Part scientific treatise, part philosophical fiction, Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (1987) offers a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of the human and opens the way for a strange non-philosophy of life by studying the strange animal “vampire squid from hell”. Overcoming anthropocentrism, Flusser maps our joint evolutionary paths, portraying the uncanny similarities between the two creatures and the fascinating and marvellous biology of the Vampyroteuthis. “The same fundamental structure informs both our bodies,” writes Flusser,

“His metabolism is our own.” An homage to the provocateur’s text, Litvintseva and Wagner’s work Bilateria – a subkingdom of animals that has a bilateral symmetry and complete digestive tracts with separate mouth and anus – employs the Klein bottle as a form with which to inhabit the interstices between organisms and environments. The Klein bottle is a mathematical shape that, like the Möbius strip, merges interior and exterior, beginning and end. In Bilateria, the form is simultaneously a leaky vessel and a projection surface for an array of found video material. Organisms and environments are mapped onto a single metabolic pathway where inside and outside continuously fold into each other in rhythmic pulsations. Somewhere between the mouth and anus, in the centre of our digestive system, humans transform the world and itself through food. “Reality is not an organism or an environment,” authors argue, “Reality is food.”