art

Through readings of the works of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald, David Farrier explores the idea of Anthropocene as marked by haunted time.

Hornby draws attention to the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations aim to increase environmental awareness, arguing that Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control.

An early color photograph of the Suna River by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863–1944), who is also featured in the picture.

Lithograph by Leopold Niemirowski from Puteshestvie po vostochnoi Sibiri I. Bulychova (Bulychov’s Travels in Eastern Siberia), 1856.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Thomas Lekan offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission’s Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Wolfgang Struck’s essay examines the renewed attraction to the medium of the atlas in light of representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene.

In this commentary, Stefan Helmreich considers how Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave, has recently been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene, and how the image has been adapted to speak to the contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.