Mutations 0: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene

by Jeremy D. Johnson (Editor), Brandt Stickley (Contributor), Sam Mickey (Contributor)

Mutations Zero… A magical grimoire from the future; an Anthropocene Hypertext. This first issue features contributions by Brandt Stickley, Sam Mickey, AnaLouise Keating, Matthew Segall, Barbara Karlsen, Sean Kelly, and editor-in-chief Jeremy Johnson.

90 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2024

About the author

Jeremy D. Johnson, MA is the founder/director of Nura Learning and has worked in the online learning field for five years with companies such as Evolver and the Open Center in New York City. He is also a contributing editor at Reality Sandwich magazine. He has published on OMNI, Conscious Lifestyle Magazine, Kosmos Journal, Evolve Magazine, and Evolve and Ascend. Jeremy is the current president of the International Jean Gebser Society.

Reviews

[Paul Mirek]

An adventurous but brief (one might even say breezy) collection of speculative philosophy to which I was tipped off by the inclusion of Matthew David Segall (footnotes2plato.com), roughly focused on reconceptualizing the human and nature in light of the ever-present climate crisis. Pretty heady stuff, so I appreciated the range of voices here, many outside the traditional halls of academia and drawing from lived experiences as practitioners of various outré disciplines. A few provocative quotes that stood out to me:

[The] sensations that I feel in the pulse will be replicated in the channels and tissues of the body associated with the systems affected. In this case, when I found the acupuncture point through palpation, I also felt similar sensations at the tip of the needle, and I perceived an image of a dense mass of small, bulbous capsules and the words 'islets of langerhans' [sic] came into my mind. After the treatment, I looked up this term, and of course found the image that I had seen. (p. 17) - Brandt Stickley, "Approaching the Origin: The Diaphanous Body and Classical Chinese Medicine"

In a metaphysics of radical interconnectedness, imagination is not a private, internalized faculty located exclusively (and uniquely) within each human being. Rather, imagination is a shared faculty with a bridging function that—when activated—connects us with other dimensions of reality. We can imaginatively enter into other realms—whether the realm of a snake crossing our path, a squirrel hopping from tree to tree, the trees on which that squirrel pauses, the images in [queer intellectual-activist, poet, and artist Gloria Anzaldúa's book] Light in the Dark, the metaphor in a poem or a sunset, the spirit we encounter in our dreams, and so on. (p. 48) - AnaLouise Keating, "Ontological Imagination: An Anzaldúan Manifesto for Social Change"

What [Continuum Movement founder Emilie Conrad] taught, and science is now confirming is that our body is the continuation of a universal unfolding; an unbroken biological thread that can be traced to a single ancestor (LUCA), which emerged from the primordial sea 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. In other words, our human cells exist because of an incredibly resilient germline that has been replicating since the ancient beginnings of life on Earth. Going one step further, Emile [sic] taught that the water inside our cells held the memory of all ancestral life that came before. Our bodies are a living continuity across time and space; a sort of space-time-gravity matrix connecting all species, timelines and codes. (p. 66) - Barbara Karlsen, "Becoming Metamorphic: Moving Towards a New Conception of Life"

May our new year be mutated and bright. See you on the other side.