But this assumes that the original text doesn't change... Even if the words on the page don't change, the reader does, so in some respects the 21st century reader who is reading Balzac in French isn't reading the 'original' either. But this begs the question of who the original reader is... only the 19th century readers? what about early 20th century?

For some, this universal language is the ultimate tragic end to cultural and linguistic diversity at the hands of American globalization and imperialism...

This visualization perfectly captures the two underlying structures of your project - on the one hand, a networked group of ideas around the problem of translation; on the other, ever-growing concentric circles around the idea of the bourgeois interior (a kind of obsessive and obsessed point that gives birth to more forms like itself :-)

I like how you bring the question of 'gaining' something back in here. I wonder if you could have clarified what you meant in the previous sentence - why would a bilingual project necessarily mean a 'loss of meaning'? idem for the digital? Could you quickly walk your user through the ideas behind these statements? ie. digital as an 'impoverished' form of the text; and a monolingual user's 'sense of loss' when seeing the pages in French (en effect, tu ne donnes pas de traduction pour les pages en français).

You seem to have lost the italics for book titles and quotation marks for the short story.

Maybe point back to Walkowitz's quote in order to highlight the contrast between the works she is describing and the literary works you are analyzing - as we discussed, your three texts are very much embedded in context - ex. national in terms of language, European in terms of genre and theme, etc.

The more I think about Walkowitz's work, the more it strikes me as grounded in a very different understanding of translation and philosophy of language. For Walkowitz, language would always and already be a translation of the real world and so there is no 'original' from which things get lost... Instead, there are varying levels of socio-historical 'embeddedness' with some texts connecting to global audiences and others remaining quite local.

Benjamin's ideas are an excellent way to introduce the notion of loss of meaning as it relates to both language and objects. His reading of loss of meaning is posited on a philosophy of language that believes in the possibility of 'true' naming but one that is 'always' lost (in part because it is an ideal found in myth).

Could you give the title of the text you are referencing? (or a link to your bibliography)

Could you make a link to the fin-de-siècle ennui to bridge the gap between Balzac's story (1830s) and Grey/Hofmannsthal (late 19th century)?

If you wanted to continue working on this project in the future, it would be really interesting to bring in a few women writers to compare the ways in which they portray the 'uncanny' object.

Maybe a sentence or two to acknowledge those who were not part of this 'enriching' and as a result more marginalized than ever?

You could be more specific here and speak of European society, I think.

I love the image but I think you could have a title that actually captures the spirit of your ideas in the project!

I couldn't decide where to put my general comments since the 'end' of your story is a redirect loop :-) Actually, it seems appropriate to put them on the induction page since 'Option 5' is predicated as the 'best option all along'.

• It was fascinating to read your story about a world of posthuman ethics that draws inspiration from both past biblical myths and logic systems of future machines. In a world in which ethical decisions have been completely taken out of human 'hands', I agree that the induction of humans into the machine is the only 'logical' ending.
• I'm wondering, though, how you arrived at your understanding of posthuman ethics as that which is no longer human rather than a relational or situated embodied ethics. Was this something you found in one of the texts you read? It's quite the opposite of what we discussed in class when we spoke of posthuman ethics as emerging not from a single source (consciousness, agent, machine or other) but instead from kinds of relations - empathetic, caring, eco-sustainable, etc.
• I think Tofunmi made an excellent point about needing to imagine further the materiality and narrative perspective of the black box. At the end, you speak of 'cells' which suggests living matter but this is immediately contrasted with the image of the CPU. In the end, your posthuman ethics feels more transhumanist to me than posthumanist (unless of course the machine is inducing the humans in order to eliminate them which MacCormack imagines as a possible posthuman future...).
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 6/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 4/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 5/6 TOTAL = 15/20

So the black box is living matter? and not just circuitry? Kind of like the ship in Butler's "Dawn"? Except the image below looks pretty mechanical and not much like a living being.

What kind of machine? What does this machine look like?

This page reminds of the long psychedelic sequence in Kubrick's film before Dave arrives at some kind of 'elevated' state and then goes on to be reborn. But Kubrick ends his film with a being that is still very much embodied... whereas your story inducts all of life, all living beings into the same material state of circuitry and the machine. I suppose a transhumanist like Kurzweil would respond that this is how humans will overcome death, sickness and suffering. But vital materialism would refuse such a future that would ultimately get rid of the earth's biodiversity in terms of matter differences. And posthumanist ethics would ask whether such an induction would constitute a more sustainable relationship with the earth. Given the amount of energy needed for cloud computing, I kind of doubt it... but it's a good question - with no more human bodies on the earth - just human consciousnesses in the form of CPUs - what kind of energy resources would be needed?

Like a Black Mirror episode... the humans only choice is in fact not a choice so they will all become uploaded, disembodied (artificial?) consciousnesses.

So he selects an option with no idea of the outcome? Wouldn't he need to know what A and B are for hovercraft traffic reconfiguration? Or is the point of the story that the humans move towards more and more abstraction? (no longer need the examples like in the cave problem)

But is this an ethical problem? Or all decision-making has been relegated to the black box?

This display of absolute power and authority seems to me like the nightmarish consequence of transhumanism.

So here we get to the extremely complex question of how thought can be translated into code (and the whole mind-body problem, actually). Wouldn't posthumanism and vital materialism argue that thought cannot be extracted from bodily experience?

Kind of like the yoghurt in Love, Death, Robots. But isn't this a predictable outcome in the sense that the non-human reproduces the world that has been the objective of so many human civilizations in the past? (And that has failed time and time again because prosperity isn't all it's cracked up to be - see studies on wealth and happiness...).

How would posthuman ethics challenge this complete dependency? One of the principles of posthumanism is co-dependence and co-relationality so the black box would need to be dependent on the humans in some way as well.

But how is this intelligence embodied? One of the key questions of posthuman ethics and vital materialism is: what is stuff made of? Your narrator needs to explain where the black box comes from, its 'internal organs', its materiality (sand, silicon, nanotech??) since this is essential to understanding what comes to 'matter' for vital materialism.

Your logic gates remind me of Tarski's axioms that I spent a whole semester studying for a math class (I did a math and french lit double major as an undergraduate). Euclidean geometry is so satisfactorily logical.

This image reminds me of French philosopher Michel Serres's book Hominescence (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/hominescence-9781474247047/) in which he argues that nature is information (genetic code) just like cybernetic systems.

This, too, cleverly sets up Enlightenment secularism against Christian Theism.

The capitalization of the "I" in the main character's name is a really clever way to point to the opposition between the individual as the origin of thought vs. a supernatural force as ultimate authority ; ie. Descartes "I think therefore I am" vs. God's reply to Moses - "I am who I am".

Wouldn't the black box need an infinite amount of time to make this calculation (keeping in mind all the potential events of Aion time)?

What does it mean to become 'better humans' in this case? Allowing pregnant woman to take shelter instead of ex-soldiers? Doesn't this distinction reinforce gender identities? How does this move towards relational agency and vital materialism?

Your introduction, methods, description & obstacles pages are a great way to frame the ideas that go into your story-telling. I would have loved a little more content, though, in terms of how you are understanding 'vital materialism' - ex. a black box is made up of what matter? how does embodiment 'matter' (or not) for a black box? ; and how you are understanding MacCormack's posthuman ethics vs. Braidotti's posthuman ethics; ex. MacCormack is much more radical in her embrace of human extinction, no? she seems to see this as a valuable imaginary space for moving beyond anthropocentrism (whereas Braidotti remains quite critical of this negative view of a complete ending to all humans).

what about anti-humanist critiques? ex. post-colonial critiques of human rights (see Ian's warm-up discussion on (un)documented citizenship).

will you explain this 'meta-novel narrative' somewhere? Do you mean meta-fiction as when a story refers back to the act of narration that produces the story?

ditto, create a link to source online.

create a link to reference online somewhere?

I'm really looking forward to reading the stories and seeing how you do this!

Did you ever find method 1. opposing method 2.?

do you need a 1. if there is no 2.?

Which brings in much room for interpretation as well.

This idea of drawing inspiration from the black monolith in Kubrick's film is great! One of the things the monolith does is accelerate evolution...

'one where one'...

I've been thinking about how ideas get ordered and the problem of writing a less linear/chronological story. You use bullet points below to create a kind of 'ordering' whereas on the methods page you use numbering. To some extent, this imposes a kind of 'artificial' order since the ideas do not necessarily have to be read in that order (ex. the chapter topics are not in any particularly logical order, are they?) Could your stories have allowed for a similar rearranging as independent units?

Which ideas from vitalist materialism?

I'm trying to figure out the table of contents page and feel like I might be stuck in a loop already - why are there four tables of contents in the list below? And how does the visualization allow me to see connections across the project? This organization still looks more like a tree than a network - or a I missing some of the pathways when I view it this way?

Overall comments

• I enjoyed the mix of text, quotes, images, videos you integrated in your project in order to illustrate the work of deconstructing the ways in which gender, fashion, and the non-human intersect in museum curatorial practices. The distinction between self-fashioning and self-styling was particularly productive for developing a posthuman lens on these practices (although there was a little confusion when you spoke of agency).
• You successfully balanced theory, example, and multimedia so that your user doesn't get overwhelmed by terminology. But it might have been helpful to integrate a glossary into your project (with internal links) to keep your use of various terms clear (the page on the deconstructivist approach was particularly helpful in this regard).
• You created some great slideshows and visualizations to break down the linearity of your project and allow your user to navigate the project following different pathways.
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 6.5/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 5/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 5/6 TOTAL = 16.5/20

Here you use self-styling but right above in the header you use 'self-fashioning' - this is quite confusing...

Your concluding remarks nicely come back to two key concepts - affect and embodiment - in the search for posthuman curatorial practices, while also leaving open the question of deconstructing gender. Just a quick thought - Butler's theory of gender performativity brought me back to your explanation of the more traditional curatorial practices of staging and dramatizing. To some extent, what you are calling for is for fashion exhibitions in museums to display the deconstructivist method 'at work', no? how is this different from staging and dramatizing? or can these traditional practices be used more subversively to create an affective and embodied posthumanist fashion exhibition?

Hmmm, scholars like Barad would argue that all bodies are both semiotic and material. Could you explain how 'non-verbal' and 'semiotic' (meaning-making) do or do not overlap? And how this relates to posthuman curatorial practices?

What do you mean by 'male subjective oppression'? The patriarchal gaze? or normative masculinity?

I'm not sure you need yet another theorist... Karen Barad's agential realism does not fully align with new materialism and would need to be unpacked much more fully.

Where is this quote from? It's an excellent point but I'm not sure of the connection between the two ideas in this paragraph - what is 'playing semi-autonomous being'? are you referring to the taxidermy animals or the museum visitors or the mannequins?

I'm still stuck on the idea of dresses as promoting a 'non-gender dialogue'. I think you are absolutely right in asserting the alien-like head features of the mannequins but the rest of the bodies are quite traditionally feminine in shape, no?

Since your title refers to the runway as well, you may have wanted to begin with an explanation of this first image (and how it contrasts or not with the second image from the MET exhibition).

I thought you were initially referring to Mugler's collaborations with 'outsiders' like the Cirque du soleil. Does the museum exhibit point to the ways in which his bestiary collection may have been a result of working on costumes for the show Zumanity?

I agree! This seems like the greatest challenge - how to display clothing that has been designed for a particular kind of body in ways that deconstruct exactly that normalized and gendered body?

But the maternal body has also been sexualized by the phallocentric gaze (I'm thinking of paintings of Mary and Jesus...)

I'm confused - why the maternal body? wouldn't this have a similar effect of universalizing the female body? or is the point to create a connection between human and non-human female bodies (a kind of ecofeminist approach)? Or is the point to deconstruct the association of the maternal with something human?

So you are making a distinction between different kinds of self-styling practices, some of which remain quite humanist whereas others move towards posthumanism? How does this more humanist 'single self-styling' overlap with or differ from 'self-fashioning' (that you also point out as being self-aggrandizing)?

What is this exactly? I found this article - https://www.jstor.org/stable/23540930?seq=1/analyze - but I'm not sure if you are referring to actual writing practices (this would then fall under 'rhetorical practices' in the traditional categories mapped out above).

It's not clear to me how you are using the term here since Braidotti uses it to refer to biological, less conscious functions of the human body (and other living beings).

Is this image from the bibliographical source?

Could you have given an example of what this might look like? The MET seems to have tried to deconstruct the use of space in its exhibition of Kawakubo's work but without challenging the mannequin bodies used to display the pieces.

Maybe create an internal link to the page of your project to which you are referring?

The initial visualization is a lot of fun to navigate as the size and choice of links changes depending on what you have clicked previously. I'm not sure I fully understand how the connections work (most tagged pages to that page?) but this option challenges a purely linear navigation of your project - good!

In the MET video, the mannequins still have quite traditional forms...

I'm not sure what you mean by this term - minority ethnic groups? or more generally the socially marginalized?

An excellent point! But maybe to challenge the normalizing processes of what it means to have a human body?

Could you walk through this argument more slowly given that these pieces are still dresses in the more conventional sense?

I'm wondering what it would be like to wear a piece like this - would the body feel more freedom to move or more restrained by the added forms?

Ok, a get a much better sense of how you are using self-agency here. And it definitely fits with the distinction you are making between self-fashioning and self-styling.

again, what's the number referring to here?

I would add that they also challenge the notion of 'normalized bodies'.

What source is this?

Watching this video, I was a little surprised by how many of the pieces in Kawakubo's collection are skirts, dresses and what I would consider 'gendered' clothing. Could you have acknowledged that her work still contains many 'traditional' pieces? ex. dress meets body rather than fabric or material meets body. The pieces that seem most posthuman to me are the ones that place objects on the body and so 'deform' it to some extent - this definitely moves in the direction of imagining new embodiments.

Good! This paragraph nicely summarizes how your project articulates a sense of self-styling with respect to the deconstruction of gender and the intersections with the non-human.

The self-centred subject is defined as autonomous and self-defining (which is in opposition to a relational subject).

When looking closer at the exhibit on the museum's webpage, I noticed there is a more hands-on component as well - 'the sewing box.'

Also mention that you will not be looking at runways as performative spaces?

Good! Clear explanation of what deconstructionism works to do - undermine binary oppositions by revealing their co-dependency.

This image should be lower on the page, where you discus Kawakubo's work, no?

General comments

• Your project brings together two different cultural imaginaries - the AI as (romantic) other and the alien as (feared) other. While the former clearly overlaps with the posthuman, the latter has a much longer history (think of Cyrano de Bergerac's belief in moon creatures!). This gap needed to be addressed somewhere in the project, especially since Jonze is trying to move beyond the intense fear of the (AI-machine) Other whereas Glazer is ramping up the anxiety around the (alien) Other.
• You outline quite a few different components in your methods section but without ever fully developing them in the project pages - ex. where was the example of an alternative romantic love? This left the user with bits and pieces of arguments, ideas and creative experiments without any real cohesion. Similarly, the use of Scalar's functionalities was quite haphazard - ex. sometimes new pages were created for quotes and other times not; images were added to pages without explanation, etc.
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 6/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 4/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 3/6 TOTAL = 13/20

While I really like this attempt at representing Samantha's 'internal organs', there is a much, much larger network missing from this image - the huge warehouses that store 'cloud computing'. Samantha must be connected to these larger 'brains' somehow. It may have been helpful if you wanted to represent the AI's materiality to do some research on these larger networks and how they work, where they are located, etc.

This excursion into a poetic encounter with the film would have been extremely effective if it was seamlessly integrated into the project. While I get the sense you are working to defamiliarize the user, you needed to frame this experiment with respect to the anti-humanist critique and the scene analysis. As it stands, the poem feels completely disconnected (and why the images given that your poem is not actually rooted in a specific place)?

General comments

• Your project takes on the complex and difficult topic of machine ethics through story-telling, illustrating a possibly less hierarchical relationship between humans and non-humans. You flip Asimov's laws so that humans are given a code for moral behaviour instead of the kyroids and imagine an egalitarian instead of exploitive relationships between the two (yet the humans are still quite exploitive of each other!).
• You offer some additional contextual information at the beginning of the story in terms of the name 'kyr' (which reminded me of 'care') and the posthuman. Each of the laws also have some background material, which was extremely helpful for situating your thinking. But I felt there also needed to be a concluding page with reflections on the obstacles you came up against when writing the story and the successes (or failures) of the survey (which didn't get as developed as I thought it would be).
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 6.5/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 4/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 4.5/6 TOTAL = 15/20

How do the natural lighting and long takes work together to create a sense of foreboding?

I'm looking for interpretations of each of these elements - ex. how do the use of long shots and close ups contribute to a sense of dread? How does the natural setting contrast with the presence of the nonhuman alien character? This scene does an excellent job of creating a sense of the uncanny because of the lack of emotional response (feels very alien) on the part of a very human-looking being (feels very familiar).

It's not clear to me why you chose this scene to analyze with respect to your anti-humanist critique of the film. Would it not have been better to pick a scene where the viewer experiences the male-female reversal of power? Or a scene that 'fails' to represent a posthuman subjectivity?

Again, you needed to delve into the arguments you are making here, providing examples and evidence with scene analysis like we did in class.

But this is an article about Her, no? The page link here brings the user to a quote about Theodore and Samantha.

Since this is the crux of your argument, you need to give some specific exemples of 'gendering', 'racializing,' and 'sexualizing' the non-human other (here's where you could have included some scene analysis).

Why not just create an annotation on the page of the main argument for quotes from scholarly sources?

Are these pages kind of like footnotes? How / when did you decide to create a new page for an argument (rather than integrate it into the main argument page)?

It's great to have your methods outlined here - but I lost sight of the 'posthumanist strain' of thought in the long list of ideas associated with an 'anti-humanist critique' - is it the 'issues of matter' point at the end of the list? I think you needed to organize this paragraph a little more carefully.

Before summarizing the two films, you needed a paragraph outlining and explaining this idea of 'life beyond species' - how do you understand the two strains of post-anthropocentrism? in what ways does it converge with and diverge from posthumanism?

Page reference for the quote? It's a great choice but I do think you could have dug a little deeper for your explanation of defamiliarization - it's a key term in literary studies well before Braidotti takes hold of it.

I realize you may have wanted to make your human characters as identifiable as possible for the reader but I'm having trouble with their superficiality - money, jobs and status seem to be their main driving motivations (at least as far as the male characters go!). Were you creating unlikeable human characters to get the reader to identify more with the kyroids? If so, you needed to develop the lives, experiences and interactions of these non-humans as well. I really wanted to know more about them (and less about the humans with their Porsche, lavish weddings, multinational corporations, business schools ! ;-)

What I find really interesting about your three stories is that they don't actually give the reader a sense of the kyroids' thought processes. The three kyroids 'assess the situation' according to a pre-set law. So even though you explain their actions in light of this law, the reader doesn't really begin to identify with them as characters because no details are given about their lives, their personalities, etc. whereas the humans are outlined in quite a bit of detail (social status, past events, etc.). Did you consider dedicating as much time to describing the kyroids as you did to describing the human characters?

Hmm, I hadn't expected this turn of events - a new posthuman species that helps humans remain human or at least maintain social interactions with other humans (which for many is key to the human condition - sociality and social structures). This is a very different kind of 'intervention' than say, the aliens in Butler's novel, who reduce human interactions initially because they so often lead to conflict and violence.

I had been hoping for a female protagonist this time... SF is so swamped already with male protagonists (and authors and filmmakers :-)

I'm fascinated that this conversation also starts with the problem of time - 'short term' vs. 'long term' - and then moves into question of efficiency and laziness (with respect to taking the 'time' to work through difficult decisions).

Part of Joseph's inability to identify / empathize with the elderly pedestrians seems to be his lateness, which got me thinking about mechanical time like clocks, work schedules, etc. that impose 'their' time on other possible temporalities in order to maximise human 'output.' Do the kyroids have more time? Ria seems to experience time differently - she 'takes' the time to assess the situation here.

But this is quite anthropocentric, no? 'greatest net good consequences' for humans? what if an action is devastating for an ecosystem but brings pleasure to the greatest number of humans? this is where environmental ethics begins to challenge some of the (hidden) assumptions of human moral systems.

Very cool drawings! From where did you draw your inspiration? I think I remember now. From Asimov's book, right?

Could you have developed this annotation a little more to explain how this discussion about AI's materiality informed your choice of embodiment?

I actually thought this was going to be about self-driving cars and the moral 'decisions' they are currently being programmed to make - see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07135-0

This point about various societies seems important and gets a little lost. Will all societies in this future world have 'work, school, and home'? Or 'neighbourhoods' and 'houses', 'streets' and 'news media'?

all humans? could you instead give the user a sense of the number of people interviewed (and different age groups)?

This sounds more like transhumanism to me... In class, we spent quite a bit of time discussing the role of embodiment for posthumanism - it reminds us of our eco-relations and of the human as dependent upon the planet as habitat.

Do you want to make the distinction between transhumanism and posthumanism? Whereas the former promotes enhancement and augmentation, the latter critiques the biopolitics of such a project.

I love the background images on this page! I'm not sure how you got them to be dynamic but it's extremely effective for creating the sense of moving towards something in the future.

This word sounds a little like 'care' in English. Maybe something to develop further?

Naming a species after time is fascinating. It's gotten me thinking about the class discussions about chronological vs. cyclical time and linear vs. networked temporalities.

Overall comments -

• This is a great project that incorporated many well thought-out components such as the original production of three musical pieces (and the learning of the necessary technical skills to do this!), the audio clips created from the interviews (I'm sure you spent quite a bit of time on this as well! And I loved how the audio component added another layer of musicality to your project), and of course, the scholarly research into the question of machine-generated music (and art more generally).
• Your conclusion about creativity as shared across various human and non-human agents echoes the post-anthropocentric theories we have been exploring in class over the semester.
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 7/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 5/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 6/6 TOTAL = 18/20

Your two concluding remarks nicely summarize the underlying objectives of your project - countering the fear of machines 'taking over' musical creation and challenging the idea of what constitutes the human. I think you could have added a third remark, though, about the materiality involved in these four different musical compositions - with what kinds of matter are you interacting? how does this matter also act upon you (allowing for some choices but not others)? etc.

Could you have rephrased this in terms of 'becoming human' and 'becoming machine' instead of 'being' and an 'extension of being'?

And on your interviewees previous experiences, no?

Too bad you can't upload audio files into Voyant Tools. Then you could see how this word cloud compares to the vocabulary used by your interviewees.

You have some excellent sources, here, and you integrate them beautifully in your projet. I'm curious as to whether you found any sources that were also extremely critical of the turn to AI generated music...

It is exactly this 'aura' that Walter Benjamin argues came to an end in the age of mechanical reproduction (from the single highly prized painting to the mass production of Warhol's soup can). In other words, each new invention brings an 'end' to a previous 'aura'.

You could come back to the notion of autopoiesis that Braidotti uses to describe non-human self-organizing and self-styling (following biologists Maturana and Varela),

Unless of course creativity is something that is understood as greater than the human; ie. a kind of zoe creativity?

This example reminded me of my daughter's creation of themes and variations when she was in her third year of music theory. I wonder how your interviewees would respond to these pieces... probably not with comments about it being 'simpliste'!

Clever title! The only problem is that your interlude provides a much more complex and rich musical experience than the other four pieces! It's quite amazing to listen to what the MAGE-human assemblage ends up composing.

I'm not sure I understand the term. Could you give a definition before citing Fox and al.?

Here, you needed a little more explanation of the term 'agency' (either Latour and co. for the STS side or Bennett, Barad, and co. for the feminist side). It clearly does not mean having an interiority or consciousness (as in 'moral agent') and instead points to the capacity to interact with others (so agency is relational and not a feature of identity). In the case of the MAX/MSP, it is not a question of having 'superior agency' but of interacting in new ways which gives rise to new social assemblages/networks.

Again, I think there would be a ton of things to say in response to this question if you brought in animal studies :-) But I realize this is beyond the scope of your project...

Could you have brought in the posthuman idea of 'becoming' here? In what sense is the machine becoming composer in terms of the effects it creates (not about identity but about expression)?

The quote in this first annotation seems to perfectly capture some of the questions I have been asking about the listener's previous experiences.

I'm wondering if the response to this question depends in part on the listener's level of musical training...

No annotations for these responses? I was surprised by the contrasts - 'senseless' and 'régulier', 'étonnant' and 'simpliste'. Is there a wider variety for this piece than the others?

I agree but here's where it would have been helpful to have an example of such a collaboration that gives rise to some great music. I don't think we need to sacrifice what we consider good music when discussing machine-human collaborations, but we may need to rethink some of the categories we use to discern what we like and don't like as well as acknowledge the influences that contribute to these preferences.

Your annotations on the interviews are really thought-provoking. I'm not sure this is the best format for them, though, since they kept appearing and then disappearing on my screen.

I'm wondering about the addition of the percussion since this is what feels most electronic to me... But this got me thinking about how these three sounds are often used in trap music. Could part of what the interviewees are reacting to so negatively be the combination of these sounds? (ie. more 'traditional' flute and more electronic percussion)

I find this argument really interesting and was wondering if you could follow up with a point about the blurring of the organic and inorganic that this kind of thinking requires... for example, Wilson's point about rematerializing the body but not necessarily in an organic form.

I was just about to ask about the role of the body as techne :-)

You could include a few of the comments from your interviewees who all emphasize a kind of return to the organic, the peaceful, etc. (I wonder if you would have had similar comments if you had used a minor instead of a major key...)

A general comment about this page - the addition of interview clips spread out over the page was excellent! It created an amazing polyphony as I read over your text and listened to the clips at the same time. I loved the different tonalities and pitches of these voices that ended up creating a kind of musicality that spilled over onto your written text.

This list evokes for me the profoundly embedded and embodied human (emotions, senses, life, rhythms) as well as the more humanist view (soul, transcendence, etc.)

Overall comments -

• Your project explores a less linear and more relational understanding of temporality in some really productive ways - theoretically and creatively (mix of readings and artistic creation); structurally and aesthetically (triads and not binaries, colours to create additional links); experimentally and analytically (webs of ideas and arguments). You make relevant connections to posthumanism in your critique of the Vitruvian man's microbes :-), and your clear explanation of a chronological, linear time vs. multiple, rhizomatic temporalities. There were a few times when I felt you could have explained your examples a little more, though - ex. biopolitics of corn, or gut microflora.
• I was also left with a few questions that a final page might have helped answer - what did the artistic element bring to your project vs. the more traditional research-driven element? I'm thinking of Braidotti's definition of art that pushes us beyond the limits of the human in so many ways... And how does this understanding of multiple temporalities give rise to a posthuman politics and ethics? What kinds of sustainable relationships are possible with corn and bacteria?
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 6.5/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 5/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 5/6 TOTAL = 16.5/20

The use of repetition in each of your artist's statements is extremely effective - well done!

Did you consider playing around with the placement of the cubes? For example, placed horizontally instead of stacked vertically? Or suspended in space in different places rather than 'building' from the ground up? And then there's the question of the stool upon which the cubes are stacked :-)

I also really like the idea of the cube structures as pockets of time in a much larger enfolded web to temporalities.

True, but this feels added on rather than integrated into your project.

Bibliographical reference?

Or maybe on a microcellular level?

This is a very cool image - where does it come from? I'm also wondering about your annotation that stops in mid-phrase.

Could you explain the red bulbs? I'm assuming this cube represents an inner view of the body (with the red being blood) but I'm not quite sure.

I really like how you weigh both sides here of the 'promote the microbe' movement. You could also point out that much of the discourse about gut flora has to do with health and wellness (playing into an 'optimized' humanist self again). Feminist scholar Elizabeth Wilson has a really interesting book on this called Gut Feminism that examines the relationship between depression and intestinal issues.

Ok! The cube structure becomes a kind of actualization of the many different possible timelines within which humans and corn interact. With respect to your corn as fellow vs. corn as resource, I'm wondering if it would have made sense to connect a much longer thread to the cube structure (a more indigenous cosmologies worldview) and a much shorter one (a more Western industrial capitalist view that is often critiqued for being 'short-sighted'). In this way, you could have connected threads and cubes... or was this not the point?

So why the timelines with cube structures and without cube structures? Would the former be a kind of Aion, the virtual possibilities of all temporalities? I see you start to explain this below in terms of two different installations but it's not clear to me how the threads interact with the boxes...

Ok, I see that you are bringing up the biopolitics of monocultures here.

I'm intrigued by the term 'fellow' - could you explain what you mean?

Hmm, I'm not sure about this conclusion. I get the sense that corn is instead treated like bio-genetic capital, that can be manipulated to maximise profit. Could you have raised this problem of the biopolitics of corn? I was reminded of an amazing play by a Montreal-based playwright Annabel Soutar - https://porteparole.org/en/plays/seeds/

The slideshow below poses a bit of problem for me because of the timeline you created to outline the evolution of corn. It feels like the images should follow each other in time or something... I think it's the use of the arrows that creates this sense of temporality where you did not intend to have one.

I love your use of colour in the text (that matches the gif next to it, in this case)!

You clearly outline two opposing views of time, drawing on Tanaka's article to challenge a linear and anthropocentric notion of human history. You cite Braidotti but I'm wondering if you could have made a few more connections to class discussions and material; ex. our discussion of the prefix 'post' in posthuman - does it mean necessarily coming after the human? in a purely linear temporality, yes, but this is not how posthumanism views time; if instead we understand time as multiple layers of differing temporalities, then posthumanism posits itself inside, next to, alongside humanism and identifies many different moments as posthuman (pre-modern moments as well).

I love how this page juxtaposes text and image in order to create multiple points of view on relationality. Because it 'moves' when you hover it, the visualization of your project pages is particularly effective. I was wondering, though, if you could have given just a short description of the photographs since I'm not sure how to interpret these coloured pieces of yarn strewn across space...

• I've come back to this page to add my general comments about your project because I haven't found a 'conclusion' page anywhere that offers additional reflections on the two parts of your project; for example, how can the creation of a CD stairway to heaven as a kind of mourning practice be brought to bear on the analysis of song lyrics in which human lives are mourned? How might thinking about music's materiality lead to more sustainable practices in the music industry? How does this project invite the user to think about death on a 'species' level instead of an individual level? (ex. the CD example is more 'collective' I think)
• Overall, your project takes on the difficult task of asking how human and object deaths come together in the music industry. Thanks for sharing your love of these artists with the user!
• Given the long traditions and intense affect attached to human deaths, it may have felt specious at times trying to identify forms of grief and mourning with respect to object deaths. Your two creative examples begin, however, the important work of opening up a space for this discussion. At the same time, I was left wondering about this problem that was never really addressed. Maybe the next step in thinking about a posthumanist politics of material death?
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 6.5/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 4/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities - 4.5/6 TOTAL = 15/20

Good! You have clearly outlined the main components of your project. You just need to clean this sentence up a little - 'to investigate.... to embody... to investigate'.

Reference? what do you mean by a 'digital good'?

Is this an orphan page? Or is it meant to be linked to the other pages somehow?

I love how this creative experiment to represent a CD stairway to heaven combines a humanist text with a posthumanist attention to the object. Very intriguing! At the same time, I am quite aware of the large gap between this part of your project and the first part about 'mourning human deaths' - I'm wondering if you could have bridged this gap somehow.

These are quite questions but it feels like you needed to go further in your analysis of the death/rebirth of these machines... ex. the return of vinyl or the processes of recycling - in other words, could you have created a bigger picture of the material networks in which these objects are implicated?

This 'grave' also contrasts quite strikingly with the usual landfill sites.

Is this the main aim of posthumanism? Instead of 'protection', I would speak of a need to consider the lives/deaths of inanimate objects in the creation of a sustainable politics.

Could you have integrated a few quotes about zoe in this section in order to make the link between animate beings (a more eco-posthumanist focus) and the lives-deaths of inanimate objects (your focus)?

After exploring the pages related to this topic, I have a couple of general comments: 1) it was key to the question you are asking in this project to include actual songs, videos and lyrics - your choice of songs felt really relevant but I would have liked a little more explanation of why these three artists in particular; 2) you explained the lyrics with respect to the artist's contexts which pointed to the ways in which music (and art more generally) are viewed as biographical - but it felt at times that you were moving too quickly through the songs - what rites and rituals are associated with this form of mourning? how does this type of music allow for an expression of grief that other types may not (ex. reggae, ambient, etc.)?

It's great you responded to my comments about not completely effacing the issue of human deaths from your project. You may also want to have pointed out that posthumanism does not always make space for the kind of mourning you are describing here.

Why does this page only allow me to go back to 'mourning human deaths'?

This point made me think of Charlie's warm-up discussion about zombies and the between life and death state they represent. To some extent, time in jail could be analysed as a zombie state (especially with respect to the explanation given in the glossary about black slavery).

This feels like a bit of a stretch... When watching the videos, it was the omnipresence of bills (money) that struck me as the strongest link to these bio-capitalist forces.

Could you speak to the religious imagery here? The notion of the devil and hell as deeply engrained in ways of imagining human death?

True, but you could also come back to how music becomes a form of mourning? what are the practices of rite and ritual that play into this expression of grief?

You could spend a little more time unpacking this use of social media to create a narrative around a song about an individual's life.

Could you analyse this line since it refers to the practices of burial (human death vs. object death)?

Could you have analyzed this line since it creates a tension between 'flirting' with what one most fears (and possibly desires at the same time - see class discussions about Eros and Thanatos)?

So how are these deaths inscribed in the kind of bio- and necro-politics you refer to on the intro page? Maybe a little less explanation of the lyrics and more critical analysis?

This page nicely walks the user through the process by which you arrived at your project topic. Your point about a species vs. individual death is well made, as is the latter assertion about material deaths of music equipment. Could you also introduce the notion of life-death continuum here (another central point of a posthumanist thinking about death)?

I love this image! You do need to properly cite it, though (Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Big Fish Eat Little Fish” (1557)).

• It was a lot of fun exploring your project, Sam. There were so many different components and yet you managed to keep the whole thing organized (and not too overwhelming! although part of being introduced to a new religion means being overwhelmed :-)
• In many respects, your topic of a posthuman/non-human religion dug deeply into the ideas of vital materialism that we worked through in class by taking seriously the amazing diversity of living beings on the planet. You made connections to other questions that came up in class like a zoe-centred egalitarianism and a view of death beyond the self. Your use of scientific knowledge to outline a non-human religion also nicely echoes the kind of interdisciplinary postsecularism that we were only able to briefly touch on in class (but that appears in the God's Gardeners thinking in Atwood's novel).
• If I still have a few questions, they are largely related to how you could continue to reflect on this topic: 1) in terms of the final requirement, eschatology needed to be discussed with respect to a life-death continuum - could this be what a non-human religion teaches us? 2) I felt like the project needed some of kind of conclusion - this could have been a list of additional questions or a summary of plant religion, animal religion, bacteria religion - how are each of these religions different?
• Evaluation - 1) how your chosen topic engages with the complexities of posthumanism - 7/8 ; 2) how you situate and critically analyse the posthuman lens used in the project - 4/6; 3) how you integrate SCALAR's functionalities (great choice of images!) - 6/6 TOTAL = 17/20

If you move from eschatology to temporality, you could speak of much longer 'lives' - like 5000 year old pines - and begin to challenge the notion of individual death. Somewhere in this section, you could also have discussed the life-death continuum - how do non-humans exemplify this continuum? ie. difficulties of identifying where individual life begins and ends; the notion of life as spread across beings.

I'm wondering about religions with beliefs about reincarnation that seem to have a more circular understanding of time than eschatology (more linear). It seems like a discussion of temporality needed to be part of this 'requirement'.

This point and the one about 250 000 000 year old bacteria got me thinking about time scales and how eschatology works on such a short time scale (relatively - individual lives, historical eras like 1000 years for millenarianists) compared to geological time. When does it no longer make sense to speak of endings?

You might have a look at - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23389107

What if animals taught us not to fear death? So instead of 'eschatological concern' we might speak of 'eschatological acceptance'?

I'm fascinated by the fact that the more personal "I" is most prominent with respect to this requirement. I suppose it makes sense in light of a metaphysics of death, ie. the idea that death gives meaning to individual human life and the idea that it is impossible to imagine one's own death. But I'm really interested by your attempt to move beyond the individual to understand death at a species level, combining 1) life beyond the self; and 2) life beyond death.

hmm, I had been hoping for an example of plant morality that aligns with 'do unto others what you would have them do unto you'!

A kind of becoming invincible? How does this fit wit interspecies relationships?

True, but what about identifying a moral law that is common to many different religions like the Golden Rule? What might something like this rule look like in the non-human world?

Ha!

You might have a look at primatologist Frans de Waal's work - https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en

You could outline two kinds of moral systems, one that emphasizes power and another humility. This might help with finding parallels in non-human worlds. We also discussed in class the ways in which morality might align with levels of survival / life/ flourishing.

In line with this critique, I think you could have pointed to the cries of "Save the cow, save the nation" in the video clip below.

I love the examples on this page. But I was wondering how you chose the different kinds of inter-species relationships - were you looking for a mix of symbiotic relationships, mutualism, commensalism & parasitism?

Ok, here's the example that I was asking about on the 'animals' page where death and destruction serve a larger eco-systemic purpose. You could link this to the 'eschatological concern' page. Or you could make a connection to zoe's destructive forces at the inter-species level...

The mention of ants removing the aphids' wings in the video raised the issue for me of human-animal relations on factory farms. I think the interspecies relations requirement needs to include these more destructive components of these relations as well (not to naturalize or demonize them but to acknowledge them).

This might be the perfect place to come back to the concept of species that still raises debates within biology. And you could link this to a move towards post-anthropocentrism, as Charlie suggested in her comments.

The example of fruits and seeds is perfect for thinking through plant rituals. You could emphasize creativity and creation as part of these rituals.