What is the
“Age of Entanglement?
Explained
2024
“Since the Age of Enlightenment, the realms of human exploration and expression have been coddled into silos that are self-reliant and often self-referential, both in means and in mindset. But if you can smash protons down a seventeen-mile straw at nearly the speed of light, you’ve earned the right to question the category of gravity. Theoretical physics alone just isn’t enough: it’s an entangled proposition to a truly BIG question, spawned by an entangled state (literally and metaphorically).”
Our constructed worlds and societies are no longer organized on the grounds of our deep ancestral ties with our closest environments. In alignment with the initial goals of acknowledging and bridging the divide between cultural and material systems, as well as recognizing the link between terrestrial existence and our sustenance, the discourse surrounding the Age of Entanglement sheds light on the intrinsic interconnectedness that exists and is constantly evolving around us. A deeper understanding of this concept serves as a constant reminder of the profound interconnectedness of all things, guiding my process.
In contrast to the Age of Enlightenment, which is defined as “a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics” In the Age of Enlightenment, we learned that nature followed laws and by understanding these laws, we could predict and manipulate them.
As Hillis writes, “We learned to break the code of nature and thus empowered, we began to shape the world in the pursuit of our own happiness. We granted ourselves god-like powers: to fly, to communicate across vast distances, to hold frozen moments of sight and sound, to transmute elements, to create new plants and animals. We created new worlds entirely from our imagination. Even Time we harnessed. The same laws that allowed us to explain the motions of the planets, enabled us to build the pendulum of a clock. Thus time itself, once generated by the rhythms of our bodies and the rhythms of the heavens, was redefined by the rhythms of our machines. With our newfound knowledge of natural laws we orchestrated fantastic chains of causes and effect in our political, legal, and economic systems as well as in our mechanisms. Our philosophies neatly separated man and nature, mind and matter, cause and effect. We learned to control.” Though there was much development that was fostered through this age, the critical division for the sake of analysis and control has left us in a state of disassembly.
The current phase of human development, perhaps considered as the final chapter of the Enlightenment, is characterized by the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). In our pursuit of AI, we imbue machines with the ability to learn, adapt, create, and evolve, mirroring our own capacities and embedding life-like qualities into our creations. This advancement has revolutionized the way we collect, share, and utilize information and intelligence, leading to a global expansion of our reach and impact through interconnected machine-based networks. From our handheld devices to satellites orbiting in space, the intertwining of machines and living beings has grown exponentially, forging connections that were once unimaginable just a few decades ago.
These developments have led researchers from philosophy, quantum mechanics, biology, design, engineering, archaeology, ecology, mycology and more to believe that we are now in an “Age of Entanglement”. This age, where we can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world or our technology, but as a part of them, integrated, codependent, and entangled. This is further supported by philosophical endeavours of Latour’s Actor-Network theory, Morton’s Hyperobject theory and Harman’s Object-Orientated Ontology. Ian Holder, an archaeologist ponders the relationship between humans and things across time, in how “…our relations with things are often asymmetrical, leading to entrapments in particular pathways from which it is difficult to escape.” — inherent and inescapable entanglement.
Oxman and Hillis could be tagged as leaders in coining the term of the “Age of Entanglement” from a techno-human level, but what this research has realized is that this notion of entanglement is referred to in many other disciplines, stemming from similar conceptual understandings. Entanglement cannot be based solely on technology aspects and solutions, but also on the “impact that our daily actions have on the complex web of life, whether that impact be immediate, mediated, deferred, collective or individual.” When we consider that our planet is a closed system, we should always keep planetary ecologies in view and how their components are entangled.
Simply put, we can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the slightly arbitrary hierarchy of physical space, random human selection or deliberate deign — “Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows.” As we discover new intricate complexities and networks, we need to orientate ourselves to not just explore the complexity of human activity in flux with our tools we create, but also how these how these activities are embedded in the landscapes on which they depend, how they exchange energy and materials across scales and how these flows influence other participants in shared ecosystems, both locally and globally.
When thinking about material culture and materiality, there isn’t much focus on the human and how things come to have person-like qualities, how they act, have agency, personalities, spirits, powers. The things we create are so often a reflection of our desires, needs, wants, imaginations, — rooted in our stories. This aspect remains grounded in identity and then there is a shift towards how things act in the word. Exploring the relations between material cultures, objects, things, etc goes a long and far way and one key component in the first pursuit of acknowledging and bridging the division between cultural systems and material systems is thinking about the estrangement that has occurred in how things are made to begin with.
This estrangement occurs for three reasons as identify by Hodder:
- Separation of producer from products of labor in factory-and-market distribution systems.
- The work place conditions create estrangement from the process of work which is seen as negative.
- The legal and political definition of private property estranges the worker from the product.
These conditions are all keys and connected to capitalism and the Anthropocene. Materials and things are seen as always relational, contextually embedded within specific networks and social contexts. Materials and things are seen as actively engaged in the social process, and as going through social biographies. After all this work it can no longer be argued that self and society and nature can be separated from things, studied independently of materials and the object world.
Hegel and Marx and others that have touched on this topic were right. Humans and things emerge contextually in relation to each other. Since humans and things are dialectically and relationally construed — in different contexts, different types of materials, things and humans are produced. Nothing can be true or understood without the truth of the other. We are all actors in this story, and in this network.
What can our inherent ecology teach us as we explore, expand and develop new things? Echoing the intentions of this project laid out previously and the other literature that supports these thinkings, it is all further pushed outward when thinking about how fungi operate within all this.
The Age of Entanglement heralds a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things. In this era, the concept of entanglement extends beyond physics to encompass all aspects of life, highlighting the intricate relationships between organisms, ecosystems, and even ideas. Mycelium, the vast underground network of fungal threads, serves as a poignant teacher of entanglement. As the literal embodiment of interconnectedness, mycelium demonstrates how diverse entities can coexist and thrive through symbiotic relationships. By forming intricate networks that connect trees, plants, and soil, mycelium facilitates the exchange of nutrients, information, and even warnings, illustrating the profound interdependence that characterizes life on Earth. Studying MBC can teach us valuable lessons about cooperation, resilience, and offers insights that are crucial for navigating the complexities of our entangled world in the Age of Entanglement.
SOURCES:
Correa, Isabel. “Human-Nature Entanglements — Isabel Correa.” Isabel Correa, July 29, 2022. https://mariaisabelcorrea.com/blog-1/human-nature-entanglements.
Hillis, Danny. “The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement.” Journal of Design and Science., February 23, 2016. https://doi.org/10.21428/1a042043.
Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Penguin UK, 2018.
Hodder, Ian. “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View.” New literary history 45, no. 1 (2014): 19–36.
Hodder, Ian. Entangled : An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester, West Sussex ; Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Kirschner, Roman, and Karmen Franinović. “INTERACTING IN ENTANGLED ENVIRONMENTS.” In De Gruyter eBooks, 249–60, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035622751-014.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. OUP Oxford, 2007.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Posthumanities, 2013.
Nakamura, Kyoko, and Yukio Pegio Gunji. “Entanglement of Art Coefficient, or Creativity.” Foundations of science 25, no. 1 (2020): 247–257.
Oxman, Neri. “Age of Entanglement.” Journal of Design and Science, January 13, 2016. https://doi.org/10.21428/7e0583ad.
Prominski, Martin. “Designing Landscapes of Entanglement.” In Routledge eBooks, 171–82, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315613116-17.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life. London, England: Bodley Head, 2020.
Wilson, Edward. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage, 2014.