Viewed from a Deleuzian perspective, knowledge-production is a multiple and collective affair that emerges ‘alongside’ the creative act of composition when conceptual elements are drawn together into novel combinations. We sincerely thank everyone who has contributed to this book as a complex assemblage of parts. Together we have created a loosely bound and mobile system of ideas for understanding the posthuman condition. In diverse renditions, the chapters situate posthumanist concepts transversally across fields of enquiry or in practices of disciplinary encounter, to describe an interactive ecology without closure or fixity. The outcome is not an ending, but provocative of further beginnings, future thoughts: new formations of knowledge for worlds yet to come.
We are especially grateful to Natalie Linh Bolderston and Isobel Cowper-Coles at Rowman and Littlefield International; their good advice and encouragement continually lightened for us the burden of the editorial process. Sincere thanks to Gry Ulstein and Evelien Geerts for their editorial and administrative assistance. We thank all the chapter authors for their participation, and for their ever-willingness to accommodate our suggestions and requests. We owe special thanks to Jussi Parikka, Iris van der Tuin and James Williams, for enduring a longer-than-expected haul to the finish line.
An earlier version of Jussi Parikka’s chapter was published as ‘Cartographies of Environmental Arts’ in The Midden, edited by Jenni Nurmenniemi and Tracey Warr and published by Garret Publications in 2018. We are grateful for the permission generously granted by Garret Publications to reprint a revised version of this work. Parikka’s chapter references works of art by Helen Hunter, Tuula Närhinen, Elena Mazzi & Sara Tirelli, Mirko Nikolić, and Nabb+Teeri. We thank the artists for allowing us to include images of their work. The image by Helena Hunter appears courtesy of the Natural xHistory Museum, London. All other images in Parikka’s chapter are used by kind permission of the curators of the Frontiers in Retreat project as part of the Helsinki International Artist Programme.