.Claire Isabel Webb organized & led ‘What Will Life Become?’, a multi-day workshop feat. panels, thought exercises & artistic presentations on the implications of 3 areas remaking what it means to be human: space exploration, multispecies mutualism & AI.

berggruen.org/wwlb/

Yes, I did spend a chunk of today making an overly didactic browser-based game about the history of canine experimentation and, yes, you can play it now. brad.bolman.com/dogs.html

“Filaments of knowledge pop up unexpectedly, sewing themselves into surprising places. Ideas are dislodged from their original context and sprout in novel ways,” Claire Isabel Webb writes of the history of knowledge.

noemamag.com/the-ladder-the…

Biotechnologies, AIs, and ventures to outer space; What Will Life Become?, a Workshop I've organized as a USC-Berggruen Institute Fellow, will explore futures of life, mind, and the extraterrestrial. Day 1 is Thursday, April 21! 🦠🧠🪐 USC Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life Nils Gilman Tui Shaub

A genius …..

With Nils Gilman, I asked Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'How do you propose that we conceive of living and nonliving entities — the planet, animals like the polar bear, microbes in our gut — as having political agency, a quality that is usually ascribed only to humans?'

In the end, he was granted access. But, he was left wondering: was there a Two-Step Verification Code for one's heart?

Last week for apps, due January 10! It's a wonderful fellowship. Happy to answer and questions.

My viral BFF

Thanks Brad for organizing!

'Animals have both propelled new space technologies (in advancing the engineering of ~life support systems~ in outer space) and have become technologies themselves (as cybernetic assemblages studied to support ~humans’ life systems~ in outer space).'

Another postdoc I endorse: Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Politics of Environmental Knowledge. USC's new Dornsife Center on Science, Technology and Public Life (STPL) is fantastic. Deadline Dec. 1. dornsife.usc.edu/stpl/postdocto…

'In the contest between the clever crow and the fecund pigeon, sometimes the pigeon wins.”

looking for good readings in feminist / queer theory / multispecies studies that deal *temporalities* (including but extending bodily / material / spatial becomings)