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Gentofte Hovedbibliotek
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“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.”

Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam, 2013

“The CRISPR technology is so simple and efficient that scientists could exploit it to modify the human germline – the stream of genetic information connecting one generation to the next. And, have no doubt, this technology will – someday, somewhere – be used to change the genome of our own species in ways that are heritable, forever altering the genetic composition of human kind.”

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, 2017

“No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals – because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between super-humans and humans. ”

Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2015

“The debates in mainstream culture range from hard-nosed business discussions of robotics, prosthetic technologies, neuroscience and bio-genetic capital to fuzzier new age visions of transhumanism and techno-transcendence. Human enhancement is at the core of these debates. In academic culture, on the other hand, the post human is alternatively celebrated as the next frontier in critical and cultural theory or shunned as the latest in a series of annoying 'post' fads. The posthuman provokes elation but also anxiety about the possibility of a serious de-centering of 'Man', the former measure of all things.”

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 2013

“A bird-monster devouvering sinners, naked bodies in tantric contortions, a pair of ears brandishing a sharpende blade: with nightmarish detail and fantastical painterly schemes, Netherlandish visionary Hieronymus Bosch ( ca. 1450-1516) secured his place as an art historical magnet. Fivehundret years from his death, his extrodenary works continues to enthrall scholars, artists, designers and mucicians.”

Stefan Fischer, Hieronymus Bosch. The complete works, 2013

“Over and over again Ovid sings of beings who are transformed into stone or who come into being from stone. He evokes geology of the Mediterranean world, the hardness and austerity of its terrain: Atlas, his bones turned into boulders, is metamorphosed into a mountain that supports the star-filled heavens above (…) Ever so many beings in Ovid are turned from flesh into stone. Think, for example of Echo who vanishes into rock or Niobe who becomes stone. The world imagined by Ovid is ambiguous. It oscillates between flesh and stone. Human beings are marble incarnate, or are they marbled flesh?”

Paul Barolsky, Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso, 2014

“Of course greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence. The Gods of Greece, if we are archeological and palaeoanthropical about it all, can be traced back to the sky fathers, moon goddesses and demons og the 'fertile crescent' of Mesopotamia – todays Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians and other civilisations there, which first flourished far earlier than the Greeks, had their creation stories and folk myths which, like the languages that expressed them, could find ancestry in India and thence westwards back to prehistory, Africa and the birth of our species.”

Stephen Fry, Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, 2017

“I felt the currents move. The grains of sand whispered against each other. His wings were lifting. The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another.”

Madeline Miller, Circe, 2018

“No one had ever come this high before, and no one had ever breathed such thin air. As he stood at the top of the world, looking down upon the mountain ranges folded beneath him, Humboldt began to see the world differently. He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world.”

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, 2015

“The threshold of pain to the human ear is 120 to 130 decibels. A jet engine is about 140 decibels. Concert music, at its loudest, is 150 decibels. Blue Whales, comparatively, belt out their vocals at 188 decibels. Their communications are time-delayed because of water. They may, in their giant Umwelten, have fabulous multisensory pictures of major portions of the ocean, images that, even if we had direct access to them, we couldn't process, because our brains are too small. They may experience time in an extended way compared to our sense of time, even as their native ocean-imaging abilities likely far surpases our own.”

Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 1934/2010