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Open Humanities Press - New Book

Mundus Immundus: Unworlding, Afterlife, and the Cinema

by Jens Andermann

How is our vanishing world experienced and cathected into affective circuits of fear and enjoyment, mourning and resistance? To consider what Hannah Arendt calls Entweltlichung, or loss of world, this book turns to cinema as an alternate form of thinking (in) the present. Mundus immundus — a central figure in Augustinian theology — offers a key for addressing the clashes and entanglements between the two histories that emplot our catastrophic present: the annihilation, in real time, of a habitable planet, and the becoming-fascist of late-capitalist subjectivities as our way of coexisting with and of enjoying the world’s unworlding.

But rather than to industrial cinema’s apocalyptic end-tales and their grand allegories of collapse and resurgence of extractive capitalism and white supremacy, Andermann turns to the neo-regionalist cinemas of the Global South to study unworlding and its afterlives as an interruption or withdrawal of cinematic worldmaking, forcing viewers to “stay with the trouble.” In dialogue with films by Pedro Costa, Lucrecia Martel, Kléber Mendonça Filho, Laura Citarella, Flora Gomes, Lisandro Alonso, and Adirley Queirós, among others, Mundus Immundus inquires about disaster by invoking some of its most illustrious names: Capitalocene (the relationship of mutual devastation that subsumes bodies and environments), Negrocene (the racialized denial of world that has sustained capitalism since its origins), and Thanatocene (the imbrication between technologies of war and extraction, and of these with forms of spectacle and enjoyment founded on destructiveness). But the book also explores the poetics and politics of afterlife — of survivance, re-existence, re-becoming Indigenous — and their manifestations in contemporary cinemas of re-enactment and re-performance.

Author Bio

Jens Andermann is David B. Kriser Professor in the Humanities at New York University. He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and of the book series SubAtlantic: Latin American, Caribbean, and Luso-African Ecologies (De Gruyter-Brill). He writes about art, literature, film, architecture and politics in Latin America and Luso-Africa. His books in English include Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape (Northwestern University Press, 2023), New Argentine Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2011), and The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh 2007), and as co-editor, Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2023); Natura. Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape (Diaphanes, 2018), and Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader (Routledge, 2018).

Mundus immundus is part of the CCC2 Irreversibility series, edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook.

Open Humanities Summer 2026 Playlist

Specially curated for Open Humanities by Mark Amerika.

Bitchin Bajas - Skylarking

Aerial M - Dazed and Awake

Aerial M - Vivea-1

Chad Mossholder - Tunneling Under the Structure Till iI Falls

Amerika / Mossholder - Another Medium

Stereolab - Esemplastic Creeping Eruption

Please share your own playlists. We’d love to listen to them.

A Recently Published Title You May Have Missed

Curating Superintelligences: A Reader on AI and Future Curating

edited by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

This volume addresses a shift in contemporary curatorial field largely attributed to the ubiquitous presence of information and computational technologies, the rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence, and the reclaiming of subaltern knowledges. It poses questions about the implications of these “super-intelligences” for contemporary art and culture, and the new possibilities for curatorial practice and its future forms.

What are the lessons to be learnt? What can the practice of curating learn from AI, what can AI learn from curating, and how can both unlearn knowledges derived from undemocratic, centralised and colonialist frameworks of humans and machines? What kind of future infrastructures and curatorial practices can develop from the coming together of diverse human and non-human entities? What new kinds of curatorial knowledge can emerge from desires to reclaim marginalised categories such as automation, machine, nature, women, black and people of colour, indigenous people, LGBTQIA, from their usual positions in knowledge taxonomies as epistemological objects of study rather than curating subjects? What new understandings, relationships, and new entities can emerge once open to the possibilities afforded by expanded human and machine epistemologies?

The book is part reader and part new commissions, compiled by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, with contributions by Dominik Bönisch, CROSSLUCID, Marialaura Ghidini, Olga Goriunova, Francis Hunger, Leonardo Impett, Victoria Ivanova, Eva Jäger, Nathan Jones, Murad Khan, Nora N. Khan, Joasia Krysa, Jason Edward Lewis (Kanaka Maoli/Samoan), Mikhel Proulx, Nicolas Malevé, Gabriel Menotti, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Alasdair Milne, Christiane Paul, Helen V. Pritchard, Tom Schofield, Skawennati (Kanien’kehá:ka), Sam Skinner, Katrina Sluis, Winnie Soon, Gaia Tedone, Suzanne Treister, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Elvia Vasconcelos, Ashley Lee Wong, Mi You, Martin Zeilinger, Gary Zhexi Zhang.

The book expands on Liverpool Biennial’s journal Stages 09: The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine, edited by Joasia Krysa and Manuela Moscoso on the occasion of Liverpool Biennial 2021, and ideas first introduced in DATA Browser 03: Curating Immateriality (2006) edited by Joasia Krysa.

Editor Bios

Joasia Krysa is Professor of Exhibition Research and Director of the Institute of Art and Technology at Liverpool John Moores University, with an adjunct position at Liverpool Biennial. She served as curator of Helsinki Biennial 2023, co-curator of Liverpool Biennial 2016, and part of curatorial team for dOCUMENTA (13). Her publications include co-edited books New Directions May Emerge (Helsinki Art Museum/Helsinki Biennial 2023), Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (MIT Press 2015), Curating Immateriality (Data Bowser vol 3, 2016), and chapters in Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of New Media Art (Bloomsbury 2025), Networks (Whitechapel/MIT Press 2014) and The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (2015). She is co-author of an online curatorial software project Kurator (2004) and a curatorial AI series The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine (2021-2023). Her curatorial work was presented, amongst others, at KANAL Centre Pompidou Brussels, ZKM Media Art Centre, The Whitney Museum of American Art’s artport, and Tate Modern London.

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture, director of the Centre for Critical Data Practices at Aarhus University, and an independent curator. Her research explores data-driven digital transformation in knowledge practices. She develops participatory methods for data practices beyond BigTech extractivism through speculative approaches and open data principles in research and educational projects, such as Fermenting Data and Curating Data. She is co-author of Boundary Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and co-editor of Executing Practices (Open Humanities Press, 2018).

Curating Intelligences is part of the DATA Browser series, edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa.

Further Listening

For more on Open Humanities Press, a podcast featuring Sigi Jöttkandt, Joanna Zylinska and Gary Hall from OHP, titled 'Friendship, and Other Ways of Producing Knowledge', is available on the Scholē IRL website, and also on YouTube.

Be sure to check out ‘Emergence with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi from 3Ecologies’ on Scholē IRL while you’re there.

Thank you for reading (and listening)!

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From Search to Chat

We’ve been asked to expand on a remark in our first Open Humanities newsletter, where we referred to:

the predicted shift away from material, including open access publications, being discovered through search engines such as Google and DuckDuckGo, and toward knowledge and information being accessed through AI chatbots instead. (Apparently, much of Gen Z has already begun to make the switch.)

Why does this shift matter?

For the last twenty years, much of the open access movement has assumed that, if research is made freely available online, those with access to the internet will be able to find it. Search has been one of the principle infrastructures linking openness to discoverability.

But that infrastructure is changing.

Instead of typing keywords into a search engine and scanning the results, people – especially younger users – are increasingly entering into dialogue with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other large language model (LLM) AI systems: asking questions, providing prompts and receiving support with decision making in return. A 2026 Pew Research Centre report, for instance, has found that more than half of US teenagers now use AI chatbots to search for information.

If this trend continues, AI ‘assistants’ may soon become the primary interface through which research and scholarship is encountered, by undergraduate and postgraduate students particularly.

At the moment most of these systems operate according to a familiar freemium model. Here, basic access is free, while more advanced ‘premium’ features require payment, usually through a monthly or yearly subscription (as recently introduced by ByteDance, owner of China’s most popular chatbot Doubao, as well as TikTok).

We’ve seen this pattern before. Many of today’s platform capitalist businesses initially offered free services for a few years, regarding this as a means to become larger than their competitors as quickly as possible in order to benefit:

• firstly, from the network effect, whereby everyone uses them, be it Facebook, Academia.edu or LinkedIn, because everyone else does;

• secondly, from the advantages of scale: the larger the dataset they accumulate, the greater amount of material they can process, mine and analyse. This allows these Big Tech businesses to extract more precise insights than those of their competitors with smaller data pools.

Eventually, however, they needed to make a profit. They sought to do so not only by introducing subscription fees for premium features, but also by surveilling users’ behaviour on their platforms and monetising the resulting data through advertising and sponsored search results.

It’s therefore no surprise that Big AI companies are beginning to go down the same route, with some introducing the targeted advertising model of extractivist social media platforms into their chatbots, including the once non-profit OpenAI’s Free and Go subscription tiers for ChatGPT. After all, these AI systems already have access to everything users share with them. Given both the scale of their adoption – by May 2025 ChatGPT had become the fifth most visited website in the world – and the intimate nature of many of these exchanges, with people increasingly treating them as career coaches, therapists, mentors, friends, even surrogate romantic partners, it was perhaps only a matter of time before users’ prompts and interactions came to be routinely surveilled, and the resulting data likewise became monetised through paid adverts or charges for ad-free versions.

Some have even argued that, in the future, it will not simply be more and more of our interactions that are monetised in this way – particularly as AI becomes embedded in wearable devices such as Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses – but our intentions. These companies will use GenAI to understand what we want before we know we want it, and then draw on this intimate knowledge to present it in ways that are designed to influence, persuade and ultimately manipulate us into consuming it.

As we said in our first Open Humanities newsletter, this AI ecosystem is already narrower than the open web, being shaped by the datasets these companies have been able to assemble to train or fine-tune their models, often without authorisation or licence. If we want our open access publications to appear in responses generated by today’s chatbots, we must therefore hope they are included in these datasets, regardless of whether that material was acquired by scraping websites, downloading content from ‘pirate’ libraries, or other means. Even then it may not be enough, given that xAI’s Grok has been explicitly designed as an ‘anti-woke’ counterpart to OpenAI’s ‘politically correct’ ChatGPT, according to Elon Musk. Making research freely available online thus no longer necessarily means it can be easily found (and this in spite of the best efforts of dedicated academic discovery services such as the Directory of Open Access Journals and Directory of Open Access Books).

Moreover, if things keep heading in this direction, there’s a danger of this ecosystem narrowing still further through the introduction of pay-to-play models where, if you don’t pay the likes of Anthropic and Microsoft, their chatbots will be less likely to mention your research in responses to users’ queries and prompts. If that happens, and visibility within AI-generated responses becomes, at least in part, something that has to be purchased, open access communities such as Open Humanities Press will face an even greater challenge.

Go Analogue

What other forms of intellectual communication are possible when search is replaced by chat as the primary means through which knowledge and information are discovered online?

One response is to secede from the digital ecosystem altogether.

Many artists, activists and community organisers have begun returning to low-tech, analogue forms of communication. The resurgence of artist books, paper zines, pamphlets and DIY print media speaks to a collective desire to escape the constant tracking, scraping and training of the public online world. These formats make it possible to share vital knowledge – about Gaza, abortion access, queer rights, trans health practices – and to build community beyond the purview of corporate algorithmic monitoring, filtering, data profiling and state control.

As Mariame Kaba, founding organizer of the Black Zine Fair, observes, more and more people feel they ‘can’t say certain things’ online. In this context, zines offer a means to ‘share personal experiences, to make connections with other people, to fight censorship, to evade the surveillance that’s consistent and constant when you are on digital platforms.’

There is much to admire in this approach. We’re certainly not against occasionally making work available in analogue or offline-only form, should the situation call for it (as the first image in this edition of the newletter indicates). Yet for an open access publisher such as Open Humanities Press, whose main purpose is to make critical and cultural theory freely available online, abandoning the digital realm altogether hardly seems the most appropriate response.

Build Direct Relationships With Readers

A second answer to the question (also pointed to in our first newsletter) is one that many legacy publishers – newspapers, magazines, book presses – are currently pursuing. They, too, are concerned that readers may soon no longer discover their publications by searching online. Accordingly, they are attempting to bypass the Big AI middlemen by cultivating relationships with audiences they can communicate with directly using subscriptions (whether paid or free) to newsletters, podcasts, book clubs, YouTube channels and short-form videos.

This explains why there suddenly seem to be newsletters everywhere!

Already, traditional media companies and online publishers are no longer attracting the audiences they once did. It’s a situation that has been exacerbated by Meta’s decision to change the algorithms behind Facebook and Instagram from 2024 onwards to prioritise creator content over links to publishers. As a result many are shifting towards subscription-based models that seek to establish a more direct relationship with readers and viewers. A lot of journalists at mainstream news outlets, for instance, are now being pushed to embrace short-form video and operate much more like YouTube and TikTok talking-head, camera-facing content creators in order to reach larger audiences. (The algorithms tend to reward videos in which people feature their faces. Hence podcasts are also now filmed and then clipped up into short videos in the hope they’ll go viral.)

Yet this strategy carries its own risks. Even among those who want to create media according to a different set of principles from the mainstream, including a privileging of – and search for – connectivity, cooperation, collaboration and community through mailing lists, message boards, Discord channels and indie presses, the gravitational pull of the algorithms remains strong. All too often they end up reproducing the neoliberal subjectivity of the commodified ‘authentic’ self and cult of personality associated with the attention systems of late capitalist influencer culture; and do so even as they’re mocking, critiquing and misusing this hyper-individualistic subjectivity and trying to move beyond it.

This approach to the problem also demands a relentless cycle of posting, responding and promoting to stay current, feed the algorithms and pursue virality and reach (and in many cases income, too, through subscriptions, micro-payments and the sale of merchandise). It’s a cycle that, as well as explicitly and implicitly shaping work (social media is not a neutral tool, after all), can quickly lead to exhaustion, anxiety and burnout - not to mention overwhelming narcissism.

Create Smaller-Scale Communities

A number of factors have been paving the way for the emergence of a third response to the dilemma. They include the way:

• younger Gen Z internet users are moving away from platforms full of ads and AI slop towards online discussion forums such as Reddit, which they regard as being populated by more authentic posts from actual humans. (As of 2026, Reddit has overtaken TikTok as Britain’s fourth most visited social media service. It is ‘now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it.’ A recent agreement with Google enabling the company to use Reddit to train its AI models also seems to have increased its visibility. Reddit is now the most cited source in Google’s AI Overviews, a development likely to drive more traffic to its forums. Reddit has entered into a comparable arrangement with OpenAI.)

• people are generally contributing less to algorithmically mediated broadcast platforms like X, Instagram and Facebook, with Ofcom reporting that the proportion of adult social media users in the UK who post, share or comment has dropped by 12 percentage points in the last year alone.

  

  These platforms are increasingly seen as angry, unsafe and often cruel environments where users cannot fully be themselves yet are still expected to perform in public and live with the consequences. Consequently, many are turning to private or semi-private environments such as WhatsApp and Signal. These are regarded as relatively safe spaces where users can be themselves: trusted networks in which they do not necessarily want to be seen or noticed by large numbers of others, but do want to share ideas that matter to them and their specific communities. (This also helps explain why there is reportedly less interaction on public-facing social media platforms nowadays: more people lurking or passively consuming TikTok videos and Instagram Reels as entertainment rather than actively engaging in posting, sharing or commenting as they might once have done on Twitter or Facebook);

• having a large social media following is being taken more and more as an indication that your work has become overly shaped by the algorithms. Post-pandemic, after a period of everyone being perpetually online, accumulating thousands of followers is no longer particularly difficult or unusual. With ongoing talk of a ‘dead internet’, where content is ever more AI-generated and followers may be bots, it may even be read as a warning sign. Having fewer than 500 followers, by contrast, can suggest that, if you’re posting at all rather than ‘posting zero’, you’re posting about what genuinely interests you, not what the internet wants you to find interesting.

This has led other thinkers to embark on what they’re terming a ‘post-naïve era’. Here, rather than struggling for idealistic ‘grand alternatives like the free and open internet for everyone’, and if that fails abandoning the internet altogether, they are being more ‘realistic’ in building digital infrastructure that is designed to meet only their own specific needs and core values along with those of their communities.

They are spending less time and energy attempting to broadcast to everyone on infinite scrolling public broadcast platforms such as X, Instagram and TikTok, and more time participating in smaller communities: groupchats, newsletters, book clubs, private forums and other trusted networks. In short, they’re retreating into ‘the dark forest of the internet’ by moving away from ideas of universal visibility towards more situated groupings where they can quietly come together to create their own online spaces or miniverses.

An Experiment

In this sense the Open Humanities newsletter is itself an experiment. One of the questions we’re exploring with it is: Where does Open Humanities Press and its network of interlacing scholarly communities fit into all this?

Should we simply keep calm and carry on much as before, even as people gradually shift from search to chat – and, if it comes to it, pay AI platforms for visibility?

Should we try to get ahead of the game by cultivating direct relationships with readers through newsletters, podcasts, book clubs, YouTube channels and short-form videos, with all the attendant risks this strategy involves?

Or should we begin to imagine something else: a community of smaller, situated scholarly communities perhaps, one that remains responsibly open while no longer necessarily aspiring to universal visibility?

We don’t yet have an answer.

Perhaps the point of the Open Humanities newsletter is not to provide one, but to create a space in which we can begin working it out together.

Thanks for reading!

Please share with anyone you think might find it interesting.

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We welcome the submission of ideas and material for future posts. This includes suggestions for different ways of using Substack that are consistent with the values and practices of OHP, rather than Open Humanities being just another newsletter.

Welcome to Open Humanities, the newsletter of Open Humanities Press (OHP), a radical, scholar-led, open access publisher of critical and cultural theory. It features contributions from those associated with the Press, alongside others engaging with its ideas, publications and practices.

The newsletter – which we hope to send out semi-regularly (but certainly no more than once a week) – explores what it means to create, publish and circulate knowledge at a moment marked by the erosion of liberal democracies, the unraveling of the neoliberal world order, the increasing marketisation of knowledge and education, the hollowing out of the humanities, and the growing influence of AI on how information is produced, discovered and shared. In doing so, it questions many inherited assumptions: about authorship and creativity, copyright and ownership, politics and culture, class and inequality, even about the very idea of ‘the human’.

What Might An Open Humanities Newsletter Become?

Open Humanities also experiments with what a newsletter is and might become. In the first instance, this means being collective and community-oriented rather than centred on any one individual, and remaining free rather than paid-for. (We are not interested in using a freemium model in which basic access to the newsletter is available to all while additional ‘premium’ features - such as the ability to comment, participate in discussions or access the archives - are placed behind a paywall.)

Here you will find updates from Open Humanities Press alongside ongoing research, experiments and related activities: new writing, work in progress, extracts from forthcoming publications, reflections, responses to current events along with previously published works that have taken on new relevance.

We also welcome ideas and material for future posts. This includes suggestions for different ways of using Substack that are consistent with with the values and practices of OHP and the approach outlined above, rather than Open Humanities being just another newsletter.

Join The Open Humanities Community

If any of this resonates, we invite you to subscribe to the Open Humanities newsletter. You don’t need to do anything more if you don’t want to: every new post will simply arrive in your email inbox, no more than weekly. (Unlike many newsletters, we're not driven by the need to maximise subscriptions or audience growth, so we'll publish only when we have something we think is worth sharing.)

Subscribe now

Like Open Humanities Press itself, the newsletter is open and free, and will remain so.

About Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is a not-for-profit scholar-led publishing collective. Initiated in 2006 and launched publicly in 2008, it consists of a network of interlacing scholarly communities whose various, predominantly autonomous, editorial activities make up the press. OHP’s mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought immediately available on an open access basis, without charging author-pays fees. OHP has published over sixty relatively conventional, hybrid print+digital first open access books. It also includes ten currently active book series (thirteen in all) and twenty-two peer-reviewed journals, among them Culture Machine, Electronic Book Review, Film-Philosophy and Postcolonial Text.

(For more on Open Humanities Press, see the selection of readings on the OHP website, and most recently, Gary Hall, Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence, published in Open Humanities Press’s Media:Art:Write:Now series, edited by Joanna Zylinska – from where the above paragraph has been taken.)

Why A Newsletter, And Why Now?

Part of our motivation is to experiment with how we can respond to the predicted shift away from material, including open access publications, being discovered through search engines such as Google and DuckDuckGo, and toward finding knowledge and information being accessed through AI chatbots instead. (Apparently, much of Gen Z has already begun to make the switch.)

The latter ecosystem is already narrower than the open web; and may soon narrow further through the introduction of pay-to-play models. Here, if you don’t pay the likes of Anthropic and Microsoft, then their chatbots may be less likely to mention your work in responses to prompts. OpenAI has already begun testing introducing advertising into its Free plan for ChatGPT: if you want a version without ads then you'll need to pay.

Many legacy publishers – newspapers, magazines, book presses – are understandably concerned that readers may no longer discover their publications via the open web. As a result, they are attempting to bypass the Big AI middlemen by cultivating relationships with audiences they can communicate with directly using subscriptions (whether paid or free) to newsletters, podcasts, book clubs, YouTube channels and short-form videos.

At the same time, we are interested in exploring whether, and how, such forms can be used differently: not simply to reproduce existing economies of branding, visibility and self-promotion, but to experiment with less exploitative and extractive, more low key, collective and responsibly open ways of publishing, sharing and circulating knowledge and ideas.

In the past we’ve experimented with videos and podcasts.

So we thought we’d give a newsletter a try.

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