A rt in the Anthropocene

A rt in the A nthropocene
Encounters A mong Aesthetics, Pol it ics, Env ironments and Epistemologies
Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin
A rt in the A nthropocene
Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook
The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in the textual production and archives; but the current sense of deple- tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distri- bution. As the pressures and re-alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of “life.” There is a particular need to publish in a timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo-political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation.
A rt in the A nthropocene
Encounters A mong Aesthetics, Pol it ics, Env ironments and Epistemologies
Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin
London
2015
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2015 Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/art-in-the-anthropocene
Copyright © 2015 Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, chapters by respective Authors.
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Cover Art Details: Mary Mattingly, House and Universe, 2013. © Mary Mattingly.
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OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
001 Acknowledgements
003 Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction introduction by Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin
031 Edenic Apocalypse: Singapore’s End-of-Time Botanical Tourism project by Natasha Myers
043 Diplomacy in the Face of Gaia Bruno Latour in conversation with Heather Davis
057 Becoming Aerosolar: From Solar Sculptures to Cloud Cities project by Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski
063 In the Planetarium: The Modern Museum on the Anthropocenic Stage essay by Vincent Normand
079 Physical Geology / The Library project by Ilana Halperin
085 The Existence of the World Is Always Unexpected Jean-Luc Nancy in conversation with John Paul Ricco translated by Jeffrey Malecki
093 Cloud Writing: Describing Soft Architectures of Change in the Anthropocene essay by Ada Smailbegovi
109 The Cerumen Strata: From Figures to Configurations project by Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le
117 Geochemistry & Other Planetary Perspectives essay by Ursula Biemann
131 Images Do Not Show: The Desire to See in the Anthropocene essay by Irmgard Emmelhainz
143 The Fates of Negativity Anselm Franke in conversation with Etienne Turpin
155 Design Specs in the Anthropocene: Imagining the Force of 30,000 Years of Geologic Change project by Jamie Kruse & Elizabeth Ellsworth (smudge studio)
167 The Marfa Stratum: Contribution to a Theory of Sites essay by Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard
181 On the Building, Crashing, and Thinking of Technologies & Selfhood Peter Galison in conversation with Etienne Turpin
191 We’re Tigers project by Ho Tzu Nyen
199 Technologies of Uncertainty in the Search for MH370 essay by Lindsay Bremner
213 Last Clouds project by Karolina Sobecka
223 Islands & Other Invisible Territories essay by Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office)
233 Plants that Evolve (in some way or another) project by Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo)
241 Indigenizing the Anthropocene essay by Zoe Todd
255 Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney
271 Ecologicity, Vision, and the Neurological System essay by Amanda Boetzkes
283 My Mother’s Garden: Aesthetics, Indigenous Renewal, and Creativity essay by Laura Hall
293 A History According to Cattle project by Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson
299 PostNatural Histories Richard W. Pell in conversation with Emily Kutil & Etienne Turpin
317 Dear Climate project by Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow
327 The Anthropocene: A Process-State at the Edge of Geohistory? essay by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Anna-Sophie Springer
341 Public Smog project by Amy Balkin
347 Life & Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic essay by Heather Davis
359 Ecosystems of Excess project by Pinar Yoldas
371 The Last Political Scene Sylvère Lotringer in conversation with Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin
379 #MISANTHROPOCENE: 24 Theses poem by Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr
385 Contributors
401 Permissions
Acknowledgements
We would like to begin by thanking all the contributors to this volume for their patience and perseverance; the book is a machine for provocation because of your generosity, solidarity, and commitment. We are also grateful to Oscar Santos and Human Resources Los Angeles for hosting an early discussion of the book with Sylvère Lotringer. A very special thank you to Lucas A.J. Freeman for tireless inter- view transcription and editing, to Jeffrey Malecki for translation support and dis- turbingly thorough copy editing, to Erik Bordeleau for ad hoc translation support, and to Anna-Sophie Springer for advice, support, and translation in this collection. Thanks also to Mary Mattingly for sharing artwork for the cover, and to the Institute for Figuring for images of their beautiful crochet coral reef project. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Sara Dean for her patient and precise design of this book. This project has benefited tremendously from the advice and mentorship of our editors in the Critical Climate Change series, Claire Colebrook and Tom Cohen, as well as our allies at the Open Humanities Press, Sigi Jottkandt and David Ottina, to whom we are especially grateful for the chance to bring this collection together, and to make it available as an open-access publication.
Heather Davis owes an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who listened and pro- vided advice on this project as it has unfolded, especially to Michael Nardone for his patience, love, and support throughout. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Grosz, Dehlia Hannah, Nicole Starosielski, Margaret Wertheim, and Ada Smailbegovi for their friendship and intellectual generosity. This project would not have been pos- sible without the financial support of the FQRSC. I am especially grateful to Michael Bérubé and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities for continued support.
Etienne Turpin would like to thank the many contributors to this volume who are also dear friends and collaborators, as well as the many friends, mentors, and col- leagues who have shaped his views on the Anthropocene, including Nabil Ahmed, Lauren B. Allen, Brock Baker, George Beccaloni, Pierre Belanger, Andrew Berry, Lori Brown, Melissa Cate Christ, Nigel Clark, Sonja Dahl, Seth Denizen, Stefania Druga, Anna Feigenbaum, Matthias Glaubrecht, Jason Groves, Nasrin Himada, Stuart Kendall, Eduardo Kohn, Sanford Kwinter, Adrian Lahoud, Dian Ina Mahendra, Miho Mazereeuw, Kiel Moe, Rudolf Mrazek, Hammad Nasar, Dietmar Offenhuber, Godofredo Pereira, Karen Pinkus, Rick Prelinger, Simon Price, Robert Prys-Jones, Farid Rakun, Alessandra Renzi, Laura Rozek, Megan Shaw Prelinger, AbdouMaliq Simone, Kyle Steinfeld, Paulo Tavares, Jane Wolff, and Joanna Zylinska. A special thanks again to Sigi Jottkandt and David Ottina for their continued friendship and support. I would also like to thank my University of Wollongong senior colleagues Pascal Perez, Katina Michael, Lesley Head, as well as my research collaborators at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, especially Matthew Berryman, Robert Ogie, and
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Rohan Wickramasuriya. A special thanks to Tomas Holderness for countless hours of conversation and collaboration, and my ongoing gratitude goes out to our in- credible research team at PetaJakarta.org, without whom this work would not have been possible, especially Sara Dean, Yantri Dewi, Fitria Sudirman, Alifa Rachmadia Putri, Ariel Shepherd, Mohammad Kamil, Tatyana Kusumo, Olivia Dun, and Frank Sedlar. Finally, terimah kasih banyak to my colleagues in Indonesia from Universitas Indonesia, BPBD DKI Jakarta, Jakarta Timur, and Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, for their continued support, advice, humour, and hospitality.
Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin
In the 1930s Henri Cartier-Bresson remarked indignantly, “The world is going to pieces and people like [Ansel] Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks!”1 With his condemnation of the inorganic as an unworthy subject for photo- graphy, we understand Cartier-Bresson to be arguing for a more socially engaged art practice, one that would recognize the political economic realities of the Depression and the ways in which this decisively human context is precisely what allows art to share meaning and transform values. It is a strangely contemporary question: in the face of exploitation, brutality, and impoverishment, shouldn’t art address human suffering and struggle? Such a perspective—albeit one contested by Adams even then—assumes a difference in kind between the shameful reality of human exploits and their stony substrate. It is remarkable that in less than a century we should find the terms of this debate uncannily entangled: what does it mean for art to encounter the Anthropocene? If art is now a practice condemned to a homolithic earth—that is, to a world “going to pieces” as the literal sediment of human activity—how can aesthetic practices address the social and political spheres that are being set in stone? Becoming-geological undoes aesthetic sensibil- ities and ungrounds political commitments. As such, this collection brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations concerned with art and aesthetics that are emerging around the Anthropocene thesis, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists, and activists to address the geological reformation of the hu- man species.
Necessarily, this volume exceeds itself and its editors in every respect, reaching urgently beyond its paginated form toward environmental concerns, aesthetic pre- dilections, epistemological limits, and ethical aporiae. We certainly didn’t set out to contain the discourse of the Anthropocene, nor is it our intention to exhaust the potential lines of flight it provokes; the book is an intellectually dissipative struc- ture, operating as a conceptual centrifuge for further speculation and future action. It is not from some desire to add another conjunctive term to the growing literature on the Anthropocene that we turn to art; rather, art, as the vehicle of aesthesis, is central to thinking with and feeling through the Anthropocene. And we believe the inherent relation between the two occurs at a number of strata and across various scales. First, we argue that the Anthropocene is primarily a sensorial phenomenon: the experience of living in an increasingly diminished and toxic world. Second, the way we have come to understand the Anthropocene has frequently been framed through modes of the visual, that is, through data visualization, satellite imagery,
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climate models, and other legacies of the “whole earth.”2 Third, art provides a pol- yarchic site of experimentation for “living in a damaged world,”3 as Anna Tsing has called it, and a non-moral form of address that offers a range of discursive, visual, and sensual strategies that are not confined by the regimes of scientific objectiv- ity, political moralism, or psychological depression.4 To approach the panoply of complex issues that are aggregated within and adjacent to the Anthropocene, as well as their interconnections and intra-actions, it is necessary to engage with and encounter art.5 But before going further, we’d like to get some formalities out of the way regarding the Anthropocene thesis.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences are currently debating the rele- vant scientific merits of the so-called Anthropocene Epoch, which would allow the organization to recognize a diachronic rift separating the epoch of the Holocene— since the last Ice Age receded almost twelve millennia ago—from our current “hu- man epoch.”6 The term was first popularized by the Dutch chemist Paul J. Crutzen in a 2002 paper he published in Nature, after which references to the Anthropocene began to appear within scientific publications regarding hydrospheric, biospheric, and pedospheric research.7 As both an acknowledgement of this creeping informal nomenclature and an attempt to reify it with the requisite scientific standardiza- tion, in 2007, the British stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz, then serving as chairman of the Geological Society of London’s Stratigraphy Commission, asked his colleagues to review the merits of these yet-to-be-substantiated (at least from the point of view of stratigraphic science) epochal claims. Since then, the Anthropocene thesis has made its way into a number of other scientific studies, as well as nearly every corner of the social sciences, humanities, and arts.
To determine whether or not the Anthropocene satisfies the necessary criteria for a new geological epoch, stratigraphers and geologists are considering various anthropogenic effects, including, but certainly not limited to: the rise of agricul- ture and attendant deforestation; the extraction of coal, oil, and gas, and their atmospheric consequences; the combustion of carbon-based fuels and emissions; coral reef loss; ocean acidification; soil degradation; a rate of life-form extinction occurring at thousands of times higher than throughout most of the last half-billion years; and, perhaps most surprisingly, a rate of human propagation—a completely unabated explosion in population growth—which, according to the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, is “more bacterial than primate.”8
Even from this abbreviated list of possible considerations, evidence suggests a dramatic human impact; however, from the point of view of geology, the obvious problem is that, unlike all other geological epochs (and the even longer eras within which they accumulate), the Anthropocene is still in the making. Because we cannot know precisely how the stratifications that register our anthropogenic effects will stack up, the stratigraphic assemblage of the Anthropocene is produced through a process of speculative geology, operating according to an intensive
Art and Death | Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin 5
physical intertext of geohistories, present concerns, and future imaginaries. Not least among its intellectual virtues, this speculative dimension helps call attention to—and occasionally overturn—certain bad habits of thinking that allow humans to conceive of objects, whether micro- or hyper-, aesthetic or mundane, as distinct from the processes of their emergence and decay.9
Of course, speculative considerations regarding the legibility of anthropogenic change also stir up the disputatious matter of when the period can be said to have begun.10 Three dominant positions now shape the geological debate. In the estima- tion of paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the eight-thousand-year-old inven- tion of agriculture and its attendant deforestation led to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide; this suggests that humans have been a primary geological force on the planet since nearly the beginning of the Holocene, making the Anthropocene nearly co-extensive with the last eleven and a half thousand years, since the most recent ice age. Crutzen has suggested his own date for the beginning of the epoch, putting the invention of the steam engine in the late-eighteenth century at the beginning of an uninterrupted rise in carbon dioxide emissions that can be read in ice-core samples. This date might be more precisely located in 1789, the year that witnessed the invention of the steam engine by James Watt—the technology that enabled human forces to exceed the modest limits of muscle- (whether hu- man or animal), wind-, and water-power—as well as the publication of Immanuel Kant’s essay, “What is Enlightenment?” This date is thus especially peculiar, since, for Crutzen, the moment at which human and natural history become inseparable coincides with the most decisive event of their (philosophical) separation, Kant’s alleged “Copernican Revolution.”11 Finally, a decisive mark for the beginning of this new epoch could be located in the irradiated soil that is immediately apparent in the sedimentary records following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,12 and at the test sites on appropriated Indigenous territories. Not only did the end of WWII mark the proliferation of these radionuclides, but it also designated the dramatic postwar spike in population growth, consumption, and technological development referred to as the “Great Acceleration.”13 This potential starting point would also highlight the recent explosive growth of the global human population, which now exceeds seven billion.14
In his remarkable essay reflecting on nuclear catastrophe from Hiroshima to Fukushima, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy makes an appeal to remain “exposed,” that is, to endure our encounter with catastrophic loss by allowing ourselves to sense it. If we move too quickly, even catastrophes, like everything else under capi- talism, become little more than general equivalents of exchange. “We are being ex- posed to a catastrophe of meaning,” Nancy asserts, adding, “Let’s not hurry to hide this exposure under pink, blue, red, or black silks. Let us remain exposed, and let us think about what is happening [ce qui nous arrive] to us: Let us think that it is we who are arriving, or are leaving.”15 The Anthropocene invites these considerations of arrival and departure, ones that are variously taken up throughout the book. The broad areas of concern that form the subtitle of this book are too common among
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the contributions, and too entangled within each contribution, to be parcelled out sectionally; we thus decided to leave the book as a collection of forces, vectors, con- cerns, and perspectives that can be engaged and read in multiple orders. While the collection itself is not divided thematically, we nevertheless want to provide a few lines of entry—lines that have animated our own thinking, writing, and activism— to the volume that follows. In order to embrace this abundance without reducing it to generalities, the remainder of the introduction proceeds according to four especially intense trajectories of the Anthropocene. We begin with “Extrapolations Beyond Geology,” examining how the proposal for an era of the anthropos has both disrupted and enticed other intellectual orbits well beyond stratigraphy and geol- ogy; in “Aesthesis and Perception,” we address the role of sensation in constituting experience, as well as the potential for sharing sensation across genres, disciplines, and species; we then move to “Spatial Politics to Contested Territories” in order to narrate some of the critical transformations within the field of aesthetics that have occurred over the last half century, as tools for data visualization, forensics, and territorial analysis have shaped art in both concept and practice; finally, in “Numeracy and the Survival of Worlds,” we consider the role of numeracy as a requisite epistemic guide for temporal knowledges dealing in difficult-to-conceive sequences of time, such as the Anthropocene. We conclude this introduction by asking what imaginaries might be possible under the sign of the Anthropocene, and how they could be constructed to refuse both false hope and the apocalyptic foreclosure of possible futures. We also want to acknowledge that whatever the outcome of the International Stratigraphic Commission in considering the merits of the Anthropocene thesis, the cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical implications of this discourse are neither isomorphic, nor easily dismissed. What follows, then, might be considered a propositional itinerary, accompanied by some preliminary heuristics, for encountering art in the Anthropocene.
Extrapolations Beyond Geology
This is exactly what I fear with the Anthropocene thesis; it proposes a “future…