[csaa-forum] Extended deadline: 10 December. Concepts for Action in the Environmental Arts

[Warwick Mules]

Extended deadline: 10 December.
Concepts for Action in the Environmental Arts
 
 
Transformations Journal: Call for Papers
Issue 30: Concepts for Action in the Environmental Arts
Co-editors: Grayson Cooke, Warwick Mules, Erika Kerruish and David Rousell
 
This special issue seeks contributions from scholars who are developing
innovative concepts, strategies and practices for the environmental arts.
Such critical reconceptualisations of the field are urgently called for in
response to mounting evidence that we have entered the Anthropocene epoch, a
time typified by climate change, catastrophic loss of biodiversity,
ecological instability, resource depletion, ubiquitous digitisation and
rapid advances in biotechnology and computer science. In revealing the
profound entanglement of human culture and natural phenomena in the
contemporary world, the advent of the Anthropocene has had a destabilising
effect on dualistic philosophies and binary logics that have upheld rigid
barriers between the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the inorganic,
the natural and the artificial, the social and the material. New concepts
are called for that can mobilise creative thinking and action outside of
such anthropocentric and humanistic frameworks, and mobilise new practices
that are both attuned and responsive to the rapidly changing environmental
conditions of everyday life.
 
>>> EXTENDED DEADLINE: Abstracts (200-400 words) are due 10th December 2016,
with a view to submit articles by 31st March 2017.
>>> Abstracts should be forwarded to: editor at transformationsjournal.org
>>> View Transformations online: http://www.transformationsjournal.org
<http://www.transformationsjournal.org/>
 
This special issue further aims to establish a theoretical toolkit of
conceptual resources that can provoke, incite and in-form experimental
practices in the environmental arts. We define the environmental arts
broadly for this purpose, with a particular emphasis on modes of thinking,
feeling, sensing, designing, making, performing and composing that are
attuned to environmental change and are inherently collective in nature. In
this respect environmental artists have often been years and even decades
ahead of others in responding to the conceptual and practical challenges of
the Anthropocene. Since the 1960s, artists such as Robert Smithson, James
Turrell, Robert Irwin, Helen and Newton Harrison, Joseph Beuys and Suzanne
Lacy have enacted visionary environmental practices, while also
conceptualising these practices within the broader fields of social theory
and philosophy. The capacity for environmental artists to effectively
respond to the Anthropocene is also apparent in the direct modes of address
through which they are able to materialise new philosophical concepts in
public space.  For instance, rather than attempting to change public opinion
about the environment and thus alter people¹s behaviour, artists tangibly
create new environments, artefacts and encounters that directly affect
social perception, imagination and experience. jan jagodzinski (2015, p.
127) has described this as the unique capacity for the arts to operate as an
Œavant-garde without authority¹, working at the cutting edge of social,
political and environmental transformation without making claims to
disciplinary authority or truth.
In this spirit, we invite submissions that may address the following areas
of theoretical and conceptual inquiry:
-         Posthumanist conceptualisations of the environmental arts that
account for the multiple ecologies of everyday life in the Anthropocene
(Braidotti, 2013) and avoid reduction to subject/object schemata (Benjamin,
1999)
-         Theorisations of matter and materiality as agentic in relation to
creative practice, thought and experience (Barratt & Bolt, ed. 2013; Barad,
2007). 
-         Responses to the geological turn in the environmental arts
(Ellsworth & Kruse, 2012), including those influenced by geo-philosophy
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and the geology of media (Parrika, 2015)
-         The environmental arts as an applied and activist philosophy
involving the composition, activation and mobilisation of concepts (Massumi,
2011)
-         New conceptualisations of technology, technique and technicity
through the environmental arts, including those associated with social
technologies (Stengers, 2005), virtual technicities (Manning, 2013), and
technics (Steigler, 1998) and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1986).
-         The capacity for speculative fictions and geo-poetics to evoke new
social worlds and a politics to come (Shaviro, 2014; Bogue, 2011;
Negarestani, 2008)
-         Interspecies communication and collaboration in and through the
environmental arts (Garoian, 2012)
-         The changing nature of public participation through and with the
environmental arts, including their pedagogical affordances as places of
learning (Ellsworth, 2005)
-         Concepts for new formations of sense (Ranciere, 2010) to break
from neoliberal, market-based world views of the environment predicated on
ecological sovereignty
-         New concepts of being-with and care (Nancy, 2000; Foucault, 1986)
to replace the control and efficiency models of biopolitics and
governmentality that currently define environmental policies and public
debate.
 
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the
entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barrett, E., & Bolt, B. eds. (2013). Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ŒNew
Materialism¹ through the Arts. London, UK: I.B. Tauris.
Benjamin, W. (1999). ŒLittle History of Photography¹, trans. Edmund Jephcott
and Kingsley Shorter in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, part
2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, The
Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 507-530.
Bogue, R. (2011). Deleuze and Guattari and the Future of Politics: Science
fiction, protocols and the people to come. Deleuze Studies, 5, 77-97.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of Learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New
York: Routledge. 
Ellsworth, E., & Kruse, J. (Eds.). (2012). Making the Geologic Now:
Responses to the material conditions of everyday life. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum
Books.
Foucault, M. (1986). The Care of the Self: the History of Sexuality, Volume
3, trans. Robert Hurley, Penguin, London.
Garoian, C. R. (2012). Sustaining Sustainability: The pedagogical drift of
art research and practice. Studies in Art Education, 53 (4), 283-301.
jagodzinski, j. (2015). Affirmations and Limitations of Ranciere¹s
Aesthetics: Questions for art and its education in the Anthropocene. In
Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. (Eds.). Posthumanism and Educational Research (pp.
121-133). New York, NY: Routledge.
Manning, E. (2013). Always More Than One: Individuation¹s dance. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and Event: Activist philosophy and the
occurrent arts. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. (2000). Being Singular Plural. trans. Robert D. Richardson
and Anne E. O¹Byrne, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Negarestani, N. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials.
Melbourne: re.press.
Parrikia, J. (2015). A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. 
Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven
Corcoran, Continuum, London.
Shaviro, S. (2014). The Universe of Things: On speculative realism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Steigler, B. (1998). Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Time,_1> . Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practice. Cultural
Studies Review. 11 (1), 183-196.


Dr. Warwick Mules
General Editor  Transformations    http://www.transformationsjournal.org/

Adjunct Associate Professor
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Southern Cross University

mobile: +61 412 292 541





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