[ecrea] New Publication: Glimpse, vol. 19, On the Anthropocene

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/Glimpse /is a double-blind peer reviewed journal published by the 
Society for Phenomenology and Media (SPM) and distributed by the 
Philosophy Documentation Center. Enjoy a sneak peak at the contents of 
the latest issue focusing on the Anthropocene.
/Glimpse/, vol. 19, 2018
MELINDA CAMPBELL
Introduction
PAUL MAJKUT
Founder’s Statement
LANGDON WINNER, Keynote Speaker
Biosphere Meets Public Sphere in the Post-Truth Era
MARK COECKELBERGH
Scientific Suspects, Romantic Witnesses? - Magic Technologies, 
Alienation, and Self-Destruction in the Anthropocene
As in the Anthropocene the fates of humans and the planet become 
increasingly entangled, we have a paradoxical problem of agency in the 
face of the changes: we at the same time create the problem and are 
impotent when it comes to solving it. It seems that we are reduced to 
bystanders, or worse, distant witnesses. To understand this problem, in 
particular to identify what makes possible this deadlock in terms of 
agency and knowledge, this paper uses the concepts of “Earth alienation” 
(Arendt) and romantic technologies (Coeckelbergh and others). It then 
explores some paths which may help to deal with this problem: direct 
engagement with material and natural things, artistic work, changing our 
understanding of science and technology and of their relation to culture 
and politics, and critically studying the language and images we use in 
our analysis and discussion of the problem. It is concluded that the 
problem under investigation points us to deeper problems and 
complexities of modernity, to which there is no magic solution.
JAN JASPER MATHÉ
The Anthropocene as Event
The Anthropocene could become the defining name of our period, yet 
scholars continue to disagree over the very concept. One important 
challenge that remains to be addressed is the apparent inability to 
locate our experience of anthropogenic events into meaningful action. We 
see what is happening around us and we know that we need to do 
something. But in the end, there is no actual response. Even in our most 
promising scientific solutions, the evental nature of the Anthropocene 
is often overlooked. The very fact that we think about anthropogenic 
events from within the symbolic framework of science and technology 
obscures them. Drawing from the philosophy of technology and a critical 
engagement with Slavoj Žižek and Bernard Stiegler, I argue that 
technoscientific culture provides a fantasy of reality in our current 
age of human history, which is now inextricably bound up with the 
history of the Earth. Therefore, the Anthropocene is an event in every 
sense of the word, namely an object that is fundamentally transforming 
reality. It not only challenges the framework that regulates our access 
to reality - which would introduce it as just another fantasy - it 
shatters that reality completely. Understanding the Anthropocene as 
event may offer a solution to a general sense of disorientation that 
leaves human beings unable to react in ways other than merely acting out.
PIETER LEMMENS
Re-Orienting the Noösphere - Imagining a New Role for Digital Media in 
the Era of the Anthropocene
According to geologists and Earth System scientists, we are now living 
in the age of the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the most 
important geoforce, shaping the face of the planet more decisively than 
all natural forces combined. This brings with it a huge and 
unprecedented responsibility of humanity for the future of the 
biosphere. Humanity’s impact on the planet has been largely destructive 
until now, causing a rupture of the Earth System which completely 
changes the planetary conditions that characterized the Holocene, the 
generally benign period of the last 11,000 years in which human 
civilization as we know it has emerged and was able to flourish. In the 
Anthropocene these conditions can no longer be taken for granted. On the 
contrary, humanity itself will have to become responsible for the 
preservation of the biosphere as its ultimate life-support system. This 
means that its influence on the Earth System has to become a 
constructive one, among other things by inventing a cleaner and more 
sustainable modus vivendi on the planet. In this article it is claimed 
that such a transformation presupposes the invention of a global 
noösphere that allows humanity as a planetary collective to perceive and 
monitor the Earth System and interact more intelligently and sustainably 
with it. The response-ability required for taking responsibility for the 
Earth System presupposes the existence of a global noösphere that can 
both support a permanent collective awareness of our embedding in and 
critical dependence on the biosphere and function as a collective action 
platform. Based on a Stieglerian diagnosis of our current predicament, a 
case will be made for the huge potentials of digital media for our 
future task of caring for the earth.
MELINDA CAMPBELL; PATRICIA KING DÁVALOS
A New Telluric Force - Humans in the Age of the Anthropocene
The Age of the Anthropocene must address the claim that human activity 
is one of the main factors in determining not just the course of 
biological life on planet Earth, but a force powerful enough to affect 
the Earth’s climate as well as the conditions of its oceans and its 
atmosphere, and in fact, all known life forms. We cannot go backward in 
time, and it is likely too late to reverse the changes we have already 
put in motion. We must therefore consider our alternatives for moving 
forward into the future of this new age. Whatever else is true, we must 
confront a long-standing problem in this regard, which is to determine 
who will lead the way, or at least point toward a path forward, in first 
acknowledging the meaning and implications of this new epoch and then, 
of course, in figuring out how to deal with the problematic situations 
that will accompany living in the age of the Anthropocene.
RICHARD S. LEWIS
Hello Anthropocene, Goodbye Humanity - Reframing Transhumanism through 
Postphenomenology
It seems paradoxical that the name of the new geologic age might be the 
Anthropocene, while converging NBIC technologies are advancing to the 
point where some transhumanists are predicting that humanity will 
potentially be evolving into a new post-human species in the next 50-100 
years. New technologies, such as 3D printing of body parts and genetic 
engineering, bring about both exciting and potentially disturbing future 
scenarios. Transhumanists and bioconservatives bring opposing views to 
this human enhancement debate. However, they both start from a dualistic 
point of view, keeping the subject and object separate. The 
philosophical field of postphenomenology is an effective approach for 
pragmatically and empirically grounding the human-enhancement debate, 
providing tools such as embodied technological relations, the 
non-neutrality of technology, enabling and constraining aspects of all 
technologies, and the false dream of a perfectly transparent technology.
VALERIA FERRARETTO; SILVIA FERRARI; VERBENA GIAMBASTIANI
On- or Off-Life? - Life in the Era of Social Network
Online activities are becoming intertwined with almost everything we do. 
Social networks are so engrained in our lives that they have turned into 
a crucial part of what we do, both online and offline. Thus, the first 
question is, How are social media changing us? The second one is 
instead, How much has social media changed society? When a medium 
changes its form, human life is modified accordingly. Regarding the 
latter, if we assume a Foucaultian perspective, we should consider 
social media as the dispositif that can develop the subjectivity of 
individuals. Sharing information on social media represents something 
more than a simple act. This is a performative act à la Austin that 
shapes and disciplines human life by means of a virtual crowd which 
compulsively shares information and general opinions. The online 
dimension of life is either a technique or a practice that makes the 
dispositif operative. It enhances and maintains the exercise of 
institutional, physical and public power. What are the public and 
private consequences of virtual reality? In what kind of network of 
power is the virtual life enmeshed? According to Walter Benjamin, the 
digital era has a positive aspect: it allows humans to be aware of the 
poverty of human experience in general. However, this is not a lament 
for the old days. Benjamin introduces a new positive concept of 
barbarism. It has a creative force: the barbarian is a destroyer, but 
also a constructor. In this new Erlebnis, there is not a progressive 
linear time; rather, posting, sharing and experiencing happens 
simultaneously. Digital life is the beginning of a new historical 
orientation where virtual reality is an extension of the “offline” mode.
NICOLA LIBERATI
Facing the Digital Partner - A Phenomenological Analysis of Digital 
Otherness
The aim of this work is to understand what kind of “other” a digital 
being can be, or the kind of “otherness” that can be attributed to a 
digital being. Digital technologies are emerging in our surroundings, 
and they are so close to us that they can be in intimate relationships 
with us. There are products like Gatebox, which are designed to produce 
digital entities that are not merely part of the surroundings, but that 
are also partners with which (or with whom) humans have relationships. 
In studying the kind of “otherness” these digital entities can have, the 
paper highlights the effects of different designs on the types of 
relations that are possible. Following a phenomenological point of view, 
the elements required to have a form of “otherness” similar to that of 
human beings is analyzed by focusing mainly on the resistance opposed by 
the “other.” According to these elements, the possible relations in 
which robots can engage is determined according to their specific design.
MARTA G. TRÓGOLO; ALEJANDRA DE LAS MERCEDES FERNÁNDEZ; ROSARIO ZAPPONI
Living the Body as a New Anthropocene Experience?
In considering the performative work of the Argentinean artist, Nicola 
Costantino, this paper reflects on the meanings of the body as active 
material and conceptual support, regarding the arising of the 
Anthropocene. Faced with their own invention, humans engage in 
self-reference, which causes an estrangement and produces a given 
intrusion threatening the identity-integrity of the ego, inevitably 
resulting in repulsion. Actions performed in the process of cosmetic 
surgery and other scientific interventions in biological bodies manifest 
bodily dehiscence, in the form of expulsion and negation of 
morphogenetic nature. Thinkers such as Lacan and Déotte are used to 
examine the implementation of the “body object” as a knotting of 
meanings, given the impossibility of reticulate substance, humanity, and 
subject. What remains is to witness through the body an immanent 
Anthropocene experience rather than one of a transcendental character, 
achieved in an extreme way by organic and morphological modification, 
particularly through surgery. This marks the result of the historical 
passage to techno-science as well as interpreting an Anthropocene 
conversion as power-totalizing. The question is whether this convergence 
between knowledge and practice is shaping a new experience from the 
experience of a completely transformed body and under what conceptions 
or categories the new generations will embody the Anthropocene. That 
concept can accommodate the treatment of a Neo-Darwinism involving the 
adaptation of the human species under a new form of consciousness.
ALBERTO CARRILLO; MAY ZINDEL
Anthropocene and Art
In this paper we offer some considerations about the Anthropocene as the 
period in Earth’s history marked by the presence of the human being as a 
geological factor, which is especially apparent when considering the 
products of urbanization: paved roads and night-time illumination when 
the Earth is viewed from space. Both factors show the scale of human 
presence on Earth and the corresponding impact on it as our environment. 
Building on these factors, we reflect on the relationship between art 
and the consciousness of the anthropocenic character of the epoch. The 
main point is that the contribution of art to localized or particular 
ecological changes as well as to changes in the way we think and behave 
thereby makes both art and human nature ecological.
LISA DAUS NEVILLE
Memory of the Future - Cecilia Vicuñia’s Participatory Poetics and 
Murray Bookchin’s Unfolding Dialectical Freedom
Chilean poet, visual, conceptual, environmental artist, and filmmaker, 
Cecilia Vicuña, revalorizes the ancient Incan technology of quipu as a 
gathering of originary emptiness. In this empty core our essential 
connectedness can be realized. Vicuna’s complementary dialectic of 
openness and interdependence is theorized by North American philosopher, 
Murray Bookchin, as an ecology of freedom in which human being becomes 
aware of itself as nature’s own self-expression. This paper wonders the 
role of art in today’s field of intensifying ecological crisis and 
economic injustice and suggests that it may only be the art and activity 
that requires our participation in order to effectuate itself that has 
the power to heal our calcified discrete identities and return us to our 
evolutionary origins in an ecology of interdependence.
DAVID ROMERO MARTÍN
Art and Experiences of Embodied Disrupted Reality
The purpose of this paper is to identify the way in which art can 
disrupt the subject’s everyday experience of the world and self. The 
proposal starts from the hypothesis that art offers experiences of 
embodied disrupted reality, and this statement is based on the 
parallelism between certain artistic experiences and certain 
psychological conditions that are known as dissociative disorders 
(concretely, depersonalization and derealization), which challenge the 
subject’s sense of reality and self, and lead the subject to experience 
some level of detachment and a sense of loss of familiarity with respect 
to the world and the self. These aspects are also particularly felt in 
immersive environments. Immersive technologies (virtual and augmented 
reality) offer an important laboratory for perception and sensoriality, 
taking into consideration the embodied basis and the first-person 
perspective of the user-experimenter. In this context, art offers a 
series of strategies that allow the user to undergo a shift in 
experience, affecting the sense of embodiment and reality. To explore 
these notions, I refer to some phenomenological implications of the 
experience of dissociative disorders and the interrelation between art, 
technology, and dissociative disorders. Finally, I offer an analysis of 
three artistic interdisciplinary projects (“Systems,” by Briand, 
“Labyrinth Psychotica,” by Kanary, and “Decelerator Helmet,” by 
Potthast”), taking into account the particular ways of embodiment and 
sense of reality they trigger in the user. Based on the parallelism 
between art and dissociative disorders and its dialogue with immersive 
technologies, this article aims to contribute to a phenomenology of 
embodied disrupted reality from art.
BJORN BEIJNON
Mediating Knowledges - How Theater Transmits Partial Perspectives
This article examines how the human perception of knowledge is 
structured in the empirical world. It is often argued by scientists that 
facts in this empirical world can be perceived, which makes us believe 
that this world is an objective world. However, the human way of making 
sense of the world is individual and embodied, which causes the creation 
of an individual world for every human: a body-world. The empirical 
world is in this case a shared space for multiple bodies that agree on 
the causality of certain events and objects in that space. Every 
body-world therefore has its own partial perspective on the knowledge in 
this shared space, which is formed by the physiology of the body, the 
cultural background, and the identity of the person. The theater has the 
power, through the techniques of re-enactment and disruption, to give 
its audience insight in other situated knowledges from different partial 
perspectives. It can therefore connect different situated knowledges and 
create ecological knowledge: the awareness of the connected network of 
knowledges that is produced in various body-worlds on what is happening 
in the shared space. Only then can we emancipate knowledge and embrace 
the various partial perspectives that this shared space of body-worlds 
has to offer.
SARAH LWAHAS
Tools for New Lifestyles - Indigenous Stone Crushing and Public 
Perception of Television Environmental Reporting in Jos City
The neglect of environmental reporting in television programming in 
Nigeria has led to a predicament. As global interest and attention 
mounts, with the Western media playing a positive and vital role in how 
the environment can impact the lives of people now and in the future, 
television stations in Nigeria fail to play a constructive role in 
enhancing public understanding by communicating information on the 
environment. Consumers of news and society in general do not seem to 
understand the broad challenges posed, particularly by the impact of 
indigenous stone crushing, an activity that is fast becoming a thriving 
business venture in recent years for many people. This study seeks to 
examine the role and the frequency of coverage of television 
environmental news reporting in Jos city, particularly in relation to 
public perception of indigenous stone crushing by women in Jos city. The 
study is anchored in the Agenda-setting Theory and the Perception 
Theory, which explains how people make sense of the words and images 
they get from the media. The paper provides a content analysis of three 
television stations in Jos city and a focus-group discussion on public 
perception of environmental reporting in television programming. The 
study shows that there is an increasing depletion of rock formations, 
endangering indigenous culture and the aesthetics of Jos city, even 
while the rocky formations serve as high altitude points for broadcast 
masts and satellites. There is also an increasing inability to restore 
the environment in terms of land reclamation and other restorative or 
protective actions. It recommends that television stations should 
provide the platform for discussing and understanding issues that are 
germane to the environment through improved, forthright, and 
high-quality environmental reporting.
PAUL MAJKUT
Time Machines and the Appropriation of Time - Mediated, Unmediated, 
Immediated

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