Internet P.R. (Apogeo Saggi) (Italian Edition)
Mathematics and geometry have played a fundamental role in enabling this knowability. The machine of the two mirrors invented by Brunelleschi opened up the definition of the rules of perspective and performed the compression of a three-dimensional world regulated by numbers, on a two-dimensional surface.
He defined a bijective one-to-one relationship between the drawn and the real world. This operation reinforced the distinct role of the tactile and the visual dimension - the stage and the scene - and permitted to describe and graphi- cally think of infinity and the infinitesimal. Towards the end of the last century, F. This new framework suggests the study of algorithms capable of interpreting this dynamic modification process.
These themes are addressed from a technical point of view, understood as the necessary knowledge to imagine and make an idea designable. It is furthermore a reflection on the theoretical and practical implica- tions of the concept of fold, or better, on the act of folding, as a concrete and tangible capture of the infinitesimal that directs a tectonic possibility. To do this, to try and control the infinitesimal as a measure that gives structure to contemporary design, both at the architectural and the urban scale, a delving into mathematics as the algorithm that manages the machine, was necessary.
This publication is based on the doctoral dissertation in Urban and Architectural Design presented at the Politecnico of Milan and on the research and teaching activities developed by the author in that school and, subsequently, at the University of Cape Town. Solo gli utenti registrati possono scrivere recensioni. Per offrirti il miglior servizio possibile questo sito utilizza cookies. Cantieri Antincendio Salute nei luoghi di lavoro. Alzheimer e demenze Concorso OSS: Musei e beni culturali. DesignDisegno Geometry, measure and algorithm for architecture and the city.
Similarly, the space blanket refers to space travel, but also — particularly for me as southern European, it is a symbol of the current dramatic refugee crisis. Seen in the news almost on a daily basis, the silver film is often the first and only. Overall the LAAW experience has been a potent one. Being out there brought me to a deeper and stronger understanding and feeling of some of the theoretical loci I have been researching, as I have summarized in this paper.
I am left with an understanding of the importance of processes such as embodiment, displacement and empathy for my practice, and - more broadly - for a greater engagement of art within the ecological discourse. If ecology is the discourse around our oikos, or house, then it is important that we fully and deeply live in that house, that we be in close contact with the spaces and the inhabitants we share it with. My experiences in the field were incredibly insightful and allowed me to embody empathy, helping me realize that empathy is not a sentimental deterioration of thinking.
Instead, it is a force. I learned that if empathy is used in conjunction with rationality, stronger and more connected outcomes are attainable. I always felt that in order to make art I was not allowed to show my personal engagement with the matter, that good art is impersonal. I now know that a union of different languages and approaches is possible, even more: I am excited to be traveling down this new path, and adventuring into the new terrain of my inner landscape, while being more aware of its relation and inherent connection to the outer world.
Sinking into tentacular empathy has given me the great gift of knowing myself better, and I have more focused idea of the important threads I want to follow in the near future. University of Minnesota Press, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, On a corporeal level, the isolated, uni-windowed, igloo-like structure multiplic-itously serves the thesis of Safe: Although the darkly comedic tone of Safe ultimately crescendoes into hope for Carol at the end of the film, her rehabilitative stay in the isolated, uni-windowed, igloo-like structure will undoubtedly bear a whole new set of deathly intimacies; to name a few, on a purely corporeal level, each piece of aluminum, teflon, cop-per, titanium, wood, metal, straw, cotton, stone, ivory, pearl, rope, silver,.
Speaking of ingesting materials, imagine if each of those. University of Minnesota Press. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. God Bows to Math; Will Leviathan? On Software and Sovereignty. How like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyr-za Nichols Goodeve. New York, New York: Message from the Gyre. Continental Materialism and Realism.
Art and Culture with Ubiquitous Computing. Edited by Ulrik Ekman. An Ecosystem of Excess. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. New York, New York:. What are the technologies altering humanity in art as we know it? Is art the last frontier for tech? If so, what new doors are opened up at this intersection of art, technology, and humanity? Credo When we are not surrounded by nature, we are surrounded by a chain of implemented ideas: Every object started initially from a concept.
Money were a concept too, at first. And so was, capitalism. So are nuclear wars. And the consequences of all these lead to affecting our own inhabited planet. Climate change, for example, is often shaped also by implementing unethical concepts. Therefore, my most persistent question is: And therefore frameworks for more ethical societies? How can we re-think what humanity means today and how do we want it to evolve in the future? As storytellers we discover and revise meanings of the world.
What we seem to dismiss maybe too often is that we all are storytellers. Hacking Arts celebrated its fifth edition by selecting diverse parti-. The pre-hackathon journey was in itself a vibe-shaper: The first questions emerged: After a first round of inspirational introductions and performances, we were invited to pitch ideas. There are around 15 people in front of me.
I still have time to refine a concept. Everyone else has outstanding ideas. Hmm…I must find something in which I deeply believe. Something that would bring us together towards identifying what we find meaningful in being a human. Something that make us coin a more spiritual currency.
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I always think over-big. How can I do all these in only two days? Wait, I think I know or at least want to know how this would unfold. I have pitched the idea of creating a society based on core human values, such as for example kindness instead of monetary currencies. How could we design this as a functional playground? How would it look like? How would it feel?
Currently, most of our cities are shaped by consumerism. But how would they look like if we would adhere instead to kindness erism as a driving value? After a rather suspenseful and chaotic team scouting, we have found each. Three of us were intrigued by the idea and all of us were women artists no technologists, funny enough: So while all the tech people grouped themselves in gadget-driven communities, we had two options: The organisers allowed us to exist as sole rebel artists.
So here we are! The three of us embarked on one of the most abstractly enriching journey! Humans and their deeper meaning The question addressed by the hackathon sparked an Odyssey of questions, instead of an Odyssey of answers. What human qualities can we identify now and how.
What human values would we want to preserve, if we were to prioritize? What human values could become an engine for a different societal model? Are human values measurable?
Should they be measured? Each of us came up with different answers and perspectives. We tried more than one approach. As a preliminary exercise, I have imagined a society fueled by creativity, where each home would look differently almost as sculptures , according to the personality of each person. Extrapolating, a city could look like a personalised gallery. And a society likewise. But even so, would it be any better? Would it also respect to the nature surrounding us? We kept the idea on hold for a short while. After spending hours of debate, ideation and prototyping, we decided that in this context, before being able to give any answers, we shall focus on questions first and foremost.
The main prompt was: Some of the answers seemed to return: Some others seemed rather rare: The responses came from participants with technological or creative backgrounds. Prototyping a future society For the purpose of the hackathon, we had as a tangible aim: We established three main guiding principles: To begin with, after collecting all the answers, we have made a collaborative constitution, a collaborative hymn and a collaborative flag of our future society.
It resembled an abstract endless poem. An excerpt from it can be explored here: When added collaboratively, all the sounds and musical notes formed a song, which became the hymn of the future society. In order to create the flag of the future society, we created a palimpsest: The flag became a rather abstract collection of shapes, symbolizing a plurality of world visions.
- A Rose of Yesterday.
- DIGIMAG 77 - WINTER by Digicult Editions - Issuu!
- Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age by Link Editions - Issuu.
And now that we have created it, what do we do with it? We take it further. The prototype aims to become a functionable collaborative documentary where we could all design and implement hu Bringing together user-generated content and an interactive platform, the virtual space is meant to ignite our imagination towards more constructive societal models. More as a genuine joke at first, we have completed all the human values as used technologies.
And even quite advanced ones? It is all a game of perspective. How would these models function? How can we implement them? What have we learned from this journey As any challenging prototyping journey, it is first and foremost a transformative learning experience. As we are still in the research phase, there are few observations to emphasize: We began with singular human values due to the time and space constraints of the hackathon, but in general, we believe that this process is much more multi-layered.
We shall grasp better the complexity of the intertwined human values as these values are infinitely diverse and we may not want to reduce them to one. How can we integrate more values into an organic vision? Ancient hunter-gatherers mastered a very wide variety of skills in order to survive, which is why it would be immensely difficult to design a robotic human-gatherer. Such a robot would have to know how to prepare spear points from flint stones, how to find edible mushrooms in a forest, how to use medicinal herbs to bandage a wound, how to.
However, over the last few thousand years we humans have been specializing. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specialises in a much narrower niche than a hunter-Gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI. Luckily, internet seemed to facilitate the dialogue between communities at first, however it tends to be more and more filtered and distorted due to strict regulations and algorithms of the platforms. Can we re-use it for more meaningful, ethical, exploratory purposes? What do we still need to learn: Shall we aim for an organic vision that reconciles plenty or for a plurality of visions?
Most of the contemporary attempts are still driven by dystopic-driven narratives and imaginaries, while the scenarios for constructive futures seem almost nonexistent or inconsistent. Can we reconcile, for example, technology and spirituality? Future plans and prospects of the future society We are currently aiming to continue prototyping the collaborative documentary and we are in the advanced research stage.
This is just one preliminary intention to spark the imagination of humanity into a more spiritual and meaningful direction.
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However, there are plenty of measures and steps. After the hackathon, we have launched an additional questionnaire, that is publicly available and everyone is invited to contribute with a personal view: The so far responding participants added numerous core-values to the list: Each has contributed with an expanded vision for the specific human value. One of our immediate aim is to archive the responses and to visualize them. In the upcoming months, we aim to facilitate further debates towards creating a functionable virtual model of future societies fueled by human values.
We believe that we need to prototype our future and to reconsider technology not as a purpose in itself, but rather as a tool to enhance dialogue, debate, collaboration and advancement of our spiritual, natural, noetic, axiologic heritage. This is just a preliminary manifesto for a long-term path: Although the current premise is still in the development stage, we deeply believe that the urgency of acting on it more in-depth becomes rather vital and it is up to each of us to activate our own applicable imaginaries.
We may need to further expand on Futurescapes in academic sillabi, in artistic platforms, political platforms, economical frameworks in order to have an impact. However, by then, we may simply embrace it as a playground - for healing, saving, improving ourselves and the environment that we reshape. The anticipationism is the future oriented philosophical attitude, according to which we are allowed to try a concrete, conceptual and practical anticipation of some pieces of future, The selection criteria are mostly ethical, political and economic.
Grounded between Marxist political philosophy and common reformism 1 , anticipationism operates within the symbolic sphere: I defended the idea that anticipationism is the essential approach of the intersection between art and philosophy 2 because philosophy itself can turn many of its arguments in artistic practices but also in architecture and design. In the Western philosophical world it is currently more and more complex to solve the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy; the former, originally Angloamerican, should find its solutions in logic, while the later, of European origin, has on the other hand.
Philosophy is a very particular discipline, whose statute is continually discussed by the meta-philosophy, but in my opinion it is essentially characterized as a life practice, because of its crossdiscilplinary structure; its closes concept is the trusteeship: Philosophy, as a matter of fact, according to the well-known Aristotelian thesis, is the essence that the whole is superior to the sum of the parts: Anticipation means taking care of non-existent yet potential objects and making them visible within a specific context; this brief consideration on philosophy also leads to different approaches on its application: My theory, which I am going to expose in this text applying the anticipation to anthropocene, is that philosophy is a continuous movement.
Obviously the anthropocene, is intimately connected to our role on this planet and to the structural modification of soils, environments and ecosystems; this does not make though the anthropocene a quality, but rather the context in which all being on Earth are currently living. The connection between quality and quantity can occur by taking anthropocentrism, in fact, and exploring it as a founding concept.
We got a long list of factors making the anthropocene worrying, but also — paradoxically - interesting: Here is the philosophical step backwards and, as we will see, the one forward within the art: The most complex question concerns the criterion which anticipation would use for selecting the elements of a potential future and bringing them to realization. Let us consider antrhopocene 3 as our current geological era; I believe that anticipationism is also a connection method between philosophy, art and scientific thought: The anthropocene is often confused with a quality of being, such as anthropocentrism, while instead, if what geology tells us is true, we rather.
The several anthropocentrism deconstruction possibilities 4 originate the same feeling: Philosophy, more than art, can take care of the symbolic dimension by producing scenarios that, eventually, others will have to bring to completion. I have argued that the concerns about the potential extinction of Homo Sapiens are irrelevant because in fact the extinction is already underway 5 and we are facing a sympatric speciation: It is a type of evolution occuring silently and imperceptibly due to ecological isolation; as we know, humans belong to the genre Homo, whose Sapiens constitutes the last evolutionary form.
Homo habilis, Homo georgicus, Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens appeared about , years ago. Moving forward, I proposed to name a new species of Homo, potentially present already among us: The anticipation practice, constantly put in place by this different — while aesthetically indistinguishable from Homo Sapiens species, is what allows us to trace both the problems and the solutions to the current environmental challenges.
Contemporary posthuman describes a species taking the place of Homo sapiens managing to live on the planet without questioning the habitat but taking advantage of the cultural and technological evolution that paradoxically led the very Homo sapiens to its own possible future extinction. From radical food reformism to the abandonment of cities, there are practices which allow an identification of the new species such as the inclination The point is that the answer to this dilemma could be closer than we think. Contemporary philosophical posthuman looks for allies.
How can we unfold straight away the diversity of the new species born on the ruins of Homo sapiens? As any other form of life, a new one requires a new environment or, more technically, a structure in which life can develop. If the economy and politics persist to not care about ecology, anticipation seems to be a solid option. Looking for independently developed allies, my theory speculates a filling of spaces abandoned by the consumption excess and the waste of resources of Homo sapiens.
These are different areas in terms of configuration, dimension and status, sharing only the absence of any human activity. If taken together, they play a crucial role in the development of the new species. The impact of Homo sapiens contracts when the. The symbolic purpose of showing now the way we will live in the future, according to which many other phenomena of human ethics such as civil disobedience or vegetarianism will decline, is fundamental.
This is a contemporary art project within the act of recovering rural areas discarded in favour of urbanization, thanks to which government commissions allow the construction of art residences or micro-communities with a clear artistic purpose. In the project took shape under the name Inland - Campo Adentro On the other hand, because of its way to evaluate the coexistence with biodiversity, the Posthuman forms necessary islands of survival on a planet that collapses against its will.
The disappearance of Homo sapiens, of course, is a defeat for everyone. Thanks to such a contemporary artistic practice, we are driven to rediscover the question of organized utopia and study the way we interact with the biosphere. It can happen that in an abandoned area ways of living profoundly alternative to those of Homo sapiens may be developed: Under this light, to anticipate means to produce right now areas in which we can develop the life form as if speciation has definitely taken.
I believe art and architecture in conjunction are the best competitors to give a practical and actual substance to philosophical theories, especially if they imply a radical change in the ways of thinking about the subjects involved in these same theories. The reason is almost trivial; if we investigate the future or present concept of humankind, we reflect better working with artistic images rather than philosophical concepts.
Anticipating also the transformation of the habitat in which the contemporary Posthuman lives after the planet has been annihilated by the. Speciation takes place because Homo sapiens has surpassed the limits imposed by the environment, the reality has resisted, and the feedback has been a new commencement that now art tries to describe and host.
Viewed in relation to space and its control, the consequences of anthropocentrism are always treacherous and violent: The reason why the Third Landscape is a theoretical perspective for contemporary Posthuman is simple. The nature that recovers space, the life that emerges from below and that must be considered, the coexistence with biodiversity Architecture intertwined with trees and plants that integrates and shelters instead of destroying and isolating is the viewpoint that opens the theory we are using as a guide to our long journey.
The Alliance It must be stressed that there should be a total harmony between science, art, and philosophy within this framework. The selection criterion of anticipation can not be arbitrary: The Anthropocene issue is emblematic when we highlight its causes and the potential of certain changes of direction for its slowdown; the objection is obvious, I guess: There is no way global damage could be diminished by utilitarian speculations and, moreover, most of these approaches condemn to individual immobility because of the threshold effect: Therefore it is true, anticipation is good for nothing, but the correct sentence is that anticipation is also good for nothing; it is just that we tend to turn this observation into a resource, a limit to be exploited for our benefit.
Here is where art, with the arrogance that characterizes it, can provide structure to a philosophy that is risks to remain hanging in the clouds of a theory for its own sake. Art is expected to be good for nothing and yet, if we think of the political achievements that stemmed from and through art, the list could be endless; operating in the symbolic, through performance or objects production, could lead to the unveiling of a whole series of images risking to remain a theory or to be condemned to a hypothetical future that could never come true because — paradoxically- nobody strove to undertake the endeavor.
Singer, La cosa migliore che tu puoi fare, Sonda, Casale Monferrato Caffo, La vita di ogni giorno. Cinque lezioni di filosofia per imparate a stare al mondo, Einaudi, Torino 3 - C. Il postumano contemporaneo, Einaudi, Torino Rivista di studi sulla letteratura e la comunicazione, Vol. Heidegger, Quaderni neri , a cura di P. Trawny, Bompiani, Milano , p. Anticipating means treating women the same way men when are treated, in times when they were considered to be inferior -in the here and now and without being sure that a real progress could ever have happenedand perhaps organising a work that would reveal the follies of the present, hoping for a certain kind of future.
Inspired by multiple proof of the effects of human activities on climate change and the extinction of many different life forms on earth, ecological thinking has moved from the margins to the center and has become the radical edge for discussing the long-term implications of technology and modernity in relation to ecological crisis. The focus point remains the land itself, how we see, understand, use and respond to it. How we think of land and deal with it describes how we view ourselves and the planet we live on.
Art which explores the relation between nature and culture finds itself center stage in one of the most urgent issues of our time to which it both responds and gives shape. These days many more artists are traveling around the world for projects and residencies to explore the effects of humans on earth, often collaborating with scientists, engineers, designers and others, while an increasing number of exhibitions, publications and projects are devoted to this subject in the last ten years.
Humanity together with all its technological inventions forms nature. This is the core premise of the Anthropocene thesis, announcing a paradigm shift in the natural sciences as well as providing new models for culture, politics, and everyday life. Thinking the Anthropocene not only brings natural scientists and artists working with nature into the spot light making land a foremost subject but also becomes a space for new artistic practices and approaches towards land which I want to explore here. The Anthropocene has become a fashionable concept in the arts and humanities which is begging for a more critical engagement with its theoretical proposal.
It has become commonplace to start a discussion of the Anthropocene with a critical remark on the term usually stating the problems of positioning, after decades of careful identity politics, the universal Anthropos, staking out the fact that not all humans are equally responsible for the current ecological crisis. Various alternative names have been proposed to name the culprits — such as the Capitalocene, the Plantatiocene, the Eurocene, - but usually these remain footnotes in an otherwise acceptance of the rather a-political framework that the Anthropocene proposes.
A writer who does take issue is TJ Demos, an art historian who brings post-colonial theory to the debate insisting on climate justice in thinking the current ecological crisis. Also important in this regard is the work of Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz who in The Shock of the Anthropocene object to the supposed recent awakening of our environmental consciousness and observe how much writing of the Anthropocene makes no mentioning of corporate industries.
By giving a well researched historical account of the Anthropocene they show how from the outset of the industrial revolution people were quite well aware of the impact of the exploitation of our natural resources and how a specific form of corporate capitalism has ruthlessly and knowingly pursued an ecological rampart course. A critical engagement with the Anthropocene starts from the acknowledgement that man is not at the steering wheel of our spaceship as Buckminster Fuller once famously stated, and that the way out of the crisis is not in proposing even more technological fixes.
In acknowledging that it is not the planet but the Anthropos himself who is in crisis we need to start working out new concepts, values, and structures to redefine and realign our relationship to the living world around us. Here ecology is not merely environmental but political, mental and. The acknowledgement that humans and their culture and technology are an intrinsic part of nature demands not only the development of new practices towards nature but foremost the production of new subjectivities and relations. Nowadays ecology has become a new paradigm which penetrates all disciplines in which as much the concept of ecology and of nature are being redefined.
Ecology should thus be seen as an urgent cultural challenge for a reorientation towards the world rather than just an issue of environment. This is too often the limited discourse of both the environmental movement and green entrepeneurs reducing the problems at hand to technicalities of CO2 emission reductions and water levels.
When only practices and not mentalities are changed nature is still, and even more so, becoming a colonized subject of capital. To develop a true eco-sophy we need to develop radical pedagogies in which art as a specific form of knowledge can play an important role. This is why critical thinkers of the anthropocene such as Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour pay much attention to art as the place to experiment with new forms of subjectivity where an esthetical and sensorial reorientation towards the earth becomes possible.
The imagination and open form of art is given an important role in the.
What kind of assemblies and new forms of collectivities can we start imagining which also includes the non human other on a plane of equalitarian co-habitation of our planet. Which role can art play in the current climate crisis to rethink and reset the position of humans and our relation to nature? If we want to critically read the Anthropocene it is not the victory of the Anthropos over the earth but the crisis of the Anthropos itself which is at stake. This requires developing new sensibilities and relational networks as much as experimenting with new institutions and structural forms to express alternate realities and values.
This is quite a different proposition than the typical visual regime of the Anthropocene, which often consists of photographic or satellite imagery which prefers the aerial view in constructing what could be called something like a technological sublime: Think of the photographs of Edward Burtynski of red poisoned rivers or the photo series Louis Helbig made of the Alberta tar sands tellingly titled Beautiful Destruction.
The sublime as it operated in the 18th century romantic discourse allows the spectator to witness natural phenomenon as earth quakes and volcanic disruptions from a safe distance which would otherwise be too horrific for our sight. In a similar way the distant view from above leaves us in awe in the face of what is too traumatic to fully experience and increasingly anesthetizes us to the vision of environmental destruction.
This is a completely different regime of visualization then an art practice which seeks to engage with the dirt of the earth, which seeks to embody and situate oneself in the environment to start seeking out new forms of engagement and care. While the art world has seen a decade of large blockbuster exhibitions dealing with the thematics of nature, it has difficulty to embrace this kind of art that truly sets the art to work in the world.
Nor does it reflect on its own institutional culpability, its relational structures of exclusion and inclusion, its ties to corporate industries for financial support, to even begin to develop an ecosophical practice. In the following I will explore various strategies which are developed in current art that deal with relations to land and often, though not exclusively, occupy spaces outside Far more than taking environmental problematics as its subject matter it is about experimenting with new forms of being and knowing, new approaches to the earth, as well as the search for a new validation of nature amongst which new articulations of commons and communality.
In this regard I consider the work of Robert Smithson as one of the most relevant historical land artists for contemporary practice. His creation of experiental spaces offer a model in which intellectual, emotional and sensorial capacities are coming together to make people conscious of how they experience their environment and participate actively in the shaping of it from a position in between reality and representation.
Smithson strongly acted against the romantic notion of both art critics and environmentalists of his time who cherished the holistic icon of the earth and the pureness of nature as something which needs to be protected and restored, which opposed his anti-essentialistic concept of nature as a geological and technological process of decay. He considered this romantic models from the past that did not possess possibilities to create a new ecological conscience for the present. Smithsons interests in the post industrial landscape in which human action is inscribed in the earth poses sharpest the question of the ecological in.
Far more than an art category that dealt with raw earth and was a romantic escape from the city as much criticism of its time would have it, Land Art in the seventies was already a complex contemporary practice around the current media and politics. This relational aspect, the in between space that he creates between the physical site and its representation through which the work unfolds itself in fragments at different places and levels, brings the concept of process and performance in play giving rise to new spatial practices.
Land art in this way was a physical form of art rooted in a real situation in which geological, political and economical forces come together. His definition of the art work as a project instead of an object meant it is not about viewing or possessing of things but about forming a relation with the public domain.
This focus on relations and the circulation of ideas is a search for new forms of engagement which poses questions into site, ecology, politics and. For Smithson nature was always already mediated and can only be realized time and again through artificial means. In Broken Circle Spiral Hill - his second and only executed large land art piece outside of the United States which he created as part of Wim Beerens seminal exhibition Sonsbeek Buiten the Perken in in a sandpit in the north of the Netherlands - the continuity of geological and human made forms and processes is emphasized.
Denying any stable reference point, it is impossible to get a grip on the whole situation and your position within it. Instead of a visual experience it emphasizes disorientation and tactile experience. The visitor has to negotiate his experiences in relation to the physical location which brings the role of the environment in producing the experience to the fore, thus forming a model of environmental engagement. A more contemporary Dutch land art piece from Paul de Kort titled Waxing Moon from , refers unmistakenly to Smithsons most known land art work Spiral Jetty , even though the location in the Biesbosch bears no similarities to the extensive field and salt lakes of Utah.
Just like here the labyrinthian form which De Kort created in the Biesbosch changes its view with the rising and falling of the water level. But in this case the work responds directly to the policy changes with which the government tries to keep the water in check. While Spiral Jetty is situated between the primal force of nature and man made industrial forces, Waxing Moon operates in a different paradigm which acknowledges the complete interwoveness of nature and culture.
In the Anthropocene the relation between nature and culture, as well as the effort to connect these dialectical as Smithson did, is voided. Smithsons landscape dialectic between the natural and the human made, a geological past and an industrial present have collapsed into eachother. Geological history has become now itself cultural history now the activity of humans can be read in the geological layers of the earth itself and human pollution can be dated back in earth layers and bio chemical processes in the atmosphere.
Now the opposition between material processes and human action no longer works, we need a new approach to the world which is directed by material connections and processes in which the complicated interdependencies between human and earth is recognized. To develop such a total vision on system earth transdisciplinary and collective forms of knowledge are required in which methods from natural science and the humanities are brought together.
Smithson can in many ways be seen as a proto anthropocene artist. His work is a form of knowledge in which the distinction between theory and action, matter and mind, commentary and creation is being played out in relation to each other. In historical land art cross disciplinary collaboration and an affinity with research and education was already important. But where historical land artists mainly worked together on realizing huge sculptural projects, artistic research now has become a place for knowledge production between widely divergent fields bringing together the arts, sciences and local, indigenous forms of knowledge.
Also here Smithsons concept that the art work does not end in an exhibition but continuously moves into the world is important. An increasing amount of contemporary artists devote themselves to artistic research in which they work together with many different disciplines and sectors of societies to create new hybrid practices of public art for which they travel to the most remote places on earth. Smithsons influence can be seen here in understanding art as an open activity of text, documentation, film photography and bringing together artifacts and information.
For example in the work of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation who through data bases, excursions, lectures and documentations give attention to every form of use of land using enormous interdisciplinary artistic collaboration. In all of this the notion of place and site has become an urgent issue. Site Specific Art and Locational Identity land art surprisingly is only marginally treated. The references that she does make to land art present it as the essence of site specificity, as a radicalization of the phenomenological here and now and the irriducable physical nature of land as raw material, an approach to location as: She suggests here that land art was mainly concerned with the actuality of place and not with the problem of deterriorialization.
Miwon Kwon formulates in opposition to this a new definition of site as a discursive vector in which site can be an area of knowledge, a social matter, or for example a debate. But as we have seen the land art of Robert Smithson and many of his collegues was already concerned with questions of deterritorialization and discursivity in which the role of media technologies in the conception and realization of land art works go far beyond the simple documentation and siting of the work. However, in contemporary land art Miwon Kwons definition of site as discursive, the.
What remained implicit and marginal in historical land art — performance, discursivity, the overlapping meanings of land, power, media and technology- is receiving a larger focus in contemporary art that deals with land. Artists are still moving raw earth from time to time but explicitly acknowledge the discursive characteristic of land as an effect of law, contracts, discourses and systems of representation. Historical land artists already worked with inscriptions in the landscape but contemporary artists are concerned with the implications of media technologies and earthly materials, the economical, legal and political inscription in conflict areas projected on both local and planetary scale.
While an artist such as Ana Mendieta in the Untitled Silueta Series in projected the physical traces of her body in the landscape to leave a visible sign in. Other examples are Land Mark Footprints of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla [], who created shoe soles for people trying to reclaim the land of an American military test terrain, so that as a result of walking in that landscape they marked their presence in the form of a stamp on the terrain with content which problematizes the American occupation.
In a similar way Santiago de Sierra hired a group of men on the border of Mexico and the United States to chop the word submission out of the land. These works make the relationship between power and land visible by showing how conflicts writes itself into the land. Physical intervention falls together here with political intervention thus radicalizing the tradition of earth art. Carthography is another way by which artists explore and embody how we trace and track the land.
In the Green Line Francis Alys walks on the border between Palestine and Israel while carrying a leaking can of green paint by which he draws out a specific historical and social reading of how borders operate in the land itself, revealing the constructed nature of all historical, political and economic divisions of land by showing it as a temporal inscription.
The artists Saubine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche painted in a blue line through the center of Copenhague that pointed to a point of 7 meter above sea level, the average rise of the sea water after all the ice of Greenland melts due to global. What is made visible here is not the historical conflicts about the use of land but the new divisions that will arise as a result of natural disasters. Sand drawings are made by a little robot based on GPS recordings, tracing these very local and global movements of milk distribution on the earth itself telling the story of the landscape, people, economy and mobility.
This is a way of seeing yourself in landscape, how we leave traces and maps in the landscape, and how we relate to the landscape as technologically mediated. Like Dennis Oppenheim and Richard Long these artists are concerned with landscape inscription but they want to make visible the hidden traces of our technologies and frameworks while using them. Navigation is here a mediated way to nature that inscribes the body back into the land as a mutual process of transformation shaping both land and people.
Another important and current subject amongst many contemporary thinkers and artists is the commons. Much of what we share today — whether natural resources and public spaces, information and genetic codes — is privatized. Artists experiment with the model of commons as a specific form of human relations based on social communality and direct democracy.
The Danish collective N55 has an ongoing project with title LAND, started in , which consists of small plots of land in different places in the world that can be used and expanded by anyone. This communual ownership requires different kind of relations and behaviors between people that the project wants to make visible. LAND is a project that could potentially spread until all land is freed up and the project is no longer necessary.
In a similar way This is the Public Domain is an effort by Amy Balkin to create a permanent international commons from a private parcel which she pursued in in California and involves the research into legal strategies by which to hand over all rights associated with ownership to the global public. The project Land by Rirkrit Tirajavianja ongoing is putting this experiment of collective management into practice. Land is established as a self sufficient surroundings by the artistic community in the countryside of Thailand.
The intention is that it is cultivated as an open space for cultivation of the land, architectural living, cultural experiment and discussion which is owned by no one and is open for the local country side community, resulting into a hybrid of innovation and traditionalism, contemporary materials and technologies and old forms of agriculture. Not only artists but also activists movements experiment with new forms of direct action to explore anew what it means to be public, how to give shape to communual managed land through various reinventions of institutions and structures that redefine the collective and democracy in our changing society.
One of the most interesting experiments in this regard is the ZAD zone a defense , the largest autonomous zone in Europe which started as a protest against the plans for an airport outside of Nantes in France and is now a site where hundreds of activists and people from various backgrounds together with local farmers experiment with alternative forms of living, working, economies, assemblies and politics. The question what kind of political communities we want to develop when life and not the human becomes the privileged focus is explored in a series of works by the Finnish artist Terike Haapoja titled The History of Others.
By experimenting with a different ordering and structuring of these institutional forms she reflects on more inclusive forms of living together, distributing agencies and power. Ascribing culture and history to the non human animal begins to imagine a world in which radical different choices are made when life is valued over the privileging of the human. Haraway, who in wrote The Companion Species Manifesto and in centered on her own relation with her dog Cayenne in When Species Meet — develops as in her more recent publication Staying with the Trouble a new language which reshapes the meeting between humans and the non human other.
Crucial is her emphasis on the risk that is involved in opening up to the encounter with the other, which is not necessarily positive and nice, but to which we need to learn to open ourselves up rather than create borders led by fear, in order to realize the potential capacity of both. Also for Donna Haraway art plays an important role in experimenting with alternate realities and sensory and situated forms of knowledge to start imagining new political communities.
Artistic practices such as those of Haapoja create exactly this space in which the surface of reality is temporarily broken to offer a vision on new organizations of life.
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The ecological crisis we find ourselves in forces us to seek new connections to the earth, the land and all its inhabitants which acknowledge our intrinsic dependencies on our environment. Miwon Kwon concludes in her exploration of site specificity in One Place After Another that what was once a liberating cultural construction of the subject as nomadic, disconnected from place, has now become the ideology of global market capitalism.
The task that lays before us as she suggests is to explore how we can move between the nostalgia and conservatism of identities fixed to a place and the freedom which resides in the nomadic. The deteritoralization of site has produced liberating effects now we are no longer confined to normative assigned spaces for our identity. However this process of uprooting ourselves from relations has also subjected us to the fragmentation and alienation of the mobile market economy, while its phantom, the nostalgia to an actual site, comes up time and again in more violent forms.
In the Anthropocene as an intensive networked era in which the smallest has effects on the largest and vice versa the advantages of the tactical, the marginal, the local, the other no longer can be made to work. Now that the relation between nature and culture has collapsed and cannot even be dialectically connected as Smithson did, we need to find new ways of living and producing knowledge in which all the oppositions by which we defined our vision on the world sofar are being brought on one plane acknowledging the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.
But the fact that in the Anthropocene tectonic movements have infiltrated our daily lives and that vast geological scales and processes collide with our human actions should not legitimate new forms of irrationalism founded on emotional responses. Instead it necessitates a search for new foundations of rationalism as an embodied practice against modern universalizing rationalization. It requires to redefine the conditions of knowledge itself and what rationality is.
Art not as the other of reason but as a rational operation in its own right in which thinking and doing are. This is about connecting the relations between seeing and doing, vision and action entering responsibility to what we see starting from a specific time and location and from lived experience rather than abstract and uncommitted. This we find in many experiments with embedded practice which people like Donna Harraway propose against the generalization of modern rationality. Against the conquering view from nowhere she positions a way of looking that requires commitment and responsibility, a form of situated knowledge, very much in the way that Robert Smithson developed his thoughts on engaged looking in the world.
Art forms an important and specific field of knowledge in imagining and experimenting with new subjectivities for an ecosophical way of being that our new era demands from us. An eco literacy might demand the kind of attention and commitment that the Slovenian bio- artist Spela Petric exerted in a performance titled Confronting Vegetal Otherness Skotopoiesis. Exploring her intimate relationship to otherness and plant life she stood for 16 hours in front of a light casting a shadow on a field of crest, eventually resulting in a discoloration in the crest where her presence blocked the light leaving in the encounter an imprint of her body.
It is a post-Holocene geological era, i. The irreversible transformation of the chemical-physical characteristics of the earth is generating a new natural, semi-artificial world, since it is partly constructed and reshaped by man himself, and of which, he is consequently responsible for. The terrestrial landscape has changed: The warming of the atmosphere, desertification, the deep drilling in the soil, the mineral quarries, the pollution of the waters and the skies, the climatic changes and the violence nature is increasingly exposed to are unstoppable.
At least three types of human activities have affected the diversity and distribution of minerals and mineral-like compounds in ways that might be reflected in the worldwide stratigraphic record. Manifestations of the disruption of the original ecosystem of the planet are increasingly evident. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. Gould and Elisabeth S. Evolution is therefore not an engineer but rather a bricoleur, which re-uses what is available to it. An ecosophist approach to the project.
It has been definitively understood that common sense, measurement and respect for the environment must be the essential principles upon which a truly advanced society can be built. Along these lines, a number of contemporary theorists, including Edgar Morin, Ugo La Pietra, Serge Latouche and Riccardo Dalisi, are among the first to talk about neo-humanism. This vision, which therefore does not place hierarchies between man and environment, leads to a systemic whole, regenerating itself as a unitary organism.
The term Ecosophy is the fruit of the mystical experience of matter in general and of the Earth in particular. Ecosophy is that wisdom that consciously tells us that the Earth is also a subject and, even more so, a constitutive and definitive dimension of reality. From a methodological point of view, therefore, the relationship between design and man transforms into a renewed form of human-centered design, which places man unselfishly at the center of an organic project in harmony with the world. This awareness, the use of materials, processes and technologies, The more design is able to express an authentic ecosophist approach through its aesthetic-conceptual qualities, the more it will be able to go deeply into the anthropological dimension of man.
Research experiences in contemporary design. With the spread of the web and the advent of new technologies capable of modifying existing living systems - such as genetics, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine - the primordial model of humanity seems to evolve from within. In relation to the so-called Moore Law, 9 Kurt Kurtzweil believes that the curve of technological progress, due to the interaction between technologies, is growing at a wholly exponential rate.
His studies hypothesize that this techno-scientific advancement will be equal to that imaginable in twenty thousand years and will transform every sector of knowledge: With regard to this transdisciplinary convergence, the transhuman horizon is made even more tangible by the emergence and strengthening of new sciences, which are connected to each other reaching new and unexpected levels of efficiency. In particular; we refer to the NBIC convergence, that. A design response to this imaginary future, for example, is provided by the Israeli designer Naomi Kizhner, who in , hypothesized a scenario where energy resources are scarce.
These objects, serving as the archetypes of a design for the Anthropocene, mixing gold, biopolymers and electrical conductors grafted into the skin, invite a reflection on the future possibilities of contemporary design. In this evolutionary perspective, with changing production processes and markets, the role of design is transformed because the design of a product is no longer aimed at exclusive physical consumption, but also intellectual.
Critical thinking extends to a wider spectrum of themes and purposes, including political debate, philosophical reflection, scientific experimentation and environmental issues. In relation to the topic of Anthropocene, among these, the creation in the laboratory of new materials, manufacturing processes and tools for the creation of new contemporary objects plays an important role.
But the approach taken to the transformation of material also transforms the thought, because each element is linked to a precise prim-. And it is the use of this culture that inspires the designer to re-invent each time composite substances, manufacturing and aesthetic processes.
From this perspective of infinite possibilities, we find the research carried out by Lucie Libotte, on dust, or Aliki Van Der Krujs, on rain. Heterogeneous, unexpected, organic and inorganic materials, digital instruments and machinery; everything is positioned in a single synaesthetic space that is the laboratory. Like the alchemist, the designer modifies and distils the material to create something that was previously not there.
Neodymium Nd magnets are shredded with a water jet, tantalum Ta is filed out of capacitors and the gold Au recovered with acids. The aluminium Al platters — still holding their ones and zeros — are melted and recast in a sand mould. The result is not an object of common use but rather a new mineral, whose sole purpose is to open up speculation on the meaning of the substances and on how they can be used. On the philosophical debate of the Anthropocene, he also investigated the contemporary design exhibition curated by Stefano Maffei with Marcello Pirovano at the Galleria Subalterno in Milan, presented during the.
Fuori Salone in The gallery is transformed into a tropical diorama from which hybrid objects emerge, creating a dialogue - at times balanced and conflictual - between human activities and the surrounding environment.