art

Lithograph by Leopold Niemirowski from Puteshestvie po vostochnoi Sibiri I. Bulychova (Bulychov’s Travels in Eastern Siberia), 1856.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Thomas Lekan offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission’s Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Wolfgang Struck’s essay examines the renewed attraction to the medium of the atlas in light of representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene.

In this commentary, Stefan Helmreich considers how Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave, has recently been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene, and how the image has been adapted to speak to the contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.

Lindsay Kelley investigates the multispecies power structures playing out in two of Beatriz da Costa’s projects, Dying for the Other and the Anti-cancer Survival Kit.

Andrew Mark describes Bob Wiseman’s allegorical piece, Uranium, arguing that it accesses emotion to alter the consciousness of percipients.

In looking back at Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler through contemporary art, Susan Ballard suggests that in the art gallery can provide an opportunity to locate ourselves in the place of others. She argues that sympathy read alongside machinic evolution can offer a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction.

In this introduction to their Special Section “Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien,” editors Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar discuss the growing research on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology, and how the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers, among others.