Megen de Bruin-Molé

Obsessed with Apocalypse. Also with words.

Posthumanism

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Every piece of research needs to have goals, and mine has two.  The problem with these goals is that they’re kind of difficult to understand unless you explain one term: posthumanism. This term is tricky to approach as well, because it actually has two meanings. One of the meanings has to do with altering humanity through technology, with the idea … Read more

Intro to Monsters

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So as of this week I’m a freshly minted PhD candidate. This means I’m finally going to have to get around to putting all those thoughts and scribbles I’ve been accumulating over the last couple of years into what is essentially a book on monsters. In the PhD application I just submitted to the Amsterdam School … Read more

Tiny Hamsters

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Today I saw this newly-viral video of a tiny hamster eating a tiny burrito on Gizmodo:

As with all videos of animals who think they’re people, I was sold. The video wasn’t what interested me the most, though. In the comments section, the following exchange took place between the post author and a random commentator:

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I laughed (inside, not out loud) as I read that, but then I started wondering whether that could ever happen, and if so, what it would take to actually get everyone who saw that thing to abandon the internet forever. Would it be something great, or something from a Brave New World-esque dystopia?

For a second, I could virtually taste the relief I would feel to know that “It’s all done now”. I only wish a thousand dancing hamsters could make it happen.

Travis Louie and the Other Victorians

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Artist Travis Louie paints some of my favourite portraits. Part Victorian photography, part monster mashup—no matter how hard I believe that his fantastical creations never actually existed, looking into their eyes I can never quite shake the feeling that they’re still out there somewhere, taking selfies and giving the paleo diet a go.

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Where the Wild Things Are

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“I remember my own childhood vividly…I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them” (Maurice Sendak) When I was a small child, I was afraid of very few things. I can vividly remember being terrified of fire, but aside from that one phobia I was pretty … Read more

Cyborg Apocalypse

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Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto says: “the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense”.

Because the cyborg has no need of a beginning, they have no need of an end. They are inherently post-apocalyptic. But what is a creature without a past – without a narrative? Can we even imagine such a being, and would we even want to?