(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Film anthropocene (directed: Steve Bradshaw) had a world premiere during the CPH DOX Film Festival, telling the story of how we humans have affected the globe with dramatic consequences. The special thing is that we with the word anthropocene names a period that we are living in now. The anthropocene is not only a geological concept, but a powerful interdisciplinary thesis on a multidimensional influence on the planet and human life where human intervention changes biodiversity, temperatures, extinction of species and life forms. In particular, the industrial acceleration of production and consumption from the 1950s onwards has created the colossal changes in the Earth's climatic conditions and geophysical structures. As one of the film's protagonists states, for about 50 years we have behaved like enthusiastic children inventing new things and thus being seduced by all the new that is possible to make and consume. Anthropocene time is the time for the adult, the time to stop and take responsibility. For the film's experts, the thesis on the anthropocene can help challenge our divided box thinking that supports the separation between the individual and the outside world. It can help to make us aware of the community we already live in. To see ourselves as someone who lives deeply dependent on the environment and therefore also wants to live more responsibly. That we find that what we protect is something that is important. Instead of categorizing something as nature or culture, the thesis of the anthropocene invites us to see the world as a continuum made up of materials, some of which are more processed than others. The iPad is a piece of nature, but in a heavily processed form by us humans. This is not holism or New Age, because we must not take into account the world because it is beautiful, harmonious or coherent. It's about taking responsibility for the world you are a part of, because we find it difficult to see and understand our place in nature in all its complexity. It also becomes a question of how the world affects us. How the world at the same time places some restrictions on the ways we act. We do not just act in a void where we create or construct the world. We are similarly set in some material environment that affects us in all sorts of different ways that we have no control over. For example, the diet we consume has a decisive influence on our moods and emotions.
One step back – one step forward? Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson had put the new star on the international critics' skies, eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, to the convention tent in the democracy tent. The question was what art can offer when it comes to big issues such as the climate crisis. The sale was Eliasson's exhibition of 100 tonnes of ice at Copenhagen City Hall in October 2014, which has now taken up Place de la République in Paris in connection with the climate summit in December 2015. «We have lots of knowledge about the climate crisis, but the distance between knowledge and action is huge, ”Eliasson said. “I wanted to make something abstract, quite concrete, something that gives us a bodily knowledge. When people touched the lump of ice and felt the cold and how it melted, they were told something they knew well but that they didn't know that way. "
For about 50 years we have behaved like enthusiastic children inventing new things and thus being seduced by all the new things that can be done and consumed.
The path from knowledge to action became a central focal point of the conversation. The political system sees itself as healthy, and as human beings we have reached our needs and desires; it just needs to be trimmed with tax cuts and green motivation, and we will solve the problems. The problem is that the climate crisis is far from merely a technical or economic issue. The challenge consists in to get there where our politicians or where we as a society can meet some radically different decisions. Most people just want to make the decisions, for them have seen the light.
Morton, on the other hand, says it is absolutely necessary to step back; The quick decisions are based on macro- and micro-level special interests. And without the ability to make radical collective decisions, it doesn't matter if we have the technology to save ourselves; we are still building giant iron mines in China, as shown in the movie Behemoth, with disastrous consequences for human life and climate, and we have no language or sensitivity to the irreparable damage we do and which we ultimately do to ourselves. It is not about rushing to the solution, but about opening up to a new form of politics, socializing and conversation – a new horizon – where it is not only the greedy and materialistic in man that can be addressed as a reality and encouraged because it is controllable. To get there where another life is possible, not as a loss, but a possible richer world, requires an open and other conscious-
was where we can reach each other in new ways. In Morton's expanded sense, nature must contain everything, it must be a totality of all connections, and all kinds of life and plastic and technology are part of the material supplements of this life, an extension of both body and aesthetic desire. Ecology is far from just a technical issue of pollution reduction. Not only do modern economic structures, according to Morton, have had a drastic impact on the environment. But they have had an equally devastating impact on the very thinking he writes. In his book The organic thought Morton says, "Ecology is equal to lived life, minus Nature, plus consciousness." And consciousness is precisely the awareness of this flicker, of the darkness of light. Nature is a peculiar, flickering amount of interacting and confluent light or materiality that he calls the mesh (Matrix-net). Nature is the peculiar, alien in all living beings and outside them, and the interaction or connection that exists between all things, conscious, organic and mineral. According to Morton, art and critical thinking can create an "upgraded version of doing" and "two upgrade objects", of which Olafur's physical-sensory art is an example.
We have to, Morton said, have to make up for Western man's too sharp separation between thought and action, and return to the contemplative movement of thought as the greatest form of practice. Morton, who sounds like a mix of a meditating Zen Buddhist and an acidologist, has an unusual ability for an academic to speak precisely about a porous, moving and relational reality that we ourselves are a part of. The problem is that the impatient political and economic horizon maintains a static and romantic notion of nature that fits too well with nature as a consumption.
Natural romance and cynicism. Film Notes from the Anthropocene (directed: Terra Long) clearly shows this. From the dinosaur’s all-dominant nature and extinction to resurrection as plastic figures and museum-style shenanigans, the film looks like a long history of natural romance as modern consumption. Are we today caught by our own pleasant images of the pristine and original nature? With the cultivation of the seductive and pleasing images, a dangerous tendency to place nature in a place where we want it to be, such as bird song, large trees, mountains or fascinating animals, arises. Instead of creating something new for thought and sensation, nature becomes a kind of self-affirmation of the untouched or unedited nature or storehouse of recreation. We would rather lose real nature than our notion of nature as a particular place. In Morton's words: "Losing a fantasy is more painful than losing reality." We must acknowledge that we are aesthetic beings driven by desire. The question is how we can educate ourselves and come to enjoy and covet in ways other than the ones we are used to. For example, drive with electric cars that do not smell of delicious diesel. Or eat artificial meat rather than speak for a complete renunciation. Skype instead of just recreating in nature. There is nothing wrong with a strong sensory relationship with nature. The danger arises in the cynical distance of natural worship where you simply find what you are looking for. You end up with a petrified concept of nature that does not carry anything "action-ethical."» imperative with it. Conversely, one may ask whether a more artificial way of enjoying does not create the risk of a new ideology – a banal consumption where things and the senses do not act as sensory shocks that awaken us to life and make us do something else – but simply as more junk. When can we say that nature images have a changing creative power, and when do they simply confirm what we want them to be? The task of art is to re-establish a new ethic for the senses that does not end in romantic passive self-worship.
See www.nytid.no for films.
Carnera is an essayist. ac.mpp@cbs.dk.
