#weeklyblogpost

Weekly Blog Post 10/19/2021

https://michaelwang.info/The-Drowned-World

In the history of Earth there have already been five mass extinctions (that we know of) and the sixth mass extinction is believed to currently be taking place. Mass extinction is an unfathomable concept to grasp for our human-centered minds. Those who acquiesce to the era of the Anthropocene understand that the human-species has an effect on the planet, but to what means can one define the age we live in when the Earth could annihilate everything that humans have subjected to meaning?

           The artist Michael Wang’s The Drowned World reminds us of the unfathomable. With his outdoor plant installation he takes us back to the carboniferous period. With the end of the Permian age, over 251 million years ago, came the greatest mass extinction known to us. Due to a multitude of natural catastrophes whereby greenhouse gases were blasted into the atmosphere, Earth became inhabitable for 96% of the existing species. In Palermo, Italy, during the Manifesta 12 biennial in 2018, one could come across the descendents of these ancient plants, sprouting up from the ruins of an old gasworks. The remains of the plants that were exterminated during “the great dying” became the sedimentary layers of coal burnt in gasworks such as the one in Palermo. The burning of this coal rereleases the gases that were once in the atmosphere during the carboniferous period. The artificial placement of these plants alongside manmade industry entwines the human narrative with the earth’s primal history.    

           A mass extinction goes beyond simply the extermination of the human species. It encompasses the end of most life, ranging from the tiniest of organisms to the largest of mammals. Yet this thinking is in contradiction to the acceptance of antropogenic degradation. How can we as a species have an impact on a planet whose nature has eminent impact over all? How can the offspring of organisms dating from a pre-human age live alongside the systems that are concurrently dominating their possibilities of future life?

           These questions are sparked when strolling amongst the fossils and flora of Wang’s artwork. As we continue to encourage each other that we have inflicted disastrous change onto our planet, thus we have the power to undo the earth of these ‘negative’ developments, perhaps it is best that the concept of mass extinction is so difficult to grasp. With mass extinction ever looming in the horizon of our consciousness we would be stifled and incapable of creation or regeneration. To end this blog post on a (semi-)positive note, in the words of Giacomo Leopardi :

“Nothing lives that is worthy Thy agitation, and the earth deserves not a sigh. Our being is pain and boredom and the world is dirt - nothing more. Be calm.”

In what ways does the planetary become evident - wether as object, process or event? How is the planetary configured, rather than assumed and given?

As we approach our upcoming curatorial event, these apposite and provocative questions - posed by sociologist Jennifer Gabrys in the e-flux article ‘Becoming Planetary’ - echo the crux of our discussions. As we are facing deep-rooted climate, social and environmental crises, contemplating the planetary and how this perspective can be manifested is extremely relevant to us as curators. As our primary focus is to provide an awareness of the planetary, how exactly do we broach this and how can our curatorial practice enable this? 

Gabrys proposes becoming planetary as a ‘way to consider how the planetary is not a uniform or fixed set of conditions, but rather signals conditions of difference, as well as collective responsibility and possibility with and through those differences’. For Gabrys, we should be striving the make being planetary ‘as praxis’. For us, this is expressed through the adoption of the planet-wary lens. Can we get our audience to undertake a cognitive shift with us and will this result in a permanent change in the way that they perceive and relate to the living planet? 

Another compelling component of Gabrys’ text is the notion of the forest as a form of planetary media, in that they are the site of multi-species inhabitations, ‘protests and struggles for ways of being in the world’ and register the accumulations of the environment bestowed upon it by nature and human actions. Gabrys notes the forests ability to transform human-planetary relations as ‘it at once resists a universal and singular view, while also bringing into focus a multiplicity of subjects and inhabitations’. 

Perhaps the most pressing question she poses for us in relation to the forest is, ‘how does this gaze from within planetary inhabitations generate multiple modes of praxis?’. What role does the category of human play and the category of forest play in this eco-system and this discussion?In what way can we ask our audience to inhabit these categories and the planet-wary lens in a non-superficial manner? How can we together, across these different categories, consider and challenge the inequalities and crises of the current system such as climate change? We are excited to contemplate the manner in which we can fully embrace and demonstrate this dialogue in our upcoming event. 

Katie Paterson’s installation artworks focus on human relationships and connections to both the Earth and the Planetary. She often takes recognisable objects such as pianos, disco balls and, in the case of Vatnajökull (the sound of), a telephone in order to articulate and reflect upon power relations, communications and connections between humans, nature and the planetary.

Image from http://katiepaterson.org/

In Vatnajökull (the sound of) a live phone line was created to an Icelandic glacier, via an underwater microphone submerged in Jökulsárlón lagoon, an outlet of Vatnajökull. The number 07757001122 could be called from any telephone in any country around the world, and the listener would hear the sound of the glacier melting.

Image from http://katiepaterson.org/

The idea was to articulate the devastating effects of the anthropocene and climate change in a more digestible, resonating and human level. So often these issues are seen as too big or too far beyond our reach as a human creating alienation and detachment on our part. Yet by encouraging real-time communication between the humans and nature it created a common language, a common story and a common understanding of how our actions as humans have such tragic implications.

Image from http://katiepaterson.org/

In relation to our exhibition, this work is poignant as it articulates the planetary from an everyday perspective. It encourages the open mindedness, the cognitive shift and the incorporation of multiple perspectives that we attempting as part of our project. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she manages to bring the vast scale and temporal dimensions of geological and cosmological events into sharp focus, creating art that focuses less on the human and more on planetary relationships.

The neglect and dismissal of flora is not only limited to scientific outlooks but extends also to social and cultural domains with planets often being reduced to just aesthetic purposes. Alarmed by the relegation of threatened floristic communities to reductionist discourse, biologists have popularised the idea of plant blindness to describe an inclination “among humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environment” (Balding and Williams 1192). As a tendency to overlook flora, to underestimate its global ecological significance, or to reduce it to an appropriable resource, plant blindness could reflect the physiological constraints of the human processing of visual information. The pervasiveness of plant blindness and the inability to recognise vegetal lives and their complexities could be one of many factors contributing to the exponential species loss and biocultural disintegration that ever more characterises the Anthropocene.

Ways in which artists have attempted to connect plants and humans once again is through plant poetry and plant literature, a technique and form that incorporates layered, planetary narratives and discourse to not only highlight the wonders of plant life, but to create an interspecies dialogue.

Research into botanical percipience can be traced back at least to Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose. Darwin and Bose were the first to imagine and develop novel instruments to make visible the endemic semiosis of vegetal life, or what they came to term plant script. Plant script incorporated modes of interspecies dialogue between humans and plants and made visible the non-linguistic forms of communication of plants, plant-script or plant-autographs. Although forgotten for a long time, this form of collaboration and communication has opened a world of potential for creative arts to engage, evoke and elicit plant sensitivities. Rather than constructing them as objects of representation, it entails the possibility of creative exchange between plants and humans in which plant script intergrades with the production of a text. The potentials of writing practices can therefore initiate new social, biological, political and imaginative perspectives on flora. Human-plant communication can be posited as a basis for interspecies collaboration in which botanical life is an agent, participant within, and contributor to the compositional process.

Rather than passive constituents of the landscape, plants exhibit a range of self-determined behaviours, including learning, remembering, solving problems, making decisions based on prior experiences, interpreting sensory feedback in order to negotiate environments, assimilating information to enhance survival and fitness, and, even, enacting forms of altruism including care.

The plant as co-author has been seen through multiples cases of literature, including eco-fiction, speculative fiction and perhaps most effectively, plant poetry. Examples include Wright’s Five Senses (1963), Murray’s Translations from the Natural World (1992), Easter Sunday (1993) and most recently, Power’s The Overstory (2018).

Plant fiction, plant poetry and the co-authorship between plants and humans is an integral part to our project as rather than speculative reverie, pathetic fallacy or barefaced metaphorisation, plant script becomes available to us through practices of listening to, looking at, feeling, tasting, smelling and walking in plant habitats. The interspecies dialogue requires a deeper understanding between fauna and flora, a reconfiguring of our relations on this planet and to one another and a cognitive shift in perspective towards the planetary.

Studio Roosegaarde

Space waste is a growing problem many humans are ignorant about because it is not a visual tangible problem. NASA calculated that there are over 21 thousand objects circling the earth. This space debris is non-functional, human-made materials is orbit. This band of levitating space junk skirts the Earth and jeopardises current space travellers and future missions. This is a serious problem because these particles travel at hyper velocities and if they collide with an incoming or outgoing space mission, serious damage could be done. This space junk has been piling up over the last 50 years. More than 60% of the debris can be attributed to two events. In 2007, China blew up a weather satellite which accounts for 900-pieces of debris. In 2009 a private satellite and Russian military spacecraft collided and left a trail of two thousand pieces.[1]               An artist that started a project to make space waste visible from earth is Studio Roosegaarde in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency). The project consists of two phases. First the performance of tracking the space waste via specially designed software. The surrounding area is darkened by shutting down all street and commercial lights. Green beams follow the space waste while its orbiting in Earth. Phase two is a multi year program that will capture space waste and up-cycle it into sustainable products. Phase one is currently housed at Kunstlinie in Almere.               Daan Roosegaarde said the following about the project; “We need to look at space in a better way. What is space waste, how can we fix it, and what is its potential? Space is the smog of our universe.”[2]                 Studio Roosegaarde also uses art in order to ask attention for rising sea levels and the importance of water innovation. Waterlicht is a combination of LEDs and lenses which create an ever changing layer of light, influenced by wind and rain.[3] The feeling of being under water is strengthened through the use of fog. The fog moves through the LED light and becomes a layer of waves above the visitor’s head. The installation is accompanied by a live radio stream on which the artists explains his work and people share their stories about water related innovations and overcoming water related problems. The aim of the installation is to make people aware of the importance of innovation. However, the work can also be interpreted as a means to make people more aware of the consequences that climate change can have on their everyday surroundings. By making the ramifications of rising sea levels visible, the installation gives us insight into our future if we don’t change our perspective on environmental issues.

The overview effect refers to a profound reaction to viewing the earth from outside its atmosphere. The astronauts that have experienced this describe it as having deep feelings of awe and self-transcendence. Short- and long- term emotional benefits are attributed to these experiences. The intense and singular states of awareness triggered by viewing the Earth from space provide a new context in which to explore awe-inspiring stimuli, their psychological effects, and individual differences in sensitivity to such potentially transformative experiences.  

Astronauts that have experienced the overview effect characterise it as follows; a transformative experience involving senses of wonder and awe, unity with nature, transcendence and universal brotherhood, overcome by emotion, see the world and themselves differently, returned to Earth with a new sense of purpose. The astronauts state that its not just spending time in space but viewing and contemplating the Earth from a distance that brings about the overview effect. Other characteristics of the overview effect are; appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected emotion and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. Other components associated with the overview effect are: changes in space perception, changes in time perception, the experience of silence and the experience of weightlessness. 

Astronauts said they experienced awe. Awe is characterised as an intense emotion resulting from the perception of something vast, as well as the need to accommodate the experience, by social psychologists. It can occur in both natural and social situations, the emotion often overlaps with wonder, fear and curiosity. Awe correlates with wonder and the witnessing of power, as a result people can mimic behaviours, become submissive and experience heightened attention. The features of the astronauts viewing of the Earth contribute to the feeling of awe. The contrast between the Earths features and the black background of space. Presenting a well-known natural and human feature from a radically different perspective. 

Awe alone does not make up the overview effect, Self-transcendent experiences also play a part. STEs are temporary feelings of unity characterized by reduces self-salience and increased feelings of connection. During these kinds of experiences, people can feel a sense of connection with other individuals, humankind and even the entirety of existence. In the case of the overview effect, that sense of connection may encompass the entirety of Earth and its inhabitants. The overview effect might be best understood as a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, brought about by a particularly striking visual stimulus. 

The experience of awe and self-transcendence are episodic and of fleeting nature, but astronauts experience some long-term changes in their personal outlook and attitude involving the individual’s relationship to the Earth. These changes primarily entail a greater affiliation with humanity as a whole as well as an abiding concern and passion for he well-being of Earth. 

Subjective experiences can shape the ways in which individuals understand and approach new concepts, and even affect the salience of familiar concepts. These changes are conscious and propositional, and can influence an individuals broader beliefs and values. On way to understand this powerful influence might be in terms of alternations to a schema. A schema is an organized conceptual framework thorough which individuals approach new information and make sense of old experiences. When an experience does not fit into the pre-existing schema they have to accommodate by expanding the framework to take new information into account. This accommodating remains even after the experience ends and thus has a lasting effect on the individual and is influential in shaping his or her sense of self. 

The overview effect can be understood in terms of awe and self-transcendent experiences, with contributing changes to the observer’s self-schema and value system, which in some cases could be considered transformative.  

Sources: 

D.B. Yaden, e.d. “The overview effect: awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight” in Psycology of consiousness: Theory, reserach, and practice (March 2016), http://psycnet.apa.org.proxy.library.uu.nl/record/2016-13318-001?doi=1, consulted 21 october 2018

T. Bjørnvig (2013) “Outer Space Religion and the Overview Effect: A Critical Inquiry into a Classic of the Pro-Space Movement” in: Astropolitics,  11:1-2 (2013), 4-24