Contexts
Olafur Eliasson, Weather Project
The idea was conceived when Eliasson was in London. It was on a warm day even though it snowed the previous day and people talked about global warming. The artist also talked about the weather being a dynamic element. “You will see clouds today that you will never see again.” Eliasson said he wanted to capture that.
Undoubtedly,Weather has been a subject of everyday human conversation since time immemorial. The English writer Samuel Johnson (1709‑1784) was known to have remarked: ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.
People have been increasingly aware of the abnormal changes in weather owing to global warming, which are amplified in the works of Eliasson. Obviously, this issue closely related with human being has struck a responsive chord in the heart of every person.
ALEXEY TITARENKO, City of shadow, 1991-1994
"The idea of the City of Shadows emerged quite unexpectedly and quite naturally during the collapse [of the Soviet Union] in the fall of 1991. I mean that the concept itself stemmed from my impressions nourished by the everyday reality.Alexey Titarenko'street photography conveys an otherwordly artistic vision,using long exposures that made his human subjects appear fragile and ghostly.
Fuzzy crowds, like the streams of time, pour into the street of city. The energy far beyond a photo continues to spill over. In my opinion, it may be difficult to achieve such an effect with a clear and sharp image, because it is blur that has endowed the space with fathomless depth. This is exactly what I want to present in the “Mist” series.
Nature, as both subject and object, has been repeatedly rejected and reclaimed by artists over the last half century. With the dislocation of disciplinary boundaries in visual culture, art that is engaged with nature has also forged connections with a new range of scientific, historical, and philosophical ideas. Developing technologies make our interventions into natural systems both increasingly refined and profound. Advances in biological and telecommunication technology continually modify the way we present ourselves. So too are artistic representations of nature (human and otherwise) being transformed.
In the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus, it is in the idea that the sublime represents a testing of limits to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.
The seventeenth episode of the Podcast for Social Research centers on recent work by Donna Haraway, whose newest intervention in the fields of feminist scholarship and science and technology studies is titled Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Danya and Ajay discuss anthropocene logics, the trajectory of Haraway’s Marxist feminism, anthropocentrism, detachable infrastructure, the politics of dieback fatalism, ethics at the level of the molecule, speculative fabulations, migratory subjectivity, human-butterfly hybrids, Navajo-Churro sheep, and the perennial Adorno on the shoulder.
