Anthropocene

The cultural use of the concept of the Anthropocene usually includes the problem that the climate, unlike the weather, is not organized in an event-like manner and not directly perceptible, so the human imagination is facing a serious challenge when it tries to think about climate change.

This problem most often leads to questions that ask about the possibilities and performances of the art (what kind of works of art can adequately mediate the hard-to-conceive era of the Anthropocene?), which questions are complemented in this article by the question of the reception, especially reading. This addition is motivated by the recognition that the understanding of our world is traditionally associated with its “readability,” but such a metaphor of reading — precisely in the absence of perceptibility and eventuality — may no longer be able to describe our relationship to the culture and the world.

Therefore, the list of the practices presented in the article ranges from non-institutionalized and less familiar ways of reading to the operations that no longer read and interpret texts in a traditional sense. I will introduce practices that operates with contextualizing combinatorics, where the complexity of the interpretations stems from the large number of relationships created on the surface of the texts; as well as the cultural techniques of the data analyzing and diagrammatic reasoning. I will argue that in the literary and cultural studies the traditional reading methods should be complemented by the interpretations of graphs too.

We are on the brink of planetary catastrophe. Environmental, political, health and humanitarian crises have infused the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene with a sense of urgency (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Human activity has been placed in opposition (or as an add-on) to Nature, participating in a dialectical discourse that, like the binaries of sexism, racism, or even Eurocentrism, points directly to the violence, inequality and oppression of the modern world (Moore 2016). As these relate to climate and political change, the Anthropocene argument presents the exploitation and accumulation of capital as conterminous to human nature and progress.

Accumulation, however, is not only productive, but necrotic (McBrien 2016), in the sense that it unfolds a slow violence sustained by reduction or, perhaps, extinction: the reduction of cultures, languages and peoples; as well as the extinction of the Earth through depletion of resources. If accumulation is natural to us, then so are reduction and extinction.

This talk looks at how certain works of digital literary art (also known as “electronic literature” or “e-lit”) place digital production within a web of material accountability that rejects the binaries implicit in capitalist logic in pursuit of a new type of poetic materiality I am calling “web materiality.” Although it may sound counterintuitive, the destruction of natural resources and human life is directly related to the evolution of digital technologies that project a perverse sense of immaterial existence.

To expose this, I analyze five examples of online e-lit that exploit the affordances and limitations of the digital web: Eugenio Tisselli’s (Mexico-Spain) El 27/The 27 (2014) and Amazon (2019); Joana Moll’s (Germany-Spain) CO2GLE (2014) and The Hidden Life of an Amazon User (2019); and my own (Alex Saum, Spain-U.S.A) The Offline Website Project (2019). Rethinking digital materiality calls for a double framework of interpretation; one that looks both at the place of the works within the web of life (Moore), as well as a new methodological approach that is based on a multi-directional relational logic.

This requires not only a new framework to understand a new historical context (the Capitalocene) or new politics to frame digital objects (Haraway’s ontological politics) but also a different type of methodology and language such as Braidotti’s posthuman theory and politics, where new relationships of knowledge emerge from epistemic accountability and transversal ethics.

Periods of rapid technological change also redraw our sense of cultural and geographical periphery. Routes of transport and travel, communications infrastructures, and networks of cultural production extend, transform, and redirect the perimeters of our personal and collective imagination. In this lecture I will examine how Ireland’s location at the geographical margin of Europe has also rendered it a focal point of technological experimentation and exchange, and has closely entwined it with the story of electronic literature. I propose that the peripheral imagination informing this relationship can also encourage the kind of cultural dissent needed to tackle the consequences of unchecked technological ambition to the fragile environments of the Anthropocene.

Contemporary environmental traumas are placing formidable demands on the creative arts when it comes to interrogating their kaleidoscopic complexities and implications. Electronic literature that engages topics of climate, infrastructure, and nonhuman agency is in a promising position here, due to its recasting of extent literary and poetic traditions using the architectures of contemporary digital computing and communications infrastructure. These technologies are involved not just in measuring and mapping a rapidly degrading environment, but their developmental histories and continued functioning are implicated in both embedding and perpetuating the very effects being detected.

This paper, presented at ELO 2019, examines the varied capacities and potentials of electronic literature to critique the present ecological moment. It discusses a selection of three works that engage not only the most evident questions of digital technology in the context of environmental sensing, but which deploy their literary qualities to establish modes of sense-making that reach beyond the peripheries of data-driven eco-discourse. The first two works discussed are the Twitter bot Station 51000 (@_LostBuoy_), by Mark Sample, and This is a Picture of the Wind by J.R. Carpenter. Both are examined in terms of their use of literary language and digital environmental data to place into dialogue human and non-human modes of perception and knowing.

This paper closes by discussing the author's own creative practice, and, in particular, a speculative multimedia project entitled Waveform. This project is one in which an airborne camera drone measures the outlines of incoming ocean waves, and uses the datapoints yielded to generate poems that meditate on practices of measurement and classification in a scientific context. Here, the seemingly Apollonian gaze of airborne sensors are recast using the algorithms of poetry generation, working to examine the deep histories and consequences of treating the world ‘as from above’. The sciences and discourse of the Anthropocene are products of our late scramble to account for the serious damage caused by these attitudes — to map the effects they rendered peripheral to their gaze. It in this way that the critical-creative potentials of electronic literature are summarised and accounted for in this paper.

This text explores the material implications of electronic reading and writing in the Anthropocene. It does so by briefly examining the consequences that the production and usage of electronic devices has on ecosystems and social contexts. Different perspectives on how a reader or writer may deal with the negative effects of sociotechnical systems are offered: restraint, pharmacological awareness and togetherness. Such perspectives can be transformed into reading and writing tools for the Anthropocene that may allow readers and writers of electronic literature to integrate the notion of an extended community, that is, an intimate and paradoxical complicity with nearby and remote humans and non-humans, and invite them into the digital text

Source:(1) (PDF) The Heaviness of Light. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332523774_The_Heaviness_of_Light [accessed Oct 01 2019].