TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

In his paramount work on Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, French philosopher Gilbert Simondon offered a description of reality as an integrated expression of processes and regimes of individuation (physical, vital, psycho-collective, and technical). His influential perspective, however, does not admit the idea of inter- or syn-individuation, which refers to all the assemblages occurring among different individuation regimes; these would be the cases of ontological hybridization between, say, human beings and plants, crystals and animals, technical entities and social groups. By seemingly extending and legitimizing the old mission of biological taxonomy, Simondon precludes many chances for speculation that today have gained more and more relevance.
Contemporary art and artistic research can be regarded as privileged fields of experimentation when it comes to syn-individuation. The paper supports this thesis by analyzing the works of two contemporary artists: Neri Oxman and Pierre Huyghe. Oxman experiments with anisotropic composites and synthetically engineered microorganisms to craft objects that are defined by their interactions, thus eliciting creative collaborations and indiscernibility zones between human, living, and inorganic. Huyghe’s art further extends the mutational zone to the artificial. In Variants (2021-ongoing), for example, Huyghe created a multipolar ontological field by integrating the local ecosystem with a real-time simulation governed by an AI and mediated by technical interfaces such as sensors and intelligent cameras. Occasionally, the simulation materializes into post-natural entities, which can be regarded as full-fledged alien objects.
The paper aims to show that by building on Simondon’s philosophy, it is possible to outline a “Xenoaesthetics” that accounts for these phenomena of artistic hybridization and ontological transgression. In conclusion, it will be highlighted how a Xenoaesthetics could also inspire a new ecological sensibility, not based on conservation and re-naturalization but on experimentation and post-naturalization.