Proposal 2020, FACT Together, Animal Agency

Artist: Uma Breakdown

Title: “Animal Agency”

The Fact Together scheme, and the context of “The Living Planet” is a really timely opportunity for me to develop a project from a number of strands of my recent research and practice.

Patricia MacCormack’s concept of the “Ahuman” (MacCormack, 2012, 2014, 2018) extends across the philosopher’s interests in both art, and the duty of care for the non-human inhabitants of the planet. MacCormack uses the Ahuman to propose animals can be recognised and given ethical consideration not in their relationships-to, or differences-from Human, but as beings in their own right who are never knowable to humans. They have a right to exist not because of what they are, but simply because they are.

MacCormack also uses the same term to propose “Becoming Ahuman”, whereby the experience of encountering art can briefly break the audience’s concept of themselves as human as they negotiate their orientation to new ideas and affects. Both uses of the term Ahuman reshape the encounter (with art, with non-human perspectives) as something not about translation or interpretation, but as something of value that is always incomplete, hidden, or overwhelming. To use the language of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this shifts from the paranoid position of suspicion to the reparative position of care and love. The default position becomes permeability, community, and interconnected networks and processes.

I’m interested in how queer and feminist experimental literature and theory, speculative fiction, and text based video and role playing games all in their own ways and terms engage at points with what MacCormack calls the Ahuman. Each finds ways for language, meaning to come loose, opening up different ways of seeing and communicating outside of the category human.

I have just finished a PhD that used the concept of the Ahuman; the practice of artists like Tai Shani and Porpentine Charity Heartscape; the theory of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker; to propose an approach to art practice which normalises the incomplete, unknown, or collapsing, through the prioritising of care. During the PhD I made small online works, around a very similar area to “The Living Planet”, using simple games design systems (Bitsy, Twine, RPGM), video streaming, and other techniques (TTRPG systems, Diagrams, Cutups), to explore ideas of care for the non-human. These works were part of my methodology of research into art practice and as such are mainly experiments. I would very much like to use the time, support, and resources of Fact Together to develop a new game that exists as a fully resolved artwork on the internet.

I will use GameMaker Studio (GMS) to produce this artwork for HTML5 so that it can be played directly in a browser. The artwork begins as an interactive fiction, but uses the expanded capacity of GMS to destabilise this experience in the way that the techniques of Acker, Antonin Artaud and William Burroughs do for text. I have already done work with the limits of game structure (whether the rules for pen and paper TTRPGs, or image and coding language systems of Twine and RPGM) and how these can be broken to approach Becoming Ahuman. GMS will allow me to push this further, creating a browser embedded game where the player navigates a space that breaks or folds into text, and shifts register and relationship to the audience.

Something that's interesting about the concept of the Ahuman and its relationship to care and alienation is that it refuses to see these as mutually exclusive. The experience of playing a game/artwork that breaks down is one of alienation because it makes things new and strange, but the ethical proposal of Ahuman is that care still exists across this breach. This is what I want to focus on for Fact Together, the idea of emotional connection without needing constant intellectual connection.



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Acker, K. (1991). Devoured by Myths. In Hannibal Lecter, my father (pp. 1–24). Semiotext(e).

Acker, K. (2006). Bodies of work: Essays. Serpent’s Tail.

Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1(4), 875–893.

Cixous, H. (2005). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory. Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2014). The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory. A&C Black.MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). Bloomsbury.

Sedgwick, E. K. (2004). Tendencies. Taylor & Francis e-Library. http://www.myilibrary.com?id=6801

Sellers, S. (2002). ‘Writing is learning to die’: Hélène Cixous and the School of the Dead. Oxford Literary Review, 24, 97–111. JSTOR.