Radical Materialism

This Periscope features World of Matter, an international art and media project that investigates primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. Contributions by World of Matter participants along with those by other artist-activists and critics highlight transnational networks of relation that oftentimes entail forms of “slow violence,” with a commitment to grappling simultaneously with the social, the material, the geopolitical, the planetary, and questions of justice.

Earth Seeing

Emily Eliza Scott

  Among the most widely circulated photographs of all time is one snapped by astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft, just hours after its launch toward the moon, in December 1972. This image, often referred to as the “Blue Marble,” … Continue reading “Earth Seeing”

Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter

T. J. Demos

World of Matter defines a cutting-edge mode of collective artistic and interdisciplinary research, mediated through constellations of texts, images, and videos, which shares the imperative to explore how the world matters — how it enters into both materialization and conflicted forms of valuation.

Metachemistry

Ursula Biemann

Many of my video essays have elaborated the convergence of the movement of people, resources, and capital in a globalized world, building the video material into complex human geographies. Deep Weather (2013), by exploring the ecologies of oil and water, … Continue reading “Metachemistry”

The Artist as Coauthor

Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen

  In the essay “The Author as Producer,” which was written as a speech but never delivered to an actual audience, Walter Benjamin distinguishes two types of authors: the writer who informs, and the “operative writer.”[1]Gerard Raunig, “Changing the Production … Continue reading “The Artist as Coauthor”

Of Seed and Land

Uwe H. Martin

o “Cotton is in our clothes, in banknotes, cattle feed, gauze, toothpaste, and film rolls. All the while, cotton is traded more unfairly than any other commodity, and its reputation as a natural product is easily exposed as an illusion: cotton uses up more pesticides than any other plant, devastates entire regions such as the Aral Sea due to its excessive thirst, acts as the Trojan horse of genetic engineering, and drives the global industrialization of agriculture.”

Rights of Nature

Paulo Tavares

Where James Lovelock’s Gaia meets Pachamama, at the confluence of indigenous knowledge, modern environmental activism, and ecological/climate sciences, the politics of the Rights of Nature were gradually forged in Ecuador.

Urban Resources at the Crossroads

Helge Mooshammer

“Already we are seeing the excesses of speculative urbanism, which leaves behind acres of crumbling, uninhabited concrete monuments. Indeed, it seems that the urban boom not only consumes vast amounts of land and resources in the process of construction, but also might in fact use up even more in the moment of dissolution.”