Bodies between Scales in Neganthropic Performative Arts
Mateusz Borowski
mateusz.borowski@uj.edu.plJagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9631-8843
Abstract
This article offers an analysis of selected performative projects which, using a variety of technological and media dispositives, problematize scaling procedures and confront audiences with non-human scales. This perspective guides the analysis of activist projects of the artist collective Earth Art Studio, which uses existing digital infrastructure and Google maps as instruments of care for the environment. Yuyan Wang’s video installation The Moon Also Rises (2022), in turn, serves as an example of a technological dispositive thanks to which the viewers can have a bodily experience of planetary-scale phenomena. Also evoked is one of the key works of land art, Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970), and, most importantly, his film under the same title, made in collaboration with Nancy Holt. This return to the past of performative arts clearly shows that they have been problematizing the question of scale for at least half a century, anticipating, as it were, the critics of the Anthropocene, who have relatively recently begun to call for a revision of the scalar regime of modernity.
Supporting Agencies
Keywords:
Bernard Stiegler, performative arts, scaling, scale, NeganthropoceneReferences
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Authors
Mateusz Borowskimateusz.borowski@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University in Kraków Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9631-8843
Mateusz Borowski - Professor at the Jagiellonian University, PhD, defended his doctoral thesis on recent European drama at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2005. His main areas of interest are speculative fiction and counterfactual narratives on current ecological and civilizational crises. He has recently published Strategie zapominania. Pamięć i kultura cyfrowa(Academic Bookstore 2015) and, with Margaret Sugiera, Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki (Academic Bookstore 2017) and, as co-author, the work Performanse pamięci w literaturach i sztukach (Academic Bookstore 2020) produced as part of the Beethoven research project (NCN and DFG). In collaboration with Małgorzata Sugiera, he has translated numerous scholarly works and plays from English, German and French.). Since 2022, he has directed the OPUS 22 NCN grant After Climate Crisis: Non-Scalable Survival Strategies in Speculative Fabulations of the Last Two Decades, as well as the work of the Polish team in the CELSA grant Re-Familiarizing the Body and its Umwelt: the Uncanny Imaginary as a Tool to Cope with Contemporary Societal Challenges in post-2004 Europe (REFAM).
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