Mutations Zero: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene

The latest publication from Integral Imprint has arrived! Order your copy today.

This one has been a long time in the making. To reflect that, my co-editor, Dr.

Jenn Zahrt

and I decided to give it an appropriate number:

Mutations, Issue Zero: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene is now available from Integral Imprint.

An earlier version of Mutations journal was nearly ready to go to print four years ago, but then: COVID, lockdown. Daily life was transformed. Perhaps, as philosopher Bruno Latour suggests so compellingly, it had metamorphosed. It is this latter possibility which interested Jenn and I as editors of the journal.

Recognizing the kaironic nature of recent times, “Issue 1” became “Issue 0.”

In the introduction, I write about how there is something orthogonal about kaironic time. It feels like it arrives from a sidereal dimension: hairline cracks on the periphery become fissures, disrupting the normative flow of events, restructuring chronological time in favor of a more wild, creative time.

Wild time is a time of possibility, mutation.

Already Living in a New Time

“Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene” reflects the general areas that our journal issue explores and will continue to explore (readers are invited to contribute to the next issue, “Issue 1,” due for publication in October 2025).

Mutations, as a publication, humbly carries on the radical thought of the 1960s, as well as the experimental thinking of the 1970s: can we imagine a different sort of world beyond capital, and a time beyond progress? As we write, the journal does not define itself against the present but “for the future… a rhizomatic manifesto of consciousness culture—and how else could it be, but through a rhizome, a networked array?”

In my opening essay, “Mutations, Imagination and Futurability,” I suggest that we are already living in a new time, “demanding a new worldview.” The problem is, we are not so much living this new time as it is living us. “We do not know how to address this remarkable new realism,” I write. The project, for artist and philosopher alike, lies not so much in the construction of a new worldview, but rather in coming to understand how we are already living in a ‘weird’ new temporality that links time and climate, human and more-than-human, Gaia and ecology.

What is needed is an inquiry into our “unthinkable present,” as William Gibson aptly describes. This is the ongoing project of Mutations journal.

Each of the contributors offers their conceptual and poetic insight into this new time.

Mutations, Imagination, Futurability

“Mutations” is the word that the Swiss poet and phenomenologist of consciousness Jean Gebser offers to describe radical restructurings of consciousness, coeval with perceptual transformations of self and world, time and space.

“Imagination,” as I and other contributors of this journal describe, is integral to these transformations. Imagination is used here in the Anzaldúan sense: a radically relational, creative consciousness that regenerates the world.

Finally, “futurability” refers to a concept from Italian philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi. Futurability is concerned with how the virtual becomes actual, how possibilities, drawn from the protean imagination, find immanent pathways to realization, becoming material and social history. As I suggest, futurability also has to do with the realization of a planetary temporality: a time beyond linear progress.

These three themes, as I see them, form a kind of “evolutionary triptych” that helps us better cohere the synergistic, interrelated dimensions that comprise the transformation of worldviews.

Over the next few weeks this substack will be sharing excerpts from the journal and, time allowing, recording a few conversations with Issue Zero’s many contributors.

My hope, and intention, is that this is just the beginning of many cross-pollinating discussions aspiring towards the regeneration of our world and the furthering of a habitable, planetary future.

May we creatively inspire each other for the creation of new concepts and percepts that belong not just to today, but tomorrow as well.

Thank you, dear readers and subscribers. Your patronage has made this project possible.

Please order your copies here. Copies are shipping soon.

Read Issue Zero’s table of contents and journal statement below.

About Mutations Journal

A magical grimoire from the future; an Anthropocene Hypertext

Mutations: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene revives the need for imagining better worlds and using our imaginations as both a radical divinatory and political act. By putting words to the page through literary, political, and artistic creation, we generate instances, mutations, of these new worlds—realizations of the future latent in the present. This is an image of a counter-culture deeply engaged in the world, not defining itself by being against the present, but for the future. This anthology, then, builds a rhizomatic manifesto of consciousness culture—and how else could it be, but through a rhizome, a networked array?

Mutations invites a resurrection of the utopianism of the late 60s and the experimental institutions of the 70s, in our invocation to imagine a reality beyond capitalism—an occultism, a mysticism, for the Anthropocene. These emerging visions of the future promote transformations of worldview, remix past, present, and future mythologies, unleash new possibilities of aesthetics and philosophy. Contributors to this book find their home in liminality, engage in acts of “meta-cognition,” and are kin to the utopian project of spiritual and material emancipation. This book is a call for an approach to fashioning the future that is as mythopoetic as it is ecological, as mystical as it is political.

We are seeking a radical, integral multiplicity of voices in an emerging consciousness culture—voices that dwell in age of climate crisis and political upheaval. The response to this ecological age is to take leaps ourselves. Mutations is an activity, a performance, and an instance itself of the kind of thinking and being-in-the-world we might describe as “planetary.” As believers of the power of the radical, written word to transform, alter, and most importantly to commune, we recognize that writing together is an act of culture creation, and an invitation for both readers and writers alike to participate in the planetary thought of tomorrow.