Stemming from the encounters and debates of ARIA—the Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly^{^[1]}—held in Ljubljana in the summers of 2023 and 2024, this issue of the Šum journal^{^[2]} features some of the voices^{^[3]} that shaped, in one way or another, ARIA’s two editions.

ARIA is a summer school exploring—at the intersection of politics and ecological thinking—the hybridization of art, education, and theory with immersive (role)play. Experimenting with agency, identity, and collectivity, it seeks to transform the imaginaries and scripts informing our collective practice, and prototype speculative yet lived scenarios, new ways of being, thinking, and feeling in a time of planetary upheaval.

Un/worlding movements of ARIA’s cohort are fostered by transformative practices operating in the bleed-space between reality and fiction. Tapping into speculative philosophies, ancient spiritual and occult traditions, somatic techniques, and contemporary digital technologies, among others, they are guided by the need to imagine and create not only otherworlds but also otherselves.

Resonating through the contributions in this issue of Šum is thus a shared concern, and urgency, for moving beyond the deeply entrenched, traditional (Western) understanding of the “self”. No longer stable, autonomous, and separate from its environment, conjured here are the outlines of a radically transformed self, rooted in our organic existence intrinsically tethered to and entangled with the planet’s metabolism.

Tracing this softening and dissolving of the boundaries of ego-centric self-model towards more relational, transindividual, or metabolic perspectives (and ethics) allows also for the recognition of bodies defiant of organicistic views. Anachronistic body, porous body, networked body, second body, more-than-human body, planetary body, cosmic body, selfless body, multibody…, are summoned in the following pages as possible models of planetary embodiment that help us put to rest the outdated notions of the Human and its world of colonial modernity, while pointing to a possible otherlife beyond the impending horizon of the end.

Becoming-other and becoming-self are rendered indistinguishable in the twilight moment when a familiar world sets and an alien one begins to dawn.^{^[4]}