Interference Acts: Performances along the Threshold of the Human and Non-human

Book Chapter by Mark Peter Wright

In Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation

2022

Published by DPR Barcelona. ISBN: 978-84-949388-7-0

https://dpr-barcelona.com/postcards-from-the-anthropocene/

The chapter focuses on moments of interference and collision between animals, technologies, infrastructures, and environments. News reports of such entanglements are on the rise: a shark bites an Internet cable, an eagle brings down a drone, ants short circuit ventilation units. As physical systems become increasingly obfuscated through the myth of the ethereal “cloud”, what do such couplings reveal about the complexity of geopolitical networks? How might collisions of the human and nonhuman help to illuminate perspectives relating to environmental justice, agency, and rights? What type of aesthetical context is required in order to comprehend such noisy transmissions?

 

Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation

Edited by: Benek Cincik, Tiago Torres-Campos

This book includes various responses to the geopolitical conditions of our tangent times through collections of visual materials and theoretical explorations with critical positionings. The book expands on the Anthropocene theory by exploring its relations with the aesthetic concerns in contemporary representations through their geopolitical ramifications. We conceptualize postcards as documentary space-time snapshots, which convey complex assemblages of dynamic, non-linear, unpredictable, ad-hoc networks between interdependent and transcalar actors in deep time. The postcards we assemble raise questions about the ethical and political challenges of the dominant modes of technoscientific knowledge production, modes that are constituted through existing power relationships, subject positions, and differences, and that perpetuate current inequalities. They catalyse speculative and creative geopolitical imaginaries and collective subjectivities that recalibrate existing value systems and indicate alternatives.

Contributors: Adam Bobbette, Alex Hackett and Alix Villanueva, Alexandra Halkias, Angelos Siampakoulis, Barbara Prezelj, Belén Cerezo, Bengi Güldoğan, Blanca Pujals and Laurie Robins, Charles Danby and Rob Smith, Christoph Solstreif-Pirker, David Habets, Federico Ruberto, Guillermo León Gómez, Ian Rothwell, Ifor Duncan, Jane Turner, Jo Atherton, Joanna Zylinska, John Cook, Josef Barla, Jussi Parikka, Lindsay Bremner, Leila Armstrong, Leonie Mhari and Andy Zhang, Lisa Hirmer, Louise Boscacci, Lucy HG Solomon, Marianna Tsionki, Mark Peter Wright, Miikka Laihinen, Neslihan Tepehan, Nigel Clark, Nikos Katsikis, OPPO + Deniz Tümerdem, Patricia and Angus Macdonald, Rona Lee, Smudge Studio – Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Sneha Sumanth, Stine Alling Jacobsen, Susan Schuppli, Vicki Kerr, Wood Roberdeau, Benek Çinçik and Tiago Torres-Campos.

Read more and buy the book on DB Barcelona