While disappearance may seem abstract or esoteric, apocalyptic or hopeless, it is also a de-centring tool: could humans disappear from the centre to re-emerge in a more horizontal and generous periphery? Disappearance has tangible implications for both individual and collective action.
In this book, the concept of disappearance emerges as a generative alternative––including a variety of short poetic and experimental texts on the multiple possibilities that surface from our engagement with AI alter-egos and a collective artistic exercise with image generation technologies. What happens when we de-centre by loosing control?
A Book for Disappearance explores themes of extinction and ecology through the lens of contemporary technology and using AI and image-generation platforms as collective tools. It grapples with the contradictions of living in this world full of worlds and full of crises, while revindicating processes of nomadic becoming, transcending fixed identities, and collective emergence. Texts by Laura Tripaldi, Institute of Queer Ecologies, and Stacy Alaimo provide further food for thought, and invite readers into recondite explorations—of parasitic spaces and ghost bodies through materialist feminisms; of oak archives and the previous lives that forests can narrate to us; of acid oceans and the psychedelic trips they might afford.
Essays: Institute for Postnatural Studies, Institute of Queer Ecologies, Laura Tripaldi, Stacy Alaimo
Contributors:
Abdulla Buhijji
Alex Knychalska
Alvaro Azcarraga
Anna-Katharina Laboissière
Annika Kappner
Antonine Scali Ringwald
Barbara Kiolbassa
Catherine Taft
Egór Kraft
Elisa Balmaceda
Elizabeth Burmann Littin
Ella Rosenblatt
Florencia Pochinki
Gina Sara
Kashi Proenza
Grace Leonora Turtle
Guillem S. Arquer Ishaan
Aggarwal Joeëllâ Kálâlã
Joke Van den Heuvel
Laura Pante
Lena Kuzmich
Lena Michalik
Mio Al-Hashimy
Nadine El Khoury
Natalia Sorzano
Paulina Mirowska
Rithika Pandey
Ryder Kimball
Shayma Nader
Tom Shepherd-Barron
Traian Cherecheș
Veronika Gryshchuk
Walla Capelobo
Yo-E Ryou
Zoe Keller
Editorial team: Yuri Tuma, Gabriel Alonso, Catalina Imizcoz, Karol Muñozcano
Editorial design: Matteo Guarnaccia, Alicia Sánchez
