Visions of Scale by DiCaglio, Joshua; O’Sullivan, Jye; Tromble, Meredith;

Short description:

A far-reaching collection of essays by diverse disciplinary authors and artists, examining how art can engage with questions of scale as concept, tool and problem

Long description:

In our hyper-connected world, where huge distances are traversed in a virtual instant, industries are founded on molecular and planetary interventions, and people carry supercomputers in their pockets, how do we relate to the scale of change around us? Can 'scale' itself remake our world-view?

The essays in this book focus on scale as both theoretical concept and artistic tool, exploring how technoscientific ways of viewing the world are critiqued, extended, and interpreted through art practice. Contemporary artists and scholars engage scale not only as a source of awe, but as an essential component in approaching a host of issues including ecological crisis, global pandemics, inequities in globalized economic and sociopolitical systems, and upheavals brought by computing and communication technologies. Visions of Scale explores the scalar aspects of innovative ideas including AI hypnosis, interspecies relations, permaculture and education, race and infrastructure, and offers a fresh take on perennial concerns such as attention and mortality, through a wide range of art and design practices from AI and architecture to performance, sculpture, and video.

Visions of Scale offers a toolkit for critically analyzing and working with scale to address important socio-political issues in and through contemporary art. It provides a model for applying scale as an epistemological tool and as a means of visioning new realities, introducing a vital new approach for addressing interconnected issues within the critical humanities in a time of planetary uncertainty, reconsidering our relationships with other beings and systems, both proximate and distant.

Table of Contents:

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Dedications

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements


Visions of Scale: An Introduction, Joshua DiCaglio (Texas A&M University, USA), Jye O'Sullivan (National College of Art and Design, Ireland), and Meredith Tromble (University of California, Davis)

Part 1: STRUGGLING WITH SCALE IN NON-HUMAN SYSTEMS

1. Symbiosis and Scale: Visualizing Multi-Scalar Systems Through Contemporary Art, Jye O'Sullivan (National College of Art and Design, Ireland)

2. Scaling the Planet: Towards a Planetary Vision, Yifeng Wei (National College of Art and Design, Ireland)

3. Stranger-Glossary: On Unobjective Scales, Matheus Morani (Curator, Brasil) and Renato Pera (Rio de Janeiro State University, Brasil). Translated by Christopher Mack

4. Scale, Infrastructure, and African American Literature, Henry Ivry (University of Glasgow, Scotland)

5. Axonometric Projections: Living at Scale, Jesse Colin Jackson (University of California, Irvine, USA)


Part 2: MODULATING SCALES OF ATTENTION

6. Poetry and Scale, Alice Major (Independent Poet, Canada)

7. The Sliding Scale of Attention, Ellen K. Levy (Independent Artist/Scholar, USA)

8. AI States of Mind and Scaling the Technological Unconscious: Hypnotic AI artwork and experiment, Ania Malinowska (University of Silesia, Poland)

9. Proxistant Vision in the Age of AI: From Spiral Jetty to Planetary Computation, Synne Tollerud Bull (Kristiania University of Applied Sciences, Oslo)

Part 3: ATTUNING TO THE SCALES OF SCIENCE

10. Sonic Scales and Audition's Tricks, Patricia Olynyk (Washington University, USA)

11. Interscalar Feeling with Arabidopsis thaliana: moving between spatial and temporal scales with the ""lab rat"" plant, Jane Prophet (Sheffield-Hallam University, UK)

12. Scaling with microalgae across poetry and science, Helena Hunter (University College London, UK)

13. Scale Undone: A Madam Entropy Performance Lecture, Meredith Tromble (University of California, Davis)

14. Out of Scale, Laurel Jean Fredrickson (Southern Illinois University, USA)

Part 4: LEARNING TO WORK WITH MULTISCALAR ENTANGLEMENTS

15. Multi-scalar Eco-actions in the Westridge Permaculture Garden, Mick Lorusso and David Prince, (Independent Artists, USA)

16. The FIELD: Multi-Scalar Creative Ecological Pedagogies, Seoid-n O'Sullivan, Gareth Kennedy and Jye O'Sullivan (National College of Art and Design, Ireland)

17. Contemplating Everything: Meditative Frames for Science's Scalar Schematic, Joshua DiCaglio (Texas A&M University, USA)


Index