“If we were in a bath whose temperature
rose half a degree an hour,
how would we know when to scream?”
-Bertrand Russell
Our world today is
drowned in a misty pool of endless time where we are not able to see beyond our
outstretched hands. Our experience of time is limited to human-time, while the
world changes in relation to geological-time that leaves us blind to the
changes in our environment. Despite our lack of vision, the world carries on,
constantly morphing; still echoing what the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus
noted many centuries ago. Change is a function of time, and as long as there is
time, there will always be change. But, from the industrial age to the
technological era that we live in today, the speed of change
has superseded the change itself, which has formed the stage for much of the
ecological dialogue in the last 50 years. Technology became the facilitator of
the environment, and to a limited extent the anti-environment over
the course of time. However as we have seen, the anti-environment cannot be
reduced to merely mathematical abstractions. Therefore, despite technological
advancements aiding in breaking the distance between humans and nature, it has
reshaped the environment creating more uncertainty.
In regard to the ecology, where are these anti-environments that
seem more important now as ever before? In this instance the crucial interplay
perhaps needs to happen between government (environment) and arts and science
(anti-environments) for any real impact to take place. Joseph Beuys
experimented with an ‘extended concept of art’ for social change, but I suspect
his environment was not yet ready for people to accept this idea. But today,
events such as the Arab spring shows that such a collaborative act can have a
difference, and the question is how do we utilize this enormous collective
creative force for change? However moving in this direction requires treading
on a very fine line between ‘art for art’s sake’ and propaganda, which then
becomes nothing more than a form of the political environment.
There are other relations that also exists where art returns as
the anti-environments of perceptual awareness vis-à-vis the society. It is
ironic, but true, that in the age of the anthropocene, the human-animal has
somehow been displaced as the sole inhabitor of the foreground, and there has
emerged from the background this other non-human object thereby dissolving this
duality.
If we thought that the outer environment was brought into art
through the likes of Duchamp, Andy Warhol and others, therefore blurring the
lines between art and life in the late 20th century, then the
21st century art and reality seem to have
split altogether, or perhaps the veil of technology has distracted us from the
real issues. It may once again be useful to revisit McLuhan who states that in
an electric environment of instant information, the distinction between
‘mirror', and ‘action’ gets blurred. The first step then becomes to break
the illusion of the illusion of technology. The times seem to
call for the investigation of the unknown (hyperobjects), rather than the known
(objects).
If in the past artists wrestled with the problem of the object,
then in the future they will be consumed by the hyperobject
(if in the present we remain blind)
So the question at hand is ‘how do we know when to scream? The
time to scream is over, and we are now living in its echo. The new
technological advancements are already creating a new unknown environment while
we are still bathing in its spectacle. Today the challenge for art to act as
the anti-environment then lies in rethinking
the role of technology in
the artwork.
