GT 24 - Ella Cui - LIFE, OTHERWISE

LIFE,

OTHERWISE Evolution

Aesthetic World Building

“Human-centric design is a design failure from the start. Human peoples will only thrive if they do not position themselves in the center but rather among and in relationship with all life.”

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AESTHETIC EMBODIMENT EVOLUTION NARRATIVE POSTANTHROPOCENE

THESIS STATEMENT

”THE LIVING WORLD IS NEITHER “ENVIRONMENT” NOR “NATURAL RESOURCES. THE LANGUAGE WE USE WITH “MORE-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS” MATTERS. WE HONOR HOW LANGUAGE SHAPES OUR PERCEPTIONS.’’

Graduate Thesis 2024

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Have you sensed the changes? Are you aware that the future is coming?

We live in a world that is always changes After 5 billion years’s evolution, Earth became what we see today. Inspired

by James Lovelock’s theory of Gaia, Earth will continue as a self-regulation system that survives from all kinds of catastrophy and the creatures can always adapt to the changes through evolution. According to global statistics, by 2100, the world’s population will explode to 11 billion. It is this growth and expansion that has made humanity the dominant on land.

While it develops, we seem to rarely consider the future of the living world.

However, nature is always changing, and life is always evolving—the future will inevitably arrive. This project takes this as its starting point, offering an aesthetical imaginative living world of 1 million years later, bringing hope for what lies ahead.

5000 years later, the great earthquake happened. The earth's plates move towards the Pacific Ocean, causing the pacific to disappear. Asia and North America merge to form a central continent, while Africa and South America move in other directions and form independent islands. Others descended to the ocean. The climate has also changed, with extreme alternating cold and heat. Most of today’s vegetation cannot adapt to such changes.

How will species evolve? "Are there animals that eat grass? As long as there is grass, there will be such creatures. Are there animals that climb trees? As long as there are trees, there will be such creatures. Are there animals that eat fish? As long as there are fish, there will be such creatures." It is important to determin the environment before making any assumption about evolving creatures in the furture.

Mycelium have survived through their extraordinary adaptability, forming large mushroom colonies that dominate the landscape. They absorb minerals, decompose dead organic matter, and act as shade and transport nutrients. They form vast networks of hyphae whose color and texture could alter the Earth’s surfaces by affecting their reflectivity. Mycelial colonies could help control the amount of solar radiation that is absorbed or reflected back into the atmosphere, affecting local and regional temperature.

In such a situation, the existence of humans seems to become less important. Human peoples will only thrive if they do not position themselves in the center but rather among and in relationship with all life.

With all of the assumptions. This project will imitate the representation of the Garden of earthly delight to unveil the brand new Earth.

GAIA_A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH NOVACENE_THE COMING AGE OF HYPERINT PROTOPIA FUTURES FRAMEWORK TENTACULAR THINKING PARALLEL FUTURES GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHT

PROVOCATIONS

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Graduate Thesis 2024

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GAIA A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH JAMES LOVELOCK "Life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. A rough paraphrase might be that life is one of those processes which are found whenever there is an abundant flow of energy. It is characterized by a tendency to shape or form itself as it consumes, but to do so it must always excrete low-grade products to the surroundings."

"It also suggests that life-like processes require a flux of energy above some minimal value in order to get going and keep going."

"The result of this more single-minded approach was the development of the hypothesis that the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts." "the Earth began its existence as a separate body in space about 4,500 million years." "s not surprising, therefore, that little is known about the origin of life on our planet and still less about the course of its early evolution" "Once life began, it probably established itself in the sea, in the shallow waters, the estuaries, river banks, and wet lands. From these earliest habitable regions it spread to encircle the globe."

"Pollution is not, as we are so often told, . a product of moral turpitude. It is an inevitable consequence of life at work. The second law of thermodynamics clearly states that the low entropy and intricate, dynamic organization of a living system can only function through the excretion of low-grade products and low-grade energy to the environment."

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NOVACENE: THE COMING AGE OF HYPERINTELLIGENCE "Okay, what is Novacene? Novacene is a new epoch of life on Earth, one that follows the current epoch of Anthropocene, during which human activity has had a global impact (2019, pp.33–44). In Novacene, cybernetic life will dominate the Earth. These organisms will be, as they do not currently exist, living systems constructed out of electronic rather than organic components. These “systems” will evolve from their initial state, just as biological life evolved from primary elements billions of years ago . Exactly how this evolution will occur is not explained. By “living system,” Lovelock refers to a system that is self-reproducing, self-improving, and autonomous."

"But why would this evolution of life on Earth from biological organisms to cyborgs happen? It will happen because the essence of the cosmos is information, and natural evolution on Gaia is directed toward the perfection of intelligence. (We human beings were just a stage in this process, and we are very imperfect.) Or it may be that by creating information-saturated life, Gaia, or even the cosmos, gains a perfect understanding of itself. Of course, we may in hindsight ask why the cosmos would even try to understand itself. To even ask such a question, the cosmos would need to already have some understanding of itself, or at least an urge to achieve it! Nevertheless, such questions do not taint Lovelock’s narrative and argument."

"Gaia is a beautiful concept, and it helps us to appreciate nature better, but it is hard to view Gaia as a living organism in the sense of biological life, as Lovelock suggests. After all, this is the only form of life we know. Are other forms of life possible?

Maybe they are, and such a possibility is not logically impossible, but reality does not necessarily follow purely logical possibilities. One could say, “That’s too bad for reality,” but this does not resolve the argument."

"Humans are the only “understanders” existing in the Universe.

Nothing else understands the cosmos. We are alone, like it or not.

We have only the Earth, and migrating to Mars is just a dangerous phantasm Information is “the innate property of the universe and therefore conscious beings must come into existence. . . we are the tools by which the cosmos would explain itself” . We are too reliant on logical thinking but “with intuition we can now know far more than we can see"

Graduate Thesis 2024

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PROTOPIA FUTURES FRAMEWORK MONIKA BIELSKYTE "The “we” of Protopia is everyone involved in putting this together, yes, but also the collaborators past and future, joining this gradually expanding community of ours. Together, we learn to foster radically hopeful and inclusive future ways of seeing and being in this world."

"Mainstream futurist discourse tends to extrapolate from the status quo and proposes singular, predetermined future visions.

The problem with a lot of such foresight is that it is bound by the constraints and suppositions of dominant perceptions of reality. Within the Protopia Framework, however, we position that there is no singular “future” trajectory but rather a vast scope of many alternative futures. It is continuously shaped not just by our actions but also by our inactions and our apathy."

"Superficially, one could perceive Protopian Futures as situated “between” Dystopia and Utopia, yet they are not particularly indebted to either. Dystopias/Utopias are monologues moored in the gaze of privilege, inevitably tied to boundaries of thought established via patriarchal settler colonialism. Protopia is a continuous dialogue, more a verb than a noun, a process rather than a destination, never finite, always iterative, meant to be questioned, adjusted, and expanded.

Our goal is always to center the previously marginalized perspectives, especially those at the intersection of Indigeneity, Queerness, and Disability. Above all, Protopia explores visions of embodied HOPE, futures wherein we have come together, as imperfect as our condition is" "REGENERATIVE ACTION & LIFE AS TECHNOLOGY: With recognition of destructive feedback loops already in motion, we consider sustainability solutions entirely insufficient and aim for regenerative practices in every aspect of our civilizational construct.

We prioritize biological over mechanical technologies as the only truly viable long-term strategy. We grow, not just build."

"The living world is neither “environment” nor “natural resources.’’ Such ways of framing pervert any possibility of an equitable relationship with the Planet. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in Braiding Sweetgrass, the language we use with “more-than-human beings” matters. We honor how language shapes our perceptions."

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TENTACULAR THINKING DONNA HARAWAY "What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on Earth must not be named the Anthropocene!"

"The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of interlaced trails."

"Gaia’s intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself—microbes will adapt, to put it mildly —but threatens the livability of Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an “event” already under way called the Sixth Great Extinction." " Evidence was mounting that the acidification and warming of the oceans are rapidly decomposing coral reef ecosystems, resulting in huge ghostly white skeletons of bleached and dead or dying coral. That a symbiotic system—coral, with its watery world-making associations of cnidarians and zooanthellae with many other critters too—indicated such a global transformation will come back into our story."

Graduate Thesis 2024

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"Species Man did not shape the conditions for the Third Carbon Age or the Nuclear Age. The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence, once again. Autopoietic, self-making man came down once again, this time in tragic system failure, turning biodiverse ecosystems into flipped-out deserts of slimy mats and stinging jellyfish. Neither did technological determinism produce the Third Carbon Age." "(2) Species Man does not make history. (3) Man plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human exceptionalists tell.. (4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do not do History."

"We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story." " However, the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness.."

"Corals helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthropocene in the first place. From the start, uses of the term Anthropocene emphasized human-induced warming and acidification of the oceans from fossil-fuel-generated CO2 emissions."

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GARDEN OF EAR HIERONYM

Graduate Thesis 2024

RTHLY DELIGHTS MUS BOSCH

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PROTOPIA FUTURE WORLD SETTING CREATURES LANDSCAPE

PROJECT

”Algae, mycelium/fungi are not forms of life to fear or disregard but to lean into. We honor these unsung heroes holding together the biological realm of this planet. ”

Graduate Thesis 2024

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PROTOPIA FUTURE Evolution continues its relentless march forward, with recent discoveries in 2024 unveiling the emergence of over 100 novel species within the diverse ecosystems of New Zealand. These newfound organisms stand as testament to the ongoing process of adaptation, showcasing their epitomize the dynamic interplay between life and its surroundings, perpetuating the evolutionary journey that has shaped our planet. In such a situation, the existence of humans seems to become less important. as mentioned in the article “protopia futures”_ ”Human peoples will only thrive if they do not position themselves in the center but rather among and in relationship with all life.”

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WORLD SETTING The future world setting is based on the continent shifting theory. 5000 years later, the great earthquake happened. Earth's plates move towards Pacific Ocean, causing the pacific to disappear. Asia and North America merge to form a central continent, while Africa and South America move in other directions and form independent islands. Others descended to the ocean.

The climate has also changed, with extreme alternating cold and heat.

Most of today’s vegetation cannot adapt to such changes, with only a few species of conifers surviving. They tend to become either short and wide and keep everything closer to ground or become really tall and thin to receive more energy.

Graduate Thesis 2024

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CREATURES How will species evolve? "it is for sure that as long as there is grass, there will be creatures eating it. As long as there are trees, there will be creatures climbing it. and as long as there are fishes, there will be creatures hunt them." so the landscape need to be certained to make assumption of the evolving creatures.

During the great change of nature, Mycelium have survived through their extraordinary adaptability, forming large mushroom colonies that dominate the landscape. They absorb minerals, decompose dead organic matter, and act as shade and transport nutrients. They form vast networks of hyphae whose color and texture could alter the Earth’s surfaces by affecting their reflectivity. Mycelial colonies could help control the amount of solar radiation that is absorbed or reflected back into the atmosphere, affecting local and regional temperature.

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Jellyfish

Graduate Thesis 2024

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When dealing with natural disasters, creatures in the ocean are always the first to adapt to changes. Jellyfish have evolved far beyond their initial simple stage. They now have advanced cognitive abilities and complex neural networks. They use transparent membranes on their heads to communicate, forming complex patterns and colors to convey emotions and information.

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Shell Bird

Graduate Thesis 2024

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The land birds are nocturnal Animals. The adults will migrate to the south end of the central continent in winter and go back after newborns.

Land birds are born with wings that can fly high to prevent them from predators and these wings will gradually become heavy shells on the way back to north as they grow up.

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Turtle Beak

Graduate Thesis 2024

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After the great earthquake, most inland water became acidic.

Some turtles need to give up their original habitat and gradually move to live on land. To better catch the insects in the stone cracks, their beak become longer and is thin enough to insert into the stone.

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Graduate Thesis 2024

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