Manifesto for a New Humanism, Part 2: The Culture of Projection

Continued from “Manifesto for a New Humanism, Part 1: Cellular Thinking”

6. The Alchemy of Projection

If the humanities learned more from artistic ecologies, as discussed in the first part of this article, they could inventively revive the humus of the “seminarium.” The initial meaning of the term is a “plant nursery,” or, more broadly, a “breeding ground,” which came to define institutions in which knowledge could be “cultivated.” This sense of the seminarium invites us to explore projective, environmental processes of thinking and to consider technology in a “nurturing” cellular light, in order to “cultivate” a less fearful attitude toward post-digital life. Rather than remaining encapsulated in mediatic bubbles or hopeless prisoners of social-media space, the invitation is to expand the potential of technical objects as a generative milieu of interaction between subjects and ambiance, and to articulate processes of relationality.1 The specific message of the present “seminarium” is to redefine the notion of projection, to be more open to projective processes of transformation, and to think inventively about the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence.

By cultivating the luminous intelligence of a plant, and projectively creating with environmental processes, one could expand the cellular potential of technical media, introducing a different energy into artistic and humanistic fields of study. The medium of light passing through air, in a living being as in a technical projective object, is in fact a shared atmospheric energy, capable of transforming their respective ambiances and interconnected ecologies. This environmental force of projection—the ambient energy of “environmentality”—can change the mentality that shapes relations between humans and their surroundings.

I thus propose that we cultivate the culture of projection, reviving the lost relational and transformative core embedded in the alchemic origin of the concept. Rather than considering projection a protective shield used to defend the individual against the outside world, I conceive of it as a hospitable environment that engages relational capacities to create bridges between subjects and environments, to open doors between biotic and technological systems, and to build sites of contact and communal exchange. To reclaim such relational plasticity requires embracing, in theoretical terms, an imaginative environmentality, located not only in the arts or the humanities and their philosophies but also in the history of science. I want, in particular, to revive the conceptions of a number of misinterpreted early sciences that dealt with matters of energy and their ambient transmission, and that have been forgotten through disdain for projection, with its negative and isolating connotations.

It is well known that the idea of projection became central to psychoanalysis and the arts of technological modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. But it is not well known that its history is also deeply rooted in environmental processes, and that its meaning goes much further back in time. The term “projection” actually originated in alchemy, where it was already in use in the late fifteenth century. This is a fundamental genealogy to unearth, because it speaks of projection as the act of transforming organic and inorganic matter. This genealogy is consequential not only for rethinking what the term “projective” means but also for understanding what a projective model of knowledge can do. Fundamentally, projection has an inherent, alchemic capacity for material transformation. Recognizing the process of projective knowledge as such an alchemy of transmutation can expand the environmentality of technologies of projection. Let us look further into how projection began its transformative journey in the chemistry of alchemy.

Illustration from Spiegel der Kunst und Natur, 1654. License: Public Domain.

As used in alchemy, projection described “the throwing or casting of an ingredient into a crucible,” especially “to effect its transmutation.”2 According to the philosophy of science, such projection can act on various kinds of matter to morph it. While an alchemical reaction is known to act mostly on metals, there are also experiments that pursue transformative reactions that create more organic processes.3 Alchemic projection is said to engage processes of “calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, [and] multiplication.”4 In this materially reactive, organic, biotic, and environmental sense, the act of projection thus defines a fundamental alchemic function: the radical metamorphosis of matter, the vital transfer of substances, and their mediation into other forms. From alchemy, then, a figurative meaning of projection emerges that is an ecology, rooted in elemental philosophies and in the morphing of environmental processes both organic and inorganic.

This reflection on the alchemic transmutation from which projection issues, coupled with our previous considerations of biotic processes and cellular thinking—the basic connective principles of natural and human life—offers a generative model of transformation. It gives hope for reconsidering grim views of both the ecosystem and projective media in favor of a different alchemy. As I have shown in depth elsewhere, this is also because, along with alchemic processes, the technology of projection stems from the vital energy fields of the environment, ranging from the atmospheric diffusion of light waves and particles to electromagnetism, and encompasses mesmerizing forces of connection such as the energy of attraction between different entities.5 It includes vitalist, animistic, or even such mesmeric practices as the pull of animal magnetism, which are so often disdained. These practices, despite their differences, all propose models of knowledge that are based not on conflict or the isolation of humans and technology but on environmental relationality, transmission, and transformation.

So, rather than continuing to fixate on the enclosed spheres, algorithmic bubbles, and addictive digital segregation—digital prison cells—in which humans are trapped in hostile ecosystems, I propose that we continue to think of organic cells. It is critical that we consider biotic processes of connection and transmutation, and especially that we explore the nexus of communication and interaction that is generated in an ambiance in conjunction with technological forms. Establishing this vital link between cellular formations and mediatic forms, even if it seems far afield, is what a philosophy of environmentality can do. It can make unusual connections that can change the conventional understanding of disparate fields by proposing access to different processes of knowledge.

Let us then continue to explore the process of projection in more cellular and relational forms, emphasizing that it did not emerge from optical, insular models of knowledge but from diverse biorhythmic movements that defined the culture of modernity. These rhythmical processes of knowledge, observed across disciplines ranging from sciences such as physiology and cellular biology to the humanities, introduced a form of relational thinking that ultimately affected the course of visual culture and became translated into the movement of motion pictures.

7. Cellular Life and Rhythms of Becoming

A form of associative, relational—that is, projective—thinking as a nexus of disciplines came together in modernity, offering a new understanding of cellular life and its rhythms as a process of human and more-than-human transformation. This epistemological change used observation as a form of mediation and produced forms of projective visualization. Notions that emerged around 1800 advanced the conception of the organism, in multidisciplinary research that studied systems of biotic becoming and their reliance on a wide-ranging notion of rhythm. As the historian of science Janina Wellmann shows, a true epistemology of rhythm was established in modernity, extending from biology’s rendering of the cellular network as a site of rhythmic movement to other forms of knowledge concerned with living processes.6 Physiology offered an understanding of the human body that differed from the views derived from anatomical dissection by instead observing the body in motion. It foregrounded bodily fluidity and spatial and temporal flux, and described these phenomena in terms of relations of frequencies.

Concurrently with science, such biorhythmic thinking informed music theory, philosophy, literature, and visual culture, all of which addressed motion in the forms of tempo, pace, and pulse. As a biological figure of thought, rhythm was also seen as closely linked to vitality and to vital matters such as the formation and transmission of affect. In this view, life is, essentially, motion. It does not so much exist as become. The observation that cells themselves form a nexus of becoming propelled this view, as they were shown to form, divide, multiply, and connect in rhythmic ways, resulting from the inner structure of a transformative interplay.

The most important advance of this wide-ranging, mobile epistemology was that it observed the processes that mediate forms of becoming and structure rhythmic motion. This observation of mediation, produced in various fields, gave rise to imagistic representations of variation and modification. Conceived as a transitional phenomenon, the transformation of matter led to a reimagining of the entire physiology of the human body, which became closely connected to change in natural phenomena. Theories of generation, emerging from physiology, met botany. They informed literary studies of plant-thinking as well, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1790 book, The Metamorphosis of Plants, in which he promoted the idea that plants develop in rhythmic oscillation and interplay.7

Works of nature and works of art became connected in their nexus of transformative becoming. This gave rise not only to a new language but to a new conceptual register, and to an innovative form of imagining. Music led the way in the biotic shift as it became visualized in written compositions as a vital force. The human pulse became the measure of musical tempo. Music theory thus came to speak of music as a representation of organic life.

This new episteme—a mix of biological and aesthetic theory—was activated in mediatic ways in visual culture. Movement was put to the test, analyzed by new technological instruments that could not only observe it but also reproduce its dynamics in pictorial sequences. This form of mediation through visual instruments of knowledge offered representations of phenomena not visible to the human eye. Visual studies depicted the rhythm of hands used in making things, such as combing, knotting, and weaving. A succession of gestures was manifested as a visual choreography of motion. Dynamism in dance and gymnastics was also subject to forms of technical visualization that emphasized the beauty of movement, reproduced in pictorial series of intervals, repetitions, and variations.

Étienne-Jules Marey, A Flying Pelican, 1882. License: Public domain.

A graphic, cadenced, pulsing form of visuality was thus born from these biorhythmic movements. It materialized physiological motion in analytic sequences of interconnected fragments that formed an assemblage, producing a series of dissimilarities. This kind of serial observation was also articulated in the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, who devised their own mediatic language to sequentially render the physiology of motion. This invention of complex visual techniques for creating moving images then transferred into the new media of cinematic technology, where a projective apparatus furthered the mediatic imaging of “motion pictures.”

This rhythmic conceptual framework, arising from the experimental observation of biotic and cellular forms by way of mediatic techniques, “projected” motion into an unprecedented development of visuality. Spatial artworks were produced in studies that ranged from the visualization of animal and human motion to depictions of the metamorphosis of membranes, the transmutation of the nervous system, and the transformation of the life of plants. Thus, organic life itself came to be seen not as an isolated phenomenon but as a projective, relational one.

This epistemic shift made rhythm into the very art of generating transformative relationships—an art capable of imaging new connections in biotic environments. Motion, light, and nutrition fused into larger visual studies of metabolic functions, and transductive processes of turning solid into liquid emphasized flux and fluidity. Processes of generation and regeneration, formation and transformation created forms of interconnective relationality while becoming organically mediated in novel visual forms.

This phenomenon gave rise to a modern understanding of processes of transmutation themselves as projective mediations. It ultimately led to a redeployment of the ancient theory of metamorphosis proposed long ago by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, which now became a modern modality of projective thinking between all living entities.8 Processes of transformation came to be observed and depicted as they were visually mediated in motion—through microscopic techniques of viewing as well as in pre-filmic representations of movement visualized in serial images. Metamorphosis was reimagined in such projective mediations, seen not so much as the transformation of substance but as the mutation of its movement. In this web of interdisciplinary relations, nature and art, aesthetic and scientific experimentation, biotic and technological forms combined to articulate a nexus of relational rhythms: a mediatic visualization of the fluid, malleable character of organic matter’s mutability.

8. Cellular Relationality and Psychic Life

As such a nexus of transformative connections, this biorhythmic argument about a projective cellular interrelationality, discussed thus far in a material sense, could also be pushed in the more psychic direction that is a vital part of the concept of projection. Advances in physiology in the 1800s suggested that life’s mutability, observed in the mediation of the changing relations between the form and composition of matter, engages the psychic realm as well. Such mutable relations came to be described as the “temper” (Stimmung) of the life force. The term “Stimmung,” which had developed as a philosophical and aesthetic concept in Germany beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, circulated widely throughout the nineteenth century. Often simply translated as “atmosphere,” the concept is particularly relevant here, as it was derived from musical attunement and developed in modern aesthetics as a psychic disposition, or rhythm—in essence, as an atmospheric condition.9 The notion of Stimmung emphasized resonance, a rhythmic transfer of psychic energies in ambiance: a transmission of affect, or more simply, mood, in and through the environment. Life forces were seen as entering into a psychic relationship with one another in such a resonating, ambient sense. They were capable of associating and transforming by becoming mutually “tempered,” that is, attuned to one another in the atmosphere.

This atmospheric idea of a psychic tuning even influenced a new notion of cellular thinking. A major advance in this realm was made by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who argued for the psychic life of cells. In his 1889 book The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology, Binet claimed that a cell lives “a psychic life”—fundamentally, “a life of relation” based on a “sensibility” that was reactive to the external world while also “possessing the property of responding by movements.”10 Binet’s work ultimately established that a cellular projective process is not only effectively relational but affectively moving.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, drawing of glial cells of the mouse spinal cord, 1899. License: Public domain.

The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms was published at the height of a scientific interest in psychological research. The late nineteenth-century was a time when psychology itself was being established as a discipline by figures such as William James, the philosopher and psychologist, author of the influential The Principles of Psychology (1890).11 Scientific experimentation on the nature of perception and affect was important to James, who established the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and hired the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg to run its lab.12 Pursuing laboratory work to observe experiential phenomena gave rise to a reconceptualization of depth and movement, using optical instruments that mediatized the dynamics of inner and outer motion. This mediatic research sought to visualize the active relations that mobilize psychic life, such as the motion of emotion, the directional movement of attention, and flights of imagination. While pursuing these laboratory experiments on such projective movements, Münsterberg also turned his attention to motion pictures and wrote one of the first books of film theory. In his 1916 psychological study of cinema, he argued that psychic states are visibly and tangibly manifested in film, for in his view, this medium is nothing but a “projection of the mind.”13

It is in the context of this kind of psychic experimentation, then, that the idea of a “psychic life of cells” was born and could further develop, “stemming,” as it did, directly from cellular thinking: from the wide-ranging nexus of transdisciplinary observation of physiological rhythms that, as we have shown, defined the cultural atmosphere of the modern era. Biology, subjectivity, and technology were combined in this research, which ultimately offered a new understanding of environmentality as rhythmic.

This outlook on cellular life—how it operates in relational attunement—has been reprised today as the research of contemporary neuroscience progresses, alongside cellular biology, seeking to understand projective processes. In 1992, for example, the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, who participated in the identification of “mirror neurons,” proposed that a “mirroring” effect produces empathic interpersonal connections.14 In short, in order to fully perceive a movement, one must mirror the action in one’s own physiological system. The observation of this phenomenon thus engages a dynamic, relational operation of projection. This neurological response rearticulates a projective idea that was put forth in modernity in physiological terms: Einfülung, the notion that an “in feeling” is also a “feeling with.” This understanding of Einfülung affected modern theories of empathy in art, as it was widely explored in nineteenth-century German aesthetic theories.15 Such a kinesthetic idea—that one can generate a projective response to an art object or environment just as to a person—extends the aesthetic reach of theories of relationality and points to the transformative relations embedded in environmentality.

Current neurological research seeks to further this understanding of virtual interrelations as biorhythmic. Neuroscience is especially concerned with how “intercellular chatter” gives rise to crucial “properties of the nervous system: sentience, sensation, consciousness, memory, thinking, and feeling.”16 These aspects of psychic life are triggered by a highly dynamic, interactive component of cell life: the neuron. Neurons form intentional connections to one another in the brain to make psychic functions possible. They support the plasticity of the brain, based on their capacity to take and give form.17 Neurons do not function simply by mirroring but also have the ability to be shaped and molded. Such a metamorphic ability is relational, since neurons work in processes of cooperative assembly. As components of cells, neurons are in fact interconnective units that enable different architectures to be built and, in turn, rely on the environment in which they grow to constitute a community, and even a form of citizenship. Their form of assembly is based on communication, tolerance, diversity, boundary formation, and cooperation—in other words, on ecological relationships.

Avoiding the reductionism produced by neuroscience’s primary, if not exclusive, reliance on brain functions, I wish to turn this finding, against the grain, into a more ecological proposition: that it is a cell environment, with its processes of interaction, that forms the atmosphere in which psychic life and projection develop, becoming a psychic and mediatic process of knowledge. Consideration of the ecosystem of cells, and further articulation of their relational and symbiotic interconnectedness as an ecology, offers a contemporary pathway to understanding how to activate complex psychic projective processes of transformation. Most important, pursuing this kind of cellular thinking, with the understanding that a cell environment is shared by humans and more-than-human entities, exposes projective forms of intra-action that can mobilize and affect human relations with the larger environment, including mediatic ecologies.

9. Atmospheres of Cellular Transformation

This imaginative, multilayered reflection on the biosphere, capable of being projective and relational, is necessary in our times. In order to envision potential metamorphoses in ecosystems, exit our digital bubbles, and dispel the illusion of social media as offering sociality, it is crucial to explore more closely the nexus of these interrelational, environmental processes of knowledge. A cellular thinking that exposes biorhythms of projective screening stands in opposition to isolating notions of mediatic projection, while an alchemic, projective imagination fosters acts of transformative relationality in an ecosystem. In both these modes of knowledge, a process of transduction—a force of material morphing attuned to biorhythms—comes alive.

This transformative biorhythmic impulse is not only a philosophical desire but also finds material expression in the visual arts in forms of environmentalization and practices of symbiontic relationality.18 A number of artistic interventions explore ecologies of affiliative relation, and even entanglement, with our more-than-human companions. They suggest that we pursue processes of knowledge that counter dynamics of conflict and an extractive individualism with a tender attunement to affect and engagement. Such a projective outlook on living ecosystems is a condition for the possible creation of a new and more beneficial humanism, as reimagining the relationship between technology and biorhythms becomes an increasingly crucial factor for our future. 

Pierre Huyghe’s forward-thinking art practice has been at the forefront of this movement, with his experimental, techno-biotic visions of knowledge processes. Going beyond simple environmentalist politics, Huyghe’s installations gesture toward a broader phenomenon: the “ecologization” of contemporary art.19 His work addresses an important aspect of environmentalization: how ecology functions within the larger infrastructural ecosystem we inhabit. And it offers a diagnostic account of how this affects the production of art. It especially does so by forging relations that engage the intermingling, living materials of nature and culture, projecting this change not only in aesthetic form but in the nature of the artistic and technological habitat.

A milieu that projects a decisive environmental turn was transformed into a living and breathing technological Umwelt in Huyghe’s large-scale project aptly titled UUmwelt (2018–24).20 For this installation, hailed as an example of “ecosystem aesthetics,” Huyghe collaborated with Japanese computational neuroscientists to translate MRI scans of a subject’s brain activity into images projected on screens, working at the intersection of neurobiology and artificial intelligence.21 As these visions of neural networks multiplied on the screen, ten thousand flies swarmed and buzzed throughout the ambiance. The images “screened” from the brain were not only in perpetual motion but also constantly modified into clusters throughout the time they were projected in the space. Triggered by sensors that responded to atmospheric conditions in the galleries—to light, temperature, dust, and humidity—and enhanced by the motion of the insects and humans in the space of projection, the images reacted in response, morphing and mutating with the meteorology of the ambiance itself.

Pierre Huyghe, Camata, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

In Huyghe’s UUmwelt, then, climate becomes an actual environment, and Umwelt is revealed as a cultivated milieu: a biological “culture.” The gallery space thus turns into a biotic site that is also abiotic, a mixed ecological environment that is inherently technological. In a projection of moving images that act as if they were reacting or self-generating, not only do images change their artistic form and format; the very sense of projection itself is modified. In this activity of screening and projecting mental images, a living, morphing ecosystem becomes an entire biosphere, in an atmosphere of projection that critically exposes the diverse subjective and objective elements that produce an environment and affect its change.

The 2024 exhibition “Liminal,” created for Punta della Dogana in Venice by Huyghe in collaboration with curator Anne Stenne, which presented new creations as well as the artist’s work from the prior ten years, extended this line of inquiry on environmentality.22 The ecosystem of an atmosphere of projection was part of this exhibition, restaging Huyghe’s earlier ways of expanding the potential of this milieu in environmental terms. Offspring (2018), a pure space of atmospheric projection made of light, color, and sound, was an environment produced by a self-generating technological instrument that was constantly learning from the exhibition environment itself. The technology responded in synchrony with atmospheric change and generated its own meteorological transformation, producing an atmosphere of diffused projected luminosity in a constant rhythm of relational becoming.

The exhibition site of “Liminal” was itself conceived in this ambient vein, designed as an environment in constant processes of becoming and reciprocal exchange between biological, cellular, and technological forms. It was particularly transformed by Huyghe’s more recent dynamic installations into a transitory milieu of encounters between human and more-than-human entities that learn from one another, exchanging memories and archives as well as future projections. Biotic rhythms and their ritual motion permeated the atmosphere of the exhibition in all its configurations, from the display of Huyghe’s earlier aquarium works and living marine ecosystems —Zoodram 6 (2013), Cambrian Explosion 19 (2013), Abyssal Plane (2015), and Circadian Dilemma (El Día del Ojo) (2017)—to recent work created with the aid of artificial intelligence.

A self-directed film shown in this exhibition titled Camata (2024) was driven by machine learning and constantly edited in real time by AI, in response to sensors located in the exhibition space, which responded to its atmosphere, including sound, vibrations, light, humidity, and temperature. In the film, a set of machines, seeming to belong to a former mechanical era, appear to be performing a funerary ritual on an unburied human skeleton, found in the Atacama Desert in Chile. A work of media archaeology meets future technologies here. The lens of the camera performs what feels like an anatomy lesson from the past, as if it were gathering from the remains not just the parameters of a physical body but what constitutes a corporeality, the very matter of a living organism. The constant motion explores a biorhythm as if to learn something that goes beyond even the physiology of a human body in order to understand what might actually constitute a new human subjectivity.

The nonhuman eye of the machine and the camera’s lens survey in this way the remains of human existence in a vast, desertic landscape. The projective motion gathers from this environment signs of transition and the future integration of the combined biorhythmic movements of humans and technology. The process of thinking inherent in archaeology, geology, minerality, animality, and humanity fuses in this imaginative aesthetic and mediatic atmosphere. Expanding the range of Huyghe’s previous “living ecosystems,” this technological space engages the sense itself of environmentality as a relational, transformative process of knowledge. Thus conceived as both historic and futuristic, this artistic ambiance becomes an actual projection of a new humanism.

10. Environments of Biorhythmic Transmutation

Generated conceptually across theory and practice, such environmentality is not only attuned to the currents of vital forces in both organic and inorganic bodies; it can also work at transforming them, in tune with their inherent cellular biorhythms, thus affecting the very notion and constitution of the human. This metamorphic knowledge process is also at work in the experimental exhibition “La Levadura y El Anfitrión” (The Yeast and the Host, 2017–18), conceived by Philippe Parreno at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, where the actual constitution of a cell environment comes alive.23 Conceptually, “The Yeast and the Host” extends Parreno’s long-standing interest in exhibitions as mediums—spaces that mediate encounters between humans and more-than-human forms of agency. At Museo Jumex, this became an urgent reflection on the emergence and interaction of a distributed intelligence: an ecology in which biological and technological systems mutually shape one another. 

Philippe Parreno, La Levadura y El Anfitrión (The Yeast and the Host). Installation view, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, October 26, 2017–February 11, 2018.

Grounded in a biotechnological form of projection, “The Yeast and the Host” created the actual atmosphere of a living cellular meteorology. At the center of the exhibition environment was a bioreactor that cultivated yeast colonies connected to a computational system that remembered the program of a past exhibition.24 The living cells of the yeast reacted to the past and present environment, and this triggered the order of appearance of film projections, sound vibrations, and light changes in the space of the gallery. Furthermore, environmental changes within the museum—variations in humidity, temperature, luminosity, sound, and motion—affected the biological system, which in turn altered the projections and the meteorological rhythms in the space. In this environment, information was metabolized through communicative feedback loops that resembled cellular forms of signaling and adaptation. The exhibition itself thus behaved as a cellular environment as images, sounds, biological entities, technical objects, architectural structures, and visitors participated in this shared atmospheric, biorhythmic ecology.

“The Yeast and the Host” worked to generate a projective dialogue between the human mind—as in the neurons of the host that choreographs the exhibition—and the cells of the yeast, engaging other forms of intelligent or emergent matter and activity as well. In this atmosphere of relational processes in which visitors are absorbed, projection itself becomes activated as a mutable ecology: a living milieu of transformation, a reciprocal process of transduction. In this ecosystem, generated by processes of “becoming” in which biological and technological rhythms intra-act, a new form of environmental knowledge is produced, one in which the human itself is engaged as a nexus of transformative relations. Among other artists, Parreno and Huyghe, however differently, share ways of reimagining the human by primarily reshaping its relation with more-than-human life, including technological processes. This suggests that it is possible, and even desirable, to reimagine a humanistic perspective that is nonetheless not anthropocentric. This responsive, alchemic, and metamorphic environmentality points toward a new humanism that is not hierarchical. By learning from the arts, humanism can reinvent itself, moving beyond human-centrism.

11. Metamorphosis: Projecting a Cellular Environmentality

A projective environmentality is activated through a nexus of varied phenomena, ranging from points of contact between cellulose and celluloid, or between the biotic and tech-poetics, to more complex relations that engage environmental modes of knowledge and processes of cellular thinking. In both theoretical and artistic practices concerned with environmentality, engaging biorhythmic forces leads to a reimagining of old divisions between the human and the nonhuman by acknowledging the cellular connections and the flow of elements of which they both are made. As visual art expresses this nonhuman-centric yet humanistic perspective—open to a projective, cellular relationality—it can technologically transform energies in space. The awareness that a cellular biorhythm connects all living beings that populate the atmosphere can thereby transmit receptive and transformative energies throughout the surroundings.

Ultimately, cellular thinking can thus spur a relational ethic. It reveals that there is a biotic form of sympathy in ambiance, understood as a “feeling with” the various forms of life in the atmosphere. Learning from the psychic life of cells, this cellular environmentality can recognize vital forms of intra-action across spaces of exteriority and interiority. The nature of the cell environment—a site of connective, affiliative, communicative activity—is transformative because cells are perceptive and receptive to one another, even in psychic terms. Their haptic forms of ambient transmission are interrelational: grounded on projective contact rather than protective isolation from themselves and their environment.

This sense of environmental connection holds as well when we understand projections of affect as atmospheres. Rather than a discrete entity, an atmosphere of projection is interstitial—transitional, diffuse, and ungraspable in singular or individual form. In technological as well as natural contexts, this projective atmosphere is not an isolating enclosure but rather an open ecosystem. To sense an atmosphere—to grasp an “air”—is to perceive a situational mix of diverse living matter in flux. As a biotic microclimate, a projective atmosphere not only evolves but also dissolves: It is a force field of plural energies that intra-act in a constant state of becoming. It is precisely this alchemy of biotic dynamisms that produces metamorphosis. In this ambient midst, beings are “projected into” a sentient relation to space—one that can radically reconfigure their own biorhythms.

When the concept and art of projection are genealogically situated, as we have done, within the biotic, alchemic, and environmental movements that shaped modernity across disciplines, this biorhythmic cluster of relational, projective, transformative models comes to the fore even historically. From such models, one can now devise alternative projective ecologies—expanding on this modern cellular thinking—to further mobilize the interrelational force of biotic environments.25 Because such a cellular approach is based on porous, plastic, ambient mediations, it can foster deeper interconnection with the agential entities that shape our milieu, including technical objects. Exploring this biorhythmic nexus of relationality can indeed result in the implementation of projective relations with, rather than protective isolation from, not only the environment itself but also the environment of media.

With the aim of countering an isolating politics of fear—a perception of the environment as an ecosystem of conflict, the dread of digital bubbles, and anxiety about a future overrun by artificial intelligence—I emphasize the capacity of technical objects, affective projections, and permeable atmospheres to project processes of transformation based on the alchemy of relational modalities. As we have noted, the transductive potential of projection resides in its very origin in the field of alchemy, for it is a force actively seeking the conversion of matter. Expanding on such alchemic history, the process of projection should be nurtured and cultivated as it transmits an ambient energy capable of transmutation.

The biotic formation of a cellular nexus itself projects such a process of transduction: This is a milieu of interrelational plasticity. Cells exhibit clear responsive, receptive, and reciprocal capacities that enable them to change. Their plasticity results from their collective existence and forms of interaction, from their being constantly molded in interconnection with one another. This cellular form of projection is not exclusive to human bodies or other living entities; rather, as a form of sympathy, it extends across animate matter that shapes environments, creating not just communication and change but exchange. To experience an atmosphere of projection as something other than a mere set of negative states, in cellular or technical form, one must be in resonance with—tenderly attuned and open to—an ecology of vital relations capable of generating a dynamics of coexistence in the environment.

To engage in such relational, affiliative ethics—should we call it a new humanism?—is essential for cultivating not only ecosystems of coexistence but also for envisioning the processes of their metamorphosis. To imagine a future beyond individualism and mere mediatic connectivity, real connections need to be implemented. It is time to envision such projective ecologies more fully: to activate the cellular power of biomorphic forms to design alternative futures for media, not limited to producing mere product. A cellular thinking across the arts, the humanities, and the sciences can help us reimagine projective processes of knowledge that are affective: it can offer transformative models of reciprocity based on the plasticity that comes with contact. The nexus of environmental life is truly plastic, because living entities adapt to the metamorphosis generated in ambient contact with others. Ultimately, cellular life, with the kind of thinking that issues from it, is based on mutualism. To pursue this atmosphere of environmentality is to foster more projective forms of encounter—delicate connections that become forms of sociality, commonality, and community within open, hospitable environments. This is the cellular relationality I call for: a metamorphic shift, an environ-mentality of care, the outline of a potential new humanism.