//
*/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/
*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*
--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University
Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Blog:http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/
Latest:
Book: Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative
Intelligence:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/
Journal issue: Ecologies of Dissemination issue of PARSE Journal #21 - Summer
2025, edited by Eva Weinmayr and Femke
Snelting:https://parsejournal.com/journal/#ecologies-of-dissemination. (I'm one
of the contributors to this experimental issue which emphasizes collective over
individual authorship.)
Video: 'Liquidate AI Art', Computer Arts
Society:https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2025/october/webinar-liquidate-ai-art
Talk: 'The Independent Intellectual vs Posting Zero and the Dead
Internet':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/12/2/the-independent-intellectual-vs-posting-zero-and-the-dead-in.html
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