We like to understand ourselves as agents in the process of worlding, as the species with the capacity to construct the future. On some scales we can; on other scales we are mere fodder for material processes. Worlding is enacted sometimes with deliberation; other times it is an act of emergence arising from a set of conditions. Worlds do not exist a-priori.
Understanding ourselves as part of material speculation—deliberate or otherwise—constitutes a productive alienation. It is in our interest to attempt to apprehend alien worlds that already incorporate us. To understand where we are, where we have been, and where we want to go requires translation.
Translation should advance our empathies as well as understand our complicities as a species.
It is the interface that makes legible, visual, and palpable what we see—not simply what we want to see. Art is a function that makes the invisible visible and penetrates consciousness through leaky infiltration.
Protocol 007_Alien translation is what we need art to be.