Mutant Futures: Design and Mythopoeisis in Posthuman Times

How might design, philosophy, science and mythology inform each other, while producing fresh and imaginative multi-species responses to address the genesis and future of ecological devastation?

“But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”
– Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 259

This panel takes as its point of departure these words uttered by Alfred North Whitehead in his seminal lecture published as Process and Reality in 1929. Fast-forward nine decades and it has become clear that the Earth’s sixth mass extinction (which we are currently living through) is in no small part due to the modern West’s stubborn commitment to a regime of scientific truth and mastery that disavows modes of knowing that do not conform to its own. This has left the human species in a deeply ambivalent relation to its own pasts and futures, with perhaps only this certainty: that human history itself will soon be history. As a consequence, Whitehead’s words seem less of provocation today than they do a bitter necessity: we are in dire need of propositions that are more interesting and daring than they are true. This panel reflects on how artists and designers are uniquely positioned to experiment with propositional frameworks that do not rigidly adhere to modern “truth telling,” and that are capable of opening up vistas for living and dwelling in the twenty-first century that are all the more real because they are untrue.