climate

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.

I reflect on this edition I think about one of the major contemporary political issues of our time that reaches into the past and into the future.

Nature. The Earth. Climate. The human body. The human soul.

Many of these pieces evoke the cries of the earth under the scorching fury of our activity as humans. These pieces speak to the earth and the earth speaks back to them, creating a dialogue that begins in the soil and moves into the soul. Earth to Human. Human to Human. Human back to the Earth. I see these pieces, in collection, as a journey from the soil into the human mind. And if we are to regard media as a means of communication between humans, we can therefore understand how new media is an apt form of art for reflecting the current dissonance between the earth and the people who call it home: technology has both bridged the distance between humans, allowing us to communicate with people across the globe, as well as being the force that has damaged people’s lives; we as humans have a better understanding of the earth and its physical and biological systems than generations before us, while also almost unable to hear its cries—or, rather, we are not ready to truly listen.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/editors-note-for-the-new-river-fall-2019/)

Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding’s Animate Earth and James Lovelock’s recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/looped)