ABSTRACT
This chapter examines artistic practices that use scientific methods and tools to highlight the role of biological and technological micro-agencies in the formation of more/than/human entanglements. Scrutinizing the methods applied by Eduardo Kac in his project Edunia and by George Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara in Biopresence, the chapter demonstrates that the artistic practices present a postanthropocentric approach, emphasizing that the more/than/human relationality results from the multiple entanglements of human bodily activities with nonhuman figurations. Instead of control, the artists thoughtfully provide care, cherishing the more/than/human materiality, entailing an ethical reflection on the novel entanglements. For the artists, it is the laboratory, rather than the studio, which becomes the shared site of their artistic creation, one where the divisions between organic and nonorganic, human and nonhuman, mechanical and biological, matter and meaning are questioned. To contrast the ethico-onto-epistemological approach employed by Kac, Tremmel, and Fukuhara, this chapter opens with a discussion of Brandon Cronenberg’s film Antiviral which presents a vision of biocapitalism’s anthropocentric aims driven by the logic of consumption. In the coda to this chapter, I examine more/than/human/ entanglements in Alex Garland’s film Annihilation in order to demonstrate that the changes in the socio-cultural, environmental, political conditions of the Anthropocene, under which new synergies of knowledge are created, develop ethical methods for our sustainability.
