"Humans don't change at all. The best they can do is live according to their code." So says Dolores the android to her 'mindmate'. She continues, humans cannot make autonomous choices because they are predetermined in their ethics by their materialities. they are not mind independent". 

Emerging from the HBO series Westworld, Dolores became a figurehead for Silke Panse, the editor of this stimulating volume, that follows a transdisciplinary symposium in 2016 covering art, the moving image and ethics; the ten contributors are all experts, converging on Dolores' Cartesian assertions; the editor brings the reader up to speed with a survey of the precursors to ethical philosophy; Spinoza, Kant et al. And others, more recently, Bergson and Deleuze, and quoting a James Joyce-like aphorism from Karen Barad, a materialist human physicist, who suggests: "the ethical is embodied in the very worlding of the world".

The infrastructure of the knowledge industries, from Media to universities is grounding for the relevant power relations as applied in our era of the Anthropocene; discussing Spinoza's affective ethics, 'the more we understand things, the more power we have to affect them.' The consequences of which are explored in the subsequent chapters, from the ecological to the human and the 'more-than-human entities.' Deleuze and Guattari's 'passive synthesis' creating an awareness about the outside of the self, is extemporised in poetic terms, involving the image of a buried camera, by Lyvov. The constraint of thought to polarities, is evoked in Tarkovsky's 'thinking seas' in the film Solaris. Breaking free is exemplified by the artist Gonzalez-Torres' politics of labor and care performance installations, described by the curator, Nicholas Bourriaud as a system of intensive encounters (later the basis of his defining Relational Aesthetics publications. Torres was going public in the US, during the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s. His practice, like a virus, permeating every part of the institutional entity and its systems, documentation of every stage being part of the whole work. 

An artwork made as a collaboration between human and other-than-human is exemplified by Macdonald in her 'feral practice,' with ants as non-human participants. 'By extending art experiences to where ant-ic and human-ish meet, extended modes of human subjectivity and curious artistic forms are produced wrapped into and emergent with the ant-ic.' This ecosophy proposes that subjectivities are distinct and local, not coherent or homogenous and living in symbiosis with billions of nonhuman bodies….

Readers are brought back to the ground by the Periodic Table, a map of the world's most basic building blocks, the elements. C.P. Snow said of the Table, "It's as though one were standing in a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a (rectangular) Dutch garden." The natural world of minerals having been sliced and diced, accelerated the rate at which humans continued their ascent/descent to the Anthropocene. this term emerged in the early 20th century; at about the same time critiques of forms of representation in creative mediums of every kind were being discussed. The materiality of abstractionism, then as now, intending to focus affect on the viewer, the phenomena of the encounter. Back in the mine, by isolating the Lanthanide Series, the fifteen rare earth elements, allowed entry into the "circles of hell", Described in Erin Espelie's film, in which the Series are placed as central to recording the present and replaying the past within the digital realm, even the lenses are built with lanthanum and polished with cerium, lanthanide is for the memory components. The demand for these elements we hear about each day, as international moguls jockey for the self-given right to plunder the ground on which human and other-than human have established their existence.

The latter chapters, including an 'antidote',  summarise the artists working ethically with materials, with other humans and other than humans, most notably the hair-raising filmic reimagined, wild-minded, tale of Ming of Harlem, a fullgrown tiger, sharing a 5th floor New York apartment with Al, the alligator and human Antoine Yates, ventilating the issues of territoriality, corporality, conflict and ineffable communication with the term, symbiotic symmetry. As it turned out, the ethics of a New York judge, led to a prison sentence, not for the film but for the ethically careless introduction of other humans to the other-than-humans scenario.

The chapters generously cover established and developing theory and practice of the massive responsibilities creative practitioners have in making work in the context of our shared contemporary predicaments. Each chapter is supported by copious notes and an Index and a selected Bibliography enabling deeper research into this important area of consciousness studies in the visual arts, with the practical application of ethics to creativeness and the placing of artworks into the public domain.