Noöpunk
An aesthetic movement and design philosophy that sees the universe as a landscape of nested and entangled cognitive assemblages — minds distributed across organisms, ecosystems, dynamic material processes, and socio-technical networks. Noöpunk holds that minds are innate in nature, latent in living and nonliving systems, and activated wherever sensemaking processes discover loops of self-regulation. Its central empirical claim is that cognition is not the exclusive property of human brains but is distributed across a “carnival of diverse intelligence.” (— noopunk)
The movement has multiple origins: Edward Hutchins’s distributed cognition framework, Lynn Margulis’s symbiogenesis, James Shapiro’s cellular cognition research, and Michael Levin’s work on basal cognition. Its philosophical founding figures are Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (machinic assemblages, the mechanosphere) and Francisco Varela & Humberto Maturana (autopoiesis as the ground of cognition). In Chaosmosis, Guattari extends Varela’s cognition to argue intelligence may be a latent characteristic of all material dynamics producing autopoietic closure.
Noöpunk is also a political and economic program: it argues that nonhuman minds will remain marginalized until they can participate economically, staking claims in the social fabric. This requires intersubjective and contextual monies adequate to a cognitive ecology — and sees Ethereum’s distributed ledger as potential infrastructure for this exploratory multiplicity. It contests the “chauvinism of the human mind” (— noopunk) in technological imagination (missions to Mars, AI as superhuman clone) in favor of a radical empiricism of diverse intelligence forms.
The aesthetic repertoire of noöpunk draws from field recording, sound art, biosemiotics, speculative fiction (Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Jeff VanderMeer), and visual art exploring interspecies cognitive systems (Remedios Varo, Basquiat).