Online Course POSTHUMAN LAB: Artistic Research in the Anthropocene by Vanina Saracino

“In 1490, Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci created The Vitruvian Man, a drawing depicting a nude male body in two superimposed positions, inscribed within a circle and a square. This artwork encapsulates Leonardo’s notion of ideal body proportions while positing the human body as the fundamental unit of cosmic order and harmony, grounded in irrefutable Euclidean geometry. The Vitruvian Man—a white, male, abled, attractive, and possibly heterosexual human—became the archetypal representation of the human according to the artistic and scientific ideals of the High Renaissance, as well as one of the most iconic anthropocentric images in history. But what does “human” really mean?

As posited by Rosi Braidotti, the notion of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns—not to mention the political ones, since “some of us are not even considered fully human now” (Braidotti, 2013). According to her, “after the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much contested post-feminist conditions, we seem to have entered the posthuman predicament”. 

This historical period, in fact, is marked by a radical shift in the way we think about our species, and what we consider to be the common denominators of humanity. The human is now contended between two opposite poles: the posthumanist, which believes we have been overly influenced by Enlightenment ideas and calls for an off-centering of the human in favor of a more-than-human approach that acknowledges the irreplaceable interconnectedness of all species; and the transhumanist, which holds that we are still at an early stage in our co-evolution with technology and advocates for techno-transcendence and geoengineering as responses to climate breakdown.

The Posthuman Lab focuses on the posthumanist predicament by considering a wide range of visual artworks and theoretical texts that challenge the notion of the human, viewing us as one element in a complex ecosystem of entangled living matter. Donna Haraway, who resists the term posthuman and prefers to define herself as a compostist, reminds us that the root of the word human is the same as the word humus (soil): we are earthly beings born out of matter that is both terrestrial and stellar, and our existence is not independent but deeply entangled with that of every other critter on the planet. Complex, messy realities evolve through continuous, grounded, and generative processes. Artists, especially since the 2010s, have fully embraced this shift of paradigm working toward the dissolution of human-centered narratives through artistic research and practice. This course will embrace the posthumanist predicament through their views.” (Text by courtesy of Vanina Saracino)