Week 7_Reflection Companion species and Jellyfish stories
Digital species
Donna Haraway — Companion species
Donna Haraway opts instead for the term of companion species, referring to nonhuman entities with which humans coexist.（further the concept of cyborg) She used the term as an exploration into the historical emergence of animals who are not meat animals, lab animals, wilderness animals, war dogs, vermin or pariah dogs, but who are part of a very particular historical relationship.
e.g. Mobile can be seen as a company. When they fall, need to be picked up and charge them as feed every night. People need to upgrade, protect and maintain them carefully. Meanwhile, mobile phones provide information, connectivity and entertainment to people. They grow alongside human being and adapt well to people’s demands, as humans adapt to fit the needs of the device.
About digital companion species
Not only limited into species but also the combination of human and technique.
As the development of ‘post-cyborg entities’ exegesis.
Entities or non-entities forms
Annemarie Mol - — ‘the body multiple’
This concept recognises that the human body is comprised of many different practices, sites and bits of knowledge. While the body itself is not fragmented or multiple, the phenomena that make sense of it and represent it do so in many different ways so that the body is lived and experienced in different modes. (e.g. ‘I eat an apple’)
In her concept, Mol comments that when I ear an apple, is the agency in the ‘I’ or in the apple? Humans may grow, harvest and eat apples, but without foodstuffs such as apples, humans would not exist. Furthermore, once the apple is chewed and swallowed, it then becomes part of and absorbed into the eater’s body. It is impossible to determine what is human and what is apple.
The eating subject, therefore, is semi-permeable, neither completely closed off nor completely open to the world.
Mol then goes on to query at what stage the apple becomes part of her, and whether the category of the human subject might recognise the apple as ‘yet another me, a subject in its own right’.
Apples themselves have been shaped by years of cultivation by humans into the forms in which they now exist. In fact, they may be viewed as a form of Haraway’s companion species.
How then do we draw boundaries around the body/self and the apple? How is the human subject to be defined?
Jellyfish wins in the final
“We are in this crazy, unforeseen and incomprehensible situation where we are competing against jellyfish. And they are winning,” says the Australian marine biologist and jellyfish expert Lisa-Ann Gershwin.
For at least 670 million years, jellyfish have been floating — unchanged — through our oceans, and pretty much everything that damages our ecosystem seems to benefit them: overfishing brings down the number of predatory fish that could reduce the number of jellyfish. Plastic bags in the oceans kill other predators like turtles. On top of that, jellyfish flourish in warm water; it extends their breeding season, while many fish suffer from the lower oxygen percentage. “Warm water is a disaster for anything that breathes and a dream come true for anything that doesn’t breathe much, like jellyfish,” Gershwin says.
At the beginning of last year, a massive jellyfish invasion threatened to wipe out the fish population of the South Australian seaport Whylla, and another temporarily paralyzed the nuclear power plant in Swedish Oskarshamn when jellyfish plugged up the cooling water supply….
Marine scientists have thus arrived at an apocalyptic prognosis: “Jellyfish will be the only survivors when everything else has fallen apart.”
In collaboration with marine biologists and animal keepers, Rimini Protokoll is flipping the view of these creatures around and staging it as a gaze directed back at their observers.
