How can we become the body without organs in the anthropocene epoch?
How do external sounds affect us?
Speculative design is a growing methodology raised by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby that objects to orthodox forecasting approaches, thus creating open debate about what kind of future people want. Speculative design could be a thought experiment and method to provide viable solutions and stimulate audiences to realise and discuss the ‘wicked problems’ – problems that are challenging or unattainable to solve (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Many speculative artworks deal with various techno-futures that reshape how people interact with resources and the environment – a task we may need to reset our imaginations in reaction to the Anthropocene, the latest historical era when human activities have significantly impacted the planet's environment and ecosystems. This phrase refers to an unofficial geologic time unit (National Geographic Society, 2022).
The research started with these keywords: speculative design, future, and interview and further expanded to the body without organs and applied sounds to investigate the complex interplay between Anthropocene and the future and the human body.
This practice-based research employs a standardised and open-ended interview method to participate in discussions about futures, bodies, and identities as the first step. Second, thematic analysis was utilised to gather data, analyse, and evaluate the results of the interviews. Thematic analysis is a helpful tool for resolving experiences, perspectives, or behaviours during data collection. The interview results led the investigation to a philosophical concept – the body without organs and Anthropocene. Raised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the body without organs means the body is uncontrolled and floating, opposing the dominant subject, and refusing to construct a central meaning. Sounds, especially experimental sounds, could be regarded as the body without organs since they are decentralised and fluid.
This research aims to provoke people to be aware of three major concerns in an artistic approach: what type of future people want, what the future might be, and how to react to it.
We as humans should examine ourselves under the context of the Anthropocene. We may need to rethink the consequences of our political and social structures on the earth (Anderson, 2015).
‘The Earth – the Deterritorialize, the Glacial, the giant Molecule – is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters flow in all directions, free intensities or nomadic mad or transitory particles’ (Fast, 2018).
Deleuze and Guattari describe the earth as a body without organs, that the body is uncontrolled and floating, opposes the dominant subject, and refuses to construct a central meaning. At the same time, a body without organs is not a specific ‘body’; it can be anything that fulfils this requirement, such as a book that lacks a conventional narrative.
It is a response and backwash for the daily body under the current cultural system. Based upon this, the experimental sound can also be regarded as a body without organs since it has the following characteristics:
a) Sounds have the characteristic of vibration. Sound is a vibrating power that creates linkages between human and nonhuman bodies (Fast, 2018).
b) The hearer is fluid to the same degree as the sound object is fluid. The listener’s hearing, perspective, psychology, and culture shape the sound. Each person, community, and culture listen differently (Shank, 2020).
In some ways, we are as unpredictable and fluid as the body without organs. We as humans are endeavouring to figure out the position in nature, the relationship with technique, and the images of the other. However, in the physical world, we are restrained by the authority, power system and ‘the truth’, which means we are fettered. Likewise, capitalism and colonialism are closely correlated to the Anthropocene's consequences.
To break the centralisation system, we need to build a new ideology. Referring to the concept of ‘rhizomes’, raised by Deleuze, which means we need to create a diversified, mutability, irregularity, and fluid. When we believe we have touched freedom and unfettered metamorphosis, how can external voices affect us, whether we notice or not? Can we calmly confronted when the Anthropocene comes and be a
body without organs in a world supervised by systems and authority?
Ultimately, the artwork is an applied interview with the future body applied generative arts as a tool to explore the relationship between anthropocene, sounds and body (see below). A hybrid of a tree and a human backbone. The tree represents rhizomes – the metaphor and symbolism of the body without organs. The spine means human, both physically and spiritually. It moves, dances, and transforms vigorously or gently, affected by the random sounds of this world. This object seems to convert freely and uncontrollably, but it is controlled by the system, which is the code I put in. It moves based on the rhythm, pitch of the voice.
