Paper short abstract:

The paper examines artistic practices as a laboratory for exploring more-than-human temporalities and future-making and how those practices can operate as a test-bed for engaging with temporalities beyond human time.

Paper long abstract:

Grounded in the Anthropocene discourse, the realisation of human activity as a geological agent poses the challenge of rethinking and reassessing human temporalities and humanity’s relation with its environment. This results in a geologic turn in the arts and humanities (Turpin 2012) and leads to geologic practices and thinking which go beyond the earth sciences to probe and apply questions of deep time and deep futures concerning intentional and inadvertently anthropogenic activity with marked potential deep future implications.

One lens through which such an anthropogenic impact can be read is that of contamination (Parikka 2023) and with respect to the Anthropocene not only in terms of the contamination of the environment but of time itself. It is now that humanity draws the temporalities that future generations and other entities have for themselves or have to deal with.

With a series of artistic case studies (including artists like Andy Gracie, Katie Paterson, Martin Howse, Susan Schuppli and the author), this paper examines artistic practices dealing with contamination and temporalities beyond human time.

Intersecting cultural anthropology, with posthumanities, geology, and art, the paper aims to articulate and demonstrate both, how transdisciplinary artistic practices may be capable of addressing more-than-human time scales and how the imaginaries brought forward by artists are exploring the conditions for a politics of temporal scale, that is, how humanity can engage with temporalities beyond human time. The paper will apply Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art (1998) to examine the artistic mediation of the artwork's potential social agency.