through the agency of cockroaches. She invites the viewer to consider these little fellas’ existence: thousands of years of being denigrated by humans, relegated to the role of an unwanted pest, carriers of filth and disease. Could we learn something about our own humanity by adopting the perspective of cockroaches? How could we revise our relation to all species in a way that is constructive and sustainable?

    A still of Pest to Power (check the video at the The Overkill Online Exhibition)

    ️ Maize Longboat is a digital media educator, videogame developer and producer based in Tiohtià:ke (also known as Montréal). He is the creator of Terra Nova, a two-player cooperative game that narrates the first contact between an indigenous person and a settler. However, this first contact happens years into the future, after a massive climate event has forced most humans to leave the planet.

    As a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from the Six Nations of the Grand River, Maize’s current collaboration within Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, is a testament to the thriving presence of Indigenous people in digital space. His work helps shatter misconceptions of Indigenous peoples’ relation to digital technologies, and contributes to their self-determined future.

    Terra Nova – click here to play!

    Barnaby C. Steel is the co-founder of Marshmallow Laser Feast, a London-based experiental art collective that uses Virtual and Augmented Reality to expand humans’ perception and experiences of the natural world. The collectives’ creations allow people to embody, for example, the senses of mosquitoes or trees.

    Barnaby believes that VR can tap into the emotions and imagination of a human population that is increasingly concentrated in cities, spending most of its time indoors. His vision is that these techno-artistic creations will encourage people to protect ecosystems and connect with other species.

    Teaser of Marshamallow Laser Feast’s ‘Treehugger’. A version of this piece can be visited in The Overkill Online Exhibition.

    ️ Iris Zhan (@iris4action) is a 17-year-old climate activist based in Maryland, U.S. Iris is the co-founder of Fridays For Future Digital, an initiative that gives young activists an outlet to protest online when they cannot convene physically for climate strikes.

    Iris is also an active member of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led grassroots campaign in the United States, that has been lauded for its influence in Joe Biden’s increasing attention to climate mitigation policies. Iris and her colleagues work extremely hard to materialize a sustainable and decarbonized world. I am excited to have her fearlessness and conviction present at our discussion, as well as her experience of the impact of digital technologies in activism.

    JOIN US!

    I’m sure this will be a super inspiring session that will unleash our imagination and give us ideas on how to move forward and leap into new worlds. Join us by watching the live stream on YouTube (17:00 – 20:00 CET / 11:00 – 14:00 EST) so you can ask questions to the speakers through the live chat. See you there! ♡

  • I DON’T KNOW WHY I CARE, BUT I VERY MUCH DO

    I DON’T KNOW WHY I CARE, BUT I VERY MUCH DO

    “Reasons for being nice to other lifeforms abound, but around them, there is a ghostly penumbra of feelings of appreciating them for no reason at all. Just loving something never has a great reason attached to it. If you can list all the reasons why you ‘should’ love this particular person, you’re probably not in love. If you have no idea, you might be nearer the mark.“

    — Timothy Morton, “Being Ecological“

    Bodies of water are usually terrifying to me. I find fish completely alien and disgusting since I’ve had memory, which is why I can hardly enjoy swimming in lakes and seas. But last weekend, I decided to overcome this fear and surprised myself with a plethora of sensations. 

    A group of friends and I spent a day in Füssen, a charming town in the Bavarian region. It was a sunny Saturday and we were picnicking by a lake. With a little bit of encouragement from my friends, I took my slippers off and stepped in the water. It was covering my ankles and I quickly looked down to discover I was surrounded by dozens of fish. They were swimming there, centimeters away from my skin. I was petrified and overfull by a feeling of unease, but I waited and paid attention.  The fish weren’t even curious about my presence. They were just there being fish and doing their own thing. I felt silly. 

    I slowly walked further into the lake, up to the point I couldn’t see them anymore. I knew they were there in big numbers, swimming around my hips, my waist, and my shoulders. I took some air and submerged my head in the water. I came out frantic, gasped, and looked at the hills and mountains surrounding the lake. I was so little in a mesmerizing landscape, sharing the fresh water under the warm sun with these little fellas. A friend pointed out there were a couple of ducks swimming my way. I felt like that meme of Arnold Schwarzenegger being one with Nature.

    After a few minutes of trying really hard not to freak out, I noticed one of the ducks caught a fish in its mouth and I suddenly became super conscious about water creatures. I nervously came out of the lake, feeling victorious, nevertheless. 

    Why does it matter?

    Because after reading hundreds of pages about our “being” ecological, (not in the sense of caring about the environment, but in the sense of becoming deeply aware that we are just a part of this über complex system we call nature), I’ve decided to take these lessons off my books and into my experience of the world I inhabit. This is what made me step in the lake and pay attention to the fish that have so intensely disturbed me in the past.

    It’s almost indescribable, the shift I get to feel in my entire body, like scraping from my skin all my preconceived notions of self-importance in an ecosystem that has a life of its own. It isn’t always pleasurable nor easy. I was born and raised in the city, with concrete below my feet and smog within my lungs. I became most familiar with A/C, leather couches, iced coffee and perpetual electrical outlets. Sometimes, experiencing things like fish in lakes feels daunting, awkward, unfamiliar. 

    Come to think of it, everything in my cultural upbringing taught me that us humans are a special kind of species. We can force beings we don’t find pleasing out of their habitats. We can domesticate other beings to meet our most capricious desires. We can transform our environment to simulate our modern dreams of minimalist lofts, carpets, lamps, ceramic, mosaic. 

    It’s starting to dawn on me that perhaps we shouldn’t. Perhaps we should be respectful and pay attention to our surroundings and the other lifeforms that inhabit it, stop making our needs and wants the center of the fucking universe. It doesn’t matter if it’s fish, snails, bees, weeds, flowers. Shifting our perception of other lifeforms and our relation to them is the single most powerful feeling I believe can make us ecological. 

    The greatest tragedy for folks like me who grew up in concrete jungles is that if we don’t make a conscious effort, this mysterious feeling of being ecological will pass us completely by. We might visit forests, oceans, deserts, the Mayan jungle, but we’ll consume them just as we consume iced coffees. We’ll watch the waves until the sun sets, cocktail in hand, from seats where we can’t quite see coral reefs dying. Then we’ll go back to our resort to sleep in a king size bed with fresh linens. 

    It is not our destiny, though. We’re always one decision away to rediscover the world with the eyes and curiosity of a child. We can decide to venture into unknown sensations, looking closely and attentively at other lifeforms as if nothing was given, as if things weren’t there for our pleasure or consumption. All we need is to be respectful and take a minute to pay attention. I’d say otherwise, all we’re left with is petty pleasures. We’ll be missing out on something truly magical, destroying irreplaceable things and ourselves in the process. 

    Picture of the lake taken by Diana