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Anthropocene

This tag is associated with 3 posts

FCJ-226 ‘And they are like wild beasts’:[1] Violent Things in the Anthropocene

Susan Ballard School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong [Abstract] Disappearance At the opening of the temporary Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2010 there was a room curtained off from all the others. Looking behind the curtain I found two chairs, headphones, a silently meditative voice, a highly-reflective dark blue leaning-yet-standing wooden panel, a rug, and a humming slide projection of an old ballroom. Of all the various objects somehow existing together for this moment, it was the chairs that held my attention. They were just chairs but they seemed important. The work was Circular Facts (2009, figure 2) by New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan: an installation based on the script of a performance Buchanan staged after researching the strange and highly publicised disappearance of British writer Agatha Christie. [2] In 1926 Christie vanished for eleven days until she ‘was found staying in a hotel under a…

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FCJ-211 Embodying a Future for the Future: Creative Robotics and Ecosophical Praxis

Keith Armstrong Queensland University of Technology [Abstract] Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1995) defined ecosophy as a form of personal, relational and intersubjective philosophy, or a guiding series of principles, which he contrasted with the discipline(s) of ecophilosophy. Ecosophy was subsequently developed by a number of commentators, notably Félix Guattari (1995) who categorised it as a relational process that draws upon interconnected networks of mind, society and environment. My own synthesis, or ecosophical undertaking, is contexualised within the aegis of experimental arts practices, comingled over the past 22 years with diverse historical tendencies in new media arts and net art. In response to societal and environmental imperatives, I have evolved an approach to thinking and working that I call ecosophical, and that involves scoping out a relational, interactive, embodied and interdisciplinary series of interventions that interrogate cultural conditions. This process has involved a broad swathe of media and approaches, and in…

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FCJ-175 Humans at play in the Anthropocene

Troy Innocent Swinburne University of Technology [Abstract] culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even in those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs , €“hunting, for instance, €“tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this play that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world (Huizinga, 1949 : 46). Introduction The Anthropocene marks ‘a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, where natural forces and human forces become intertwined.’ (Zalasiewicz 2010: 2231). It is the current time in which human processes such as culture and language, the use of tools and technology, are acknowledged as part of the earth’s ecology, €“and as integral to the operations and behaviours of the earth’s ecology…

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