Hyperobjects

Notes I’ve made as this project develops.

Statement:

These photographs are a response to Timothy Morton’s book “Hyperobjects”, that contends contemporary issues like global warming and climate change are simply too colossal for us to fully comprehend because they stretch over time and space. My images present the “evidence” that Hyperobjects are all around us and that climate change is visible, should we just look.

Mark Fisher:
“The haunting comes first: the psychological does not subsume the spectral; it is construed by psychoanalysis as a symptom of the spectral.

The ghosts that should most haunt us are the spectres of events that have not yet happened.”

“Anything you can do, I can do meta” - Morton

It’s weird making photographs knowing they’ll never be viewed as historic artefacts.

Thinking about Marc Augé’s Non-Places:
Trying to bring HyperObjects “home” by showing the evidence “here” rather than positioning climate change as “somewhere else”. There’s almost instantaneous nostalgia for the very recent past (a time pre-covid, pre-Brexit, pre-now), a sentimentality for what we’ve lost, a backward tilt - a way of insulating one’s self from living in a future/present which is insecure and frightening. A reality Adam Curtis explores in Hypernormalisation. These images seek to confront that.

Everything becomes history ever more quickly (Augé p22), it’s on our heels. The future is here in relation to global warming, (Morton) meaning the present is crushed and distorted between these two hyperobjects. So, then: How do we live?

Dream Culture

Images:

- Every single plant on earth. Dying.
- There are 10,000 passenger planes in the air right now.
- The last stop of oil will be used.
- 100,000 parts per billion.
- 1.5°
- Rubbish dump
- Recycling - aircon units
- Massive Victoriana - Railway - St Pancras
- Air
- Time
- Solar panel
- Wind turbines
- Oil refinery - Salt End - Immingham
- Bridgewood plastics - Hessle
- Every SUV in London
- Statue of a slave owner
- Marx - All that is solid melts into air
- Evolution - Natural History Museum - Darwin
- Empire
- Burnt out building
- Hostile architecture - to stop homeless people sleeping
- AirCon
- Ghost towers
- 1400 billions of tons of CO2 since start of industrial revolution. Trapped in lower atmosphere
- Over production
- DuPont Teflon
- Micro plastics
- Dissent or perish
- Scrapped car
- Crashed car
- Car engine - flash close up
- Circuit board

Jason Hickel:
"A long view of the history of capitalism reveals that growth has always depended on enclosure. The Lauderdale Paradox first articulated by James Maitland holds that an increase in “private riches” is achieved by choking off “public wealth”. This is done not only in order to acquire free value from the commons but also, I argue, in order to create an “artificial scarcity” that generates pressures for competitive productivity. Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but rather abundance.”

Rainer Maria Rilka:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.
No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

Links:

On HyperObjects:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/introducing-the-idea-of-hyperobjects

Lichen:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/nature-and-pollution-what-lichens-tell-us-about-toxic-air.html

Animals crawled onto land:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025464-600-first-fossil-of-fish-that-crawled-onto-land-discovered/

The Limits To Growth - 1972:
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/

Plastics:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-plastic-problem.html

Plastic:
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/7281/every-single-piece-of-plastic-ever-made-still-exists-heres-the-story/

Mass extinction event:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html

Invasive species:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-are-invasive-species.html

Carbon capture building materials:
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/01/solid-idea-for-dealing-with-carbon-emissions/

Object Oriented Ontology:
https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-art-53690

OOO:
https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2020/08/20/what-is-object-oriented-ontology-what-is-actor-network-theory-what-is-the-philosophy-of-movement/

Ballard - The Drowned World:
https://literariness.org/2019/06/02/analysis-of-j-g-ballards-novels/

Ballard and Ecology:
http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/AHR57_Tait.pdf

“Ballard produces a radical imaginary that ‘explores the deep implications of time, space, psychology and evolutionary biology in order to dismantle anthropocentric narratives and, in turn, open up alternative ways of experiencing, and conceiving of, contemporary human subjectivity’”

Ballard wrote of the millions swept to their deaths in The Wind from Nowhere:

“They were helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survive, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly.”

Using Format