Abstract

This article addresses recent art projects that are discussed under the notion of new materialist aesthetics. This term is used to elaborate connections between these projects and their methods and recent discussions of the nonhuman and posthuman philosophy. The article also elaborates some positions in technological or 'media art' practices that work on hardware and infrastructure but also on the geophysical underpinnings of media. It expands on more geocentric perspectives in art and aesthetics through connecting a range of such projects by a contemporary artists including Martin Howse, Jonathan Kemp, Ryan Jordan, Terike Haapoja, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier to the body of land art (as represented by Robert Smithson) and current new materialist discussions.

Highlights

  • There are more interesting aspects to the term posthuman than mere talk about the end of the human

  • This is a new materialist, embedded and located subjectivity that does not draw so much on the celebration of the nonhuman of certain sorts of speculative realism, but on culturally and historically situated formations of modes of life that are irreducible to the human being.[6]

  • Instead of a clear-­‐cut poststructuralist ontology based in language, we discover the terminology of geology embedded in this way of understanding the nature of the material: The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures

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Summary

JUSSI PARIKKA

The Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract. Each of the partners in symbiosis owes, by rights, life to the other, on pain of death.

—INTRODUCTION
—CONCLUSIONS

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