Abstract

LIVERATION. PROMETHEUS DELIVERED tells a story that oscillates between science fiction and horror, utopia and dystopia. The episode connects sculpture, literature, music and performance with biochemical processes in which liver cells are fermented and distilled to alcohol. The narrative leads into the recesses of a new materialism where the human body and its tissues are subjected to radical sustainability.
The cannibalism of the future will not derive from amorality or dark evil, but from the principle of autotroph resource utilization. Autophagy is no longer metonymic with the savage, the uncivilized and the pre-modern; instead, it is the ethical imperative for a posthuman world and reflects the desire for attaining a paradisiac state of self-containment. LIVERATION refers to the ancient tradition of hepatoscopy. The organ that was once deemed the seat of life becomes the episode’s point of departure to read humanity’s future VERMÖGEN in the context of a cellular economy.