148 - Caroline A. Jones

Cultures of Energy

Dominic and Cymene talk foot injuries, bears, and a project called "smell my box." We then (15:52) welcome to the podcast the marvelous Caroline Jones from MIT who talks about her amazing research and curatorial work on bioart, biofiction, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience and much much more. We start with her provocative concept of “symbiontics” which points toward a change of human consciousness necessary for our survival as a species. She tells us about the works of artists like Jenna Sutela, Tomás Saraceno and Annicka Yi who have helped inspire her symbiontic thinking. We talk cultural evolution, survival of the most interdependent as an alternative to survival of the fittest, art as philosophy and politics, feminist bacteria, and the ethics of interspecies art. We turn from there to her current collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison on visibility and invisibility in the Anthropocene. We close on cybernetics, the idea that consciousness doesn’t stop at the limits of the individual mind and what we could learn from splicing a bit of sequoia genetic material into our own.