Non-human Agents Research Articles

Photography and the Organic Nonhuman: Photographic Art with Light, Chlorophyll, Yeasts, and Bacteria

ABSTRACT The concept of nonhuman in relation to photography has recently been mostly theorized through technology, while organic nonhuman agents and processes at work in photography have received less attention. In this article, works by three contemporary Finnish artists who incorporate organic materials and processes into photography are analyzed to renegotiate the borders between photography, bioart, and science. This leads to a rethinking of the dichotomy between the concepts of technological and organic in the context of contemporary photographic art. Combining new materialist and posthumanist theories with photography history and theory allows for a multidisciplinary method that recognizes the worth of both human and nonhuman agents and processes at work. The artworks are analyzed as temporal and processual, taking into account their performative qualities.

Peace Needs to Embrace the Anthropocene

The current climate crisis and related extreme weather phenomena massively influence everyday human life and thus also armed conflict and peace. Acknowledging the human origin of these biospheric instabilities introduces the geological era of the Anthropocene. While it is built around the acknowledgment of the human ability to indelibly alter Earth’s physis, it does not celebrate humanity’s sovereignty, but rather indicates the dissolution of agency within the complex interrelationships between the human and the nonhuman world. The Anthropocene and the issue of peace obviously interrelate. This essay describes the Anthropocene not only as a useful conception in approaching peace, but as its conditio sine qua non. Its ontological implications highlight the substantial share of nonhuman agency and complexity through extreme weather phenomena in armed conflict and peace, while its epistemological innovations reveal the indispensability of the dissolution of the modernist transcendental ego for reasoning about and practicing peace. Peace in the Anthropocene means to let the world and its myriads of human and nonhuman inhabitants speak and to take them seriously.

«СОЮЗ» ХУДОЖНИКА С НЕЧЕЛОВЕЧЕСКИМ АГЕНТОМ – УТОПИЯ ИЛИ РАБОЧАЯ МОДЕЛЬ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ПРОИЗВОДСТВА?

The subject of the article: works of contemporary art created by non-human agents, on the example of which one can analyze the ways of interaction of contemporary artists with non-trivial media (algorithms, robots, "half-life artists", etc.). The object of the article: the impact of technological innovations on contemporary art production, as well as the need, in connection with the artist's appeal to science and the latest technologies, to rethink the goals and objectives of communication through images and the very concept of art. The purpose of the project: to update the information for the scientific world about the strategies of interaction between a human artist and a non-human agent, as well as about the nature of this interaction. Results of the work: the study showed that the creation of a work of art (both physical and as part of a post-production strategy, as a re-significance) – despite the criticism of anthropocentrism by representatives of the Actor-Network Theory and individual media theorists, should still be understood as purposeful activity inherent in a human, but not in a non-human agent. Appeal to non-human agents can be considered within the framework of the paradigm of "assistive technologies" and "chimerical" actor. Scope of the results: expanding the boundaries of the application of art history methodology and related disciplines, which contributes to the development of a language for describing the phenomena of contemporary art in the interdisciplinary field of modern media, in particular, in the dynamically developing field of art & science. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, key trends were identified that determine the nature of our interaction with the other in the process of creating a work of art and interacting with it.

From Devil-Fish to Friendly Whale? Encountering Gray Whales on The California Coast

Eastern North Pacific gray whales are famed for their remarkable ecological history: from near extinction to recovery and from ‘devil-fish’ to ‘friendly whale’. This article critically examines the origins and development of the narrative framing of gray whales’ history as one in which the whales were long known as ‘devil-fish’, until they became ‘friendly whales’ in the 1970s. Drawing on archival sources from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, this article interrupts the premise of a smooth and linear transition from devil-fish to friendly whale. Instead, gray whale histories reveal much more complex and even contradictory human–whale encounters along the California coast. Throughout the time period examined, precursors of the familiar contemporary narrative of gray whale history emerged, each building on prior remembrances of gray whale pasts. More broadly, this article contributes to contemporary conversations in more-than-human historical studies about nonhuman agency, multispecies encounters, memory, and environmental histories of emotion.

Кризис репрезентации экспертного знания и медицинской практики в эпоху COVID-19: казус Рауля — Агамбена

The gap between fundamental and applied science in today’s world is caused by a number of social, political, and now biological factors related to the challenges humanity faces, such as climate change, international terrorism, hybrid wars, intense inter-country competition, and, finally, pandemics. World governments are responding to the emergence of mixed natural-social formations, including “new wars,” global warming, environmental pollution and COVID-19, with rather brutal biopolitics, not always based on relevant scientific expertise, especially in the context of its systemic crisis. For scientists, these circumstances mean an even greater challenge, forcing them to step out of their usual university and laboratory settings into the “field,” rethinking their relationships with applied scientists and engineers, as well as politicians, doctors, journalists, and non-human agents (viruses, gadgets, programs, etc.). The recent scandal surrounding the French microbiologist from Marseille, Didier Raoul, is most revealing in this context. A comparative analysis of his case and the case of the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the context of reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, will help to evaluate the scale of the crisis of the global healthcare system, biology and medicine in Europe and the USA, and the difficulties of representation of expert knowledge in the humanities discourse, mass culture, contemporary hypermedialized environment and conflicting political and economic interests. The author sees a possible way out of this situation as involving non-human actors in the dialogue on these issues, rethinking the role of the human being and re-evaluating the possibilities of the mass media and institutions of governance.

Criminal Law And Artificial Intelligence: Perspective From Italian And European Experience

An offence committed by artificial intelligence seems like an oxymoron, at least in a legal system in which criminal offence is literally an expression of the personality of a human being. However, reality knocks on the door of the criminalist, evoking the possibility that a non-human agent may commit harmful acts for which the community expresses a need for punishment. This paper examines the perspective of a rational criminal control with respect to acts performed by or by means of machines and software that learn and evolve through a comparison with the environment in which they operate.

ЖИВОЕ И НЕЖИВОЕ В ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ СОВРЕМЕННЫХ СЕРИАЛОВ: ВИТАЛЬНОСТЬ АНДРОИДОВ

Humanity has been inventing a robot throughout its history. The steam-powered Pigeon of Archytas and the automatic servant made by Philo of Byzantium belong to the antiquity. Automatons of St. Albertus Magnus, Bacon and Regiomontanus, the Jewish golems, the anthropomorphic idols of Daedalus, the “Iron man” of the Russian monarch Ivan IV, Leonardo’s mechanical knight, the Writer, the Draftsman and the Pianist of Pierre Jaquet-Droz. Each following epoch filled up the list of inventions seeking to come as close as possible to the likeness of the living. At the same time, the desire to reproduce any possible manifestations of vitality has always been accompanied by unaccountable fear of the artificial, non-living and its invasion into the living space. With the advent of cinema, these desires and fears have acquired a new “face” – the number of all sorts of doppelgangers, technical entities generated by the science has multiplied; new images – robots, cyborgs, androids. They have got not only a new aesthetic, a special screen appeal of animated machines, but also a new subjectivity – a certain type of perception based on the indistinguishability between artificial and natural. The modern media landscape offers opportunities for conceptualization beyond the oppositions: the extension of the idea of life, the existence of hybrids and human network extensions, variations of artificial intelligence, autonomous non-human agents and communities. In this regard, the new authenticity seems to be an inseparable combination of technical and natural existing in the same space, in the same body. The article explores the idea of new subjectivity of androids, cyborgs, replicants in modern science fiction TV shows, connected with a special vitality, perception, senses and cognition (“Extant” (2014-2015), “Humans” (2015–2018), “Westworld” (2016–2018), “Altered Carbon” (2018), “Raised by Wolves” (2021)

Confronting Pandemics: Human and Non-Human Agents in the Discourse of the Moscow Authorities on COVID-19

The article is devoted to the discourse of the Moscow city authorities regarding COVID-19. We believe that this discourse is closely connected with the implemented city policies, articulating and legitimising them. The empirical base of the study is news from the official website of the Mayor of Moscow and entries from the blog of the Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin. The article focuses on discursively created agents of urban life, the attitude of city authorities towards them and the relationship between them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 There are many human and non-human agents in the coronavirus discourse: government officials, townspeople, agents associated with the treatment of coronavirus (medical workers and technologies), and agents associated with the life of the city during the pandemic (infrastructure, organisations and companies, employers, education system). All of them are built around a key agent - the virus itself. Citizens as agents in power discourse are represented by a variety of categories that form two large overlapping groups. The first group is associated with the position of people regarding the disease: people with suspected coronavirus, who fell ill with varying degrees of severity of the disease, recovered, died; donors, vaccine study participants, vaccinated. Over the analysed time period, the discourse related to morbidity undergoes at least two turning points: the transition from a small number of cases to statistics disaggregated in terms of age, and from disaggregated statistics to the total number of cases with an emphasis on the number of severe cases of the disease. The second group of categories of citizens includes belonging to certain social groups, for example, an age cohort, socially vulnerable groups, workers (in general and in certain industries), schoolchildren and students, service users, public transport passengers.
 Citizens are viewed by city officials as important agents involved in the fight against the pandemic. Their agency is discursively produced as a result of the interaction between themselves and the city authorities. Citizens who follow the authority rules gain agency, while those who do not follow them are deprived of it due to rare mention or omission.

Vegetal Cinema in Christine Montalbetti’s Novel Western

This article examines the vegetal agency taking place in the novel Western (2005) (Western: A Novel, translated by Betsy Wing in 2009) by contemporary French writer Christine Montalbetti. Building on the cinematographic performativity of the novel itself and on a materialist ecocritical approach, it studies the mobility of plants in this narrative to identify how the cinematographic transmediality contributes to engage the vegetal in the foreground. This analysis allows to feed the characterisation of cinematographic devices in the contemporary novel and to prolong the reflection on nonhuman agency and its presence in literature today.

WILD BORDER OF POLITICS

The challenge of the politics of the Anthropocene is how to respond to the protests of nature: how to elaborate modes of thought, collective action and social institutions through which non-human agents can be integrated into political communities, even as non-humans exceed our understanding and remain a subject of difference. This paper looks at how the contested borderland forest, Białowieża, at the Polish-Belarusian border helps us think across protest culture during post-socialism. We examine the Białowieża forest as a site of, participant in and provoker of a series of protests: those against national park expansion, against logging, in support of bark beetle rewilding, of far right radical movements and for or against Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers crossing through the forest since EU sanctions were imposed on Belarus in 2021. We do so in order to suggest that these protests should be read as a continuum that enables reflection into why this forest is a key site of protest; that exploring them as a continuum reveals something about an emergent ecology of protest; and that this exploration offers an insight into what is at stake if we see the forest itself as protesting.

“Too Easy” or “Too Much”? (Re)imagining Protagonistic Enhancement through Machine Vision in Video Games

This article explores how video games that valorize techno-masculine imaginaries of superhuman domination also present humans as depending on computational and non-human agencies to succeed. Through close readings of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward 2007) and Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red 2020), I illustrate the close connection between machine vision and militarized visions of domination and agency. The analyses show how beyond-human vision enhances player characters and players, complicating the human-machine relationship in the process. Video games can build on and feed into anthropocentric and masculinist narratives. This article demonstrates how even when the technology appears to support these fantasies of human control, there are moments when it takes over or otherwise disrupts the god-like interventions of the human. By analyzing failures, glitches, and the consistent machine participation in the assemblage, I unpack explicit cases of machine agency as part of a broader assemblage, revealing a more complex power dynamics than those that are initially presented to the player. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the superhuman machine vision was never exclusively human to begin with. Understanding vision and agency as shared with machines both enables and complicates fantasies of dominance in video games.

Stay away from me: Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment.

This study investigated whether the coughing behaviors of virtual agents encourage infection avoidance behavior, i.e., distancing behaviors. We hypothesized that the changes in people's lifestyles in physical environments due to COVID-19 probably influence their behaviors, even in virtual environments where no infection risk is present. We focused on different types of virtual agents because non-human agents, such as robot-like agents, cannot spread a virus by coughing. We prepared four kinds of virtual agents (human-like/robot-like and male/female) and coughing behaviors for them and experimentally measured the personal distance maintained by participants toward them. Our experiment results showed that participants chose a greater distance from coughing agents, regardless of the types, and negatively evaluated them. They also chose a greater distance from male agents than from female agents.

Twinning the Pandemic and the Anthropocene: Crises, Challenge and Conciliation in the Anxious Witnessing of Nonhuman Agency

This paper seeks to situate the anxieties engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic within the framework of the Anthropocene to analyse the multi-faceted ramifications of human and nonhuman interaction. By connecting this ongoing global crisis of human health with the politics of climate change, it attempts to read the forgotten agency of the nonhuman microbe in the light of the rude disruption of the traditional understandings of biopolitics (where bare life has taken centre stage) and the difficulties it has brought in bridging the rift between abstract and concrete information, leading to the scapegoating of victims. It ends with the suggestion of preparation for greener futures by imagining human health within planetary health instead of an anxious wait for a return to pre-pandemic times.

Crises and Community Construction in the Post-Epidemic Era: Posthumanist Survival in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy centers around a global pandemic that almost wipes out all human beings. In such a post-catastrophic world, the survivors have to defeat fierce criminals who escaped from the Painball arena and construct a new community with nonhuman beings. This article puts forward a posthumanist interpretation of survival in three novels and redefines the position of humans in the world through the decline of anthropocentrism and the rise of nonhuman agents. The pandemic’s danger, as well as the severity of the environment, bring about insecurity and anxiety for human beings. Therefore, to confront the severe social crises and anxiety caused by the current global pandemic, Margaret Atwood provides us with a paradigm that human beings ought to abandon the conquest of nature, insert themselves into a larger framework of cross-species identification, and construct a new community that characterizes a harmonious, tranquil and respectful coexistence of multitudinous species. Our comprehension of Atwood’s opposition to anthropocentrism will be strengthened by an examination of survival from the perspective of posthumanism, which will also arouse widespread worries about ecological consciousness in this post-epidemic era.

Do lonely people seek robot companionship? A comparative examination of the Loneliness–Robot anthropomorphism link in the United States and China

Anthropomorphism can provide psychological closeness and compensate for loneliness; therefore, it has been assumed that lonely people are more likely to anthropomorphize robots and will exhibit preferences for anthropomorphic robots. However, to date, few robust studies have tested these intuitions. To fill this gap, we examined the link between loneliness and robot anthropomorphism. Across four cross-cultural studies (2 preregistered; N = 1590), we found counter-intuitive results. More specifically, lonely people were less likely to anthropomorphize robots (Study 1) and showed less preference for anthropomorphic robots (Study 2); these effects existed in Chinese but not American cultures. Further, observers rated consumers who purchased robots with high (versus low) levels of anthropomorphism as less lonely; this effect was more pronounced in Chinese culture than in American culture (Study 3). Further, a growth anthropomorphism orientation—beliefs that people anthropomorphize nonhuman agents out of sincere interest in these agents rather than to counteract loneliness—accounted for these cultural differences (Study 4). These findings enrich the current understanding of anthropomorphism from a cross-cultural perspective and have practical implications for robotic designs.

Beekeepers' beecomings and the agency of a bee

The limits of non-human agency are still a highly disputed topic in humanities and social sciences. This paper is a case study of the relationship between Polish beekeepers and bees, based on data collected during two and a half years of participant observation and conducting ethnographic interviews. I suggest that bees have an immense amount of agency in their contact with humans. Bees shape people in their image in the process of beecoming, thus influencing the way they think, speak and behave. Moreover, bees have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to the inner architecture and politics of the hive. A significant means of manifesting bees’ agency is a sting. Stinging is a direct message to a human, a way of signalling the bees' needs and feelings. Surprisingly, in this relationship between insects and humans, the insect has the upper hand.

Pericles’s Humming Waters: Nonhuman Agency, Textual Criticism, and the Practice of Material Ecocriticism

<i>Pericles</i>’s Humming Waters: Nonhuman Agency, Textual Criticism, and the Practice of Material Ecocriticism

Art and non-human agencies

Post-human thought is permeating the art discourse, with philosophical foundations based on care for other species and a removal of human as the centre of the human universe. In this editorial, we can read about the articles published in this issue and the ways they intertwine with each other and the concepts that seep through this ethical movement. Some counterarguments will also be offered as a way to critically challenge the momentum these perspectives are taking and as a way of not losing focus on the reasons why they emerged in the first place.

Deconstructing agency in the G20 leaders' declarations in the last decade: A corpus-assisted discourse study

Investigating agency has become a pivotal issue in discourse studies, especially organizational discourse. This study aims to identify the controlling agency (who/what) behind G20 leaders' declarations in the last decade and how such agency is constructed. To this end, this study offers a concise examination of relevant literature investigating fundamental concepts like discourse and agency in light of the overlapping relationship between form and function in language studies. Further, an eclectic methodological approach has been devised to arrive at a multi-leveled analysis. Two stages of analysis were designed. First, a corpus of the declarations between 2012 and 2021 was created and analyzed using #LancsBox v.6.x. and Wmatrix. At this stage, we was established as a prime agent in the corpus and proven to collocate heavily with agentive speech acts. One sample declaration, Riyadh 2020, was used for minute discourse analysis in the second stage. Inspired by transitivity system, process type analysis, and multivalence frameworks, this stage revealed the profound presence of non-human agency alongside the human one. Nevertheless, further examination demonstrated that this sample still constrains non-human agency due to semantic and textual constraints.

ПОВАРЕШКА МАРФЫ: АНТРОПОЛОГИЯ РЕЛИГИОЗНОЙ ИНФРАСТРУКТУРЫ

The infrastructural turn in the social sciences comes from a tendency to change the anthropocentric epistemology in social research. This new approach corresponds to the classic program of social anthropology as it makes the known unknown and provides one more perspective which helps reveal the invisible politics, inequalities, and social tensions. Yet, when it comes to the social research in the field of religion, the interest to how infrastructures work has not resulted in new academic discourses and research practices so far. This article outlines some directions and topics in the anthropology of religion which stem from the infrastructural turn. First, it highlights the work of the social imagination of believers when they deal with thick or thin (poor) infrastructural systems. Secondly, it discusses the moments of infrastructural breakdown which provoke believers to generate semiotic ideologies in order to represent their experience of communication with non-human agents, both mundane and divine. The infrastructural approach to understanding religious life does not pretend to become a new research methodology or social theory. Rather, it suggests that thinking infrastructurally on typical topics for anthropology of religion, such as pilgrimage, charity, memory or historical imagination, helps us to better understand the logic which shapes the everyday life of a religious person and community. Furthermore, it helps us remember that religious and secular domains of life are usually not separated in ethnographic reality.