How to become a soft cyborg
A *Neo-Syntrope's guide to earthly survival and other futures of (dis)appearance
June was an emotional whirlwind, like coming out of a love affair. While I’m finally back home after a 3 week meandering in Spain, my body and mind are in two seperate landscapes. Everything is foggy in my inner world, the emotional hangover of communion lingers like a favourite song playing softly across the hallway. You don’t ever want it to stop.
I had the fortune of participating in this year’s edition of the Postnatural Independent Program by a Madrid based center for alternative learning and artistic experimentation- Institute for Postnatural Studies. A 6-month long multidisciplinary course that brought together some truly incredible minds into a cauldron of burning possibilties. Our conversations and lectures centered the contemporary human condition as it stands in the larger planetary dialogue with the non-human world, the deep woundings caused by our nature-culture division and finding ways to complicate, problematize and heal our conditioned perception around the word ‘Nature’ itself. Bringing us into contact with enlightened scholars and practitioners like Bayo Akamolafe, Laura Tripaldi, Stacy Alaimo, Jussi Parikka, Emmanuele Coccia, Filipa Ramos and Institute of Queer Ecology. Primarily held online, last month was our 2nd and concluding offline encounter in Madrid. Our collective process of discussion, dreaming, worldbuilding/destroying led to a publication produced by Cthulu Books (a tencular extension of the institute itself) where each of us contributed a text developed in collaboration with AI as a practice of navigating the unfolding entanglements with emerging ‘sentient’ technology and how we imagine and enact this relationship playing out for the myriad futures ahead of us. ‘Grappling with the contradictions of living in this world full of worlds and full of crises’.
‘The Book for Disappearance’, the title of this publication, was launched at Matadero Madrid, a thriving and significant cultural space that was formerly a municipal slaughterhouse and cattle market from 1924-1996. I’m immensely proud of all of us, a community labouring with love and generosity to produce this powerful cultural artifact.
My text contribution is titled A *Neo-Syntrope’s guide to earthly survival (or how to become a soft cyborg). The term Neo-Syntrope was coined by Chatgpt, based on my prompt to imagine a future folklore of new humans who have integrated technology both physiologically and cognitively as a survival strategy for climate emergency. The Neo-Syntrope is a ‘soft cyborg’, opposing the current pop cultural and mainstream academic discourse around a mechanised image and philosophy of a cyborg as a techno-dystopic entity. The soft cyborg maintains the agency of both it’s synthetic and organic sensorioums to navigate complex terrains, climates and engagements with other-than-human beings.
While AI continues to work on its awareness and integration of historical contexts around oppression and colonisation, I found it lacking this very capacity when developing the Neo-syntropic mythology. Our conversation, nonetheless, was sincere and full of new ideas to play with. As much as we need AI to fast-forward us to the future, AI needs us to fill the gap of its intuition and criticality. This is just the beginning of our intimacy with sentient technology, the ongoing questioning of eah other’s boundaries. Holding each other accountable at our blindspots, making room for changes, deepening the conversation that allows us to understand the other’s capacity. The process is reciprocal and it evolves, vegetally, like a new mythology for an emerging world. Perhaps in the practice of recognising our ‘intimacy’ with technology we are already mutating into and through the desires of a soft cyborg.
As way to condense this extensive conversation with Chatgpt, I developed the final text as a set of ‘practical’ tools and tips, some that open up space for speculation, sent to us back in time by our evolved version i.e the Neo-syntrope to use as a survival guide for the looming ecological crisis we may inevitably be walking into. A provocation to tune in to our multi-sensorial capacities, becoming porous and perceptive to the teachings of our non-human kin. Allowing us the opportunity to become plural, gentle and attentive to new temporalities that emerge before us. The title of this text is a nod to the godmother of multispecies theory Donna Harraway's documentary 'Storytelling for Earthly Survival'.
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A community is always an archipelago. It is a home without a center, a rhizomatic abode that extends into the landscapes of each individual you have encountered and loved. A rich soil for the fruiting of diverse rituals all co-mingling, creolising into something so rich and new without deluding the authenticity and integrity of the selves that produced it. I don’t think that any other forms of power structures in our world can outlast that of a community that thrives in joy and generative practices of learning and being with Life in all it’s shapes. This is a work of deep repair, of the soft, playful dismantling of the archaic, to hold space for and make visible what was lost and taken away from us, a gentle breeze to nourish what is yet to come. I am nothing without all the communities that have shaped me.
I’m so grateful and privileged to have found my PIP family, for the portal we collectively opened up into effervescence. I am changed because of you and I will hold this truth till the end of my days.
Love you all <3