‘This Is How the Earth Must See
Itself’
How contemporary aesthetic
practices perform more-than-human sensoria
PhD research & dissertation (successfully defended March 2024).
Department for Culture and Media, Freie Universität Berlin
Climate collapse, species loss and what is commonly (and, as some suggest, problematically) called the Anthropocene, indicate that we have reached a series of earthly tipping points and a failure of anthropocentric worldly inhabiting. In an attempt to respond to this crisis, we find ourselves in the midst of what might be called a ‘posthuman turn’ in critical theory.
Artists, too, have responded to these urgent issues, renegotiating planetary relations through aesthetic means. This exploration of the posthuman — or what I will preferably call in my dissertation more-than-human — by aesthetic practitioners is perhaps inevitable. It no longer makes sense to think of sensing as we do. The limits of an anthropocentric sensorium are revealing themselves. The earth is speaking back, but we do not yet know how to listen.
Works of art offer particularly intense loci of aesthetic encounter, making them interesting sites of experiment for emergent sensoria. My dissertation therefore looks at several emergent aesthetic methodologies that renegotiate the anthro-sensible, working with and within more-than-human collaborations in ways that go far beyond the eco-art of the 1970s or the bio-art of the 1990s.
How might contemporary artistic and aesthetic practices offer experimental methods for performing more-than-human sensoria? While varied, what unites these disparate practices is how they trouble many of our inherited and anthropocentric assumptions about sensation and expression — a set of material-discursive and performative norms I describe collectively as the anthropocentric sensorium. Building on the work of Judith Butler and Karen Barad, I conceptualise this anthropocentric sensorium as a dynamic process of boundary-making, the permissions of which shape how human subjects sense the world and themselves. These boundary limitations not only exclude nonhuman cultural expressions and more-than-human sensationality as logical impossibilities, but they also perpetuate the feltness of human separation and exceptionalism from the world.
I argue that it is vital, in this ecological and political juncture, to find ways to work against these anthropocentric sensational limitations. How might one engage with the earth’s more-than-human sensationality, beyond a humanist scope that tends to exclude that which challenges or inconveniences us? As performative, the anthropocentric sensorium is not as stable as it might seem. Unruly sensations always slip through the cracks. This is how more-than-human sensoria can begin to emerge, and where art and aesthetic practices can intervene. While more-than-human sensoria are far from singular or coherent, and do not exist as a binary counterpoint to its anthropocentric iteration, what they share is a tendency towards entanglement and worldliness over individuality and separation. In this research project, I explore practices in embodied mimesis, attunement, speculative fabulation, and natureculture, drawing upon a variety of contemporary art and aesthetic practices.