Whether it’s in our cities, our homes, or our social relations, Mattern continues, “Breakdown is our epistemic and experiential reality...What we really need to study is how the world gets put back together.”

As Dr. Nichola Raihani, British psychologist and Professor of Evolution and Behavior at University College London puts it, “The history of life on earth is a history of teamwork, of collective action, and of cooperation.” While traditional discussions of how humanity became the dominant form of life on Earth have focused on competition, the truth... See more

From indigenous cultures — who’ve tended to operate on a paradigm of cooperative collectivism that’s deeply entwined with their relationship to nature — to the African Ubuntu philosophy that emphasizes communal values, empathy, shared humanity, and the foundational belief that individuals exist in a web of relationships, there are countless... See more

Quantitative indicators — faulty proxies for qualitative truths — are our primary measure of success, and considerations of life beyond our own have, until now, been largely absent from our day-to-day decision making. What magic might unfold if we just adjust our aperture? And what’s at risk if we don’t?

And more than anything, it feels particularly, uncomfortably, acutely uncertain.

the disintegration of shared narratives may risk a loss of collective memory and identity, but it also opens the door to a broader and more equitable representation of diverse histories and experiences. In recognizing the historical context of centralized narratives, we understand that while the scale and impact of narrative fragmentation are... See more

As Kader Attia writes in Repair: Architecture, Reappropriation, and The Body Repaired, “While in the Western world, the act of repair aimed at simply restoring an original shape, in traditional cultures the repairs aimed further, towards the creation of a new aesthetics. For the West, repair was an illusion of reappropriation of the self, but for... See more

In December of 2022, British contemporary artist Es Devlin installed a public sculpture in concert with the Endangered Language Alliance, “Your Voices,” outside of New York’s Lincoln Center. The work responds to anthropologist Wade Davis’s observation: “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem... See more

As Kristoffer Ørum, artist and self-proclaimed ‘misuser of technology,’ pointed out in a RADAR interview, as LLMs become “very good at drawing things that look like something,” humans have the opportunity to push in the opposite direction, reviving more absurdist and abstract forms of art — much like how the expressionists thrived after the advent... See more