Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

After humans destroy one another’s worlds, what will be left are the jellyfish. At least, this is the suggestion of the biologist Jeremy Jackson, who argues that the synergistic effects of the 6th mass extinction have led to the flourishing of some species — such as jellyfish. Such thriving is almost certainly not what Joseph Beuys had in mind when he argued that we are creating the “total artwork of the future social order.” But what would happen if we held these provocations together: that human auto-destruction is a creation for other worlds, other species … other others? Artworks for ...

A mattress, conceived as a place to crash, together. A hot tub, imagined as a site to encounter the end of the world. In times of networked connectivity what’s perhaps more radical than embracing virtuality is to think about the stakes of the body, community, and personal encounter. These are themes engaged by the work of performance artist Cindy Baker, whose projects speculate on the forms of intimacy and interaction that art is capable of generating. In Baker’s words, her art uses the medium of “context” in order to explore questions of community engagement and social inquiry. Brought together by ...

Where do artifacts go when they are destroyed? They enter a void of historical erasure, of fabricated narratives and convenient amnesia. We used to call that place a museum. But what happens when a museum is itself destroyed, when it is burned or looted, when icons and artifacts turn to dust or fall back into the hands of people? Can we still access them, and do we even want to? As Boris Groys points out in this issue:.. Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Becoming Revolutionary: On Kazimir Malevich Boris Groys The Insurgents, Part I: Community-Based Practice as Military Methodology Nato Thompson Visions of Eternity: Plastic ...

The SDUK broadsheet series takes aim at a broad range of concerns—and this issue, GRAFTING, explores how we come to know, define, and interact with nature, where we see its boundaries and identify its needs, and how we understand its entanglement with culture. Following on the origins of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in the spirit of publishing, questioning, and problematizing “useful knowledge,” we recognize our readers as curious people who may pick up this publication with certain questions already in mind. Perhaps you are asking, “Where do nature and the city intersect? What does this mean ...

When M. Beatrice Fazi claims that “computation is computation,” we know this is so precisely because computation is never simply contained within the skin of computers, but is instead singularly generative. That generativity—in the fullest sense of the term, and perhaps even a little more than that—is the premise of this book, and thinking with Fazi opens onto more-thans precisely because her analyses are so self-contained. Indeed, the thinkers in this collection demonstrate that because “computation is computation,” attendant concepts of media, race, intelligence, digitality, aesthetics, and compression are troped in new ways, yielding novel trajectories.

In the 21st century, a humanly-impacted climate is the natural state of planetary affairs: a global environmental disaster but perhaps also an artwork of geological scale. Responding to this idea requires an artistic spirit with an ecological conscience–perfectly espoused by the work of artist Jennifer Willet. From speculations on the genetic future to reflections on the ways that art challenges engagement, interaction and analysis, the contributions in this book share a key concern of Willet’s: a recognition of the complexities of artistic engagement in a time when the stakes of technological living have never been higher.

Eldritch Priest’s work does not often figure sounds as waves, but instead favours earworms and egregors … abstractions that are themselves equally figured through sound. This field is one of phono-fictions, and the contributions to this volume variously figure out (and in) Priest’s work by leveraging, interrogating, and promulgating the waves of boredom, bullshit, imagination, and analysis that drive it. These contributions are thus (sometimes true) fictions of a special type: they redound in (non)sonic bodies that are never isomorphic with themselves, instead moving parasitically in modulatory resonances that aggregate and dissemble according to logics that exceed sensibility.

Our earth is no longer the solitary blue marble pictured from outer space by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. Now, scholars such as Amanda Boetzkes imagine it as a plastic blue marble, mediated as it is through the paradoxes of intersectional and elemental thinking, anthropogenic change, and the ongoing project of imagining the futures we are building together. From visions of catastrophe to poetic journeys through the urban, social and artistic imagination, the contributions in this volume redistribute the currents of Boetzkes’s ecological and theoretical insights. They discover new terrains of consideration, styles of thinking and creative forms of ...

Consisting in historical scholarly work, art-criticism, and fiction, S.D. Chrostowska’s writing exhibits a vitality that seems always on the edge of breaking differently, while also limning a solidity that suggests each trajectory has always been fated to be exactly what it is. The complementarity of these forces — the thing that in their being together as one makes it impossible that they are the same — makes Chrostowska’s oeuvre irreducible, unabstractable, unrepeatable, and — yes — catalytic. In this, Chrostowska’s work doesn’t simply stage another freedom/fate conundrum, but also constitutes the conundrum itself in its aesthetic profile.