A r t i s t s ’ A r t i c l e
When do We Stop being human?
Prefiguring Nonanthropocentric Thinking
luCy hG S o l o m o n , CE S A R b A Io , An d CE S A R & loI S
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The art collective Cesar & Lois (artists Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar
Baio) discuss their artworks that explore networked growth as a logical
system and form of thinking, incorporating living organisms such as
Physarum polycephalum (slime mold) and fruiting mushrooms. Their
artworks imagine a technological network built on a microbiological
framework. The hybrid computational model they envision is linked to
the ecosystemic logic of living systemsthe living network’s decisions are
ecologically responsive. The artists seek to obtain knowledge across
species and disciplines as they reconsider the nature of thought.
ARt thA t ImAGInES
nonAnthRopoCEntRIC thInkInG
Through art that straddles multiple disciplines, we attempt to
orient the networked processing of information to living net-
works. In our artworks, we contemplate an ecosystemic intelli-
gence, an artificial intelligence (AI) that processes information
on behalf of and in the form of ecosystems [1]. By engaging
with living and nonliving systems in our art, we invite viewers
to consider the potential for connections across artificial and
living nonhuman intelligences. We look at different under-
standings of human societies that consider humans as part of
a web of life, and we ask what it will take for the rest of human-
ity to stop being human centered. Our work asks viewers to
contemplate what that integration would look like and what
the results might be for societal systems and for ecosystems.
Degenerative Cultures [2] and Thinking Like a Mushroom
[3] are artworks with multidisciplinary inputs that propose
a merging of microbiological networks and other forms of
intelligence, and a radical reorganization of how most mod-
ern sociotechnical systems interact with nature [4,5]. In both
artworks, we ponder social structures and networks (e.g. the
Lucy HG Solomon (artist, educator), California State University San Marcos, AMD
Dept, ARTS 337, 441 La Moree Road, San Marcos, CA 92078-5017, U.S.A.
Email: cesarandloiscollective@gmail.com. ORCID: 0000-0001-6369-9363.
Cesar Baio (artist, educator), Rua Elis Regina, 50 Cidade Universitária—Zeferino
Vaz, Campinas, SP, 13083-854, Brazil. Email: cesarandloiscollective@gmail.com.
ORCID: 0000-0002-1174-3526.
Cesar & Lois (art collective).
See https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/55/5 for supplemental files associated with
this issue.
ways we exchange information) and how their architecture
reflects and reinforces anthropocentric thinking and the po-
sitioning of nature as commodity. Jason W. Moore’s account-
ing of nature’s relationship to human social politics and of
the destructive force of capitalism undergird our critique of
anthropocentric machines [6]. Against the backdrop of late
capitalism, Macarena Gómez-Barris identifies intangibility in
“the capacity of life otherwise to reroute commodification and
scientific classification.” Gómez-Barris continues, “The intan-
gibility of the forest metabolizes, grows, multiplies, and es-
capes the condition of monoculture, whose complexity forces
consideration, as Eduardo Kohn asks, can forests think?” [7]
We pivot technology toward the intangibility of life forms.
In our artworks, we propose hybrid technologies that see and
listen to the complexity of living networks, challenging spe-
ciesism in technology and anthropocentric modes of thinking.
In various experiments, as in Fig. 1, we layer microorganisms
Fig. 1. Workshop output, growth of Physarum polycephalum layered with text
as part of A Collaborative Writing Workshop with Nonhuman Entities, Cesar &
Lois, Coalesce Center for Biological Arts, University at Buffalo, NY, 2020.
(© Cesar & Lois)
©2022 ISAST
https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02246
LEONARDO, Vol. 55, No. 5, pp. 445–450, 2022 445
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with human thinking to see what overlaps and outcomes may
occur. In doing so, we interrogate the human-serving vision
of nature that extends from intellectual strands originating in
modernity [8], a legacy that contrasts with the many ancestral
traditions of living with nature in a communal (nonhierarchi-
cal) way [9]. This anthropocentric thinking rooted in moder-
nity and spread through colonial capitalism persists even in
the logic models at the base of our most prevalent technolo-
gies, networks, and social structures; these logic models pri-
oritize human beings (or, rather, specific sectors of privileged
human beings), generate incomplete datasets (in which groups
of humans, other species, and entire ecosystems are disenfran-
chised), and deplete nature (via extractive manufacturing,
energy consumption, and carbon output). Our biodigital hy-
brids, which we call bhiobrids, include fungi and protists that
overwrite this human-centered logic, with books and Internet
texts as the substrates for growth and colonization. These liv-
ing artworks posit a web of human and nonhuman entities,
with conduits among nodes that are living and others that are
computational and electronic.
Advancing artworks that are also interspecies networks
and living technologies necessitates working in laboratories
and collaboration with scientists as we ponder how rela-
tional networks, consisting of living and nonliving, human
and nonhuman nodes, might allow for different constel-
lations of ecosystemic relationships. In an exchange with
biologist Paul Cullen, we learned that communication for
yeast cells takes place through a cell’s metabolic pathways, in
coordinated processes across cells, between groups of cells,
and in cellular responses to external stimuli [10]. In a con-
versation with biologist Solon Morse during our residency at
Coalesce Center for Biological Arts (see Fig. 2), we learned
how environment and species are together involved in co-
creation, as with the interconnected bacteria, fly, bat, and
cave responsible for establishing a particular environment
conducive to them all [11]. The ideas that flow from such
exchanges catalyze our artworks, through which we imagine
hybrid networks that require the type of cooperation pres-
ent in nonhierarchical living systems, systems that manifest
collaborative thinking.
Fig. 2. Lucy HG Solomon (Lois) and biologist Solon Morse prepare to extract
DNA from the gut microbiomes of Cesar & Lois in the lab at Coalesce Center
for Biological Arts, University at Buffalo, NY, 2021. (© Cesar & Lois)
Fig. 3. Colonized book from Degenerative Cultures, detail of growth of
Physarum polycephalum over text of Jacques Boyceau and the French Formal
Garden in Sentient States, Porto, Portugal, 2019. (© Cesar & Lois)
Our vision of an expansive form of network proposes
the integration of technological and biological circuitry in
order to construct new possibilities for thinking together
[12]. We are conducting poetic and artistic experiments that
allow us to imagine a nonanthropocentric future, which
for us entails a society that does not privilege humans over
nonhumans, or specific humans over other humans, and
that weighs environmental impacts against desired out-
comes, such as speed of delivery and cost to the end user,
because this technology would rely on various inputs into
its decision-making.
Thinking together—in various collaborative configura-
tions, in ways observed in networked ecologies, as well as in
new ways that we have yet to understand—has implications
for human and nonhuman entities, for microclimates within
bodies, and for environments at all scales. This requires that
human beings—and eventually machines—think beyond the
intellectual and political trajectory of the individual as carved
out by modernity and perpetuated by global capitalism.
Within our living artworks that incorporate the techno-
logical and biological colonization of human texts, books
that isolate thinking as a discrete and individualized process
and that contextualize human logic as isolated and elevated
become the substrate for microorganisms’ growth. Others
might see these books as “contaminated” by an external en-
tity (see Fig. 3 for one example of a colonized book). We see
these living books as conceptual leaps into a layering of logics
and a critique of speciesism. Our artworks place human logic
not at the top of a hierarchical chain of decisions but as part
of the web of life [13]. Such a heterarchical perspective has
cultural and creative antecedents and corollaries in a host of
ancestral traditions and finds contemporaneous support in
post-anthropocentric theorists’ thinking.
446 Solomon et al., When Do We Stop Being Human?
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jumbled text is then tweeted [14]. User interaction with the
@HelloFungus Twitter feed spurs the AI to consume Internet
texts about human rationalizations of climate change and
plans for climate interventions, with the AI focusing in on
the geolocation of the artwork and that place’s contempo-
raneous climate issues. The AI algorithm, based in natural
language processing and informed by organic data, is trained
to recognize texts that assert humanity’s dominance over na-
ture—texts which are relevant to the site of the installation.
The biological and digital agents’ revised texts make up an
archive that reshapes those historical and contemporary ex-
pressions of human-centered ideologies that espouse human
control over the living world [15].
Our artworks are the product of thinking across disciplines
in ways that respond critically to the restrictive frameworks
that extend from human-driven innovations like Cartesian
perspective, extractivist capitalism, and artificial mind. Al-
though thoroughly scrutinized and critiqued in academia,
residues of Descartes’s prioritization of human perception
endure, and his elevation of human reason over nature has
echoes in efforts at geoengineering and climate fixes. In the
Singapore edition of Degenerative Cultures, we grew slime
mold over this passage by Descartes (see Fig. 5).
I perceived it to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly
useful in life; and in room of the Speculative Philosophy
usually taught in the Schools, to discover a Practical, by
means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, wa-
ter, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that
surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of
our artizans, we might also apply them in the same way
to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render
ourselves the lords and possessors of nature [16].
In the installation Degenerative Cultures, living organisms
grow over books, moving according to microbiological logic.
The books contain texts that champion human reason and
claim the right of human beings to control the planet, includ-
ing living beings and landscapes. Humanity’s reorganization
of the planet, which has arguably led to the climate crisis, pro-
vides the backdrop for our thinking around human-centered
technologies and the possibility for alternative forms of AI
Fig. 4. Degenerative Cultures, documentation of installation with living
artwork in Edital CoMciência—Ocupação em Arte, Ciência e Tecnologia, Belo
Horizonte, Brazil, 2019–2020. (© Cesar & Lois)
DegeneratIVe cultures
Degenerative Cultures, a series of artworks that responds to
various local climate concerns (as shown in Fig. 4), includes
a slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) that “tweets” and an
AI that mirrors the growth of the Physarum polycephalum,
with both the living organism and the machine consuming
texts about human dominion over other living beings.
In the Degenerative Cultures series, slime mold, a network-
ing protist, grows alongside airborne fungi across a book
asserting human control over nature. The cultures advance
across the text, excising words as they grow. Although Physa-
rum polycephalum is not a fungus, it was previously misclas-
sified as such. Human classification of the nonhuman is a
fascination for us as artists, and it is also a central occupation
of those who study the living world: a coding of living and
nonliving entities that leads to greater understanding and
the superimposition of human logic. In our artworks, human
texts are revised as slime mold and collaborating fungi grow
over the characters.
In the installation, the organisms’ growth is tracked and
parameterized by a computer vision program, with images
of that growth translated through optical character recogni-
tion and compared with the original text: The increasingly
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Fig. 5. Degenerative Cultures, documentation of
Physarum polycephalum’s growth over Descartes,
resulting in tweets at the handle @HelloFungus, growth
cycle and documentation from Global Digital Art Prize
Biennial exhibition, Singapore, 2019. (© Cesar & Lois)
Solomon et al., When Do We Stop Being Human? 447
[17]. Responding to the Capitalocene as articulated by Jason
W. Moore [18] and to “Integrated World Capitalism” as de-
scribed by Félix Guattari [19], we consider the challenges to
local and global ecosystems when global consumption moves
minerals and bodies and redefines relationships to the liv-
ing world. At a time when scientific literature intimates that
mycelia communicate [20], when anthropology considers
the ways in which forests organize themselves and “think”
[21], and plant physiology experiments reveal that certain
plants retain memories [22], thinking across species seems
plausible, even promising, while AI based on human neu-
rology, human language, and human-specific datasets seems
exceptionally limiting and distinctly Cartesian.
In our artworks, we contemplate the kinds of decisions an
AI based on environmentally responsive organisms and the
complex trans-species chemical communication networks of
the protist and fungal worlds might make. By working specu-
latively with hybrid networks, we obscure human logic with
the logics that are embodied in microorganisms [23]. That
does not mean that we postulate that these are the same or
comparable (human and nonhuman logic); rather, we pos-
tulate that humanity can learn from these beings, whose sur-
vival on the scale of billions of individuals requires mutually
beneficial and community-responsive decisions.
thInkIng lIke a MushrooM
Our ongoing artwork Thinking Like a Mushroom (Color Plate
A and Fig. 6) offers an opportunity to reflect on another
entity’s logical growth patterns and communication strate-
gies. This artwork includes a meditation and a challenge: to
think like a mushroom. We nurture the growth of mycelia
and mushroom within philosophy, landscape design, botany,
and language texts, posing conceptual questions about intel-
ligence and how different logical systems might reorganize
the knowledge represented by the books. After growing
mushrooms within books and observing the conduits of my-
celia through the pages, we began to develop a mycelial AI
that examines books and attempts to alter them by removing
their human focus. In an interdisciplinary panel on this work
hosted by Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge, the panelists
imagined which texts might be interesting for the mycelial AI
to consume, with Meeting Ground artist Susan Main suggest-
ing the fungal colonization of homeowner covenants written
to protect profit rather than habitat [24].
It is our hope that by acknowledging and potentially ac-
cessing the logic of these nonhuman systems, we will become
capable of more expansive thinking—thinking that is nonan-
thropocentric and that can make environmentally responsible
and community-responsive decisions. Expansive nonanthro-
pocentric thinking has real-world corollaries and antecedents
in ancestral communities that espouse environmentally inte-
grated thinking. In our development of Thinking Like a Mush-
room, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s revelation of the Anishinaabe
word puhpowee, “the force which causes mushrooms to push
from the earth overnight,” was propulsive—an example of how
living with other species inflects human logic and language
[25]. When Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Cas-
Fig. 6. Thinking like a Mushroom, 2018–present: mushrooms grow over
philosophy texts, contemplated by viewers, aided by audio meditation,
documentation of fruiting from growth cycle initiated in 2018, exhibited as living
sculptures at A Ship in the Woods in Escondido, California, 2019, with editions
at Mesa College Gallery in San Diego, California, 2019. (© Cesar & Lois)
tro assert that Amerindian collectives are “not a remnant of the
past” but “a substance of the future” [26], we recognize our ef-
forts of creative futurism as a repetition of a set of relationships
that predates our existences, our technology, and our artworks.
We strive to learn from these epistemologies to move in direc-
tions that recognize and value the traditions and wisdom of
building human/nonhuman communities.
thInkInG ACRoSS lIFE FoRmS
By collecting, growing, and observing living organisms,
ranging from slime molds to fungi to lichens, we contem-
plate other modes of thinking, including various forms of
microbiological logic that predate human beings. In How
Forests Think, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn contemplates
nonhuman thinking as a means of liberating human logic:
We are colonized by certain ways of thinking about rela-
tionality. We can only imagine the ways in which selves and
thoughts might form associations through our assumptions
about the forms of associations that structure human lan-
448 Solomon et al., When Do We Stop Being Human?
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guage. And then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we pro-
ject these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing
it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own,
and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them to
provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves.
So, how should we think with forests? How should we al-
low the thoughts in and of the nonhuman world to liberate
our thinking [27]?
Kohn’s thinking forest is perceived through the conduit of
the Ecuadorian Amazonian Runa people. Most of us do not
think in the way that forests think. Humanity in the large
sense, the global and globalizing entity responsible for mas-
sive carbon output and the acceleration of climate change,
performs and reperforms behaviors that defy a forest’s logic.
How mushrooms think is connected to how forests think.
Indeed, mycelia form mycorrhizal networks (akin to neural
networks) within forests [28]. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who
simultaneously traces the cultural and economic mosaic of
the matsutake mushroom and interviews mycologists about
quorum-sensing, exclaims of mushrooms, “Chemical sensing
that creates communal effects! How strange and wonderful
the world” [29]. Donna Haraway recounts scientific models of
relationalities that show that “interspecies—really, interking-
dom—meetings and enfoldings can produce entities that hold
together, develop, communicate, and form layered tissues like
animals do” [30]. These logics—human and nonhuman—are
at odds, with some exceptions, such as the logic of interconnec-
tion embedded in many Indigenous teachings and practices,
which act as a foil for the formula for extraction and exploita-
tion as delineated by Gómez-Barris: “Intangible geographies
function as entropic spaces that cannot be contained by the
extractive view, Western science, the commodity logic of late
capitalism, or racial governmentality, but instead are managed
by Indigenous peoples, cooperatives, and ‘no contact’ popula-
tions to amplify the multiplicity of the forest’s life forms” [31].
ConCluSIon
When do we stop being human? This question extends in
two directions. The first is related to the hypothesis that we
stopped being human at a point in the past. We conjecture
that this moment corresponds with the formulation of the
so-called modern human, with the consolidation of anthro-
pocentrism and the belief in human exceptionality. Such
centering of the human existence, outside of Indigenous
perspectives and more harmonious intercommunal rela-
tionships with environments, ultimately removes us from so
Fig. 7. Portrait of Cesar & Lois with Physarum polycephalum, 2018.
(© Cesar & Lois)
many factors of human existence. On the other hand, when
we pose this question, we point to the future. When will we
stop being human? The climate crisis has provided scenarios
that make it possible to imagine a future of the planet without
humanity. Approaching this question with another mode of
thinking, one may consider its meaning to be: When will we
stop being humans according to the concept of human (or
man) forged in modernity? Further, when we will end the
self-centered formulation that positions the human in a hier-
archical position of control and authority over other entities
in the living world? This text does not seek to answer these
questions but assumes them as a starting point to speculate
on the ways we position ourselves in relation to the ecosys-
tem and technologies and societies we live in.
Connectionist and extractivist trajectories are on a con-
stant collision course in which the latter threatens to expunge
the former because of their distinct logics. Human logic that
accepts ecosystem extraction as inevitable can be viewed as
an extension of the Enlightenment’s hierarchical moralism,
and yet Kohn warns against drawing too close a moral les-
son from the nonhuman world [32]. Despite this warning,
we contemplate nonhuman forms of logic arising from the
nonhierarchical organizations in forests and embedded in
cooperative living systems (in Fig. 7 we replace our heads
with networking microbiological organisms). Although ap-
plying the logic of the nonhuman to human challenges may
constitute yet another form of anthropocentric thinking, the
integration of human and nonhuman processing may bend
human systems toward nonanthropocentric logic and away
from speciesism. We as artists peer inward and ask, What
does our logic dictate, and—in a time of ecological crisis and
unprecedented technological connectivity—how do we build
ecosystemic ways of being human?
acknowledgments
In the development of Degenerative Cultures, Cesar & Lois relied on
the research contributions of students and the input of scientists in
Brazil and California, including conversations with California State
University San Marcos (CSUSM) biologist Betsy Read, who first intro-
duced Cesar & Lois to Physarum polycephalum with a strain originally
sourced by her colleague, biologist Tom Wahlund. CSUSM DaTA Lab
students, especially Kodie Gerritsen and Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (UNICAMP) actLAB student Héllen Anjos, worked with
Cesar & Lois on research and development. Reno Beserra and Jeremy
Speed Schwartz contributed to the technical development of Degen-
erative Cultures.
We received funding for the Degenerative Cultures project from a
CSUSM Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Grant and from Grant
2018/24452-1, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The project’s it-
erations were supported by the 2018 Lumen Prize in AI, the 2019 Global
Digital Art Prize biennial exhibition in Singapore, Edital CoMciência—
Ocupação em Arte, Ciência e Tecnologia (www.2021.programacomciencia
.org.br) at MM Gerdau in Brazil, and the 2021 Aesthetica Art Prize.
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Solomon et al., When Do We Stop Being Human? 449
references and notes
1 Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar Baio, “An Argument for an Eco systemic
AI: Articulating Connections Across Prehuman and Posthuman
Intelligences,” International Journal of Community Well-Being 3, No.
4, 1–26 (2020): www.doi.org/10.1007/s42413-020-00092-5.
2 See project documentation for Degenerative Cultures by Cesar & Lois
at www.cesarandlois.org/degenerativecultures.
3 See project documentation for Thinking Like a Mushroom by Cesar
& Lois at www.cesarandlois.org/xknowledgesystems.
4 We use the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modern societies” to
characterize societies erected on the foundation of modern episte-
mologies. We prefer not to use “Western” because this term excludes
ancestor cultures in the Western Hemisphere. At times we use the
terms “capitalist,” “colonialist,” and “extractivist” to describe societies
in which imperialism and consumerism drive societal relationships
to nature; “modern” is useful here in pointing to a specific intellectual
lineage.
5
Jason W. Moore uses the term “nature” in the larger sense, inclusive
of human organizations and everything that results from those. Jason
W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumula-
tion of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).
6 Moore [5].
7 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and
Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2017) pp.
18–19: www. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220n3w.
17 HG Solomon and Baio [1].
18 Moore [5].
19 Félix Guattari, “Integrated World Capitalism and Molecular Revolu-
tion,” paper presented at the Conference on Information and/as New
Spaces of Liberty (CINEL) (1981).
20 Leho Tedersoo, Mohammad Bahram, and Martin Zobel, “How
Mycorrhizal Associations Drive Plant Population and Community
Biology,” Science 367, No. 6480 (2020): www.doi.org/10.1126/science
.aba1223.
21 Kohn [9].
22 Michel Thellier, Plant Responses to Environmental Stimuli (Dordrecht:
Springer Netherlands, 2017), www.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024
-1047-1.
23 Here we consider Francisco Varela’s theory of embodied mind, tak-
ing into account not only human bodies but microbiological entities
as well. Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991): www.doi.org/10.29173/cmplct8718.
24 Cesar & Lois et al. [12].
25 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Sci-
entific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 1st Ed. (Minneapolis:
Milkweed Editions, 2013) p. 49.
26 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the
World (Oxford: Polity Press, 2016) p. 123.
8 See explanation of terms in Note [4].
27 Kohn [9] p. 21.
9 Eduardo Kohn warns against grounding “hopeful politics” in the
heterarchical examples of the nonhuman living world. Eduardo
Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the
Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
10 Paul Cullen, interview by authors, Buffalo, New York, 27 January
2020.
11 For more on the co-creation of habitat and entities, see Solon F.
Morse et al., “Some Like It Hot: Evolution and Ecology of Novel
Endosymbionts in Bat Flies of Cave-Roosting Bats Hippoboscoidea,
Nycterophiliinae),” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 78, No.
24, 8639–8649 (2012): www.doi.org/10.1128/AEM.02455-12.
12 See this panel discussion of the potential for integrating the biologi-
cal and the digital: https://youtu.be/gwTToL9M_p8. Cesar & Lois et
al., Reading, Unearthing and Eating Anthropocentrism: A Panel on the
Literature and Landscape That Brought Us to the Anthropocene, and
How Cesar & Lois Respond through Their Artwork, Yes We Cannibal,
Baton Rouge, LA (27 June 2021).
13 See Moore [5] for “Web of Life” in the context of world systems
theory. In March 2022, we presented in the “Listening to The Web
of Life” interdisciplinary workshop centered around environmental
artists Helen and Newton Harrison’s use of the term, “Web of Life.”
La Jolla Historical Society and Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
La Jolla, California (17 March 2022).
14 @HelloFungus. @HelloFungus Twitter feed. Twitter, 2018–present,
www.twitter.com/hellofungus (accessed 30 June 2021).
15 We examine the slime mold’s tweets as poetic output in Cesar & Lois,
Physarum polycephalum, and @HelloFungus. “A Poética de Uma In-
teligência Artificial Microbiológica e Um Organismo Inteligente,” in
Investigação-Experimentação-Criação: Em Arte-Ciência-Tecnologia,
Diogo Marques and Ana Gago, eds. (Porto, Portugal: Publicações
Universidade Fernando Pessoa, 2020) pp. 241–253: http://hdl.handle
.net/10284/8875.
16 René Descartes et al., French and English Philosophers: Descartes,
Rousseau, Voltaire, Hobbes: With Introductions, Notes and Illustra-
tions (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910) p. 50.
28 Monika A. Gorzelak et al., “Inter-Plant Communication through
Mycorrhizal Networks Mediates Complex Adaptive Behaviour in
Plant Communities,” AoB plants 7 (2015): 10.1093/aobpl/plv050.
29 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On
the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Univ. Press, 2015) p. 401.
30 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthu-
lucene (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2016) p. 64–65.
31 Gómez-Barris [7] p. 20.
32 Kohn [9] p. 19.
Manuscript received 30 June 2021.
luCy hG soloMon is a Fulbright scholar whose global proj-
ect probes microbiological connections across distant terrains.
An educator in the Department of Art, Media and Design at
California State University San Marcos, she leads the DaTA
Lab (Laboratory for Data and Transdisciplinary Art).
Cesar BaIo is a CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento
de Pessoal de Nível Superior) scholar whose postdoctoral work
at i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art and Technology) at Plymouth
University focused on data and the city. He is an educator in the
area of art and technology at Universidade Estadual de Campi-
nas (UNICAMP) and the director of actLAB (Laboratório de
Pesquisa em Arte, Ciência e Tecnologia).
Cesar & loIs is a collective formed in 2017 that probes the
evolution of humanity’s relationship with nature by advancing
intersections and parallels between technological and biologi-
cal systems. Cesar & Lois consists of artists Cesar Baio and
Lucy HG Solomon, with contributions from other artists and
scientists.
450 Solomon et al., When Do We Stop Being Human?
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COLOR PL ATE A: WhEn do WE Stop bEInG humAn?
pREFIGuRInG nonAnthRopoCEntRIC thInkInG
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Thinking like a Mushroom, 2019–present, living artwork in which mushrooms grow over philosophy texts and viewers
contemplate that growth, aided by an audio meditation, documentation of fruiting from growth cycle initiated in 2018,
exhibited as living sculptures at A Ship in the Woods in Escondido (pictured), California, 2019, with editions at Mesa
College Gallery in San Diego, California, 2019; Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge (exhibition Eat the Anthropocene),
2021; and NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (Texts and Soundings: The Image Talks Back), 2022. (© Cesar & Lois)
(See the article in this issue by Lucy HG Solomon, Cesar Baio, and Cesar & Lois.)
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