Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from “institutional critique” to “infrastructural critique,” or toward “infrastructural speculation,” in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of “the cancelled future,” art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change.

This collection of essays, conversations, and artworks explores how technology now mediates our encounters and, in doing so, forms alternate, networked subjectivities. It asks how intersubjective intimacy might be theorized epistemologically, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically, and considers how such relative intimacy might connect physical matter and cybernetic systems or forge new subjectivities.

Across his works, Zach Blas closely engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, the internet, predictive policing, airport security, biometric recognition, and biological warfare.

A mermaid dives through the Cold War ruins of nuclear submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle in Sirenomelia, by artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė. This book, a poetic and scientific meditation on the artist’s iconic work, explores posthuman mythologies, future archaeology, and the invisible structures that enfold us, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political.