“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, August 28, 2011

My Proposal for the Museum of Non-Visible Art

Global Warming: A Hyperobject

This is a massively distributed found art object that exists in a phase space whose dimensionality is too high for humans to see. And yet every day it will burn your skin, fall on your head and cause coral to die. This magical object lasts for 100 000 years. It covers the entire surface of Earth up to the height of the outer atmosphere, and includes photons from the Sun.

1 comment:

Rod said...

A response: These things are more of a post-visible sublime than a non-visible art. In the liberal atomic world everyone is destroyed (but us) by a force whose power is not a condition of its visibility but its scale. (You talk about scale - macro, micro etc a lot). And scale is a POV thing.

Either way, try telling a Trobriand Islander that sea-level rise is an artform. Or a blue-tailed lizard that global warming is a curatorial thematic.

Actually, I know you'd agree and that, in fact, this is not what you were talking about.Really.