The Hyphen
The Anthropocene is an epoch in which the folding and unfolding of human and non-human life are perturbed and distorted in unfamiliar ways. An ethical stance to multiple and multiplying anthropocenic worlds requires radically decentering human thinking beyond the myopic orbit of human exceptionalism. What tools, devices, images, and words are adequate to this task?
It is not admissible, we believe, to start with the word “non-human,” which implies an opposition, a polarity, or a disjunction between the human and that not considered human. From this word, however, we salvaged the hyphen: a small linguistic gesture, which suggests—even performs—the networked, the rhizomatic, the membranic, and the tuberous.
Inspired by patterns of thought we see in the work of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Myra Hird, and Eben Kirksey, we challenged ourselves to create an image that would evoke the hybrid disturbances of more-than-human-ness. Our visual design went through several stages and refinements. We chose a circular frame for its holistic form and we bisected it with a ground line to balance the above and below. We animated the image in order to add a sense of life. This was done with pre-twentieth-century technology—the thaumatrope. We were able to record this on an iPhone and screen it to the seminar as part of our presentation on the second day. Our final thaumatrope is the hyphen made visual, a semi-abstract pulse of life, matter, and cosmic energies in the universe.
