International book launch with TIMOTHY MORTON & FEMKE HERREGRAVEN
Sonic Acts and Dark Ecology officially launch their new book – The Geologic Imagination – richly illustrated and beautifully designed collection of essays, visual contributions and interviews.
This new publication is inspired by geosciences and zooms in on planet Earth. Fundamental to The Geologic Imagination is the idea that we live in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Human activity has irreversibly changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, and even the Earth’s crust. Humanity has become a geological force. Consequently, the perspective has shifted from humans at the centre of the world to the forces that act on timescales beyond the conceivable. These ideas challenge us to rethink our attachments to the world, and our concepts of nature, culture and ecology.
With this book Sonic Acts examines how art and science map and document new insights, and how the changes and transformations that occur on a geological scale can become something humans can feel, touch, and experience.
The Geologic Imagination features new essays by Timothy Morton, Douglas Kahn, Paul Bogard, Michael Welland, and Raviv Ganchrow; there are interviews with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Matthew Coolidge, Liam Young, Noortje Marres, Kodwo Eshun, Kurt Hentschläger, and Mario de Vega; and visual contributions by Femke Herregraven, Mirna Belina, Ellsworth & Kruse, the Center of Land Use Interpretation, Marijn de Jong, and BJ Nilsen & Karl Lemieux.
The publication accompanies the Sonic Acts festival 2015. A major part of contributions is connected to the Dark Ecology project that started in October 2014. The book also contains unearthed, a new soundwork BJ Nilsen made during the Dark Ecology explorations of the border zone between Kirkenes (Norway) and Nikel (Russia).
In connection with the international book launch Plattform, Sonic Acts and Dark Ecology present talks by Femke Herregraven and Timothy Morton.
Morton, one of the contributors to the book, will reflect on Dark Ecology, thinking at Earth magnitude and The Geologic Imagination.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World, The Ecological Thought, Ecology without Nature, nine other books and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. Morton is a proponent of object-oriented ontology (OOO), a new philosophy that shows how nonhuman things—a fox, a pencil, the biosphere, a song, a quasar, a mixing desk—are as rich and alive and special as we think humans are, and how they influence each other in a sensual, molten ether.
Femke Herregraven will talk about her research on how climate change opens up new investment opportunities for financial markets and how the melting Arctic ice will increase the speed of financial trading.
Femke Herregraven’s work traverses global finance, information and geopolitics. Works exist online and as installations, video, prints, drawings, and games, often exploring geographies of avoidance and the ways in which financial systems carve out new geographies through spatial organisation. Herregraven’s ongoing projects include Geographies of Avoidance, addressing the offshore escape of financial regulation and The All Infrared Line, revolving around the physical backbone of global finance.