“Y: POSSIBLE FUTURES” is a serie of curated events by DIVADLO X10 focused on an transdisciplinary and transgenre interconnections opening new ways of meeting the local and international (art) scene.

Diffractions Collective and sdbs will be participating with the installation Operation Anthropolysis

when: 02 – December – 2019

Operation Anthropolysis

Diffractions Collective / SDBS

Concept:

The purpose of Operation Anthropolysis is to explore the entanglement of ‘future’ itself bound up with the morphing nature of Homo Sapiens through the influence and infiltration of toxins, chemicals, additives and contaminants in its environment and especially upon the site of the body. Furthermore, the project highlights how the Homo Sapien has always been a palimpsest of mutations that drive non-linear and unpredictable transformations to our species. This can be accounted for through the range of genetic mutations such as: (The MCM6 gene, that some people kept producing the enzyme lactase, allowing them to drink milk. RNF213 Gene improved blood supply to the primate brain, improving ancestors intelligence. MYH16 gene enabled our jaw muscles weaken, which allows our skulls and brains to expand. AMY1 gene increasing the production of the salivary enzyme amylase which facilitates the digestion of starch) and thus has and will continue to adapt to adverse environmental or alloplastic conditions that have been instrumental in the development of Homo Sapiens and will continue to do so – especially, now in the age of the Anthropocene/Necrocene.

                  We will focus on the influence and infiltration of toxins, chemicals, additives and contaminants that have been voluminously documented to have disruptive effects on the human endocrine, immune, reproductive, nervous and other systems. This has been testified through the nature of Biphenol or BPA bearing a detrimental impact particularly on Endocrine receptors, mimicking human estrogen at low concentrations. Implications have been felt across multiple species, where the ingestion of the plastic has decreased the quality and quantity of sperm counts among Western men or over 99 percent of turtle hatchlings in northern Australia are female due to increasing sand and sea temperatures. Moreover, our biosphere has become enveloped in tiny pieces of degraded plastic, synthetic fibers and plastic beads, collectively called microplastics, that have turned up in every corner of the planet. Furthermore, petrochemical drifts accumulating on our windowsills and roadsides have been discovered by European Researchers that have found an array of material that is precipitating such as: Acrylates/polyurethanes/varnish/lacquer (hereafter varnish), followed by nitrile rubber, polyethylene polyamide, and rubber type 3 (13; ethylene-propylenediene rubber).

1 Thus, how does the infiltration of toxins, chemicals, additives, contaminants and plastics reconstitute the link to and by human actors? Can we imagine how humanity’s technological capabilities, atmospheres and ecologies will react in these new configurations of contamination? Here, we present the concept of Anthropolysis that derives from the idea of ‘lysis’ referring to the breakdown of a cell caused by damage to its plasma (outer) membrane and extending it to Homo Sapien as its boundaries and its ‘perceived’ bodily surfaces and internal bio-architecture are disintegrating in the wake of ecological devastation.

                       Respectively, our installation/project Operation Anthropolysis is an accelerated speculation on the nature of ubiquitous contamination in relation to the morphing of the human into a rapidly evolving type of creature due to the forces unleashed by unchecked biotech/nanotech, metamaterials, industrial megaprojects and nanoparticles. This omnipresence of multiple and multiplying ‘fallouts’ is only a ‘glimpse-metaphor of the true amount of chemicals and their reactants transforming all ecosystems and habitats on the planet, generating terminal waste zones anticipated to endure and collate for 100,000 years (3,000 generations). Interestingly, each such Terminal Waste Zone breeds novel life and unexpected sentient forms. We are seeing a new era of ‘World Waste Making’ underscoring Tyler Volk’s contention that “The earth is one big waste world.” Critically, ‘Waste’ itself has catalyzed the emergence of lifeforms, underlying here that our own survival is predicated on oxygen that is a waste-product of photosynthesis. The Earth’s soil and water consist in large degrees of the built-up waste products of living and nonliving matter. Ultimately, our project is consonant with the focus on how waste is ‘materially world-making’ – connecting geosphere, biosphere and stratosphere.

                          Through its combined effects on the body-minds and civilizations of humanity, waste is now forming even our noosphere and technosphere. Thus, challenging the conception that ‘Waste’ itself is a static or inert category, but rather is a dynamic, vibrant and sentient producing process that begets a medley of new lifeforms or reconfigured uses i.e. leachate bacteria, bacteria gobbling up oil spills, radioactive waste, and the emergence of plastic bottle-eating bacteria discovered and synthesized in Japan.

2 Therefore, as the recognizable contours of Homo Sapiens dissolve and mutate, in overt as well as subtle ways, we can expect to witness the emergence of new forms of sentience and body-mind designs that will gradually efface our standard anthromorphic template. Hence, how does the nature of contamination and waste compounded by the pressures unleashed by the grand fragmentation caused by global warming, humanitarian catastrophes, resource depletion, technomic hegemony, state dissolution and tech proliferation, potentially spawn novel life forms that will be under an unimaginable amount of evolutionary pressure?

                       Furthermore, how does our age reflect what Justin McBrien posits in his work “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene” that Capitalism operates on the continuum of necrosis where: Necrosis proceeds by autolysis, a form of self-digestion in which a cell destroys itself through its own enzymes action. Capitalism is the reciprocal transmutation of life into death and death into capital. Necrosis is capital’s mode of apoptosis, reproducing the means of production by its destruction. It is both saprophytic and parasitic: it feeds on live and dead nature the same; it seeks to render them indistinguishable. From the standpoint of the Necrocene, capital appears as a species, an opportunistic detritus feeder producing mass extinction in the present through the exploitation of past extinction.

                    Here, strategies of assimilating to such toxic environments used by such life forms in order to survive inside the supradynamic hyperobject of the near-future Earth can be envisioned and simulated and for our purposes spawns consideration how has and what is anticipated for the Homo Sapien to transform. Operation Anthropolysis proposes several interactive scenarios for the emergence of such Anthromorphs as adjusted to the many (from our point of view) extremely toxic environments of the future. Thus, we will be envisioning future habitats and settlements revolving around Anthromorphs that are aligned and configured according to the mutant and contaminant, endocrine, immune, reproductive, nervous and gastrointestinal compositions. Our installation will comprise of imagining scenarios of what these ‘Anthromorphs’ or 5 variants of these ‘Anthromorphs’, or a form of ‘speciation through contamination’ will be, their evolving biological-chemical composition to mirror evolutionary selective pressures that are symptomatic of unabated ecological destruction and crucially their habitats. Furthermore, we will examine how ‘waste’ is a core element that is tied up to the nature of Deep Time, a temporality that surpasses the minuscule emergence of human life, yet crucially shapes the conditions for inhuman futures to arrive.     

                     Installation and Realization:

We envision and intend to realize our exploration of Anthropolysis through an installational format:

• a) First, we will use discarded, makeshift, assembled materials/posters detailing extant and novel life forms that emerge from Terminal Waste Zones.
• b) A small “contained waste zone” in the gallery space itself that will attempt to (through the usage of plastic, saprophytes, petri dishes) directly speculate on how synthetic life forms emerge in these conditions.
• c) How and whether these organisms inherit a symbiotic potentiality for life forms to be acclimated into the Homo Sapien, in order for the human to be able to cope with the morphing of geopolitical terminal zones.
• d) An overarching speculation on the nature of speciation arising through novel configuration of the extreme waste that will remain active in real-time, incorporated into the gastrointestinal system of a Xenoanthromorph.
• e) A short (3-5 minutes) video illustrating the nature of mutation and precisely how the notion of ‘waste’ itself is an ingredient in shaping temporality.

photos credit: Dustin Breitling