Redefining the Role of the Artist in the Anthropocene

‘’In the Anthropocene epoch, we are using the climate change scenario and the collective responsibility oratory –that are effective to get our attention on ecological crises issue-although are not much helpful when it comes to understanding the causes of the contemporary crisis, as are: capitalism, colonialism and rather simplistic/unsophisticated ideas about nature, in contrary we could think that it (Anthropocene) will justify radical political, social and economic interventions. When no doubt left, that the socio-economic and environmental spheres are interconnecting, which is art role on global environmental crises?’’

British and American Studies, 2022

In official geologic terms, our age is known as the Holocene, but, unofficially, the term Anthropocene is more and more frequently used to refer to the recent centuries and decades, in which the human impact on the planet, its climate and ecosystems, has had visible and irreversible effects. Ironically, the rise of rationalism, the triumph of science and the advances in technology have been responsible both for progress, improving living standards and enlightenment, and also for the confirmation of the destructive power of the human species. Reacting against the effects of industrialization and urbanization, the Romantic poets and artists were, in many ways, the first environmentalists. Their nostalgia for a preindustrial world, for the natural rhythms of life and work, their belief in the protection and love God offers all creatures, animals, and plants, all follow intuitively the principles much more recently outlined by eco-ethics. The book edited by Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione, academics at the University of Turin, Italy, in the Environmental Studies series of Lexington Books goes beyond the abstract purposes of literary criticism and theory, in a successful attempt to draw the readers' attention to important and urgent contemporary concerns. As philosopher and cultural critic Santiago Zabala argues in the Foreword, the relevance of this volume lies in its powerful evocation of an emergency which most of us do not confront directly. But the absence of urgency doesn't make silent emergencies any less serious. If in 2020 the pandemic grabbed us all, more or less symbolically, by the lapels, after it had been an ignored emergency for years, the same can be said about the environmental crisis humanity is facing at the beginning of the third millennium. At the same time, the value of this book consists in its capacity to demonstrate that, while science follows its own path, often inexorably, literatures and arts are more capable of raising public awareness, because of the emotional hold they have on the public. If scientists can barely make their warning reach our ears, written stories, poems, photographs and music will hopefully reach our hearts. In Santiago Zabala's words, "while science seeks to rescue us from emergencies by improving and preserving knowledge, the arts rescue us into emergencies, calling for our intervention, as this book does."

Der Tagesspiegel, 2017

longer original English text, co-written w/Suzanne Schwarz Zuber, commissioned for the Berliner Festspiele as part of a series of articles appearing (in German) in the Tagesspiegel.

World Art (vol 3: 163-168), 2013

Leonardo, 2001

If the development of mass media utterly revolutionized the situation of art in the 20th century, current research into the technological reconfiguration and replacement of the human organism promises an even more radical disruption of art's cultural status. As engineers contemplate the creation of artificial life, artistic creation again finds its traditional values and procedures called into question. How will artists respond to the challenges posed by cyborg culture?

Boutel I want to thank Nicolas Bullot, who organised this symposium, and the contributors for their careful consideration of my work. Of course, I am delighted that philosophers of science, not only aestheticians, are prepared to engage with these debates. *** Richard Menary notes that humans are niche constructors. We engineer the environment, both cultural and physical, that we occupy. Not only can we buffer ourselves from the vicissitudes of the wider world in this manner, we are also a behaviourally flexible species, able to cope with change and variability. The knowledge, skills, tools, and practices that enable the propagation of this mode of existence are passed on to each new generation, as are techniques for the further enhancement of such knowledge and for refining and adjusting such skills and technologies. In other words, biology and culture interact and support each other.

Zbornik radova Akademije umetnosti Novi Sad, iss. 10, 2022

The research presented in this paper begins from the time of turmoil in the field of arts and thinking (about art) in the late 19th and early 20th century. The shift from traditional techniques and operational procedures to modern ones, which is followed back from the time of industrial revolution, contributed to the elimination of art as the relevant operational procedure and consequently to the elimination of the values on which the traditional art survived. Although modern art drew its inspiration from the well of resistance to tradition and social reality in which the masses played an important role, the paper attempts to follow the task the art has inherited from earlier times - the artistic display of sense at the level of image, which differentiates it in the recent cultural, economic and intellectual conditions from the mass industrial production of consumable images. The paper examines the possibility of differentiation of artistic image in postmodern period, at the time of excessive expansion of mass media and electronic simulation techniques, following the realisation that the modernist ideal of progress and the exclusivity of art are unviable. The paper presents the arguments of the philosophers who deny the possibility of art in postmodern era. Contrary to that, it indicates that there is a vast area of artistic production which testifies with its exquisite experiential and cognitive value in the field of image to the need for artistic mimesis and its articulation of reality at the time of simulation.

With the enormous chaotic changes taking place today, contemporary artists are showing us a vast and mystifying range of artworks that show glimpses of nascent worlds coming into being and just as quickly disappearing into oblivion. In Part One the author explores a world that seems to be gaining some traction-the world of the post-human. Contemporary art is showing glimpses of this still-forming world in artworks produced from a collision between, or interpenetration of virtual reality and empirical reality, giving rise to weird, horrific, and sometimes strangely beautiful forms. In Part Two the author seeks to penetrate "behind" this post-human art to the activity of the artist, in order to find the original "bringing forth" (Heidegger) of post-human artworks. This move reveals the fundamental place of revelation and prophecy as the origin of any artwork and thus indicates the essential nature of the post-human world.

Leiden Elective Academic Periodical, 2022

The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero's oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction's indeterminacy to Surrealism's fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.