Zooetics

Writing algae and other life

William Blake was critical of the rigid, reductive influence of Newton’s ideas, of his insensibility to vision and ethical restraint. Describing Blake’s portrait, Alan Moore remarks that: ‘Newton sits in single-minded concentration, crouched above his calculations and immune to the more fractal charm of blue and orange lichens spattering the rocky backdrop, his chill bench…

M for Mycelium

Zooetics is a five year research project by art collaboration Jutempus*, exploring the possibility of bringing human knowledge, technologies and processes into closer collaboration and understanding with the knowledge, technologies and processes of other life that we are co-existing with on the planet. This month the Zooetics Pavilion is in the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius…

Zoo Stories – Creative Writers – Call for participation

Writers including Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka and Ian McEwan have used fiction to reach across the human/non-human life divide. As part of the Zooetics project, we are developing radio broadcasts inspired by Kaunas Zoo, incorporating short fiction texts by creative writers based in Lithuania. Engaging with animals at the zoo, talking with zookeepers and other staff…

Science Fiction and Real Science

Just posted a blog on the Zooetics website on the relationship between actual technological research and development and fictional technologies such as teleportation, telekinesis, and galactic language translators, or J.G. Ballard’s bio-engineered plants, insects, houses and clothes in Vermilion Sands. I’m compiling a list of sources for fictional technologies and future worlds relating to The Anthropocene. Your…

Watch Tomorrow’s Zooetics Lectures Live and Pose Questions to the Panel

Zooetics is a transdisciplinary research project unpacking, reevaluating and recombining the notions of Nature, Interspecies and Anthropocene. It began last week with the first in a series of lectures and seminars at Kaunas University of Technology delivered by Christian Schwagerl, talking on The Anthropocene, and Natalie Jeremijenko on her art and engineering inventions addressing…

Zooetics Lectures start today

Zooetics Lecture Series starts today in Lithuania at Kaunas University of Technology with presentations by Christian Schwagerl and Natalie Jeremijenko. Interview with me published today, including my attempt to respond to the great question: ‘What is the purpose of a writer in society today?’

Zooetics has just launched. It’s a research project on the frontier between human and other forms of life from mammals, to mollusks, to microbes. I am Zooetics writer in residence working with the art group Jutempus, who are based in Lithuania. Zooetics starts by unpacking the notions of ANTHROPOCENE, INTERSPECIES and NATURE with a series of…