Manifesto for a New Humanism, Part 1: Cellular Thinking

The cell … is a nexus: a connection point between disciplines, methods, technologies, concepts, structures and processes. Its importance to life, and to the life sciences and beyond, is because of this remarkable position as a nexus, and because of the cell’s apparently inexhaustible potential to be found in such connective relationships.

—Maureen A. O’Malley and Staffan Müller-Wille1

Is it time to call for a new humanism? In art and in theory, there are signs that point in this direction, signals to capture, and routes to open up. But what a “new human” might mean, and exactly when this might be said to have emerged, are questions that remain subject to speculation.2 The relation of the human to technology is at stake in this redefinition, but it is not a new question. It is clear that media and modernity have shaped a new age of humanism, not only blurring the boundaries between the human and the machine but also raising questions about the agency of objects, including technical objects, and how they affect the environment in which we live. We have now, however, reached a different stage in this mediatic landscape, one that requires us to ask different questions.

In the age of artificial intelligence, when a technical object acts as if it were intelligent (or at least appears to be so), we need to reconsider what this new digital capability entails. Is it the ability to collect and process data, detect patterns, store, compare, relearn, and retrain? While this results in production, and delivers a product, what remains to be understood more fully is process. How is a process of knowledge generated by a nexus of relations, and how is this process implicated in the formation of emotional, projective, and social intelligence? I am interested in exploring an aspect of this issue from the perspective of the humanities and the arts, while moving beyond old assumptions about the exclusive role of human subjectivity, intentionality, or force of will in the cognitive process. I propose that we approach the process of thinking by examining a nexus of interactions: the “cellular” networks of communication that exist in the environment, in our bodies, and in technology, and that operate across the natural and the artificial, the biological and the digital. I suggest that the form of a given knowledge process can be better understood and expanded through engagement with the diverse processual forms of interpretation, relationality, and sociality that constitute what I call “environmentality.”3

The philosophy known as new materialism has opened a road to such an investigation by exploring the relation of the human condition to the nonhuman and the habitat. But various interpretations of the process of knowledge have emerged even when proponents of the new materialism have agreed that reality has its own objective logic, not necessarily shaped by human comprehension. Can thoughts exist outside of our thinking, as “object-oriented ontology” contends?4 Or, in asserting their own agency, can inanimate objects still affect human life?5 While not anthropocentric, a philosophy of vitalism would respond that “vibrant matter” plays an active role in human society.6 And, of course, we have known for some time that agency is not the inherent property of an individual or the human, but results from a dynamism of forces.7 Elements “intra-act,” constantly exchanging and diffracting, never operating as separable entities.8

Is it time to take these thoughts a step further in the direction of a new humanism—and for what purpose? To respect the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces, one would have to acknowledge not only those operating in nature or technology, but also in the molecular vitality and cellular energies that shape the human body in relation and response to them. This requires a final rejection of Cartesian humanism, and its dualism, especially because in view of contemporary material philosophies and AI it is clearly no longer possible to claim that “I think therefore I am” is the sole province of the human. The concept of a dualism between the mental (res cogitans—immaterial thinking, as of the mind or soul) and the physical (res extensa—bodily, extended in space, nonthinking) is particularly myopic when it comes to exterior forms of thinking, and especially ecosystems. It cannot explain, for example, the vibrancy of thinking processes developing in physical, social, and technological environments. Even more simply, a dualistic view cannot conceive of the environmental intelligence of plants, including their capacity to sense, memorize, and learn from this aptitude, communicating and adapting through processes of admixture and transformation.9 A new humanism needs to be capable of enabling humans to learn from these other forms of intelligence, natural or artificial, including from the ways in which cellular elements connect in reticular, networking structures, acting as a collective rather than as isolated individuals within an environment.10 Building on recent environmentally oriented theory, as well as on pre-Socratic philosophy, can lead us to better understand this flow of elements in our bodies, and to recognize that this mutable, molecular system is not exclusive to us but rather constitutes a connective thread between the human and the broader flow of being.

Imaginary rendering of Vaucanson's digesting duck in Scientific American, 1899. License: Public Domain.

To achieve this new humanism grounded on environmentality would also require a revision of phenomenological accounts of the human. If we are to expand on environmental processes of interaction, we cannot think of the human as the subject of a first-person lived experience, involved in an intentional engagement with the world. While a phenomenological sense of embodiment, perception, and situatedness involves aspects one might wish to retain, we need to explore further how the human is not merely embedded in the environment but fundamentally constituted by it—intrinsically intertwined with it, even beyond context or history. No longer conceived as a subject moving intentionally and subjectively in a milieu, the human needs to be redefined as milieu itself—a rhythmic ecosystem, a fluctuating, cellular milieu of constant transmutation through the environment.

A proposal for new humanism would also have to engage the inner process and transformative aspect of environmentality. This might be defined as the awareness that environments, including technological ones, contain a form of knowledge, and that, in turn, mentalities can be transformed by inventive spatial systems and techniques produced in art, media, and the humanities. To argue for this concept of environmentality is to better understand intelligence: It is to shift from product to process. It is to interrogate the model of knowledge that ecosystems propose, the relations they establish, and the imaginative interpretations they enable.

Emphasizing what we might learn from this nexus of biotic and environmental processes, I take here preliminary steps toward such an investigation of environmentality. At a basic level, humans are constituted by flows of water, cellular rhythms, and mineral substances. In acknowledging that we are composed of an active mixture of earthly, biological, and technological forces, I can begin to consider aspects of this complex ecosystem. I trace forms of cellular organization and biorhythms, which are connective and which have the ability to transform spaces into networks of communicative relations. I am particularly interested in exploring the process of projection and transmutation as a nexus of generative relationality. Turning to visual acts of projection that facilitate exchange between humans and with technical objects in processes of environmentalization, I consider what is expressed in aesthetic practices, especially in environmental art and media, as these often anticipate what is yet to come, acting as agents of perceptual and conceptual transformations.

I am drawn to these projective forms of thinking—relational, that is, “cellular”—as a means of reimagining the relationship between technology, nature, and human imagination, and rethinking their shared ecosystems. I call for a relational ethic that would encourage experiences of exchange and sites of commonality, based on the cellular logic of biorhythms shared between humans and the environment. The receptive, responsive, and metamorphic capacity of cells explored here constitutes a vital connection between these two ecosystems.

Recognizing that we are composed of a similar admixture of elements is generative, for it can lead to a redefinition and even transformation of aspects of the human relation to its surroundings, especially artistic and technological milieus. This “becoming” process of environmental knowledge is alchemic in nature. If we humans are to overcome the harmfully isolating bubbles of the self in which we are enclosed—expressed in digital bubbles, defensive screens, fear of exposure to the outside, and environmental retreat—we need to be more hospitable to becoming other, and to confronting the mutations that such becoming entails. To change this insulated and individualistic condition requires becoming more open to processes of projection and engaging in the alchemy of their metamorphosis. This is because navigating the flow of transmutative processes means welcoming the instability of the human itself. Grounded in the metamorphosis of matter articulated by natural philosophy and the natural sciences, I seek to foster this environmental process of metamorphosis through a plastic nexus of projective, transductive interactions between ecosystems. Might this environmentality offer an initial path toward a new humanism?

1. Biotic Projections

In developing a biotic model of environmentality, it would be helpful to raise some basic questions that frame this inquiry. Can an environmental or biotic form of thinking change the perspective of the humanities? How can we further develop “the environmental turn”? These questions concern the extent of the humanities’ reach with regard to relations between human and nonhuman subjects, or more precisely, more-than-human entities. One issue is how far “afield” the range of the humanities can extend: that is, which terrains of the biosphere—such as air, water, or ground—and biotic forms we wish to cover or uncover, and which elements of our inner human architecture and outer forms of construction we can consider in order to finally overcome the isolation that issues from the dichotomy between inside and outside.11 

For example, to begin simply, how might the inner life of a plant relate to technology and, in particular, to techniques of projection? At first glance, an inquiry into vegetable and cellular life may seem to diverge, both in terms of method and object, from an analysis of the arts, or of technological models of media. But if a plant’s cellular structure is subjected to a mediatic analysis, we can see that it in fact shares aspects of the materiality of visual technology, and in particular that of the film medium.12 And if we think further in cellular terms about forms of projection, as I later propose, we may be able to shift our perspective about the negative effects of media toward an outlook on environmental coexistence that does not exclude a new form of humanism.

Let me begin modestly in approaching this cellular thinking by uncovering a productive relation between two disparate elements: celluloid and cellulose. One is apparently technological, the other biotic. But if, as humanists, we choose to adopt a relational and environmental method of analysis, we discover that celluloid, which is the material of the filmstrip, is derived from cellulose, a primary component of plant cells. When the vibrant vegetal substance of cellulose is transformed into nitrocellulose by a chemical process, it becomes the combined natural and artificial substrate of cinema. Thus, cellulose, the dietary fiber that makes a plant vital to itself and to us, is also the vital matter of film. In other words, there is a vegetal condition at the root of the material existence of the film medium. A plant stalk makes film stock. Or, put differently, the life we see moving on the screen is a sort of reanimation of plant life.13

This condition of environmental existence goes to the heart of cinema’s own environmental life. It even reveals the medium’s specific ecology. My main point, then, is to suggest that both plants and film are materially defined by their particular form of mediality: a receptivity to and relation with light. Like a film screen, a plant is a form that lives by light. It is itself a “medium” that filters light, capturing it in order to exist. As a medium of life, a leaf literally screens the light as it breathes it, transmuting it through photosynthesis. This alchemy of transmutation is also the chemistry of film. Film’s photographic process enacts a moving conversion of “light-writing.” The translucent layer of celluloid, derived from pulverized cellulose, mixed with a solvent and overlaid with a crystalline film, responds to and transforms light’s radiance. When held up to the light, this light-sensitive material can even reveal the luminosity that its emulsion base can capture. Moreover, in the space of a film theater, light projected through this material composed of plant-based elements activates the screen surface, and then emanates from this luminous membrane in an ambiance of darkness.14 As in the atmosphere of screening, a vegetable specimen is itself a screen of projection that lives in a delicate balance between light and darkness. And, if deracinated, a plant perishes with all its cellulose, just as a celluloid negative deteriorates when exposed to light.

Pierre Huyghe, Zoodrama, 2010. Live Marine Ecosystem, Glass Tank, Filtration System. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist.

In essence, then, these biotic and technological phenomena are atmospheric matters, for both plant life and film’s existence are ambient products of transformed sunlight. I should emphasize that plants and film function as “environmental mediums”: They absorb luminosity not merely for their own vitality but also mediate it in order to circulate it and radiate it in the environment. A plant not only captures light but also converts it into palpable energy. It does so by orienting itself toward the light, in a system of interconnection with other plants that affects the environment. That is also the case for the moving image, a magnetic product of electricity, which returns artificially mediated sunlight to us in the form of a vibrant atmosphere of projected light.

By adopting this environmental viewpoint, one can therefore venture to claim that, if a leaf is a screen, the atmosphere is a space of projection. For, ultimately, the natural screening process of light in a plant is as temporal as it is in the art of projection. A leaf not only screens sunlight but also retains its trace. Imprinted on celluloid and on the surface of the screen in the atmosphere of projection, this memory of light also lives in the medium of film. It activates its own luminous, energetic transport, suspended between natural and artificial conditions, thus bridging the animate with the inanimate in its vibrant technology.

2. The Cellular Nexus as a Transformative Process

Thinking in this way—in relationality with plants, organisms, living matter, and biotic rhythms—can help reimagine the direction of both media analysis and eco-criticism, thus contributing to the transformation of the ecology of art and media. By listening even more closely to the life of cells, a more complex process of relationality emerges—a nexus that is both projective and transformative of both human and more-than-human environments. For this reason, I want further to explore cellular thinking in order to activate this “environ-mentality”—a process that, indeed, implies a shift in cultural and aesthetic mentalities. I will continue to explore this aspect by delving deeper into the matter of cells.

What is a cell? In biological, physiological, histological, and environmental terms, cells are elemental entities, live environments, and proliferating hubs of living matter.15 A membrane-delimited cell hosts the fundamental molecules of life, the building blocks that compose all living organisms.16 The body of a cell is enveloped in a porous skin—a “screen” that separates its interior and exterior environments. This membrane-screen is not a barrier or a shield but rather a semipermeable partition. Hence, a cell is bound but not bounded.

The plasticity of a cell results from the inclusive function of its surrounding coating, a threshold that regulates transport. The layering can filter both entry and exit, enabling motion from outside to inside, and vice versa. Both fluidity and clustering are possible within this screen-membrane. A cell membrane is a kind of screen that facilitates diffusion as well as energy transmission. It is essentially a projective agent in the sense that it mediates complex interrelations between environments, facilitating metabolic and energetic processes.

A cell is also a vessel in a larger sense. It generates consumable forms of energy to subsist, but it also replicates and reproduces to maintain and disseminate life. A unit that is never simply enclosed in itself, it is also open in the sense that it is generative and propagative. This entity is furthermore fundamentally relational because it is affected by other cells, and can affect them in turn. Moreover, a cell is able to cooperate with other cells because it can send and receive signals that affect others in physical proximity and at considerable distances. The key to this ability is cells remaining in constant communication both locally and across larger biological networks.

This environmental sensibility propels cells to interact with each other in a nexus of stimulating, vitalizing forms that include establishing virtual, mediatic relations that are themselves projective. Communication between cells is based on a form of reception that generates internal transduction, to which a response follows. Responding to changes in the environment, cells can, in turn, modify the ambiance in which they participate. It is through such interrelational processes of projection that both inner changes and transformations of cellular environments occur. 

There is also an element of sociality involved in this alchemic transfer and receptive transmission. Even when a cell regulates its own transport of nutrients and waste across its membrane in a seemingly independent manner, or when it generates its own energetic dynamics, it still works in concert with others. Furthermore, a cell can build larger corpuscular units in collaboration with other cells. Cooperative assemblies of cells with similar structures and functions can form tissues, and the cooperation among various tissues, in turn, forms organelles that sustain the life of an organism. This cellular form of receptive relationality, capable of both creating and responding to a milieu that is even larger than the host’s habitat, is responsible for human health.

3. Cellular Networks in Art

If connecting celluloid and cellulose leads us to think differently about projective technologies, consideration of the relations that biotic elements establish—how they form not just a hub but an epistemic model of connectivity—is an important next step for a new humanism to take, in both theoretical and artistic terms. In order to explore the cellular modality of the nexus as a process of knowledge, transmission, and transformation, it would also be helpful to tune into inventive aesthetic forms and mediatic practices. Many contemporary artists are, in fact, animating the vitality of this projective thinking by elaborating aesthetic systems of connection that refashion the way cells relate to, affect, and change one another. Because this relational process informs the life of the human, albeit not exclusively, exploring this cellular thinking means expanding the range of connections that exist between human and natural ecosystems.

Sarah Sze is one such contemporary artist to observe and learn from, for she notably constructs models of connection that are also modes of thinking. Her large installations invite viewers to approach, circulate, and become enveloped within the space of a carefully constructed assemblage of suspended items that are always connected to one another in a relational nexus. In each iteration of such work, an unstable, even fragile network of various things, often ordinary objects, is delicately bound both to itself and to other media in types of linkage that appear to be in a constant state of becoming. Sze likes to say that in her cosmos of relations, “everything teeters.”17 A Sze assemblage fluctuates and oscillates. It sways, quivers, and quakes. It pulses, radiates, and vibrates in unison.

A New York–based artist who has undergone architectural training, Sze has been much fascinated by science and has engaged deeply in scientific thinking.18 The cosmos she constructs, which emerges from her extensive practice of sculptural installation, is also projective. Among the objects of everyday life, consumer items, and plants she includes in her relational assemblages, there are also film-editing tables and projective devices. These latter are often computer screens or smartphones, but not exclusively. Other surfaces act as screens, such as blank paper that often turns into a white, screenlike fabric. Tangible, absorbing waves of luminosity fill the installation space with the atmosphere of life in motion. Sze builds sculptural architectures, resonant with scientific imaginaries and biotic structures of relation, and imbued with a mediatic history of ambient, projective motion.

Sze’s assemblages are conceptually driven to create environments of relationality. Her installation techniques construct the type of nexus that is an ecosystem. She has architected a series of cosmological networks. The structure of Triple Point (Observatory) (2013), for example, not only moves in response to air currents but invokes the movement of planets. Triple Point (Planetarium), created for the US Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, is an actual presentation of planetary structures tied together and teetering. The delicate construction of Things Caused to Happen (Oculus) (2023), installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, holds an orbital assemblage of screenlike objects that resembles a miniature cosmos. Emanating from the spherical structure suspended in space, an abstract and evocative video projection onto the gallery walls cycles through representations of natural phenomena such as passing light, a mix of fire and sunset, cloud-like formations, and birds flying in the sky, suggesting a cosmos of metamorphic relationality. Similarly, in Timekeeper, a series of ambient installations initiated in 2015, a dynamic community of object-organisms do not just interact with themselves or within their own construction. Tied to one another in a teetering system, the items in Sze’s ecosystem respond to the environment in which they are placed. Reaching from the outermost sites to the innermost surfaces, this is not only an ecosystem but a cosmology: a constellation, a galaxy, a cellular system.

The sense of projection revealed in this ecosystem especially engages a scientific modality, for it appears to emerge directly from biorhythmic processes of connection. Sze’s relational artistic systems are built as if they were molecular structures, biotic networks of communication. The singular items of her reticular networks resemble how individual cells create larger constructions and complex building structures through their assemblage. The serial montage of objects reinvents how larger biotic, corpuscular units can be built only in collaboration with others, thus forming a nexus of cooperative assembly. Moreover, these items, like cells, respond to signals from, and changes in, the environment and can, in turn, modify the ambiance in which they participate. Just as in biotic systems, if you tried to move any of the items within one of Sze’s teetering networks, other elements would necessarily be affected and transformed. The objects held in balance in Sze’s installations, like the ecosystem of cells, must then be “teetered together” to create a biotic cosmos sensitive to constant metamorphosis.

Cutting across biology and technology, Sze thus produces an actual form of cellular architectonics. The work reenacts and visualizes the ways in which the metamorphosis of cells and membranes, the transfer that occurs inside neural networks, the transmutation of the nervous system, and the transformation of the life of plants or other living entities are themselves moving, serial, relational, and transformative assemblages. Sze asks the visitor to her installations to activate this very model of cellular thinking. To perform a scientific operation, here, means to seek to understand the delicate shifts in our own inner cosmos: the biotic links, the nexus of connections that make life possible, and mutable.

4. Cultivating the Garden in the Machine

Activating what I call a “projective imagination,” sculptural and moving-image installations are redefining the nature of projection in forms of environmentalization that transform the space of the contemporary art gallery, the museum, and other public spaces. The interaction between natural and technological spaces explored in these art practices also promotes less negative ideas about the ecosystem and more inventive environmental perspectives on media.

Jesper Just, The Garden in the Machine, 2023. Courtesy of the Perrotin.

This is the case with Jesper Just, a Danish artist living in New York who practices what he calls “tech-poetics.” His permanent installation of 1,400 square meters of LED-screen projections is aptly titled The Garden in the Machine (2023). This video work, which panoramically envelopes the entire façade of a building in Aarhus, Denmark, responds, with a twist, to important issues raised by the cultural historian Leo Marx in his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden.19 In this pioneering work, Marx focused on the relation of nature to culture and technology. He considered how “the machine’s sudden entrance into the garden” affects the conception and reception of an environment, and how art and politics can transform it.20 In echoing Leo Marx, The Garden in the Machine offers a contemporary reflection on the human-technological environment. The issue now is no longer to show, as Leo Marx effectively did, how deeply the machinic is embedded in the human understanding and transformation of nature. What is at stake today is to understand how biotic forms and cellular systems relate to digital processes and their technological apparatuses, which affect environmental life.

The Garden in the Machine presents natural and filmic processes working together in imaginative relations of environmentalization. In front of the Aarhus building, which is embraced in translucent projection, there is a tree, with sensors attached that measure its water intake, temperature, growth, weight, and movement in the wind. The biotic data gathered produce a live archive of the life of the plant, and this data affects the projection by means of a software program that converts the information into a projective movement that simulates a biorhythm. The data are transferred into a technique of communication between the real tree in the urban landscape and virtual trees projected on screen. As the natural biorhythm of plant life migrates into the video projection, it transforms the ongoing flux of the video environment. The digital appearance of the filmed forest changes atmospherically. The natural colors of its trees take on different tones and gradations, depending on the living condition of the tree in front of the building. The atmosphere of this filmed forest becomes increasingly alive as it constantly morphs in relation to material, biotic life. This projective technological network, which senses how plants interact with their surroundings, communicates with the actual sensitivity of their reticular, connective roots. It is as if the process of projection were as vital as the ecosystem of plant life and as fluid as the nexus of natural, cellular biorhythms.

The Garden in the Machine continues the biotic and atmospheric line of investigation that Just pursued with his Seminarium (2021). The title of this work, derived from Latin, evokes the word’s original meaning, which denoted a “plant nursery,” or more broadly, “breeding ground”—a meaning that was later transferred to name institutions in which knowledge could be nurtured and “cultivated.” Just’s installation incorporates this idea of the cultivation of knowledge—that is, environmentality—into a sculptural ecosystem that connects together plants and video screens as mediums of the absorption and atmospheric diffusion of the energy of light.

A network of plastic tubing, cables, and glass vases was set up throughout the gallery in which Seminarium was exhibited, creating a hydroponic cultivation system where plants grew in water.21 In front of the vases, there were large, angular, curvilinear, fragmented LED screens, which presented images of human bodies bathed in a special infrared light. These screens transmitted precisely the kind of light waves plants need to make the process of photosynthesis possible. And therefore, this process of projection makes it possible for the plants to live and grow. Seminarium harnesses at a conceptual level the biotic energy of life-forms that passes through screens, doing so by reinventing the etymology of “plant nursery” through a “nurturing,” projective atmosphere of luminosity digitally materialized to “cultivate” biotic forms. In both Seminarium and The Garden in the Machine, then, biotic and technological processes are fused in forms of environmentality, virtually merging into a single organism, living and breathing before our eyes.

5. Transforming the Ecology of Media

This kind of cellular thinking that exposes the nature of cellular life as relational—that is, projective—can further transform aesthetic ecologies. Here I want to reprise the idea that a cell functions as a screen, performs acts of screening, and activates projective movements as a way to advance notions of mediatic projection away from sheer negativity. Rethinking the projective modality in cellular terms of connectivity might help to relieve some human anxiety about the expansion of technology. Let me offer some reflections on how this philosophy of environmentality can change mentalities that associate screen media with protective isolation in favor of building a more relational, cellular way of thinking about the mediatic environment.

We seem hopelessly trapped in algorithmic bubbles, segregated within invisible yet pervasive networks of informational space, addicted to endless loops of social media that do not, in fact, offer sociality. To top it off, studies of screen-based new media have exacerbated this situation by insisting on this negativity and conceiving projection itself as deleterious. In the theoretical literature, a set of grievances has been attached to technologies of projection. The screen, ever-present in our lives, has become associated with a protective shield used to defend the individual against the outside environment, an ecosystem perceived as a threatening, menacing zone. Mediating between outside and inside, screen media are said to function as both a safeguard and refuge but, in doing so, they actually end up becoming isolating barriers against our surroundings.22 Coupled with a restrictive conception that an ecosystem is a mere site of conflict, competition, and survival, awareness of the hostile Anthropocene contributes to the exacerbation of this multilayered cultural anxiety: a projection of the idea that exposure to the environment is risky, dangerous, and fearsome, which forces defensive retreat.

This expression of post-digital culture has dangerous consequences for humanity. It seems to me not only socially dangerous but politically questionable to relegate the kind of projection that occurs in screen media entirely to negative feelings such as fear and anxiety, which require “domestication” and anesthetization, discipline and ordering, barriers and enclosure. Such an insular understanding of digital media seals the borders of the human subject and limits our haptic reach to the environment in ways that are also gender confining, reinstating spatial divisions between inside and outside and constrictions that have traditionally been employed to establish and reinforce gender difference.

But could it be that projection itself has been trapped in just such an isolating, negative apparatus of human and environmental control? A constrictive insistence on the danger of the environment and the isolation of the mediascape has effaced the intersubjective potentiality and relational desire that are embodied in the very notion of projection. As I will further articulate in the second part of this article, a different cultural genealogy of projection—rooted in the connective biorhythms of cellular thinking—can shift our perspective on projective environments.

Environmentality offers a way of thinking about a vital nexus of connections: the cellular relation of technology to ambiance and the atmosphere of projection. I wish to establish this alternative view because I believe in the force of projection as an imaginative, relational process of knowledge transmission. This is because of what is rooted within it: the idea of a project. Etymologically, projection is an act of “throwing forth.” To project is to draw, to draft, to move forward in space. The project of projection is to project possibility in order to transform not only a person but a site. To rehabilitate projection, then, means to expand its environmental potential. This can happen through both theoretical and artistic interventions that are capable of using technology to foster a biotic, sensory interconnection not only between persons but also with the environment.