Art in the
Anthropocene
Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics,
Environments and Epistemologies
Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
London
2015
First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2015
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Contents
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 Smailbegović
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
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,
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
4
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
Art and Death | Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin 5
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 perfect continuous” tense, which puts theorists into a very agreeable
position.
— Isabelle Stengers16
Beyond the stratigraphic discussion, the Anthropocene can be felt as a call to
re-imagine the human through biology and geology.17 It is a call, in other words,
to place our industrialized present—a present that consumes time itself—
within a temporal frame that is at once evolutionary and geologic. As a
charismatic mega-concept (and one that seems to herald its own extinction
through its enunciation), it emphasizes the need, as Donna Haraway says, “for a
word to highlight the urgency of human impact on this planet, such that the effects
of our species are literally written into the rocks.”18 The Anthropocene is a term that
