Extreme Stratum
by Felice Grodin
What is it to ‘create’ during the Anthropocene? The new geological age that some hypothesize began over two centuries ago with the burning of fossil fuels, is perhaps accentuated by the detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. [1] The ‘signal’ or traces are both chemical and biological – increased radioactive isotopes, increased atmospheric carbon (CO2), increased atmospheric methane (CH4), lower acidity (pH) in the oceans, increased permanent organic pollutants (POP’s), and global species transfer, to name a few. These global changes have ushered the possible end of various plant, animal and eventually, human life. If then this extreme stratum or ‘litheostratigraphic’ layer is underway,
a sedimentary recording of ends – as artists do we still make ‘things?’ In an era that has accelerated our own envisioned extinction – how do now define ‘human?’ Perhaps there is a critical need to revaluate the role of art in general as our own boundaries between ourselves and the earth are now porous.
What is this new ecology? How do we describe it? How must an art practice expand in order to grasp the new state of things and possibly intervene within it?
To go back to the issue of the bomb – Baudrillard says in the essay ‘In Praise of a Virtual Crash’:
We are dominated by bombs and virtual catastrophes which do not explode: the international
stock market crash, nuclear war, the third-world debt, and even the demographic time-bomb.
One could, of course, argue that all these things will inevitably blow up in our faces one day, just
as there has long been a prediction that, within the next fifty years, an earthquake will surely see
California slide into the Pacific.” [2]
He goes on to elaborate on what he calls the virtual wars and virtual economies versus real wars and real economies. Perhaps the moment they interfaced was that very moment in Alamorgordo, New Mexico in 1945 where war strategy met with the material world. A tipping point was exercised in a real explosion that in an instant altered our environment forever. Yet borrowing from Baudrillard’s point, what about the before and after, and of all of the moments and material elements in between? Rather than a big bang – a quiet slow build. It would consist of layers of thermodynamic fissures, pressures and circulatory transformations that require resources. As Baudrillard suggests, there are the ones that hover above the earth – in the cloud. They are webs of virtual high frequency stock trading, drones on missions, IM and video based conference calls, GPS locators...And there are the ones on the
ground – at the horizon of the earth. They are shipping and trucking routes, mineral and fossil fuel extraction, combat warfare, speculative real estate construction...Are these not at least some of the (invisible) forces that have produced the Anthropocene?
Borrowing from another source - in this case Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, [3] one of the considerations of art in this age of complexity is to render it visible. In the novel there are 55 prose poems describing 55 different accounts of a city – all of which point to same origin. But rather than 55 random accounts, the novel is structured – nine chapters with eleven themes consisting of five each. Thus the narrative is non-linear, repetitive and layered. It describes not the monuments or sovereign governance of a place, but rather its networked underpinnings revealing those normally not presented. Therefore there is a logic, or what one might call a behind the scenes logistics. Field conditions, mappings and diagrams are current examples of visualizations of this phenomenon. [4] Moving away from principles of composition, hierarchy and unity and towards our present anthropogenic thermodynamics, there is a preference in the visualization of properties. Processes in formations of becoming, displacements and flows, aggregations of variation and repetition, are alternately trapped within something that we can for lack of a better term – see. In his essay “Visualizing the Anthropocene” Nicholas Mirzoeff stakes a claim for ‘the right to look.’ [5] Elaborating on the autonomy to ‘arrange and rearrange the relations of the visible and sayable,’ there is the suggestion that in order to be truly possess agency, there is a need for a visual counter to the usual order of things. This would lead to a speculative aesthetics. It would not be beholden to the classic man versus nature motifs, but rather one that is immersive, transversal and at moments, non-human.
This out of body experience is sublime at the core. One may ask how it would relate to the Anthropocene? Perhaps we must be cognizant of an approaching Post-Anthropocene. In “Notes on the Inorganic, Part 1: Accelerations,” Gean Moreno expounds on the concept of Xenoeconomics. In its mutation capitalism is a mechanism that is now delaminated from the traditional Marxist relation to labor. [6] This relates to Baudrillard’s division of the virtual versus the actual. However to take this further, capitalism does not need us. It is a self perpetuating machine of algorithmic expansion – an alien global manifest destiny. Two popular cinematic examples come to mind: in The Terminator (1984) when the cyberspace bound Skynet (originally designed as a ‘Global Digital Defense Network’) gains self-awareness. The film actually determines the date and time (2:14 a.m. EDT, August 29, 1997) of this moment. Once again, not unlike the Alamogordo explosion, this exchange of virtual and real can not be undone. Interestingly the impetus of the Terminator series is based on this very idea – that we may go back in time in order to undo the deed. The desire to gain control once again is expressed to the extent that Schwarzenegger’s robotic character eventually becomes more human and accessible to us. The other example is in The Matrix (1997) where dominant sentient machines are cybernetically linked. Because the solar energy of the sun had been blocked by humans (Operation Dark Storm), the hived machines harvest humans as energy. Unbeknownst to us, we are passively in sleep mode within a digital mainframe – life is but a dream. This inversion of this user interface is terrifying but just as in The Terminator, we attempt to take back our power. Yet now we are the virus. The main (human) characters hack into the ‘matrix’ in order to sever its ties.
The choice to hack was given in the beginning of the film from one character (Morpheus) to another (Neo) – in the form of a blue pill versus a red pill. For Neo the truth would be revealed by taking the red pill or he could choose remain in a state of illusion by taking the blue. Perhaps as artists we must make the same choice. Are we to continue to buttress a state of things that does not want to ‘look’? But what if we choose the red pill? If we do look, first what do we see? Second, what do we want to see? Third, what may we then see? In 2016 the International Union of Geological Sciences and the International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote by 2016 whether to officially usher in the age of the Anthropocene. In the meantime, artistic practice could consider such things - seeing is believing.
Some examples of this evolving practice can be seen in the exhibition AnthropScene: Art and Nature in a Manufactured Era. Like many of the participants, Keith Waddington utilizes his background both as an artist and beyond. Possessing a PhD in biology and an AIRIE Board of Director member, he collaborates directly with bees in Interspecies Collaboration (2014) and considers art production and problem-solving in collaboration with another species. As had been pointed out to me recently by Keith, worker bees give up direct offspring in favor of protecting sisters. This is in the hopes that one would eventually become a queen. This is different than humans who favor direct offspring or children. Thus actions, socio-political values and ethics in other life forms may be obliquely ‘other’ to the vantage point of the human. Yet can we still ‘work’ with another species? Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas also screen a series of videos. In their flow series, human migration is considered. In Exotic Vs Exotic (2014), are we the invasive species or are we simply another layer that is added to this current geology? Both views are rendered within works that reveal the human touch throughout the ecological systems in the Everglades. Skip Snow who has worked for the National Park Service for 38 years – 25 at Everglades National Park – has created a notational system that synthetically records. Walking with Satellites (2015) is a series of mounted photo stills that remind us that we are bipedal. Evoking the Nazca Lines of southern Peru, they are recorded cultural glyphs created by planned urban sketches. Anteater, beaver, cartoon rex and the asteroid of doom, dragon, duck, gator, hot beverage, killer robot, kokopelli, room key, skeeter take two, submarine, wading bird and zipline use mediums both above and below to trap its results. Initially planned via hand drawing then recorded by a hovering GPS tracking device, the city becomes the canvas in which he himself is the brush. This sedimentary layer that is alternately real and unreal, human and non-human, micro and macro, is uniquely one of the Anthropocene.
[1] Divya Gandhi, “First nuclear bomb set off the Anthropocene,” TheHindu.com, January 21, 2015, < http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/first-nuclear-bomb-set-off-the-anthropocene/article6808967.ece>
[2] Jean Baudrillard, (2000). Screened Out. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 21.
[3] Italo Calvino, (1972). Invisible Cities. New York, New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1974.
[4] Stan Allen, “From object to field,” AD Profile 127 (Architecture after Geometry) Architectural Design vol. 67, no. 5/6 (May/June 1997): 24-31.
[5] Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture (Duke University Press) Volume 26, Number 2 (Issue 73, Spring 2014): 213-232.
[6] Gean Moreno, “Notes on the Inorganic, Part 1: Accelerations,” e-flux.com, (journal #31, 1/2012), < http://www.e-flux.com/journal/notes-on-the-inorganic-part-i-accelerations/>
by Felice Grodin
What is it to ‘create’ during the Anthropocene? The new geological age that some hypothesize began over two centuries ago with the burning of fossil fuels, is perhaps accentuated by the detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. [1] The ‘signal’ or traces are both chemical and biological – increased radioactive isotopes, increased atmospheric carbon (CO2), increased atmospheric methane (CH4), lower acidity (pH) in the oceans, increased permanent organic pollutants (POP’s), and global species transfer, to name a few. These global changes have ushered the possible end of various plant, animal and eventually, human life. If then this extreme stratum or ‘litheostratigraphic’ layer is underway,
a sedimentary recording of ends – as artists do we still make ‘things?’ In an era that has accelerated our own envisioned extinction – how do now define ‘human?’ Perhaps there is a critical need to revaluate the role of art in general as our own boundaries between ourselves and the earth are now porous.
What is this new ecology? How do we describe it? How must an art practice expand in order to grasp the new state of things and possibly intervene within it?
To go back to the issue of the bomb – Baudrillard says in the essay ‘In Praise of a Virtual Crash’:
We are dominated by bombs and virtual catastrophes which do not explode: the international
stock market crash, nuclear war, the third-world debt, and even the demographic time-bomb.
One could, of course, argue that all these things will inevitably blow up in our faces one day, just
as there has long been a prediction that, within the next fifty years, an earthquake will surely see
California slide into the Pacific.” [2]
He goes on to elaborate on what he calls the virtual wars and virtual economies versus real wars and real economies. Perhaps the moment they interfaced was that very moment in Alamorgordo, New Mexico in 1945 where war strategy met with the material world. A tipping point was exercised in a real explosion that in an instant altered our environment forever. Yet borrowing from Baudrillard’s point, what about the before and after, and of all of the moments and material elements in between? Rather than a big bang – a quiet slow build. It would consist of layers of thermodynamic fissures, pressures and circulatory transformations that require resources. As Baudrillard suggests, there are the ones that hover above the earth – in the cloud. They are webs of virtual high frequency stock trading, drones on missions, IM and video based conference calls, GPS locators...And there are the ones on the
ground – at the horizon of the earth. They are shipping and trucking routes, mineral and fossil fuel extraction, combat warfare, speculative real estate construction...Are these not at least some of the (invisible) forces that have produced the Anthropocene?
Borrowing from another source - in this case Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, [3] one of the considerations of art in this age of complexity is to render it visible. In the novel there are 55 prose poems describing 55 different accounts of a city – all of which point to same origin. But rather than 55 random accounts, the novel is structured – nine chapters with eleven themes consisting of five each. Thus the narrative is non-linear, repetitive and layered. It describes not the monuments or sovereign governance of a place, but rather its networked underpinnings revealing those normally not presented. Therefore there is a logic, or what one might call a behind the scenes logistics. Field conditions, mappings and diagrams are current examples of visualizations of this phenomenon. [4] Moving away from principles of composition, hierarchy and unity and towards our present anthropogenic thermodynamics, there is a preference in the visualization of properties. Processes in formations of becoming, displacements and flows, aggregations of variation and repetition, are alternately trapped within something that we can for lack of a better term – see. In his essay “Visualizing the Anthropocene” Nicholas Mirzoeff stakes a claim for ‘the right to look.’ [5] Elaborating on the autonomy to ‘arrange and rearrange the relations of the visible and sayable,’ there is the suggestion that in order to be truly possess agency, there is a need for a visual counter to the usual order of things. This would lead to a speculative aesthetics. It would not be beholden to the classic man versus nature motifs, but rather one that is immersive, transversal and at moments, non-human.
This out of body experience is sublime at the core. One may ask how it would relate to the Anthropocene? Perhaps we must be cognizant of an approaching Post-Anthropocene. In “Notes on the Inorganic, Part 1: Accelerations,” Gean Moreno expounds on the concept of Xenoeconomics. In its mutation capitalism is a mechanism that is now delaminated from the traditional Marxist relation to labor. [6] This relates to Baudrillard’s division of the virtual versus the actual. However to take this further, capitalism does not need us. It is a self perpetuating machine of algorithmic expansion – an alien global manifest destiny. Two popular cinematic examples come to mind: in The Terminator (1984) when the cyberspace bound Skynet (originally designed as a ‘Global Digital Defense Network’) gains self-awareness. The film actually determines the date and time (2:14 a.m. EDT, August 29, 1997) of this moment. Once again, not unlike the Alamogordo explosion, this exchange of virtual and real can not be undone. Interestingly the impetus of the Terminator series is based on this very idea – that we may go back in time in order to undo the deed. The desire to gain control once again is expressed to the extent that Schwarzenegger’s robotic character eventually becomes more human and accessible to us. The other example is in The Matrix (1997) where dominant sentient machines are cybernetically linked. Because the solar energy of the sun had been blocked by humans (Operation Dark Storm), the hived machines harvest humans as energy. Unbeknownst to us, we are passively in sleep mode within a digital mainframe – life is but a dream. This inversion of this user interface is terrifying but just as in The Terminator, we attempt to take back our power. Yet now we are the virus. The main (human) characters hack into the ‘matrix’ in order to sever its ties.
The choice to hack was given in the beginning of the film from one character (Morpheus) to another (Neo) – in the form of a blue pill versus a red pill. For Neo the truth would be revealed by taking the red pill or he could choose remain in a state of illusion by taking the blue. Perhaps as artists we must make the same choice. Are we to continue to buttress a state of things that does not want to ‘look’? But what if we choose the red pill? If we do look, first what do we see? Second, what do we want to see? Third, what may we then see? In 2016 the International Union of Geological Sciences and the International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote by 2016 whether to officially usher in the age of the Anthropocene. In the meantime, artistic practice could consider such things - seeing is believing.
Some examples of this evolving practice can be seen in the exhibition AnthropScene: Art and Nature in a Manufactured Era. Like many of the participants, Keith Waddington utilizes his background both as an artist and beyond. Possessing a PhD in biology and an AIRIE Board of Director member, he collaborates directly with bees in Interspecies Collaboration (2014) and considers art production and problem-solving in collaboration with another species. As had been pointed out to me recently by Keith, worker bees give up direct offspring in favor of protecting sisters. This is in the hopes that one would eventually become a queen. This is different than humans who favor direct offspring or children. Thus actions, socio-political values and ethics in other life forms may be obliquely ‘other’ to the vantage point of the human. Yet can we still ‘work’ with another species? Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas also screen a series of videos. In their flow series, human migration is considered. In Exotic Vs Exotic (2014), are we the invasive species or are we simply another layer that is added to this current geology? Both views are rendered within works that reveal the human touch throughout the ecological systems in the Everglades. Skip Snow who has worked for the National Park Service for 38 years – 25 at Everglades National Park – has created a notational system that synthetically records. Walking with Satellites (2015) is a series of mounted photo stills that remind us that we are bipedal. Evoking the Nazca Lines of southern Peru, they are recorded cultural glyphs created by planned urban sketches. Anteater, beaver, cartoon rex and the asteroid of doom, dragon, duck, gator, hot beverage, killer robot, kokopelli, room key, skeeter take two, submarine, wading bird and zipline use mediums both above and below to trap its results. Initially planned via hand drawing then recorded by a hovering GPS tracking device, the city becomes the canvas in which he himself is the brush. This sedimentary layer that is alternately real and unreal, human and non-human, micro and macro, is uniquely one of the Anthropocene.
[1] Divya Gandhi, “First nuclear bomb set off the Anthropocene,” TheHindu.com, January 21, 2015, < http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/first-nuclear-bomb-set-off-the-anthropocene/article6808967.ece>
[2] Jean Baudrillard, (2000). Screened Out. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 21.
[3] Italo Calvino, (1972). Invisible Cities. New York, New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1974.
[4] Stan Allen, “From object to field,” AD Profile 127 (Architecture after Geometry) Architectural Design vol. 67, no. 5/6 (May/June 1997): 24-31.
[5] Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture (Duke University Press) Volume 26, Number 2 (Issue 73, Spring 2014): 213-232.
[6] Gean Moreno, “Notes on the Inorganic, Part 1: Accelerations,” e-flux.com, (journal #31, 1/2012), < http://www.e-flux.com/journal/notes-on-the-inorganic-part-i-accelerations/>