Post Organic Infrastructures and Alien Ecologies

Post Organic Infrastructures and Alien Ecologies

HUB: Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society 2027

The post-organic is not the death of life but its proliferation into forms we no longer immediately recognise: engineered cells, machine learning systems, atmospheric feedback loops, and synthetic assemblages of human and nonhuman matter. These are alien ecologies, not alien because they are extraterrestrial, but because they estrange us from what we thought we knew of nature, technology, and even the human.

In the post-organic condition, life unfolds through agential realism. Existence emerges not from pre-given entities but from intra-actions, the entanglement of forces through which matter and meaning take shape. There is no clear boundary between subject and object, organic and artificial, body and code. Instead, agency is distributed across molecular, algorithmic, and atmospheric strata that act upon and through one another, forming new ontological territories in which being is relational, contingent, and always in flux.

Drawing from eco-philosophy and planetary thinking, this view understands technological systems as extensions of Earth’s own metabolic processes. Data centres, satellites, and algorithmic infrastructures fold into the planet’s atmosphere, energy flows, and resource cycles. Human and machine cognition, animal migrations, and climate dynamics form overlapping feedback loops in which agency is distributed across the biosphere and its artificial continuations.

To live post-organically is to inhabit this condition of entangled co-becoming. It is to recognise that every technological gesture carries ecological consequence, and every ecological shift reverberates through human and machinic perception alike. It is not a philosophy of extinction or transcendence but of symbiotic persistence. It is an ethics of awareness attuned to the shared agencies that sustain and transform life across biological, synthetic, and planetary scales.

Post-organic philosophy

Post-organic philosophy conceives the human as a planetary assemblage in which cognition, emotion, and identity emerge through the continuous interplay of biological, technological, and ecological forces. The human is not a fixed organism but a transient configuration within wider material and informational flows. Technology, in this view, is not an external instrument but a living participant in the planet’s metabolic and cognitive processes, an active agent in the ceaseless redefinition of what it means to be alive.

This special edition asks: What is it to be human when the post-organic becomes the planet’s new form of vitality?

Artistic research offers a crucial way to think and feel through this shift. Artists, designers, scientists, and theorists are experimenting with infrastructures not only as sites of critique but as speculative laboratories where new forms of vitality, perception, structure, and politics can be sensed and staged. This issue proposes to gather those voices and works that confront infrastructures as more than technical, more than human, as post-organic ecologies that demand new imaginaries.

Artistic and practice-based submissions

This issue foregrounds submissions from artistic practitioners and practice-based researchers working across art, design, media, and digital practices, including interdisciplinary work at the intersection of art and science and philosophically engaged artistic practice. Practice-based contributions are central to the scope of this issue and are treated as primary forms of research in their own right, not as supplements to theoretical work.

Cross cutting pillars that shape the issue

• New knowledge practices: situated methods, counter mapping, protocol design, forensic approaches, and fiction as method that make distributed systems legible without reducing their complexity.
• Novel hybrid existence: practices that rehearse cohabitation among human, machinic, microbial, and mineral actors, including care and governance across species and systems.
• Artwork as infrastructures: works that are infrastructures themselves, act like infrastructures, present behaviours through underlying structures, or incorporate agentic networks.
• Infrastructures as artworks: the treatment of grids, data centres, dashboards, datasets, logistics chains, and repair pipelines as aesthetic and political forms open to curation, critique, and recomposition.

Thematic Currents

• Agentic Realities: connections within and across materialities, agents, and agencies. Boundaries dissolve and entities act across physicalities, generating new material habitats.
• Alien Vitalities: infrastructures facilitating new non-human potentials and worldbuilding practices that render alien ecologies thinkable and inhabitable.
• Algorithmic Ecologies: AI systems, data pipelines, and dashboards as environments of emergence, opacity, and control.
• Critical Infrastructures: systems exposed as fragile or unjust in their governance. This includes diegetic prototypes related to accountability, resilience, safety, and ethics, the exposure of infrastructural harms, and methods that make complex infrastructures perceptible without simplification, including maintenance as an aesthetic and political act.
• Post-Organic Enmeshment: decentralised sensing dispersed across synthetic growth, machinic reproduction, and microbial life. Drone agency, data-driven selves, and cross-species upkeep reveal new non-human intelligences and emerging machinic phenomenologies embedded within infrastructures.

Why Now

In an age of climate collapse and accelerating automation, infrastructures no longer feel stable. Flooded cities, burning grids, and opaque AI decision-making systems are infrastructures at their limit. They mutate into something both intimate and unrecognisable. To call them alien ecologies is to admit that we can no longer master or fully map them.

At the same time, these systems have begun to perceive and act in ways that are no longer easily intelligible to human observers. Autonomous models and planetary-scale networks sense, calculate, and respond within temporalities that are nonhuman—faster, slower, or asynchronous with our rhythms of attention. Their operations reveal a deepening phenomenology of the machinic, in which perception itself becomes distributed across architectures and materials. This signals a shift from infrastructures as instruments to infrastructures as perceptual and cognitive actors that participate in the planet’s unfolding awareness.

It is also to recognise the possibility of new forms of relation, with machines that learn in unexpected ways, with microbial systems that sustain or infect, and with planetary forces that exceed human scale. This special issue will give space to those practices and theories that sense the alien as a condition of the post-organic present.

Contributions
• Practice-based portfolios presenting artworks, installations, and media experiments with a clear critical stance. Portfolios should show how the work functions, what capacity it delivers, and should reflect on method and ethics. These may include exhibition-ready prototypes, critical tools and plugins, critical interface prototyping, and portfolios of lab-field hybrids.
• Dialogues between artists, scientists, practitioners, and thinkers negotiating the alien in infrastructures. We welcome cross-institutional and community-based conversations, for example dialogues between modellers and artists.
• Data-based provocations: short, experimental texts that invent vocabularies, diagram speculative futures, or publish protocols. These may include diegetic prototypes, glossaries, annotated diagrams, forensic approaches, dataset storytelling, maintenance as aesthetic and political practice, field guides for municipalities, performative protocols, counter simulation, adversarial imaging, dashboard ethnography, and synthetic datasets with disclosure.