Archive for 2025

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[Commlist] New Issue of Culture Machine: Aesthetics of Biomachines published

Sat Dec 06 16:38:42 GMT 2025




*/Culture Machine/*is pleased to announce /Vol 24 The Aesthetics of Biomachines/,

guest-edited by Johan Lau Munkholm, Naja Grundtmann, Kristin Veel and Kathrin Maurer, from Copenhagen University and the University of Southern Denmark

Link: https://culturemachine.net/archives/aesthetics-of-biomachines/ <https://culturemachine.net/archives/aesthetics-of-biomachines/>

*From the Guest-Editor’s Introduction:*

This special issue of /Culture Machine/ on biomachines seeks to expand our understanding of the current state of the interactions between the biological and the machinic through an aesthetic lens. The notion of ‘aesthetics’ as regards biomachines invokes multiple instigations of the term. We employ it to refer to 1) the study of sensory knowledge, as defined in the work of Baumgarten, and 2) the philosophical branch that studies art and its interpretation. Ascribing aesthetic properties to biomachines allows us to home in on the particulars of the techno-sensory experiences at work in their contemporary configurations. The articles in this issue describe the constitution and implication of the meeting between the biological and the machinic in differing ways. While some contributors identify in the encounter composite forms that confuse the distinction between biology and machine, others focus on how computational mediation encloses biological processes for instrumental reasons while (intentionally or not) producing new forms of knowledge and affective entanglements. In other contributions, the transformative potentials that emerge in the meeting between humans and machines are assessed according to the power relations they construct, reproduce or challenge. It is common to all the contributions, however, that the terms and the constitution of relationality of /bios /and machine are a basic topic of enquiry that opens multiple affiliated questions and problems that sharpen our critical sense of our developing technological reality. Equally common to the contributions is a fundamental concern with aesthetics. In employing aesthetics as an approach or a practice that gives room to notions of the machinic outside its immediate instrumental context, the issue offers studies of biomachines that allow us to appreciate our new technological realities.

Contents

Artificial Touch in Contemporary Art and Culture <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8483>
*Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen & Lea Laura N. Michelsen*

Of Grafts, Interferences and Haploids: Speculative Reproduction and Biomachinic Time in Naomi Mitchison’s /Memoirs of a Spacewoman/ <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8504>
*Henriette Steiner & Kristin Veel*

AI Uncanny: Posthuman Entanglement and Biomachine Ethics in /The Trouble with Being Born/ <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8509>
*Annie Ring*

Contagious Life: Clones, Deadbots, Digital Twins <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8517>
*Caroline Bassett*

More Than an Optimisation Problem: AI Incommensurability as Companionable Aesthetics <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8522>
*Nicole De Brabandere*

Bio-AI: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Data Animism <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8527>
*Joanna Zylinska*

Pierre Huyghe’s Art, Bio-Machines, and the Question of Life <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8532>
*Kathrin Maurer*

Encountering the Biomachinic Planet <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8537>
*Thomas Storey*




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