The Cybercene Lab

Fabulous meeting of old friends and new in San Diego! 🎉🎉❤️

From left to right, myself, Prof. Pasquale Verdicchio (UC San Diego), one of the pioneering scholars of Italian Ecocriticism, Professor Loredana Di Martino (University of San Diego and my fantastic host) and Professor Clarissia Clò (San Diego State University). I gave a talk to a really enthusiastic group of undergraduate students and faculty on "The Long Italian Anthropocene: The Capture-and Control of Bodies, Lives and Ecosystems in the Cybercene."

I wanted to share with you a link to graduate student Anatoli Ulyanov's beautiful, passionate and moving news article about the lab-sponsored Multispecies Humanities field trip to Wi'ma (Santa Rosa) Channel Island, off the coast of Ventura County. Trust me, reading it will make you feel good over this whole weekend! Thanks, Anatoli, for your love for learning "all things multispecies"!👏🐊🐝🦋

https://humanities.ucla.edu/news/channel-islands-environmental-humanities/

The Cybercene Lab splashes down in England! Dr. Nathan just delivered a keynote address at the University of Oxford: "On the Epistemic Humility of Multispecies Kinship: Cultivating Attentiveness, Care and Wellbeing." What a fabulous and inspiring audience! ❤️

Happy to be invited here at Christchurch, in this special year - it was founded as Cardinal College by Cardinal Wolsey, exactly 500 years ago! 🎉

Happy Friday folks! Starting a new tradition for the lab today...Friday will be "Critter of the Week" day from now on! 🎉A wonderful way to start your weekend, we hope!

Meet...the Channel Islands Fox (Urocyon littoralis). Its cute, its cuddly, its charismatic. During the lab-sponsored graduate student seminar field trip, we hoped to encounter it and were tracking its prints. Only to find that they were tracking us back! They are found ONLY on the Channel Islands, and it is thanks to a fantastic conservation effort with the National Park Service and others that has brought it back from the brink.❤️

The Cybercene Lab and the Department of
European Languages & Transcultural
Studies warmly invite you to
A Multispecies Salon!!!
A Compost Conference for
Communicating Critters

March 11, 2025, 4-6 pm
In Royce 306
Followed by a convivial reception
www.thecybercenelab.org

New Beginnings out in California! Stay in Touch as our New Events and Projects will be unveiled in the next few days. First Lab event at UCLA coming in March 2025😍😍😍

The Cybercene Lab seeks to analyze how cultural discourse attributes value on human versus nonhuman lives, both historically and in the Cybercene era. Studies such as this recent major project at UCLA provide a lens into the complex affective lives of animals, often disavowed by/in many human cultural discourses.

UCLA Professor of Communications Greg Bryant says, “This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon [of laughing] once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said. Here is a link to the complete study, published in Bioacoustics: The International Journal of Animal Sound and its Recording.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09524622.2021.1905065?journalCode=tbio20

🐾 I Critter of the Week time!

🐶 I am so happy to introduce you four members of my multispecies family!

Clockwise from upper left: Buck is 10 years old, Argo 9, and Keera and Junior (siblings) 2 years old.

☕ Happy Monday!

Nice article from The Guardian exploring how the Cybercene has caused a renewed “flattening” of urban interior spaces globally - thanks to algorithmic visuals, have you ever gotten the sense that the interiors of modern coffee shops look all the same, whether you are in New York, Bangkok or Buenos Aires!?

Are “generic hipster cafés” with chalkboard menus, etc. the future of all urban cultural spaces, thanks to algorithmic cultural expectations? or will this standardization plateau at some point?

The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same The long read: From the generic hipster cafe to the ‘Instagram wall’, the internet has pushed us towards a kind of global ubiquity – and this phenomenon is only going to intensify

A soon to be published study demonstrates that in children, semantic encoding is far deeper when they read traditional print books rather than e-books on screens. Surprising?…

“Depth of semantic encoding is key for reading comprehension, and we predicted that deeper reading of expository texts would facilitate stronger associations with subsequently-presented related words..”

The study “provides evidence of differences in brain responses to texts presented in print and digital media, including deeper semantic encoding for print than digital texts.”

This makes one wonder… how much does screen time and virtual connections with bodies, lives and nature take away from truly engaged relationships with these living ecocultural entities?

Here the upcoming study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.30.553693v1

🪱 It’s Wednesday, so it's time for our “cool critter of the week!”

We often take earthworms for granted, just as we take fertile soil that conditions and then produces all our food for granted. Let's give a high five to these amazing creatures that engineer our soils tirelessly so that they can be so productive :)

In his final book "The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms" (1881), Charles Darwin said: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”!

Ironic isn’t it?!

The many hulking and abandoned oil rigs off the California coast have been taken over by sponges, corals, and tunicates…which then, in turn, attracted shrimp, crabs, brittle stars, and so on…right up the trophic levels!

Read the full paper here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1411477111