Blockchain Papers

Ruth Y. Y. Hung

This urgent book foregrounds the role of the senses in understanding the more-than-human. It explicates the aesthetics of the more-than-human, emphasizing the critical situation it faces today through multiple environmental crises, including pollution, climate change, and species extinction. Drawing on perspectives fr

Rubinden Kumar Balbir Singh

The term sustainable has followed us since our school days, a word that once lived in textbooks, now echoes in daily conversations, product labels, and global forums. Sustainability often takes centre stage in discussions around climate change. As digital technology evolved, new innovations like NFTs (non-fungible tokens) sparked fresh debate. While creative in form, NFTs have also raised concerns about energy consumption and digital pollution, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, as noted by Truby (2022). Shattered Dates is a traditional artwork that symbolically captures the fragile state of our climate. The use of bread tags, each imprinted with dates, months, and years, represents the passage of time and the layers of environmental challenges humanity has faced. The broken, colourful fragments reflect a world in crisis, one fractured by neglect, yet still filled with memory and meaning. This piece resonates deeply with the theme of SUSTAINAISSANCE, a call for a creative and conscious revival. It reminds us that we are living in a critical moment. The future depends not only on acknowledging the damage but also on reshaping the way we live, consume, and create. Through art, awareness, and innovation, we can begin to piece together a more sustainable existence before time runs out.

K. C. Wong

In the rise of authoritarianism, what can ordinary people do to resist the seemingly irreversible tide of state autocratization? The story of Hong Kong provides a global case for this question. In 2019, I stayed in a Hong Kong hotel interviewing “active” participants of street protests. Characterized by the ethos of “no big organization,” participants saw themselves as autonomous, spontaneous citizens rather than followers of a particular leader organization. Their coordination was based on online communication technology grounded in a decade-long fear of authoritarian encroachment. Ming-sho Ho’s extraordinary new book, Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests, examines and analyzes the fluid coordination of this anti-authoritarian resistance, aptly captured by Bruce Lee’s famous maxim, “Be Water.” The phrase—popularized by the Hong Kong-born martial-arts legend and Hollywood star—came to symbolize the protesters’ ethos of flexibility and resilience in confronting state power. With the assistance of a rigorous research team, Ho collected and analyzed an extensive dataset of 1,770 protest events, printed materials, 189 interviews, and both online and offline observations. Drawing on this rich material, he develops the concept of collective improvisation to explain how decentralized yet highly coordinated activism emerged without formal leadership or organizational hierarchy. Moving beyond journalistic romanticized portrayals of spontaneity, Ho argues that Hong Kong’s protesters exhibited an improvised rationality—a capacity to adapt, invent, and synchronize tactics under extreme repression.

Leah Nieboer

This dissertation is a novel, STATES OF ZERO, accompanied by a critical preface on rupture in the works of German artist Rebecca Horn and Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The critical preface “ON RUPTURE, ESTRANGEMENT, & EXTENSIBILITY: THE NEUTRAL IN REBECCA HORN AND THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA,” investigates negating interruptions in Rebecca Horn and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s lives—a life-threatening illness and its ensuing chronic conditions in the former, and displacement, exile, and linguistic rupture in the latter—that shape their innovative, multimedia works and their understandings of subjectivity, embodiment, articulation, and relationship. Their compositions, pitched at hyperbolic limits of self and language, touch Maurice Blanchot’s neutral—that substance which both underlies and threatens to obliterate speech altogether. In this preface, I explore some ways Horn’s works, given these ruptures, are expressive of this touching of the neutral and discuss the possible senses, embodiments, and modes of relationship her works—staged at the intersection of the human, nonhuman, mechanical, and environmental—offer as a result. Her works, intended to touch and to hyperbolize the limits of sense, ask us to encounter previously unimaginable configurations of self and other, insisting we reckon with the essential plurality of self, as we approach what Blanchot considers “the impossible” utterance this mode of articulation allows. I then take up Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multimedia work to extend the conversation into the invitational nature of rupture and its socio-ethical-political implications. The novel, STATES OF ZERO, is a composition that lives in this tradition of rupture. Set in a fictional, totalitarian state, the novel follows Zero, a woman who finds herself paradoxically embedded in the heart of the state’s increasingly totalitarian structure through her work at its national laboratory, even as her increasing disability—caused by early chemical exposure in her environments and exacerbated by ongoing clinical invasion—makes her its powerful, if unintentional, dissident. This early rupture in her form ensures she cannot become—or conceive of—a singular subject imagined by the state. Instead, she becomes a person of increasing alterity, an “impossible” body articulated across human, environmental, mechanical, clinical, and nonhuman worlds, in an aporia of unresolvable crossings. At the bottom of these crossings is the mother—Zero’s own sick mother, as well as the state’s toxins, clinical invasions, heteronormative structures, releasing dreams, and queer relationships that have mothered her form into its present state. This results in a narrative form that is as experimental and polyvocal as Zero herself. The novel itself becomes an impossible body, suspended across varying times and spaces, mechanisms of recording and surveillance, an unnamed narrator(s), and Zero’s own consciousness. As Zero, the state, and their intertwined narratives reach a point of no return, the novel and its world is flooded—with a local storm, and a teeming, lyric passage expressive of Blanchot’s neutral, where Zero may, finally, conceive of an impossible form for becoming into a possible future.

Bryoni Trezise

Chapter 2 traces the emergence of the viral child by first identifying histories and scenographies of vision that coincide with culturally specific ideations of priceless, innocent childhood. Late nineteenth century baby exhibition show cultures are placed into conversation with the origin example of a viral child – the eponymous hero of the viral YouTube clip, Charlie Bit My Finger . Both scenes enact a conceptual ‘birthing’ of the child-figure that takes place as an expression of fin de siècle anxieties. Both scenes frame the child as the anchor of industrial, and then post-industrial, forms of attention. Through a focus on vision, this chapter proposes a relationship between kinds of durational consciousness enacted by the performing child and the time-specific formation of forward-looking sentiments. More particularly, it proposes that the form of temporality indexed by the viral child is speculative futures – the investment, financial and otherwise, in a hypothetical outcome, the arrival of which is yet-to-be-seen. With the recent indexation of Charlie Bit My Finger as a non-fungible token, the chapter points to how the ‘minor visions’ of a viral child both shape public perceptions of childhood and reshape the conditions through which those perceptions are conceived.

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Geoff Gordon

On the heavily polluted soil of De Ceuvel-a former shipyard in Amsterdam turned into an eco-tech playground-the Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI) recently convened its first Experimental Zone: a 'celebration of ecology, art, theory and emerging technologies' (Sovereign Nature Initiative 2022a).Bringing together crypto-poets, ecophilosophers, blockchain developers and tech start-up investors, the gathering sought to spark 'radical approaches toward sustainability'.How could the non-human speak for and sustain itself when seen, sensed, mediated and multiplied through new technological tools or interventions?Which worlds can be crafted where 'trees, hyenas, snails, rivers, elk and algae preserve their own value' and 'humans … have a stake in their thriving' (Sovereign Nature Initiative 2022b)?How can one govern with and through the sky and subterranean?Situated at the 'intersection of ecology, economy and emerging web3 technologies', SNI nurtures 'radical approaches' that aspire to 'reconfigur[e] nature's value' and to enact a 'non-exploitative, non-consumerist' relation between 'nature, humans and technology'.De Ceuvel in Amsterdam Noord proved a perfect place for this experimental exploration.Built on the site's toxic soil, creative workspaces nested in old houseboats are tied together with natural surroundings through a winding wooden jetty.Phytoremediation plants labor (and die) to clean the polluted earth-a process that is measured, mapped and materialized into a vibrant, hybrid and digitally mediated ecology.De Ceuvel describes itself as 'never finished'-in a 'perpetual state of development' (De Ceuvel 2022).It does not only strive for specific sustainability solutions but also for a 'cultural transition', claiming that 'people have to learn new modes of thought and how to apply new techniques and technologies'.Operating on this 'cleantech playground' of De Ceuvel, Metabolic-a technology development and consultancy organisation-developed a 'sensor network' to provide

Celia T. Bardwell-Jones

I Thank Dr. Vink for her impressive analysis of design and introducing me to another method in thinking about institutional organization. I also am deeply grateful for Dr. Vink's engagement with my work on “Placental Ethics: Addressing Colonial Legacies and Imagining Culturally Safe Responses to Health Care in Hawaiʻi” (Bardwell-Jones) and responding to the call to re-envision alternative design models in guiding institutional operations that seek community engagement. Responding to this paper helped me to think further about the work I began in that article.Dr. Vink's project carefully reflects on her experience working with communities in Canada on behalf of hospital administration. Seeking input from differently situated communities, she reflects on moments of perplexity and resistance from the community members. Working with members from an Indigenous community, she found that dominant design models “can contribute to the reproduction of coloniality and modernity.” Working with diverse communities in Toronto, she acknowledged the “hypocrisy” of participation when dominant design models failed to acknowledge the ongoing process of local design work within the community.It appears that dominant design within hospital administration understands care as best done by authority. Community members are reduced to data. The cognitive work is done by the experts, who are situated outside the community. There are risks that dominant design models, despite the good intentions motivating the inquiry, may perpetrate unconscious structural gaslighting. Drawing upon Elena Ruiz's notion of settler epistemic economies that generate structural violence, Nora Berenstain identifies the nature of structural gaslighting as forms of violence that are perpetrated by settler administrative systems and their organizing logics [which] inherently depend on what Ruíz refers to as settler epistemic economies—collections of hermeneutical resources specifically engineered to promote, uphold, and entrench colonial epistemic frameworks and forms of domination as the only possible epistemological systems and governance structures while violently foreclosing on alternative epistemologies. (743)Dominant design models go beyond merely asserting hermeneutical dominance, but in so doing enact epistemic erasure. Structural gaslighting undermines autonomous community processes and prevents them from taking shape. Ultimately, the dominant design model, which assumes that the researcher knows best, stunts the necessary resistance to undermine the dominant design models.To avoid these problems, Dr. Vink aims to transform the colonial logics involving hospital administration toward a pluralistic design model. Care, in this framework, is a community endeavor. Community members are active agents involved in all aspects of the cognitive work. The experts’ knowledge is decentralized and is positionally placed among the perspectives of the community. Within this narrow space, experts are part of the crowd and must engage with the conflicting values, the chaotic background, and the turbulence of the community. A pluralistic design model, Vink argues, encourages reflexivity or epistemic perplexity, which causes the necessary friction to unsettle one's own assumptions about care in a hospital setting. Vink points out how individual and social frameworks may elicit epistemic perplexity. First, she discusses aesthetic friction, which aims to encourage individual self-reflection. Part of the intent of the design is to change the way caregivers relate to their patients in a hospital setting. The example of the dual tubing of the stethoscope invites the patient and the caregiver to listen to the patient's heart together. The modified stethoscope aims to open up a space where the caregiver and the patient mutually develop epistemic perplexities, which might bridge diverse perspectives in health. The double stethoscope offers a context of play and experimentation in dialogue with differently situated others. An aesthetic disruption of this sort aims to decentralize the epistemic labor involved in understanding the patient's health. I find this instrument interesting as it opens up a space where the patient is able to understand their bodily health more through modern medical technology, and it allows the caregiver the opportunity to learn more about the patient's values of health through a shared experience of listening to the heartbeat of the patient at the same time.Second, Vink acknowledges the limitations of generating the necessary friction that can take place at the individual level. For José Medina, individual accountability also is not enough in addressing the harms of epistemic injustice. Social institutions embedded within particular communities play a role in perpetuating hermeneutical injustice defined by Medina as “the kind of epistemic injustice that occurs when a subject is unfairly disadvantaged in her capacities to makes sense of her experience” (90). Some examples include the Women's Movement in attempting to draw attention to “the problem that has no name.” Additionally, Indigenous peoples’ activism to protect sacred places, such as mountains, rivers, or oceans, is rendered unintelligible within settler values of progress. In the context of health care, using my placenta example conceived within the hospital's hermeneutical structure, the placenta is dogmatically understood through a biomedical approach in which these alternative epistemologies forever remain inchoate or cast as an anomaly. Vink's use of the concept of the “uncommons” captures this fundamental hermeneutical incommensurability among communities. In developing pluralistic design models, the notion of the uncommons and its accompanying acceptance of ambiguous ends seems to offer opportunities for hospital administrators to interact with the community in ways that challenge the hermeneutical hospital frameworks that may center on a dominant design model.In general, I find Dr. Vink's analysis that encourages design models to facilitate openness and a critical reflexivity important in transforming the epistemic values of hospital administration. In what follows are a few critical comments that aim to draw out theoretical implications and generate discussion.First, from the figure depicting the uncommons, it seems that there are overlapping places that signify where the communities would engage each other; however, it is not clear if the space of engagement is always productive, depending on where one stands in relationships of power. For example, in the case of the placenta, the hospital, in enforcing antiquated rules, perpetrated epistemic injustice in reducing the concept of placentas as “biological human waste.” This very ontological framework imposed on the placenta was perceived by Native Hawaiian families as a type of social and moral death. The child's moral connection to the land is obliterated. While Vink acknowledges the risk of ontological occupation in which one way of viewing things overshadows other ways, the figure may overestimate the productive possibility in these spheres of interaction. This is not to say that resistant imaginations are stifled either, but it may mean that whatever productive interactions emerge may evade dominant ontological frameworks of the institutions. For example, doctors who knew families were taking the placenta home in coolers feigned ignorance of these outlaw tactics in the face of hospital administration. The doctor need not engage the meaning of the request of the families to take the placenta home. They can simply not tell the hospital administration. I suppose I want to emphasize that the spheres of interaction in the uncommons framework may not generate the necessary friction if the hermeneutical context prevents genuine interaction.Second, which relates to the first, it's unclear how epistemic friction is generated on an individual level when the larger hermeneutical framework of hospital administration stifles genuine interactions. Part of Medina's argument is that epistemic friction is experienced as challenging the epistemic agent's authority over knowledge, the burden of knowing best. The privileged epistemic agent would have to experience a loss of control of their authority over knowledge. Vink utilizes the metaphor of the stew, which emphasizes difference and marinated connections or opportunities to stew and interact with the culturally different other. In this example, while difference of the other is recognized by the knower, it is unclear whether there is enough epistemic friction to motivate a privileged knower to recognize their loss of control or authority over knowledge. How might the resistance of the privileged knower emerge if the power dynamics of the stew deeply saturate the very makeup of the stew? Moreover, resistant imaginations in a kaleidoscopic vision tend to resist dominant narratives of control and design. In the context of hospital administration, specific individual representatives of the hospital may need to adopt a resistant vision against the institution that employs them. What would that look like? Again, I am reminded that these resistant acts tend to occur at the subaltern level in which there is no change in the dominant hermeneutical framework rendering any possible individual experience of friction to merely hit an institutional brick wall. As a side note, following Medina's analysis, I prefer Maria Lugones's notion of curdling, in which milk curdles as the water is separated from the emulsion of the milk.Third, as I mentioned earlier, the framework of the uncommons recognizes incommensurability as a starting point. Vink argues, citing a point made in Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser's A World of Many Worlds, that “[t]he uncommons is a coming together of heterogeneous groups where ongoing negotiations can take place toward a commons that never fully manifests, recognizing its ever-divergent starting point” (Vink 65). The framework of the uncommons is appealing, as there is no pre-determined common that is in view. This avoids the problem of ontological occupation leaving open an ambiguous future, which is necessary in cultivating a plurality of design model. However, it seems how the coming together of heterogeneous groups cannot be fully captured by ontologies of divergence and separation. In thinking about heterogeneous groups, it is important to also recognize relationships of dependency and reciprocity that bind communities together. Institutions of care are embedded within a community, and depend on the community in rendering their very practice and profession meaningful. Grace Lee Boggs is a key figure in articulating this relationship (see Boggs). The fact of dependency reveals the precarity and vulnerability between divergent communities and that careful care and attention need to be paid in restoring and replenishing those relationships. The relationships embedded in the uncommons underlie the notion of a broader community that is flexible to adapt to the fluidity of heterogeneous groups as they shift and change. This invites communities to transform, to be willing to transform, when relationships are articulated, recognized, and respected.This brings me to my fourth point. As I mentioned in my “Placental Ethics” article, learning about another culture ought not to take place in the boardroom or a seminar room. Though I appreciate the “Iceberg metaphor” and the “story unwriting” workshops, this, to me, speaks to a dominant mode of diversity or cultural sensitivity training that includes diverse perspectives but does not actively engage. I wonder if reflexive design can be thought of in the context of home or belonging, navigating the politics of care and settlement. How does a hospital care facility establish a place in communities to care for the members of the community? This is where I believe shared projects of hospitals need to emerge within the community. Though service projects that address specific ailments, such as cancer, obesity, and so on, are important, how might these health-related issues intersect with the larger hermeneutical framework of the communities that hospitals serve? Following Manu Meyers, contexts that awaken the sensual knowledge of the environment, through engagements with nature and the land may offer out-of-the-board/training room opportunities to become open to the ontologies or cosmologies of the community. I think this is especially important when serving Indigenous communities. In my article, I wondered: What if hospital administrators established a community garden or joined community leaders in service projects in the area? What if doctors, nurses, or administrators learned the indigenous names of plants, and learned the myths of the place they live in, as well as addressing the health needs of the community? How about creating a meal in the hospital kitchen with the elders? These deeply practical activities place health administrators in actual embodied engagement with the community and may prove to be the context in which hospital administration may confront their privilege and walk humbly, prepare food humbly, or care for a garden humbly in order to sympathetically learn about the health needs/values of a community.Finally, at the heart of pluralistic design models, it is essential to define/understand what well-being means in the community, which will then guide the practices of care. Well-being is a politically contested site that is not as self-evident as hospital administration might like to think it is. I defined placental ethics as “rethinking the conditions of knowledge in hospital settings in Hawaiʻi” (Bardwell-Jones 112). However, I have come to realize that placental epistemology must be placed within a broader context of politics, or placental politics. Chamorran Indigenous scholar Christine Taitano DeLisle examines the epistemic role of the pattera, or the nurse-midwife in conducting pattera ritual practices such as burying the placenta. According to DeLisle, despite the US military's efforts in stamping out Indigenous practices of placental and umbilical cord burying, which offended Western values of hygiene and well-being, patteras resisted these efforts and insistently held on to the “old values” even while integrating modern medical approaches to childbirth. Placental politics enact epistemic resistance in hermeneutically producing generative ontological frameworks that resist the colonial logics of hospital administration.Placental politics is an example of Indigenous feminism in asserting what the very definintions of care would look like. Care, in this sense, is bound up with values of self-determination that arises not from a nation-state identity, but from the land.She argues: the political, social and cultural act of burying the placenta can be regarded as a specific form of indigenous and gendered resistance against US naval colonialism, and that furthermore, such corporeal politics of foregrounding communal relations and stewardship of lands and people can be seen as pattera assertions of cultural self-determination. (DeLisle)Placental politics as a form of Indigenous feminism serves as an alternative epistemology that relates closely to practices of well-being not only for the individual mother and her child, but the wider human and more-than-human community that animates the birthing process. Placental politics when recognized in design models can offer new ways for settler colonial health administration to transform the way well-being is understood, to establish that standards of care may not be the design model to enact, and to be willing to accept and transform hospital ontologies revolving around care.Though I appreciated the modified stethoscope as a way of aesthetically disrupting the individual knower, a more radical metaphor that aesthetically disrupts the dominant hermeneutical framework of hospital administration is the placenta. The umbilical cordage figuratively binds knowers to the land, which in turn informs what values of well-being look like and the types of caring practices that are ritualized and enacted collectively. Similar to the modified stethoscope in which the caregiver and patient share an experience of co-constituting knowledge, the placental cordage extends to the wider community, binding deep moral connections with the land, which in turn guides our values and practices of well-being, health, and care. The resistant imagination necessary for hospital administration to manifest must avoid symbolic acts of inclusion and take up a courageous political stance against asserting settler colonial, capitalistic, racist, and sexist ideologies bound up within the ontologies of the hospital administration.

Nicolás Rojas Cortés

Have you heard that some people wrote a story about the future? What? People can’t write a story of what hasn’t happened yet? Well, Nietzsche was also told that a philology of the future was impossible. To be precise, the new version of the Posthuman Studies Reader is not exactly a story in the historiographic sense, but rather in a relaxed sense; more that of a guide that will allow us to understand the assumptions on which we will draw to live in the near future. We find ourselves, in this sense, with a compendium capable of introducing us in the process of becoming self-aware of our limits—biological, educational, philosophical—as a human species.Structurally, this work is made up of an Anti-Prologue, an Introduction, and four sections, which I will focus on in this review. From the beginning, both in the Introduction and in the first section, “A. Pedigrees of Posthuman Studies as an Academic Discipline and Contemporary Posthuman Movements,” one may be pleased to find that progress in academic disciplines related to posthuman studies is real.It was already several years ago that Nick Bostrom presented “A History of Transhumanist Thought” (2005), and it is today that, thanks to this Reader, we can find a series of indications that allow us to expand our knowledge of the common roots not only from which transhumanist thought has emerged, but also that give birth to ways of thinking that generally seek to go beyond humanism. As the editors claim, the “pedigree” that we are able to find here does not emerge from a specific form of philosophy, but rather from a “critical posthumanism,” a “field of a gradual integration among Transhumanism, Metahumanism and Posthumanism, an evolving but firm ground, wide open to the new philosophical concepts about a less anthropocentric, less racist, more ethical and more clearly politicized future” (11). The roots of our past, then, will mark the path of our future.I cannot help but notice that the inspiration generated by the scholarly works of Stefan Lorenz Sorgner can already be found in the Introduction, and this is not surprising, since it is sufficient to look at the word “pedigrees” in the first section to understand that we are dealing with a work that is fully aware of the latest research in this field. Let us remember that Sorgner had already produced a study called “Stammbäume des Meta-, Post- und Transhumanismus,” contained in his book Transhumanismus: “Die gefährlichste idee der Welt”!? (2016), originally written in German. However, I would dare to say that the book’s first section seeks to mark the route of what I have called a history of the future rather than to make a deep and exhaustive reflection on the roots of “Critical Posthumanism,” which is fully understood as long as we, citizens of the future, also make our contribution to discover, reconstruct, and explain how is it that our humanist, classical, modern, and enlightened roots were able to generate the conditions for sensing the possibility of surpassing ourselves as a species.If we compare the names of philosophers, scientists, and scholars presented in the Introduction to Posthuman Studies Reader with the names presented by Bostrom in his “History” (2005), we will find that the keynotes that configure “critical posthumanism” go beyond humanism and rationalism. It is the presence of the “scientific cosmist,” of Nietzsche and his idea of the “overhuman,” of contemporary scientists—among which I can highlight my countryman Francisco J. Varela and the Buddhist Jon Kabat-Zinn—and representatives of feminism and the LGBTQ+ movement oriented toward posthumanism that we can say that this book is the result of long debates, and that it presents itself as a work that is coherent with the world in which we live and with the world in which we are going to live: that is, a world neither humanistic, nor Western, nor solely masculine.Following this route, we find ourselves with our first stop on the road to our future, section B, “Transhumanism” (41–136). The section begins with an excerpt from the text Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny by Julian Huxley While the text is notable for being the first publication in which the word “transhumanism” was presented, Huxley also assigned to human beings a descriptive note that we share with nature itself, namely that all reality is a process. This allows us to outline an approach to self-transformation that is wider and more universal than that of the already known humanisms. This characteristic note will be complemented by the proposal of FM-2030, who in his text “Transhumans-2000” already hints that we are “biofluid,” that is, a biological entity that can flow beyond its limitations. However, it is not until the appearance of Natasha Vita-More’s “Transhumanist Manifesto” that we are able to find a proposal to systematize the conditions that underpin the transhumanist project: (a) challenging aging; (b) enhancing and improving our bodies and brains; and (c) understanding ourselves as a life form that is not restricted by others. These conditions allow us to begin to systematize the transhumanist project as a philosophical worldview. They do not point strictly to human biological evolution, but rather refer to the need to control uncertainty in order to control perpetual progress and, consequently, achieve self-transformation into a transhuman existence. It is noteworthy that Natasha Vita-More has the intuition that a transhuman existence does not imply only adding gadgets to our bodies or designing bodies without a transdisciplinary strategy and perspective, since the transhuman cannot participate in a social existence without a perspective capable of confronting political absolutes and biases. Thus, self-transformation as such implies existing beyond modern morality, beyond an economy of scarcity and beyond discriminatory cruelty.On this basis, it is easy to understand the composition of the section. Going beyond the three elements recently mentioned implies a reflection on specific experiences of our existence. Transhumanism, as a philosophy, cannot be conceived as an a priori reflection and must confront our actual experience. David Pearce, with his manifesto “The Hedonistic Imperative,” is the first to confront us with the possibilities that nanotechnology and genetic engineering present when dealing with the experience of both physical and mental pain. Already, in 1995, Pearce detected what today is a devastating and real emergency, that global suffering should be a topic of global policy discussion. Depression, manic states, and bipolarity are mentioned by the author as examples that show contemporary health standards to be pathologically low. Nonetheless, an existence at the level of our current possibilities can take care of these health standards by developing the possibilities of not only suppressing the psychological states of euphoria, but also programming ourselves with a kind of euphoria that allows us to abandon our lugubrious present. This last possibility can only be conceived from a discussion that takes us into account not only as objects of transformation, but also as subjects capable of deciding on our transformation.In this way, Anders Sandberg’s “Morphological Freedom. Why We Don’t Just Want It, but Need It” argues for the need to extend the “personal right” to modify our bodies according to our own desires in order to pursue happiness. This right implies maximum personal autonomy, an idea that would directly confront contemporary ethical debates, namely women’s right to their own bodies, reproductive rights, or euthanasia. In this sense, morphological freedom would require a tolerant society that does not allow its ethical judgments to be clouded by paternalistic ways of relating to individuals. This morphological freedom, which implies understanding self-transformation as an ongoing process and not as an ideologically determined telos, is also an invitation to get hold of the different types of health that already exist, as in the case of disabled people who do not want to be “repaired” because they have already learned to cope and live with their own existence. In short, Morphological Freedom is a commitment not only to the notion of maximum personal autonomy, but also to a tolerant and pluralistic society.The inclusion of Fukuyama is necessary at this point in the narrative. His popular work “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas: Transhumanism” may, in fact, kick off this whole Reader; is there a greater representative of the bioconservative than he? There may very well be, but his naïve and uncritical ideas end up strengthening authors such as Max More and his proposal of “The Proactionary Principle.” Although the intentions of people like Fukuyama may be good at their core, they are still blinded by prejudices and weak methodological approaches. In this sense, “The Proactionary Principle” is a coherent and rational response to the impossibility of denying technological progress, but also to the need to be ethically responsible for the inevitable development of science and technology.I believe that the inclusion of “Democratic Transhumanism 2.0” by James Hughes is a sufficient gesture to refute Fukuyama and, at the same time, demonstrate that the transhumanist movement is not as naive as the bioconservatives depict. Hughes’ self-awareness when characterizing the transhumanist and bioconservative discussion as another dimension of the complexity of contemporary politics is remarkable, because if a reflection seeks to match up to the height of our times, it must be able to offer a radical interpretation of democracy in order to support a coherent relationship between (a) new social possibilities brought about by emerging technologies, (b) a state policy capable of anticipating and dealing with threats from the misuse of emerging technologies without bioconservative biases, and (c) the multiplicity of perspectives involved in defending the dignity of all people who fight for the right to control their own bodies without being coerced by society to adopt ideologically “normal” bodies. This is why I believe that Hughes’s work is an incredible contribution not only to the teaching process of what transhumanism is, but also to show that if we want to think about the present, it is necessary to adopt a multiple perspective.Unfortunately, I do not agree with the inclusion of the following text. In its defense, I understand that the content is expressed in a rather literary way; however, beyond the metaphors and literary style, Nick Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia” manifests what I consider to be a naive transhumanism. It is enough, for example, to take into account his considerations on suffering (131) to understand that, beyond the rhetoric of his approach, Bostrom’s utopian transhumanism overlooks many moments in the history of philosophy. There is much debate on suffering—from the Epicurean philosophers or Nietzsche, just to name a few—for a specialist at Bostrom’s level to present the ideas contained in his paper. Nevertheless, as I have argued throughout this review, I am more than convinced that philosophy as a discipline progresses and, in this sense, “Letter from Utopia” has allowed great scholars such as Hauskeller (2012) and Sorgner (2018) to respond to these ideas and push transhuman researchers to the limits of the question for this movement.In this sense, it appears as a great achievement to me that “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner is the article that coherently connects this first section with the rest of the book. It is necessary for me to be honest and thank Professor Sorgner for inviting me to participate in this review; however, I cannot deny that it is also difficult for me to be objective with this text, as it is because of this reading that I first became familiar with transhumanism. While the article is a direct response to Bostrom’s History (2005), it also, in my view, represents an excellent exercise in pushing transhumanism out of the comfort zone of its presuppositions. The goal now is not only to overcome our condition through genetic improvement, but also to reconsider our relationship with science, values and culture. Thus, Nietzsche’s “dynamic philosophy” in Sorgner’s perspective makes it possible to coordinate a new face of transhumanism in a coherent fashion: a transhumanism that is no longer naively materialistic or scientistic. Beyond the specific content of the article, it is necessary to highlight the level and number of discussions that were born thanks to this paper. The sole mention of Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor or Enemy? edited by Yunus Tuncel (2017) is enough to highlight the impact of Sorgner’s proposal in the academic field. The reception of his proposal has been diverse, with both support and criticism, but Professor Sorgner’s production has not yet concluded, and, in later works, he has even admitted “a weak Nietzschean or posthumanist version of transhumanism” (2016). I believe that it is this version of Nietzschean transhumanism that editors Sampanikou and Stasieńko had in mind when coordinating the content of this Posthuman Studies Reader, as the following sections of the book seek to exhibit an overcoming of our condition by destroying the assumptions that hold us subjected to humanist ideas. This thought could not be more Nietzschean.The next section, “C. Posthumanism” (137–278), is the longest in the book and the one that also, in my view, provides the most significant contribution to the task of expanding a notion of transhumanism that attempts to think beyond its human condition without relying exclusively on technology.I find interesting to begin by mentioning that one can find the aforementioned Nietzschean heritage already at work in the excerpts from Donna Haraway’s works. It is undeniable that one of Nietzsche’s greatest scholars clearly has something to contribute to the goal of characterizing ourselves, and Haraway senses this insofar as her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” can be understood from the biopolitical reflection of Michel Foucault. When she affirms that “The Cyborg is our ontology” (143), what is being affirmed is a decision in the face of humanist dualism. From this starting point we can no longer take as a given our dependence on dual separations (mind–body; animal–machine), but rather, just like a mythological tale, Haraway’s works are the starting point for doubting the boundaries that have ideologically determined us. And one may wonder what these boundaries are. I believe that the first question, in a primordial sense, should be “What are we?” in order to be able to understand what is at stake when we ask ourselves about the meaning of the posthuman. I think that N. Katherine Hayles recognizes this methodological step when she says that “human being is first of all embodied being, and the complexities of this embodiment mean that human awareness unfolds in ways very different from those of intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines” (163). With this in mind, rather than an anti-human perspective, one should create perspectives capable of understanding ourselves as the result of historical evolutionary processes that do not end in the use of technological prostheses but culminate in a different understanding of ourselves.I emphasize that Hayles’ characterization leaves room for the question of “What is a human being?” and it seems to me that the inclusion of Neil Badmington’s “Posthumanism” is a good way of illustrating the power of the issue just mentioned, for it seems that if one wanted to the question “What a is human being?” with a form of as the one could that to that is, the possibility of an to that question will on a of boundaries that are In this ideas are in the of in her of the and in of when the technologies of the the of what is a human being would be and our current idea is by itself in the face of what is different from an and one who would be as an existence that these limits or and even on the ideas of one could as an entity in the process of his own allows to extend the limits of our embodied human one I believe does in her an of to on indications in order to allow such as to generate for a methodological debate with humanism. I then, that of is an excellent of how posthumanism is capable of confronting humanism. also and assumptions into question, and this is it necessary to reconsider the elements that had been by the humanist perspective, namely on an capable of the from which we can understand ourselves in order to understand ourselves as of the world and neither nor from nor from its descriptive In a and to we could say that when “What the of posthumanism with that posthumanism is “a of that is, to ourselves no longer from the of but to do on new that can the limits that humanism on out the of a one wonder this approach could have in the It seems to me that an to this question should be a and about this is what we find at the end of this section. In the excerpt from The we find the of “a posthuman in the when a is the of the I believe that this exercise is necessary even if one does not the of since could it even to us in a of ethical that for the complexities and actual of the to and more than on the of all that has been presented However, one can the humanist and ask “What of the if at we say is is the question that could configure the of this section, a by text a text that is not only because it is a between Nietzschean and and but also because it a of that like humanism and itself in that are still of ourselves at their However, seems to that the possibility of thinking beyond the of the in the need to in a way, which is in her perspectives have been an overcoming of what we are by of and an overcoming of what we are by of a And one may what is transhumanism overcome its and itself with posthumanist This question that I ask is even a personal as I would like to do research on this topic and the possibility that a form of transhumanism capable of care of is to of itself about its doubting and give birth to new without naively limits such as in science or is The Reader do not mean as an one last overcoming of our human the proposal by both Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and the last section the book with a proposal that in of one of the that has been a of this the that philosophical reflection can can it not if in his “The of and the and in a that the of transhumanism are the and and its of the and affirms the and not only firm in this but also takes the ideas of and and a philosophy of I were to present a of his I would say that is an an for an politics in which it makes no to the what we can think is already the future is and of believe that the intuition the word may be the to understanding for that can be in of this new way of thinking is no longer thought out as a to philosophical rather, is a on a Nietzschean that, now without without concepts such as and which the of a new of ourselves, and not the of and that can us in the still present and in the in the last Reader text, I would like to point out that, in my view, Sorgner presents at ideas for namely and by ourselves to our through a of and could we and in this of that we cannot step into do I this in several This Reader is a guide to get into philosophy. I would like to have the to this content in my in the near future. I am to be able to point out that, beyond the different perspectives in this Reader, what its is an ethical toward we are not able to on ourselves and our existence how can we even begin to face the that are is only a of the of not thinking about ourselves beyond In this last sense, this Reader will be a of the people who to give an to the very same that will how we will live in the near future.

Duncan Wu

People of sense (as they are called) give themselves great and unwarrantable airs over the rest of the world. If we examine the history of mankind, we shall find that the greatest absurdities have been most strenuously maintained by these very persons, who give themselves out as wiser than every body else. The fictions of law, the quibbles of school-divinity, the chicanery of politics, the mysteries of the Cabbala, the doctrine of Divine Right, and the secret of the philosopher&s;s stone, — all the grave impostures that have been acted in the world, have been the contrivance of those who set up for oracles to their neighbours. The learned professions alone have propagated and lent their countenance to as many perverse contradictions and idle fallacies as have puzzled the wits, and set the credulous, thoughtless, unpretending part of mankind together by the ears, ever since the distinction between learning and ignorance subsisted. It is the part of deep investigators / to teach others what they do not know themselves, and to prove by infallible rules the truth of any nonsense they happen to take in their heads, or chuse to give out to amuse the gaping multitude. What every one felt and saw for himself - the obvious dictates of common sense and humanity — such superficial studies as these afforded a very insufficient field for the excercise of reason and abstruse philosophy, in the view of &s;the demure, grave-looking, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed&s; 1 despisers of popular opinion; their object has regularly been, by taking post in the terra incognita of science, to discover what could not be known, and to establish what could be of no use if it were. Hence one age is employed in pulling down what another with infinite pomp and pains has been striving to build up; and our greatest proof of wisdom is to unlearn the follies and prejudices that have been instilled into us by our predecessors. It took ages of ingenuity, of sophistry, and learning, to incorporate the Aristotelian, or scholastic philosophy, into a complete system of absurdity, applicable to all questions, and to all the purposes of life; and it has taken two centuries of metaphysical acuteness and boldness of inquiry, to take to pieces the cumbrous, disproportioned edifice, and to / convert the materials to the construction of the modern French philosophy , by means of verbal logic, self-evident propositions, and undoubted axioms — a philosophy just as remote from truth and nature, and setting them equally at defiance. What a 227 number of parties and schools have we in medicine, — all noisy and dogmatical, and agreeing in nothing but contempt and reprobation of each other! Again, how many sects in religion, — all confident of being in the right, able to bring chapter and verse in support of every doctrine and tittle of belief, all ready to damn and excommunicate one another; yet only one, out of all these pretenders to superior wisdom and infallibility, can be right; the conclusions of all the others, drawn with such laboured accuracy, and supported with such unbending constancy and solemnity, are, and must be, a bundle of heresies and errors! How many idle schemes and intolerant practices have taken their rise from no better a foundation than a mystic garment, a divining-rod, or Pythagoras&s;s golden thigh! 2 — When Baxter, the celebrated controversial divine, and nonconformist minister in the reign of Charles II went to preach at Kidderminster, he regularly every Sunday insisted from the pulpit that baptism was necessary to salvation, and / roundly asserted, that &s;Hell was paved with infants&s; skulls.&s; This roused the indignation of the poor women of Kidderminster so much, that they were inclined to pelt their preacher as he passed along the streets. His zeal, however, was as great as theirs, and his learning and his eloquence greater; and he poured out such torrents of texts upon them, and such authorities from grave councils and pious divines, that the poor women were defeated, and forced with tears in their eyes, to surrender their natural feelings and unenlightened convictions to the proofs from reason and Scripture, which they did not know how to answer. Yet these untutored, unsophisticated dictates of nature and instinctive affection have, in their turn, triumphed over all the pride of casuistry, and merciless bigotry of Calvinism! We hear it said, that the Inquisition would not have been lately restored in Spain, but for the infatuation and prejudices of the populace. That is, after power and priestcraft have been instilling the poison of superstition and cruelty into the minds of the people for centuries together, hood-winking their understandings, and hardening every feeling of the heart, it is made a taunt and a triumph over this very people (so long the creatures of the government, carefully / moulded by them, like clay in the potter&s;s hands, into vessels, not of honour, but of dishonour) that their prejudices and misguided zeal are the only obstacles that stand in the way of the adoption of more liberal and humane principles. The engines and establishments of tyranny, however, are the work of cool, plotting, specious heads, and not the spontaneous product of the levity and rashness of the multitude. It is a work of time to reconcile them to such abominable and revolting abuses of power and authority, as it is a work of time to wean them from their monstrous infatuation * . We may 228 trace a speculative absurdity or practical enormity of this kind into its tenth or fifteenth century, supported story above story, gloss upon gloss, till it mocks at Heaven, and tramples upon earth, propped up on decrees and councils and synods, and appeals to popes and cardinals and fathers of the church (all grave, reverend men!) with the regular clergy and people at their side battling for it, and others below (schismatics and heretics) / oppugning it; till in the din and commotion and collision of dry rubs and hard blows, it loses ground, as it rose, century by century; is taken to pieces by timid friends and determined foes; totters and falls, and not a fragment of it is left upon another. A text of Scripture, or a passage in ecclesiastical history, is for one whole century &s;torn to tatters, to very rags,&s; 4 and wrangled and fought for, as maintaining the doctrine of the true and Catholic church; in the next century after that, the whole body of the Reformed clergy, Lutherans, Calvinists, Arminians, get hold of it, wrest it out of the hands of their adversaries, and twist and torture it in a thousand different ways, to overturn the abominations of Anti-Christ; in the third a great cabal, a clamour, a noise like the confusion of Babel, jealousies, feuds, heart-burnings, wars in countries, divisions in families, schisms in the church arise, because this text has been thought to favour a lax interpretation of an article of faith, necessary to salvation; and in the fourth century from the time the question began to be agitated with so much heat and fury, it is discovered that no such text existed in the genuine copies. Yet all and each of these, Popes, councils, fathers of the church, reformed leaders, Lutherans, Calvinists, Independents, Presbyterians, / sects, schisms, clergy, people, all believe that their own interpretation is the true sense; that, compared with this fabricated and spuriour faith of theirs, &s;the pillar&s;d firmament is rottenness, and earth&s;s base built on stubble;&s; 5 and are so far from being disposed to treat the matter lightly, or to suppose it possible that they do not proceed on solid and indubitable grounds in every contradiction they run into, that they would hand over to the civil power, to be consigned to a prison, the galleys, or the stake (as it happened), any one who demurred for a single instant to their being people of sense, gravity, and wisdom. Sense (that is, that sort of sense which consists in pretension and a claim to superiority) is shewn, not in things that are plain and clear, but in deciding upon doubts and difficulties; the greater the doubt, therefore, the greater must be the dogmatism and the consequential airs of those who profess to settle points beyond the reach of the vulgar; nay, to increase the authority of such persons, the utmost stress must be laid on the most frivolous as well as ticklish questions, and the most unconscionable absurdities have always had the stoutest sticklers, and the most numerous victims. The affectation of sense so far, / then, has given birth to more folly and done more mischief than any one thing else.

Monica Dall’Asta, Alessandra Chiarini

Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way they are combined—as for example in the case of the numerous shots taken by the camerapeople of the Tsarist film industry, which were transformed through her editing into incontrovertible proof of the necessity of the Revolution. In a way, then, Shub's work can be considered the most advanced result of all the philosophy of the Soviet avant-garde, for her films test Lev Kuleshov's intuition about the signifying power of montage by reworking preconstituted materials that had been originally produced to respond to a completely different, and sometimes even opposite, ideological project.3Many more women after Shub have adopted compilation as their privileged approach to film production and experimentation. Once a marginal form even in the documentary field, found footage cinema is now enjoying an extremely vital phase, fostered by both the exponential growth of the audiovisual archive and the improvement of digital editing technologies that have made film images all the more usable. Up to the 1950s and through the appearance of new avant-garde movements at the end of that decade, the history of found footage cinema consists of very few names and a similarly small number of film titles. And yet, even in the first half of the twentieth century women are a notable presence in the field, not only for their sheer numbers, but also by virtue of the quality and originality of their work. In this context we need to cite at least the name of Germaine Dulac, whose archival film of 1935 anticipates many typical concerns of the contemporary debate about the historicity of the film image. Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (Cinema at the Service of History) was assembled by Dulac during a period of intensive archival research at Gaumont, where she had been employed until the previous year as coeditor of the company's newsreel, France Actualités. Her monumental film is constructed from fragments taken from Gaumont newsreels from 1905 to 1935, and presents itself as a recollection, as well as a critical assessment, of the historical experiences made by a generation, her own, that was equal in age with the cinema: the generation born during the Belle Epoque, educated in the myth of progress, and doomed to witness its ruinous dissolution in the disaster of World War I, only to find itself confronted with the advent of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Made in the political-cultural context of the Popular Front (the film was made to be screened on the occasion of the opening of an independent “all-newsreel” film venue), Cinema at the Service of History reveals a thorough confidence in the testimonial power of cinema.4 It is at once a requiem about the atrocities of war and its moral, social, political, and economic consequences, and a warning to the present about repeating the mistakes of the past.Alongside Shub and Dulac, the third female master of found footage cinema before the 1960s is no doubt Nicole Vedrès. Her innovative work on Paris 1900 (1947) combined a “classical” approach to compilation film, based on exclusive use of documentary sources, and a more definitely modern approach, which regards the products of narrative cinema as no less legitimate sources of historical knowledge than documentary materials. Vedrès's work anticipates by several decades the awareness, typical of the debate on film and history of the early 1980s, that every film, whether narrative or documentary, bears a number of specifically historical traits—or, rather, what Vedrès characterizes as a specific form of historical truth that expresses itself in a visual quality on the order of photogénie.5This early phase of the history of found footage cinema, where three women play a primary role, draws to a close at the end of the 1950s. A more critical, irreverent, and playful attitude toward archival images, and a tendency to employ the past to produce an allegory of the present, and often quite a complex one, appears in the work of diverse experimental filmmakers, including Isidore Isou, Stan VanDerBeek, Bruce Conner, and Guy Debord. Again, several women participate as well in this new moment that marks the evolution of found footage film as a major form of experimental cinema, often referred to as collage film. Though the women's names are more obscure today than the filmmakers we have just cited, their position in this shift is far from secondary in terms of their critical awareness and their innovations.Already in 1959, Jane Conger Belson Shimané's Odds and Ends offered a precocious example of a collage film that mixes outtakes of travelogues with abstract animation, both painted on the filmstrip and created with paper cutouts. Since then, the ranks of women involved in the deconstruction of the codes of contemporary culture—and often particularly of its sexist stereotypes—through the reworking of preexisting footage has not stopped growing. Filmmakers such as Anita Thacher, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh, Michelle Citron, Abigail Child, Hito Steyerl, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Eve Heller, Vivian Ostrovsky, Nina Fonoroff, Sabine Hiebler, and Frédérique Devaux, or, among the younger ones, Lana Lin, Naomi Uman, Deborah Stratman, Caroline Avery, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Joritz, Barbara Meter, Louise Bourque, Magda Matwiejew, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Rebecca Baron, Meike Fehre, Meryll Hardt, and Lisa Reboulleau—and those whose work is analyzed in this issue of Feminist Media Histories: Myriam Borsoutsky, Cecilia Mangini, Cécile Fontaine, Barbara Hammer, Valentina Monti, and Alina Marazzi—make us tempted to describe found footage cinema as a field where gender parity is close to being finally attained.Yet we want to resist explaining away such a proliferation of female auteurs who choose a most difficult manner of expressing their own imagination and thought—through images created by others in different places and times—with some sort of specific or “essential” female inclination toward montage, maybe even by invoking its similarity to the tailoring operations of cutting and sewing. Such essentialist comparisons can certainly be suggestive, but they hardly help us understand the reality of women's experience in the sphere of filmmaking. Even less could we endorse a thesis that would interpret women's bent for compilation films as an ability to excel exclusively in contexts characterized by a minimum creative coefficient. On the contrary, the innovative content of cases such as those we briefly recall above should demonstrate the opposite—that is, women's extraordinary creative capacity, evidenced by their ability to extract the maximum coefficient of originality from seemingly inert materials.But this would be a simplification, too, a sterile generalization based on a purely reactive attitude. A more interesting approach begins when one considers the apparent affinity between women and the practice of found footage, on the one hand, and on the other the material conditions of film production—more precisely, the difference that exists between the labor involved in editing and researching and that involved in shooting, especially in commercial cinema. All available data show that commercial cinema, which, as everyone knows, is basically a narrative and fictional type of cinema, is a field where only a few women succeed in reaching and holding directorial roles. We are then prompted to ask whether the specific difference that is responsible for found footage cinema being such a favorable field for women's initiative should not be sought at the level of what we mean by “film directing” in the first place.Cameraless cinema does not imply “directing” in the common sense of the word. Women working in found footage do not direct actors and technicians on a film set; they do not preside over complex organizational machines from the apex of the film set's hierarchical system. If they work in a group, they do so by choosing a few close collaborators, often other women. Their work more closely resembles conducting a research project, including immersive sessions in archives and philological interrogations about the materials, than directing a film set. This amounts to saying that women, in the absence of directorial opportunities within the frame of institutional cinema, may have elected the practice of found footage as a way to build an autonomous space of creativity that allows them to transform limitations into a stylistic peculiarity.6The subtitle of this issue, “Women Without a Movie Camera,” alludes in a clearly provocative way to the objective condition of limitation that women experience in their attempts to access professional opportunities for directing in the mainstream film industry, a situation that, in our interpretive hypothesis, can explain better than any tailoring metaphor the remarkable intensity of female creativity in found footage cinema.7 More than a yen for reusing archives, the breadth of female presence in the history of films derived from found footage proves women's tenacious will to make cinema at all costs, even if it means inventing their own modes of independent production under conditions of limitation and lack of means. Clear evidence of this is that even when they leave the particular sphere of found footage and take up the camera, these filmmakers usually keep working beyond the borders of mainstream narrative cinema, that is, in the fields of documentary, experimental, or animated cinema.Put another way, if an affinity between women and found footage cinema exists, most likely it is not because the process resembles “cutting and sewing,” but because cameraless cinema appears as a utopian mode of production that can be practiced in perfect autonomy, or together with a small group of trusted collaborators, in which a lack of means can be countervailed with patience and flair. It is a cinema that, as in the case of Cécile Fontaine, can even be executed at home at the kitchen sink.The remarkable number of women filmmakers who are or were active in found footage cinema could then be taken as confirmation of the famous hypothesis advanced by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), that we would now have many more female names in the history books if women had had their own rooms where they could work in peace, away from the stereotypes and performative codes of patriarchal culture. The separateness and seclusion of the editing room are more than just metaphors for Woolf's idea of the room of one's own as a space of autonomy and expressive freedom.The field at stake is obviously much larger than is possible to analyze within the limits of the present publication. Unable to cover the entire, rich spectrum of women's contributions to the history of found footage cinema, we chose a series of studies on a few individual figures who represent various different approaches.8The issue opens with a selection of articles by Esfir Shub, as yet unpublished in English, introduced and edited by Liubov Dyshlyuk. The publication of these materials drawn from Shub's autobiographical book Zhizn' moya – kinematograf (Cinema Is My Life, 1972) is a deserved homage to a figure who is regularly presented as the most influential pioneer of compilation film, but whose poetic reflections are almost completely unknown in the Western world. Dating back to the time of the making of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Shub's writings in this issue document her extraordinary awareness in tackling the task of assembling in a coherent montage a host of such heterogeneous materials as old newsreels, home movies, and institutional documentaries. In their rigorous as well as impassioned tone, which continuously emphasizes the political valences of filmmaking, these articles confirm the fundamental position that Shub occupies not only in the practice of, but also in reflections about, the practice of compilation cinema.Monica Dall'Asta's essay on Myriam Borsoutsky and Nicole Vedrès focuses on two French figures who are almost completely forgotten today. In the virtually perfect obscurity of Borsoutsky (better known as Myriam)—who was Sacha Guitry's editor during the 1930s, before collaborating with Vedrès on Paris 1900 and codirecting La Course de taureaux (Bullfight, 1951) alongside Pierre Braunberger—Dall'Asta finds a clue to retracing a possible female genealogy of French found footage cinema. The rediscovery, or rather the discovery, of Myriam, whose skills in editing were so outstanding as to be called “diabolical” by André Bazin, discloses a whole cultural scene that includes as many different figures as Braunberger, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jacques Brunius, Denise Tual, Victoria Mercanton, and Yannick Bellon. Paradoxically, Myriam's obscurity becomes the crucial element that illuminates a gray area in film history, beginning with Vedrès's groundbreaking work.Better known for the documentaries she shot—which register, with the precision of an anthropologist's eye, the transformations of Italian society between the 1960s and the 1970s—Cecilia Mangini also belongs to the crowd of forgotten women filmmakers. Her films based on the technique of assemblage are examined in deep detail in Dalila Missero's essay. Mangini's work in the archives began with the making of All'armi siam fascisti! (To Arms! We're Fascists!, 1961–62), the film she made with her husband, Lino Del Fra, and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché, and continued with Stalin (1962–63), codirected with Lino Del Fra and the great Marxist poet Franco Fortini. As with Dulac's and Vedrès's earlier works, To Arms! We're Fascists! offers a critical reading of the historical experience of the authors' generation, born under the Fascist regime and subjected to the destructive fascinations of its ideology. To find the documentary materials for both this film and Stalin (issued in 1963 in a version reedited by the producer and disavowed by the authors), Mangini conducted research in several archives around the world, facing huge difficulties. Her interest in the meaning effects attainable through the recombination of stock footage is further documented by an intense sequence in her film of women's emancipation, Essere donne (Being Women, 1963–65), of which Missero proposes an extremely accurate analysis.Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), is examined by Alessandra Chiarini as an example of a film based on the construction of a complex relationship between stock footage and original shots. In conceiving of her cinema as a means for the expression of “feeling-images,” that is, “inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement,” Hammer is in search of an alternative style to the linear narration of mainstream cinema.9 In the movement of thoughts and emotions that spring from the flow of images in the film, Chiarini sees a method of assemblage that is reminiscent of Maya Deren's theorizations about “vertical cinema.” In Nitrate Kisses this method is adopted to a history of the twentieth century by and footage and original shots are combined in to a critical about history that into the and of between past and present, individual and very different case is presented in essay on Cécile A French who is very of what Nicole has called a approach to found footage, the of preexisting images by way of on the film a of that in and of or of the film her on the relationship between the stylistic and and that the mode of La to the construction of The are where a with the of the film is with an to the content of the the most original of the the of footage to the that her to her from when she was a In these materials a complex whose and quite result is the of the of of film archives to create new films is the of essay. More particularly the with the complex creative and process the making of a film constructed from fragments from the of the an Italian Made by Valentina with at the editing is just the in a that has produced an a and a film, Dating from the the images as of a the of and and document the of the between and is to describe the work of and as a time with the the images, which to the women of the and at the same time the rigorous approach, no less than with which women images of women to a montage of in the with and Alina that the issue, these two of contemporary found footage cinema their experiences and their creative and professional by by film Barbara and filmmakers demonstrate a awareness in their approach to the practice of cameraless cinema. who is the of films in the political of Italian has been regularly working with the early with first feature, More with their has of interest and is the case of More with which the of who only a few after by materials from her home by her and after a time from an old her and and from the of the on a visual history of women's in that, among a host of different materials, includes fragments from films by the during the to on complex such as the of preexisting images, the of archival footage as a of and the relationship between found footage and women's cinema, and a series of very original which the of montage in the expressive of women's by the creative that exists between and the of this of also alludes to the editing room as room of one's a space where women, over the of almost a have the of Woolf's The editing room as a of separateness and autonomy is a space where women have to make of their a a of movement in the of the film If this is then we that found footage cinema should an in film We more new research will to the work of not just the filmmakers, but also so many obscure the of these