The Posthumanist #2 Rhythms / Rhythmen

The Posthumanist is a bi-annual English and German magazine featuring art, design, technology and writing. Each issue presents one theme from various more-than-human perspectives, inviting readers to imagine what living together on planet earth is and could be.

Tick, tock, tick, tock... clock and calendar time, measure- ments and metrics are systems that both organise and disrupt life on Earth. Constructed, technological rhythms interfere with natural rhythms, for example clock-time versus the daily rhythms of the sun. These are the systems that are manifesting a nature-culture divide. The sleepless protagonist in Elvia Wilk's Diagnosis, an excerpt from her forthcoming book, picks up where the first issue of The Posthumanist on sleep ends. Her sleep patterns do not fit into the mechanical, normative rhythms of clock- and calendar times. In this issue we follow the question: How can more-than-human rhythms be a source for respectful co-dwelling on Earth? Eryk Salvaggio, the cover artist for the Rhythms / Rhyth men issue of The Posthumanist, enters into a symbiotic relationship with mushrooms through listening. He trans- lates their silent language of electric signalling into music, a language perceptible by the human species. This notion of sounds as non-human world-building is picked up by Louis d'Heudières' tracing of the provenance of copper wires and Gertrude Gibbons' awakening of the voices of the dead in her interpretation of Bach's Chaconne. In an interview with Susan Morris, the artist talks about how her artistic practice explores the agency of materials and technology in patterning human behaviours and lives. Along similar lines, Beny Wagner analyses how rhythms pose a poignant question about perception: "where does one draw the line between observation and creation?" Drawing attention to how bodies must be "pulsing, drip- ping, oozing rhythms", opaque to the human but percepti- ble by other consciousnesses. Engagement with the more-than-human consciousness is something curator Lucia Pietroiusti finds intellectual ful- filment in. She urges us and herself to be more committed to questions around balance and justice towards the ecolo- gies we live in. Finally, Helene Schulze, through her work with the London Freedom Seed Bank and as a seed saver proposes the ancient idea to live in line with the rhythm of the seed. A radical act in an age of mechanical modes of production.