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H. Palmer:
"Whorlomorphic Paragenesis";
Talk: Jahreskonferenz der Society for European Philosophy / Forum for European Philosophy SEP-FEP, Staffordshire University UK; 2020-10-30 - 2020-11-07.

As a process of transformation from seawater into Cartesian logarithmic spirals, the architecture of shells appears to demand both mathematical precision and an order of time far greater than the human calendar, and began to be studied as such through the 19th and 20th centuries in works such as D´Arcy Wentworth-Thompson´s Of Growth and Form (1917). As homes, wheels, receptacles, baths, balers, trumpets, jewellery or drinking horns, shells are harder and stronger than the endoskeletal homo sapiens sapiens. What, then, is whorlic temporality? From the inhuman to the posthuman by way of the all-too-human, how might the spiral shape of shells that house crustaceans determine a different order or orders of time that might slow down or speed up evolution? This provocation is explored through the ficteme: a speculative unit that mobilises material objects or concepts through setting them to work on a fictional stage. The whorl becomes its own conceptual persona in a narrative that begins at the Natural History Museum in London one January day and ends with two human bodies accelerevolving into giant shells. The process of accelerevolving is documented in this paper.