Hello friendly homo sapiens, and welcome to our Chimeras Collective newsletter. Here we’ll be sharing information on our latest gatherings, alongside explorations of topics that interest us. Come play! What is a chimera anyways? A bit more of our thoughts below…

The chimera shows us the limits of the singular individual.

A chimera is a hybrid. In Greek mythology, the chimera is a maligned female monster, part lioness, part goat, part snake. In biology, the chimera is an organism with disparate autonomous parts. The power of a chimera lies in its two (or more) parts coming together to form a whole, yet resisting totalization.

Chimeras have long enchanted the public imagination.

They show up in countless cosmologies. They evoke fascination and disgust. They offer fantasies of other worlds.

But these monstrous figures are not imaginary; they pull back the curtain on the unavoidable entanglement of our own world. In the chimera we find a troublesome mirror. Something in our collective unconscious recognizes ourselves in them. The chimera reveals the blurring of boundaries between ourselves and the other. We were never really pure.

We aren’t just witnesses to this chimeric age – we are its living embodiment.

Information about environmental doom surrounds us, but there’s a shortage of spaces where this knowledge gets metabolized emotionally and socially. An animal body that cannot metabolize ceases to live.

Our entanglement isn’t slowing down. We continue to merge with the technosphere and plastisphere as nature-culture divides disintegrate, inhabiting a postnatural world. Each of us are chimeric beings comprised of microplastics, medical devices, bacteria, and other unknown contaminants. We are in the age of the chimera.