This issue of 'Antennae' explores the rise of interest in art and science collaborations. Partly because of the resonance of the posthuman cyborg in the ontological turn; because of the rise of Bio Art; because of the prominence that multidisciplinarity has acquired in academia; and surely in light of our fraught relationship with our environment and climate change, the intersections between art and science have recently become more complexly de ned by new ethical, political, aesthetic, and poetic registers.This project is co-edited in collaboration with American artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats whose bold experiments have raise serious questions and put into practice his conviction that the world needs more “curious amateurs,” willing to explore publicly whatever intrigues them in de ance of a culture that increasingly forecloses on wonder and silos knowledge into narrowly defined areas of expertise.

Antennae #47 Experiment

Science & Math

Wertheim, Margaret

Keats, Jonathon

Nature & Ecology

Antennaeproject

The interface emerges as an agentially charged field—it reveals itself as a productive material dimension through which our thinking, questions, and assumptions are formed, mapped, shaped, and tested. From this perspective, the interface manifests itself as an artistic material-surface—a creative and reactive field through which we modulate the bandwidth of a perceptual gap—the poetic and philosophical distance between us and the actants and systems we study. Because of its inherent agential potential, the interface is also prone to become an ethical battlefield. Strindberg constructed his own pinhole cameras because, in his view, lenses distorted the world.

Antennae #48 Interface

Kac, Eduardo

Malinas, Roger

Arts & Photography

The recent emergence of the vegetal world in contemporary art is the symptom of a new cultural shift. No longer just interested in their aesthetic beauty, artists now look at plant agency and intelligence or focus on new considerations of plants as key players in historical, biological, and ecological contexts. As humanity begins to grapple with the urgency imposed by climate change, reconsidering human/plant relationships can reveal the importance of ecological interconnectedness and lead to a more nuanced consideration of the variety of living organisms and ecosystems with which we share the planet. The contributions gathered in the second volume of Vegetal Entanglements-a tryptic entirely dedicated to plants in art and culture-focus on the notion of plant-encounters as an opportunity to overcome plant-blindness and see plants beyond the strictures of objectification. It is in this context that the artists, scholars, curators, and plant lovers featured on these pages stage and analyze original encounters with the vegetal world; they make visible, problematize, deconstruct and recontextualize to show how encounters with plants define our lives in multiple and often unpredictable ways.

Antennae #52 Vegetal Entanglements #2

The recent emergence of the vegetal world in contemporary art is the symptom of a new cultural shift. No longer just interested in their aesthetic beauty, artists now look at plant-agency and intelligence or focus on new considerations of plants as key players in historical, biological, and ecological contexts. As humanity begins to grapple with the urgency imposed by climate change, reconsidering human/plant relationships can reveal the importance of ecological interconnectedness and lead to a more nuanced consideration of the variety of living organisms and ecosystems with which we share the planet. The contributions gathered in the third installment of Vegetal Entanglements-a tryptic entirely dedicated to plants in art and culture-focus on the inextricable, actual, and metaphorical links that bind plants, ecosystems, and humans. In this issue, the interconnectedness that characterizes plant life is explored through a variety of media and approaches designed to foreground vegetal alterity. What role does anthropomorphism play in human-plant relations? How can we approach plant alterity in ways that bypass objectification? How can plants help us build fairer and more sustainable futures? These and many more questions are addressed in this issue.

Antennae #53 Vegetal Entanglements #3

Aloi, Giovanni

Antennae #60 Earthly Surfacing

Antoni, Janine

Woods-Morrow, Derrick

Over ten years ago, Anna Tsing's essay 'Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species' made its unofficial appearance in post-humanist academic circles. In 2011 it was first published in issue 18 of Antennae, and then proceeded to spawn the book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins in 2015. 
Tsing's work on mushrooms stood at the edge of non-anthropocentric reasoning, challenging categories and hierarchies to radically redesign conceptions of identity, companionship, and agency. To many, Tsing's proposal initially seemed extreme, but today, after the emergence of critical plant studies, interest in omnipresent fungi and their invisible ability to support and orchestrate global ecosystems is steadily on the rise. 
This issue of Antennae features the work of many scholars, researchers, and artists who have harnessed the world-forming power of empathy and imagination in order to make visible what has for too long been made invisible. Over time, they have devised new and much-needed thinking structures that can reconnect us with the ecosystems and ecologies we share with other earthlings.

Antennae #58 Mycologies

Sheldrake, Merlin

Wee, Helena

What is posthumanist subjectivity? Which institutions, historical events, and philosophies continue to define its cultural coordinates? And how can we move towards new Posthumanism(R)(TM) approaches which disinherit the cultural strictures from continental philosophy and western art practices that subliminally privilege a very specific conception of the Human as universal human? The reconfiguration of methodologies, approaches, and optics demanded by this new ontological turn situates art as the most productive multidisciplinary forum by which to address the truly universal challenges posed by the Anthropocene.\nPosthumanist discourses, and subsequently conceptions of the Anthropocene, have been substantially shaped by implicitly unacknowledged structural omissions. A foundation level endemic confusion of the specific with the universal critically compromises any anticipated radical paradigm shifts to, as philosopher Sylvia Wynter (2015) would have it, "give humanness a different future". Again, according to Wynter, it is important that we urgently shift the hollow universalizing terms that obscure the subjective positions of the "we" at the center of popular Anthropocene discourse. This reference point "is not the referent-we of the human species itself", a fungible planetary human figure, but rather a culturally discreet Human (or Human(R)(TM)) with specific anthropogenic activities and relations, both structurally and conceptually. 
Which new conceptions of the Anthropocene may arise when geographical time collapses with historical time? What new thoughts on the Anthropocene can be revealed when we acknowledge that neither the responsibility nor the vulnerability of climate change, are evenly/universally distributed? How do we disrupt the narratives of the Anthropocene(s) that erase the roles and realities of the non-Human(R)(TM)?

Antennae #57 Beyond Posthumanism

McKittrick, Katherine

This issue of Antennae, and the next, are informed by the exhibition Making Nature: How We See Animals the exhibition curated by Honor Beddard at Wellcome Collection in London between the 1st of December 2016 and the 21st of May 2017. This first installment, Making Nature, which takes its title from the exhibition, looks at the construction of nature as a cultural pursuit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on issues of visibility and invisibility, both cultural and ecological, to critically appraise the methodological approaches that have defined the philosophies of the discipline. Technologies of visibility like taxidermy, dioramas, macro-photography, and illustration are juxtaposed to highlight the complicity of art and science in the production of fictional narratives about the world we live in.

Antennae #49 Making Nature

Since 2007, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture has been the international reference point of the non-human turn in the visual arts. This volume gathers the richest interviews and the most thought-provoking essays featured over its forty installments thus far published -- it captures the first ten years of a truly historic moment in contemporary art and philosophical thinking. The non-human turn, which has so pronouncedly characterized the cultural discourses of the new millennium, is most definitely going to shape the course of our troubled future with the planet. Featuring the voices and work of some of the most influential artists and scholars involved in the subject of the non-human and visual cultures, this collection is an unorthodox reference point, a verbatim account of the main ideas and movements, and an archive of original documents indispensable to tracing the intersections and origins of anthropogenic discourses.

Antennae 10: A Decade of Art and the Non-Human 07-17

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