Every image in the Alterlibrary collection is intended as a quote, an excerpt of a larger discourse. But every image also stands as a matter that could undergo a series of operations and alterations. Therefore, images are renewable sources.
Operations: Extraction (photograph of a photograph printed on a catalogue) and Collection.
Image alteration: Texturing. The original image came from a printed catalogue, where it was first photographed and converted into a digital file. That digital file was then processed using a program developed by a graphic designer called Texturing, designed to extract textures from an image and generate new “visual material.” In effect, what began as a photographic source is turned into a sort of graphical fabric that can be reused for other creative purposes. This amounts to a recycling of the original visual “matter,” transforming it into a different kind of resource suitable for further design processes.
Jone Kvie's original sculptural piece combines natural materials that bear silent witness to geological and biological processes. Volcanic tuff-rock, lichens, moss, pine needles, and iron converge into a single form, suggesting a dialogue between organic growth and the elemental forces shaping our landscapes. The main structure of the sculpture is a volcanic rock collected by the artist and temporarily displaced in an exhibition space during Documenta Kassel 2022.
My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism) (a thought tradition that criticises the role of the human at the center), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile.
Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle!