Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how practices of art-science collaborations, engaged with issues related to climate change and the Anthropocene, may be understood as hybrid forms from a point of view that affirms the importance of aesthetic experiences in making sense of new atmospheric entanglements?

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, still more cross-disciplinary initiatives emerge to grapple with the multifarious issues related to climate change, global ecology and the Anthropocene. At least in Euro-American contexts, such initiatives tend to be driven by new forms of art-sciences collaboration. They include, for instance, the Anthropocene Monument, Anthropocene Project, and Aerocene. Despite important differences, these projects have at least two things in common: first, they aim at cross-disciplinary experimentation in order to articulate new vocabularies and imaginaries centered on ecological issues as 'matters-of-concern'. Second, they forefront artistic engagement in the effort to imagine alternative futures.

Based on fieldwork done in the context of the three above-mentioned Anthropocene initiatives, this paper asks how different artistic endeavors manoeuvre the various disciplinary landscapes and imaginable futures in order to shape these into new experiences based on reworking visual and other representational strategies? How may artists' engagement be understood in this hybrid space of multiple forms and disciplines?

I'll suggest that the aesthetic philosophy of John Dewey offers a valuable vantage point for approaching these settings, not as art or science, or art-sciences, but as exactly 'aesthetic practices'. Dewey's resistance towards purified notions of art, aesthetics, and society seems more relevant than ever. Importantly, it may open up for appreciating hybrid projects such as these - and many related ones crossing the art-science boundary - from a point of view that affirms the importance of aesthetic experiences in making sense of new atmospheric entanglements, while remaining productively open-ended as to their (cross-)disciplinary, material and imaginative forms.