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
On the 16th of November 2016, ‘Post-truth’ was officially declared 'word of the year' by the Oxford Dictionary. Following closely on the unexpected results of the US election, the adjective relates to circumstances in which objective facts seem less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals. As a concept, post-truth has thus far enabled a heightened fluidity between fiction and reality, empiricism and mythology, factual and subjective — it has already manifested itself as an insidious rewriting tool of past and present histories, revealing our reliance on 'truth-making' as a necessary building block of what we used to call civilization and posing urgent questions about the essence of knowledge production and consumption in today’s cultural economies.
Twenty years after the popularization of the Internet, the pervasive ability of social media to fabricate reality has become fully manifest in the omnipresent importance it plays in our everyday lives. The impact of this new epistemic fluidity on climate-science denial is currently unfolding and the extent to which post-truth politics are rapidly producing
DONNA HARAWAY
a normalization of institutional deceit is extremely likely to result in irreparable environmental damage. More literally than ever, all that is solid melts into the air, there there has never been quite as much at stake in the very notion of truth and how truth can actually impact life on this planet on multiple registers.
This issue of Antennae is the first of two instalments titled after a symposium I co-organized at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with many likeminded colleagues who share similar concerns for the future of our planet. Truth.Climate.Now. creatively addressed recent discourses and practices that define our complex relationship with nature and culture in the current political moment. Much of its focus revolved around how notions of post-truth might impact the already complicated relationship between art and science. How might contested notions of truth shape essential research questions and methodologies? The representations, policies, and lived experiences of climate change inevitably became a point of culmination for all of these concerns. This issue and the next are in part directly informed by the content of the symposium and the events that surrounded it.
Artist Lee Harrop’s portfolio maps an Art and Science alliance in the search for ‘truth’. This is presented through examples of her artwork and those she references. She proposes that the concept of ‘Post-truth’ provides opportunity for the opposing actual “truth” to establish itself more obviously in contrast to what it is not. MORE >>
This essay argues that the digital animal is more narrative cipher than cognitive avatar, less bête noir than blank slate for the human imagination,including our cruelty. MORE >>
Antennae Ten documents the non-human turn which has so pronouncedly characterized the cultural discourses of the new millennium, is most definitely going to shape the course of our troubled future with the planet. Featuring the voices and work of some of the most influential artists and scholars involved in the subject of the non-human and visual cultures, this collection is an unorthodox reference point, a verbatim account of the main ideas and movements, and an archive of original documents indispensable to tracing the intersections and origins of anthropogenic discourses.
Shifting is a piece of dystopian fiction about re-reading, appropriation and dealing with unpleasant truths. MORE >>
In Andrew Yang's first solo museum exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the artist and trained biologist contemplates our relation to the Milky Way, to which the majority of people have no basic visual access. Yang attempts to close this distance in a series of works that explore our shared elemental equivalencies; as inherent parts of the Milky Way galaxy, our corporeal bodies are, in a very real sense, celestial bodies. MORE >>
‘Anthropocentric Acts Against the Idea of Nature’ is a video installation consisting of instructional, performative segments that seek to break down the nature/culture binary. A facet of the piece was presented at the Truth. Climate. Now. symposium.. MORE >>
A project of artist-scientist team Meredith Leich and Andrew Malone, Scaling Quelccaya proposes an alternate system for presenting climate change data, designed to evoke a more embodied response to the reality of climate change through a poetic geospatial approach. MORE >>
In late April 2016, I traveled to Juneau, Alaska on a journey to visit glaciers and perform Walk like a Glacier: a site-specific intervention in which I carried and displaced a block of ancient glacial ice, walking from the tongue of Mendenhall Glacier, all the way down to its glacial lake. MORE >>
Brooks Dierdoff’s research and artistic practice investigates the institutions that shape our ideas of the natural world. He is engaged in a photographic project that documents the interior office spaces of the United States federal and state park systems. MORE >>
White Wanderer is an immersive sound installation by Chicago-based artists Luftwerk produced in collaboration with the National Resource Defense Council. It takes inspiration from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica which broke off into the W eddell Sea in July 2017. Using actual recordings of the sounds and freq uencies of melting and moving glaciers, the artist have created a haunting and contemp-lative soundtrack of climate change few of us have heard. MORE >>
Rare earth minerals are essential in the manufacturing of hi-tech products such as mobile phones, defence systems and green energy technologies. The increased use of these tools has created dystopian areas of e-production and e-waste. The group Unknown Fields produced the ‘Rare Earthenware’ filming the largest mining site in China. MORE >>
GIOVANNI ALOI
FALAK VASA
PETRA BACHMAIER