Interspecies Future: A Primer

A World After the Anthropocene

What comes after the Anthropocene? Can we depart from our human-centered perspective to build a future for the benefit of all species? What tools and techniques might help us get there? These are the questions investigated by the long-term interdisciplinary project Interspecies Future, which brings together perspectives from art, science, and technology to explore what this future might look like. First initiated in 2022 by LAS Art Foundation, this project explores new pathways for planetary thinking and collective intelligence. With more than 60 contributions, this interactive reader is the first book to provide an extensive foundation of key concepts, debates, and case studies that propose ways to re-frame, repair, and re-imagine interspecies relations. Interspecies Future: A Primer draws on recent advancements in planetary computation and machine learning, new discoveries in non-human intelligence, as well as post-human theory and Indigenous knowledge. 

The publication offers both critical/concrete and abstract/imaginative propositions, including contributions by artists Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Anicka Yi, Jenna Sutela, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, James Bridle, and Tomás Saraceno alongside texts from leading scientists like Karen Bakker, Daniel Chamovitz, Mirjam Knörschild, Dorion Sagan, and Kristin Andrews, as well as notable philosophers like Sue Donaldson, Tyson Yunkaporta, Vinciane Despret, Benjamin Bratton, among others. The texts are brought to life through interactive augmented reality animations designed by Wang and Söderström, as well as video, audio, and 3D content from artists and scientists.