How hybrid forms of image-making can invoke a shared radical imagination to respond to our climate emergency
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sunderland
Department Name: Sch of Arts and Design
Abstract
AHRC CDT Northumbria/Sunderland PhD: Benjamin James: Training Grant Ref. No. 2130078
In the West, the arts have played a distinctive role in enabling the fiction of our current perceptions of ecology; one where human mastery of the planet has been mythologised through the production of images. These artistic myths at one level separate us from nature, while also paradoxically, seeking to establish deep, meaningful connections between the human species and planetary ecology. This fiction has evolved through the development of photography, film-making, advertising and capitalism. Addressing arts responsibility to conceive new ways of imagining a response to our urgent ecological circumstance, the project will take as its start point the entanglement of photography, film-making, and networked technologies in the formation and evolution of ecological movements.
In the 19th Century, the Scottish ecologist John Muir wrote a series of texts that became part of a successful lobbying campaign to designate Yosemite as a national park. This act coincided with the production of paintings from the likes of Albert Bierstadt, and glass-plate collodion photography by Carleton Watkins. Operating at the intersection of romanticism, humanism, and technological innovation, these artistic practices together created the foundations of modern ecology. These 19th Century artworks not only formed the very notion of a 'Nature' separate from the rest of society, but also created the world's first national parks and therefore the ecological movements that present 'care' as a crucial component of our responsibility for the planet itself.
While the technologies of capture have significantly evolved since the glass-plates of Watkins to include ever more elaborate digital technologies such as photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning, the frame of representation expressed in the image has remained largely the same (Cutler, 2019). To suggest a way out of an ecology of image-making that has helped alienate our species from the very thing it tries to connect us too, the project turns to Max Haiven (the host supervisor) and Alex Khasnabish's understanding of 'the radical imagination'. Defined within their book of the same name as the force that animates social movements, the authors demonstrate how the evocative, but also elusive, concept of the imagination can be seen to bind radical social and environmental movements together - from Occupy to Fridays For Future - by engendering a common sense of purpose (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). The radical imagination visualises alternate futures unbound by current social conditions in an effort to "to create new centres, foci and spaces" (Antwi, 2020). A future making device that brings "those possible futures 'back' to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today" (Haiven & Khasnabish, 11:2014).
In the research, the radical imagination is deployed to challenge the erroneous perspective of human custodianship over nature and to offer new narratives around which environmental movements can coalesce. Using the radical imagination, the work aims to disrupt the spectator's interface with traditional images of the natural world in order to create space for new and alternate ways of looking at Nature. To enable this, the research will expand upon the idea of the radical imagination within social movements, to also consider human to nonhuman interaction (with the nonhuman embodying Nature). While there is a growing availability of resources that engage with the radical imagination, there is little to date that considers the role of the nonhuman in its construction. By convening human and nonhuman voices within its output, the research looks to construct a shared radical imagination between humans and Nature that can help animate new forms of environmental activism.
This interdisciplinary project will result in a filmwork, exhibition and written research paper.
In the West, the arts have played a distinctive role in enabling the fiction of our current perceptions of ecology; one where human mastery of the planet has been mythologised through the production of images. These artistic myths at one level separate us from nature, while also paradoxically, seeking to establish deep, meaningful connections between the human species and planetary ecology. This fiction has evolved through the development of photography, film-making, advertising and capitalism. Addressing arts responsibility to conceive new ways of imagining a response to our urgent ecological circumstance, the project will take as its start point the entanglement of photography, film-making, and networked technologies in the formation and evolution of ecological movements.
In the 19th Century, the Scottish ecologist John Muir wrote a series of texts that became part of a successful lobbying campaign to designate Yosemite as a national park. This act coincided with the production of paintings from the likes of Albert Bierstadt, and glass-plate collodion photography by Carleton Watkins. Operating at the intersection of romanticism, humanism, and technological innovation, these artistic practices together created the foundations of modern ecology. These 19th Century artworks not only formed the very notion of a 'Nature' separate from the rest of society, but also created the world's first national parks and therefore the ecological movements that present 'care' as a crucial component of our responsibility for the planet itself.
While the technologies of capture have significantly evolved since the glass-plates of Watkins to include ever more elaborate digital technologies such as photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning, the frame of representation expressed in the image has remained largely the same (Cutler, 2019). To suggest a way out of an ecology of image-making that has helped alienate our species from the very thing it tries to connect us too, the project turns to Max Haiven (the host supervisor) and Alex Khasnabish's understanding of 'the radical imagination'. Defined within their book of the same name as the force that animates social movements, the authors demonstrate how the evocative, but also elusive, concept of the imagination can be seen to bind radical social and environmental movements together - from Occupy to Fridays For Future - by engendering a common sense of purpose (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). The radical imagination visualises alternate futures unbound by current social conditions in an effort to "to create new centres, foci and spaces" (Antwi, 2020). A future making device that brings "those possible futures 'back' to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today" (Haiven & Khasnabish, 11:2014).
In the research, the radical imagination is deployed to challenge the erroneous perspective of human custodianship over nature and to offer new narratives around which environmental movements can coalesce. Using the radical imagination, the work aims to disrupt the spectator's interface with traditional images of the natural world in order to create space for new and alternate ways of looking at Nature. To enable this, the research will expand upon the idea of the radical imagination within social movements, to also consider human to nonhuman interaction (with the nonhuman embodying Nature). While there is a growing availability of resources that engage with the radical imagination, there is little to date that considers the role of the nonhuman in its construction. By convening human and nonhuman voices within its output, the research looks to construct a shared radical imagination between humans and Nature that can help animate new forms of environmental activism.
This interdisciplinary project will result in a filmwork, exhibition and written research paper.
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ORCID iD |
| Beryl Graham (Principal Investigator) |