Abstract
Our impact on the planet’s functioning has allegedly become so profound that during the last years the scientific community has been considering assuming a shift from the
Holocene – our current geological epoch – to the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. According to philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this “era of Humans” is not only visible in the devastation of natural ecosystems, but also through the destruction of human skills and methods of transmitting knowledge. The Anthropocene, which was initiated by the industrial revolution, thus passed through the industrialization of culture, and has disrupted our understanding of the world. Philosopher Rosi Braidotti proposes that with the advent of this new era, we ought to be aware of not only the ever-present environmental catastrophes, but that we also ought to use it as a tool for reappraising what it means to be Human. According to her, the Western subject was created as a product of the Humanist cultural hegemony which defined it within a logic of binary opposition. In light of these ideas, this Master’s thesis attempts to show that art can provide us methods for redefining our relationship to each other, as well as to the wider world, and help us navigate the contours of the ongoing crisis. The work uses Posthumanist thought and its affiliated philosophies in order to show how specific formal qualities of the film medium are able to disrupt the dominant norms which define our relationship to reality, and thus engender new, unexpected or forgotten forms of thinking.
Even the media themselves, which are part of art and serve our communication and entertainment, are not only virtual interfaces, but are composed of materials which are millions of years old, and whose excavation and distribution carries fundamental political and environmental impacts. The materiality of media thus impacts our everyday reality and significantly contributes to the formation of “human” society. Following Karen Barad, this
Master’s thesis proposes that any artistic production ought to reflect the material aspects of the work, whose creation is always a form of negotiation with non-human apparatuses. This problematizes not only the institution of authorship, but also the definition of the Human as such. The Human thus seems rather a product of the material arrangements of the planetary
“megastructure”, rather than a prime moving agent. The text’s main objective is to show that the binary logic which decouples the human from its environment can be transcended by means of art which can confront the dominant codes, as well as use its material basis to draw attention to the “artificiality” of our relation to the world. Art thus brings new forms of thinking which draw from their contact with the material (and medial) sphere, thus allowing us to move beyond the limited boundaries of thinking the Anthropocene.