Expanding the Field of Environmental Art in Relation to Post-anthropocentric Politics
- Submitting institution
-
Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Curran1
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Royal College of Art, London
- Brief description of type
- Multi-component output with contextual information
- Open access status
- Access exception
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This submission gathers a series of journal articles, conference presentations and a book chapter that collectively demonstrate a contribution to scholarship that expands the field of ‘environmental art’ in relation to post-anthropocentric politics. Joining research in the environmental humanities highlighting the increased political urgency of the ecological, this research opens up discussions of the environment to a transdisciplinary frame of reference that brings art practices and histories into dialogue with philosophy, anthropology, human geography and speculative-fiction. The rationale for this research came from frustration with the use of visual art practices as illustrative footnotes to the discussion, rather than acknowledging the significant role they can play in contributing new forms of thinking and innovative ways to frame or provoke debate. ‘Thinking ecologically’ requires a radical repositioning and redrawing of existing epistemological frameworks. Curran’s research presents the importance of ‘situated’ art practices (linked to particular geographic territories and tropes) in contributing non-linear, aesthetic and material models of thought that offer enriched ecological narratives combining human and non-human politics.
Several articles use the figure of the cloud as it migrates across a series of natural and technological references linking the cold war space race, global satellite technologies and environmental monitoring. Curran interweaves research from different historical and temporal registers to consider the environmental consequences of contemporary data technologies highlighting their material traces, their contribution to slow forms of ecological violence and the entanglements between human and geological/planetary time.
This research was initially presented at Universities in the UK and Sweden as well as Art Galleries in the UK (Tate Liverpool) and Spain (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona). Several papers were then published. Curran also received an invitation to present as a keynote speaker at a symposium on Art and Science at the University of Hertfordshire, UK in 2021.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
