Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
It’s been ten years since I became actively involved in the field of academic enquiry known as human-animal studies. Its antianthropo-centric, revisionist, and multidisciplinary approaches have proved largely productive in rethinking human-animal relationships and in challenging the representational tropes that have relentlessly objectified animals in art, as well as other disciplines. Although very active in publishing and well integrated amongst research peers, from an early day, I was a dissident voice. While many focused on farm animals or pets, I began wondering about insects and amphibians. The more others examined charismatic megafauna, the more I became interested in plants. The recent speculative turn in philosophy including the rise of new materialism, object oriented ontology, and critical plant studies have proved my doubts to be well founded: the zoocentrism that characterizes human-animal studies requires serious problematization. This talk looks at the productivities involved in moving beyond human-animal studies in art. more>>
In a world increasingly produced by Timothy Morton's theory of hyperobjects—a term borrowed from computer science to conceive of objects massively distributed in time and space as non-localized yet cohesive entities — what is the role of the localized organism? Taking up extremophiles, strange organisms that thrive in very specific extreme environ-mental conditions, from the industrial sludge at the bottom of the Calumet River to the arid deserts of the Atacama, this talk will explore the economic, environmental and social positions modeled and enacted by these organisms in a world increasingly characterized by volatile cycles of drought and flood, "extreme" fuel extraction, and fluid hyper-connectivity. more>>
This issue of Antennae is entirely dedicated to Human-Non-Human Networks, a multidisciplinary symposium held at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on March 12th 2016. It was organized by Giovanni Aloi, Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Andrew Yang, Assistant Professor at SAIC, and David Getsy, Professor at SAIC.
Human-Non-Human Networks gathered some of the most exciting thinkers and artists working at SAIC who share similar interests in the non-human, in materiality, perception, and epistemology.
The event questioned epistemological limitations and artistic potentialities in the acknowledgement that existing disciplinary approaches require to be updated in the face of the current climatic/environmental challenges. What is at stake in the re-imagining of disciplinary boundaries through the pursing of new epistemic strategies involving multispecies networks? What may the aesthetic repercussions of such new directions be? How can art produced within new parameters impact on everyday life?
In Plant-Thinking, Michael Marder calls for, “an infinite loosening up, a weakening of the self’s boundaries, commensurate with the power-lessness (Ohnmacht) of the plants themselves.” In an ongoing search for adopting a photo-centric perspective, can gestures of weakness and powerlessness open us to plant modes of being? In loosening our identities, what new selves might we embody? Phytovision, as both a practice of perception and a plant-oreinted media, begins as an experiment to destabilize the primacy of vision, and quietly opens a number of modes of perception beyond the clear distinctions of our human senses. In this talk I consider and present a number of practices aimed toward adopting a phytocentric perspective, weaker boundaries, passive actions, and distributed selves. What is plant media? How can we be both mediated by, and media for, a phyto-centrism? more>>
A seed is a 'small maybe' that intends to not only grow, but also travel. The landscape owes its very existence to the wanderlust of plants and the seeds they release: possibilities in search of new territories. Cities’ entangled fluxes of infrastructure, architecture, and creature, present a rich site to examine how plants find new strategies and new vehicles for living out their improbable possibility. As their animal couriers successively fall prey to human innovation, from spear to skyscraper, it remains an open question how these ecologies of interruption reroute and reimagine themselves. more>>
Woods returns to the gallery, where the sound element is crucial
Altering the string figures held by Donna Haraway—most notably from her essay “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies” where she opens with the line: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (59)—I want to pull forward questions about microbial life, particularly Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Toxoplasmosis gondii, and Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV). So often the accounts of human and nonhuman interaction are defined by face-to-face, immediacy, and direct modes on contact, which reinforce anthropo-centric (and colonial) notions of encounter. However, microbial life not only complicates “contact zones,” but also the certainty of liberal humanist notions of agency, subjectivity, and power. Starting with the ball-of-string figure the “crazy cat lady,” this talk follows the ways that human/feline relationships are done and undone by “para-affective” (microbes that alter affect) forces. more>>
Antennae is a peer-reviewed, non-funded, independent, quarterly academic journal. All rights of featured content of website and PDF publication are reserved. Editor in Chief: Giovanni Aloi. 2016
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Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
localStyle’s projects explore how territories and boundaries — whether physical or intangible — are constructed, interpreted, and negotiated via themes as varied as issues of trespass, the mating behavior of hermaphroditic marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish from the Amazon, and experimental Eurasian blackbird grammar. more>>
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
This will be an excerpt from material in the forthcoming book "Visual Worlds" (Oxford), concerning the visual capacities of pelagic fish and invertebrates. The notion is to avoid at least five possible approaches: Flusser's half-serious aesthetization in "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis," the temptation to expand Lacan's models of seeing to nonhumans, the abstrac-tions of object-oriented ontologies, and the anti-anthropo-morphisms of Uexkull and others. Pelagic communities offer a good example of complex networks of seeing and being seen than cannot be fully interpreted given the current resources of biology: we can watch acts of seeing, and we can appreciate their complexity, but we cannot fully interpret them: they exist as languages of seeing that are not assimilable to existing models. more>>