Future Wunderkammer vols. 1–3
The first volume in the Future Wunderkammer series, Between Organism and Algorithm, brings together a collection of essays exploring the shifting boundaries of life as it has historically been understood. With both apprehension and audacity, humanity tinkers with—and congeals— organisms and algorithms: holobionts, chimeras, mineral-cast intelligence. The essays in this volume embrace ontological ambiguity as a site of inquiry, asking: How has the codification of life shaped life itself? Is a mind bound to biology, or can it emerge independent of its substrate? And ultimately, in an era increasingly defined by technomorphism, what will life become
Contributions by Claire Isabel Webb, Sara Imari Walker, Benjamin Bratton, Sounds Fun, Sam Kriegman, K Allado-McDowell, Nancy Baker Cahill, Sougwen Chung, Suparna Choudhury, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa
Artwork by Thibault Tourmente, Santtu Mustonen, George Wylesol, Sounds Fun, Two-Eyed People, Jimmy Linear, Cynthia Alfonso, Public/Official, Lauren Coleman
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The second volume in the Future Wunderkammer series, Geologic and Galactic, brings together philosophy, speculative fiction, and critical theory to explore how vast scales of time and matter shape human thought. From mineral time to stellar expansion, the volume considers how duration, distance, and planetary processes reshape our understanding of life and intelligence. Kant proposed spacetime as the condition through which human experience becomes possible; Einstein reconceived the structure of the universe through relativity; Marx described modernity as the annihilation of space by time. The works gathered here move between sediment and starfield, the material and the ethereal, the finite and the infinite, and the technologies of perception that render such immensities thinkable.
Contributions by Claire Isabel Webb, Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Rosi Braidotti, Ken Liu, Neda Atanasoski, Felicity Schaeffer
Artwork by Thibault Tourmente, Public/Official, Jimmy Linear, Simon Alexander-Adams, Two-Eyed People
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The third volume in the Future Wunderkammer series, Umwelten (plural of Umwelt), takes its name from Jakob von Uexküll’s early twentieth-century concept. Using the metaphor of a “soap bubble,” Uexküll theorized that the world as experienced by animals differs fundamentally from the one perceived by the human mind. Each organism inhabits its own perceptual world—an external environment and inner experience sufficient in its own right, independent of our own. These manifold worlds remain strange to us humans, yet fully coherent to the creatures that inhabit them. The essays gathered here explore emerging paradigms of planetary flourishing and multispecies ecologies, whose individual and collective behaviors suggest sophisticated subjectivities—each a distinct and evolving Umwelt.
Contributions by Claire Isabel Webb, David Gruber, Giovanni Petri, Glenn Kaino, Jonathan Blake, Jennifer Bourne, Wendi Yan, Liam Young, Freddy Avis (Arswain), Harry Yeff (Reeps100), Trung Bao
Artwork by Thibault Tourmente, Fenna Schilling Jimmy Linear, Shay Azari, Mariano Pascual, Wendi Yan, Harry Yeff, Trung Bao
