are we human? by Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley

“If the human is a designing animal and the Earth is its design studio, this animal is not a unique and distinct creature moving and thinking within that vast studio. The figure of the human is not sharply defined. It is part of the living Earth that it designs in just as the living Earth is part of it. The material world, whether the flows in a river valley or in the veins of our own bodies, is never just outside, waiting for human thought and action. It is precisely the lack of a clear line between human and world that provokes or energizes design as the attempt to draw such a line, our forever incomplete attempt to fashion a self-image and the forever unsatisfying attempt to come to terms with what we see in this continually reconstructed mirror.”
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“The human brain itself is a malleable artifact whose circuits are continually rearranged through engagement with material culture. It is an unfinished project with a forever uncertain future and an equally uncertain beginning. The idea of a sudden flourishing of design gives way to the thought, as Patrick Roberts puts it, that ‘there is no single evolutionary event or moment where the brain becomes definitively “human.”’”

-Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley