Chaired by Michelle Bastian
Henrik Sinding-Larsen: Sustainability and life’s mysterious synthesis of linear and cyclic time.
Our Zeitgeist buzzwords are changing from progress/growth towards sustainability. A metaphor for growth is an ascending line while the metaphor for sustainability is a circle. The standard depiction of time in the natural sciences is a line, a single irreversible timeline. Non-living phenomena may also oscillate, rotate, and repeat themselves in cycles. But the central cycles of life are qualitatively different. Life’s cycles are realized by means of memory systems that can be “replayed” and give rise to both exact copies and variants of copies that still preserve a heritable “family resemblance”. Life’s memory or inheritance systems enable learning and adaptive evolution that are absent from series of events in geophysical or cosmological history. A series of hurricanes or galaxies resemble each other but inherit nothing from each other.
The critical difference is that non-living systems have only access to one past that gives rise to one future. By means of memory, inheritance, and copying mechanisms, living processes can access alternative patterns of the past in situations of choice or selection. Alternative pasts become templates for alternative futures. To realize this, dynamical patterns of the past must materialize as static (timeless) sign-vehicles in space that, through interpretation, can re-enter life’s dynamics in the future.
The paper will present elements of a new school of thinking within biology called biosemiotics, that places signs and their interpretation (in a broad sense, from genes to human language) at the center of what life and evolution is about. Genetics and molecular biology have hugely contributed to our understanding life. The subfield systems biology is about simulating life on the molecular level in computers. In spite this, surprisingly little progress is made on biology’s most fundamental questions like: What is life? How did memory and other inheritance mechanisms emerge? Can computers, at least in theory, become alive, or are there insurmountable differences between organisms and machines? For a better understanding of these questions, I argue we need to understand more of the relation between linear and cyclic aspects of time and also of the relation between time and space. Some believe science already understands life’s cyclicity through our understanding of cybernetic loops in computers. I argue that at least some of life’s most fundamental cycles, at the heart of sustainability, seems to be built on a paradoxical integration of linear and cyclic time (or on the integration of the historically unique and the generic, repeatable) that fundamentally defies cybernetic simulation. To achieve a better understanding of the mysteries of life and sustainability, we need the best from both biological and humanistic scholarship. With signs, interpretation, and a respect for paradoxes as a possible bridge, the time is ripe for a new synthesis based on mutual curiosity and respect from CP Snow’s “Two cultures”.
Bio: Henrik Sinding-Larsen, multidisciplinary oriented social anthropologist, researcher, Department of social anthropology, University of Oslo. Currently working on a book project in collaboration with biological anthropologist Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley on an integrated understanding of cultural and biological evolution inspired by biosemiotics.
Lisette Jong: Diffracting Colonial Temporalities: Non-Human Primate Bodies and the Science of Human Evolution
In 1925 Dutch anatomist Lodewijk Bolk wrote the municipality of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University Association for funds to buy a collection of thirteen gorilla skulls from the Parisian trading house Tramond-Rouppert. These skulls were prepared to show the dental development in gorillas at different ages, from young juvenile to mature adult. Driven by the anticipated extinction of the gorilla, in his letter Bolk stressed the need for acquiring the series now, before it would be too late. The skulls were of gorillas shot in the wild. Their bodies transported and transformed into specimens through the networks of European colonialism. Bolk studied apes in light of his fetalization theory: he believed that the human is in form a sexually mature primate fetus. While Bolk’s theory of evolution has since been refuted, to this day developmental patterns of non-human primates are implicated in the study of human evolution. Skeletal and dental growth patterns of in particular chimpanzees figure for example as models in the analysis of early hominin fossils. Because primates are now protected species, much present-day research into their skeletal development involves the bodies of captive instead of wild animals. However, captive apes show accelerated growth compared to their wild conspecifics, complicating the use of such data as a proxy for understanding early hominin development. Such “noise” in evolution science, reminds us of the colonial practices that enabled the enrollment of apes in European scientific projects though logics of extraction and extinction. In this paper I further explore the diffraction of colonial temporalities through non-human primate bodies.
Bio: Lisette Jong is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her current work on the remains of non-human primates in scientific collections is part of the project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.
Ciro Miguel: The Trees at the Brasília Palace Hotel
The Brasilia Palace Hotel was one of the first buildings to be constructed in Brasília in 1958. Together with the presidential residence and a chapel, they were samples of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture and a testing laboratory for constructing the new capital. As the architect presented them in Módulo magazine in 1956: “They will not be temporary buildings in the exact sense of the word: on the contrary, the idea is that they will meet all the requirements of modern technology, so that they can become a landmark or starting point for new buildings to be erected there.”
While not mentioned in the project’s description, two Ficus elastica trees were planted next to the south facade. As young seedlings, they are barely visible in the building’s first photographs. After the hotel’s fire in 1976 and the building’s abandonment for many years, it re-opened in 2005 with a brand new renovation by 98-year-old Niemeyer himself. Ignored throughout the building’s lifespan, the trees are now the main protagonists. Their overwhelming spatial presence, impossible to be edited out by photographers, destabilizes and confronts modernist architecture's timeless and autonomous image. The trees, as elements that record time with their growth, attest that buildings are not static, and are part of history.
Today, the enormous trees host more guests and species on their branches than the hotel’s 180 rooms could ever imagine. While everyday maintenance keeps the 64-year-old trees’ wilderness under control, it seems inevitable that, over time, they will also physically engulf the hotel itself with their branches. This is a visual essay mixing archival material and my photographs, followed by a paper that explores and defies the stable temporalities of architecture in its confrontation with nature.
Bio: Ciro Miguel is a Brazilian architect, photographer, and doctoral fellow of the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich. His research revolves around alternative narratives to the built environment through photography. He holds a professional diploma from the University of São Paulo FAU USP and a Master’s degree from Columbia University GSAPP. Ciro Miguel was co-curator of Todo dia/Everyday, the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo (2019), and co-editor of the book "Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture" (Ruby Press, 2021).