experimental artists cinema & theory and works by cathy fitzgerald. Thesis working title – 'The ecocidal eye: beyond the anthropocentric gaze to a relational gaze in cinema'
‘I make work that is multi-dimensional. Having come from a background in documentary photography, it is important to me to draw attention to socio-economic and political issues. While at the same time exploring more metaphysical concepts… I make my work aesthetically pleasing, rich in detail and large in scale in the hopes that the viewer can reflect on the ideas and issues that are prevalent in the work, whilst also getting a better sense of their own position in the world.’ – David Thomas Smith, Dublin based photographer
I found David’s work yesterday, a pity, as I wish I’d seen it before I’d written my recent article on ‘the Anthropocene: 10 000 years of ecocide. His photographic works in his Anthropocene series, each made up of thousands of images, show much more detailed perspectives and offer a more unsettling reflection on the state of the earth, compared to the ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ video that I reviewed in my article. His works do this as they cleverly engage one on many different levels. The intricate patterns and colours in the photographs are aesthetically arresting in their own right, yet a tension exists in the works as one is presented with the enormous scale of our own species activities: Humanity’s effects on the biosphere, in the Age of the Anthropocene, are here confirmed as inconceivably sublime. (more…)
please click title or here to see the full post and videos
< /br>
the anthropocene: 10 000 years of ecocide
The Great Acceleration in the Age of the Anthropocene; still from the video ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene‘ (2012)
‘Imagine how our discourse and actions would be different if people daily detailed for us the lives— the individuality, the small and large joys and fears and sorrows— of those whom this culture enslaves or kills. Imagine if we gave these victims that honor, that attention. Imagine if everyday newspapers carried an account of each child who starves to death because cities take the resources on which the child’s traditional community has forever depended…. Imagine, too, if our discourse included accounts of those nonhumans whose lives in this culture makes unspeakably miserable: the billions of creatures bred for torture in feedlot, factor farm, or laboratory; the wild creatures worth money, who are pursued and destroyed no matter where they hide; the wild creatures unvalued by the economic system, who are eliminated because they are in the way of production’ Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1, 2006, p.59
My still forming ideas for the first part, and the context in which my thesis (‘the ecocidal eye: beyond the anthropocentric gaze to a relational gaze in cinema’) rests, are to present and characterise the ecocidal tendencies of the human-centered (anthropocentric) gaze, to examine whether culturally we perpetuate such actions in cultural works we produce, such as cinema. In this article I decided to examine anthropocentrism by considering a new term – the Anthropocene as perhaps a means to think about ecocide over the centuries. Interestingly, I found that this term geological term and concept has been adopted quickly, in other fields, particularly in the last few months in international conferences leading up to the upcoming Earth Rio+20 earth summit.
To begin with, when I was reviewing recent data over the last few months on the state of the earth to form the background of my enquiry, I kept coming across so many different, but as I see it now related facets of planetary system collapse or change. The exponential rate and scale of destruction is simply terrifying. The results of globalised ecocide* are evident: in our atmosphere (climate change), in our oceans and waterways (ocean acidification, extirpation of marine species and actual and imminent marine ecosystem collapse), ecosystem degradation leading to gross biodiversity loss (we are now in the largest mass extinction period of the last 65 million years), non-renewable resource and mineral depletion (peak oil, peak nitrogen, peak phosphorus, peak uranium, peak everything etc). I began to see that one couldn’t focus on one particular aspect if one was to understand the systemic nature of ecocide. That one species, and our own at that, is altering so quickly the many life supports of the earth is pretty inconceivable and is leading a growing number of people to call this unprecedented period as the Age of the Anthropocene (the age of man). While there is understandably much attention being paid to climate change (this has been a focus for some in the small area of contemporary art that has begun to look at art & ecology in recent years) I sought out others who were looking at the totality of earth’s biospheric (global sum of all ecosystems) change. (more…)
video sketch: observe/r (30 april 2012) - see film details below*ZFZH6SE29PR5
A couple of months ago I applied and was recently accepted to present my work in progress at the UK/International art ecology conference The Home and The World June 19-21, 2012.
The Home and the World Summit addresses:
‘how creative people interact with the world around them, how the arts can speak about nature and the challenges facing the world, how place and community can be at the heart of creative choices, how our identities and place in the world is defined by what we call home... Many writers have suggested that our increasing alienation from the natural world has had a profound effect on the human condition and the psyche. Ecophilosopher Paul Shephard suggests that human societies have always persisted in destroying their habitat –– but that now this is compounded by our apparent loss of knowledge about the interdependence of all living things.’
‘This summit explores existential questions such as: what does it mean to be at home in the world? what does home mean to us? how can we be more aware of our ‘inhabited place’ in the world? why do we all too often fail to understand the impact we have on the world around us? It’s been more than fifteen years since Gablik suggested that art can re-enchant our connection to the world – how have we responded?’ (see more here e-brochure)
This is the abstract I sent in below (go to abstract here) Its basically the working abstract of my entire artistic enquiry – its moved on somewhat from my abstract from last year – thanks be!
A few definitions first though. The concepts and new terms I’m presenting took a long while to come together but they are ideas that have collapsed in on themselves somehow. From reading widely and perhaps thinking about how we ‘view’ or more correctly, how we construct of ‘views’ of the living world maybe something akin to what feminist theory has revealed in cultural works; the politics of power in the predominantly ‘male gaze’ . ‘Theories of the ‘gaze’ reject the idea that perception is ever merely passive reception. All of these approaches assume that vision, the quintessential aesthetic sense, possesses power: power to objectify—to subject the object of vision to scrutiny and possession. The ‘male gaze’ has been a theoretical tool of inestimable value in calling attention to the fact that looking is rarely a neutral operation of the visual sense. As Naomi Scheman states:
Vision is the sense best adapted to express this dehumanization: it works at a distance and need not be reciprocal, it provides a great deal of easily categorized information, it enables the perceiver accurately to locate (pin down) the object, and it provides the gaze, a way of making the visual object aware that she is a visual object. Vision is political, as is visual art, whatever (else) it may be about (Scheman, 1993, p. 159). ‘ (Korsmeyer, 2008)
In my general review of the state of the planet in regards to our species involvement in activities of gross and globalised ecocide (see my previous post on what ‘ecocide’ is here) that is having a recognised negative effect on the earth’s entire planetary systems (such as the largest mass extinction in the last 65 million years, climate change, ocean acidification, peak oil, peak nitrogen, peak phosphorous, peak uranium, peak everything etc), I’ve also found myself adopting the word ‘biosphere‘ – a relatively new scientific word that encompasses not just all living ecosystems but the atmosphere, the hydrosphere (our oceans), the lithosphere (the elements that make up the earth’s crust) of the earth.
The idea of the ‘ecocidal eye’ arose as ‘ecocide’ seems to capture the argument of what I’m trying to present in my enquiry – that the way we culturally represent the living world is never passive and in fact has often been complicit in how we continue to exploit the earth which now even threatens our own living support systems. It took me simply ages to come up with a phrase which would somehow connect ecocide and cinema – I had it as the ‘lazy eye’, ‘the destructive eye’, ‘the forgetting eye’ … and then suddenly arrived at the ecocidal eye!
The ‘anthropocene’ is also a new term that is being debated in geology, but I will describe this more in a subsequent post.
Abstract for my Home and World presentation, June 2012
Working title and abstract
THE ECOCIDAL EYE : BEYOND THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC (human centered) GAZE TO A RELATIONAL GAZE IN CINEMA(more…)
+ high-res version
