Environmental Humanities Laboratory – Division of History of Science Technology and Environment,

I 1900-talets estetiska historia får arkivet successivt en alltmer framskju-ten plats. Denna konstens relation till arkivet är komplex och har att göra med att kulturarvet institutionaliseras allt mer. Lösgjord från sin ofta re-ligiösa eller direkt politiska kontext i äldre tider blir konsten under 1900-talet å ena sidan i högre grad än tidigare en vara på en marknad och å andra sidan ett objekt som hanteras av arkiv, bibliotek och förstås museer. Walter Benjamin beskrev framsynt redan 1936 denna historiska förändring som i hög grad tog form i hans samtid. I den klassiska essän " Konstverket i reproduktionsåldern " formulerar Benjamin denna process som en övergång från vad han kallar konstens kultvärde till dess utställ-ningsvärde, och förlägger orsaken till denna förändring till den tekniska reproduktionens genomslag. " Med de olika metoderna för teknisk repro-duktion av konstverket har dess utställbarhet ökat i en så kolossal omfatt-ning att den kvantitativa förskjutningen mellan dess båda poler liksom i urtiden har slagit över i en kvalitativ förändring av dess natur ". 1 Man kan förstås ställa sig frågande till den starka dikotomisering som Benjamin insisterar på och även ifrågasätta hans syn på hur objekt fungerat inom religiösa sammanhang, vilket Bruno Latour och Antoine Henion gjort i en kort men kärnfylld essä. 2 Men som historiskt vittne beskriver Benjamin en process som på allvar tar fart med Marcel Duchamps " ready-mades " ett tjugotal år tidigare. Denna utveckling inom konsten var från början just en reaktion mot och en kritik av vad Benjamin kallar för konstens utställningsvärde. Konstkritikern Thiery de Duve har argumenterat för att Duchamps ready-mades förändrade grundläggande frågor inom kons-ten som " är det här en bra tavla? " till " är det här konst? ". 3 På så sätt kommer enligt de Duve det estetiska omdömet i Kants mening, snarare än smakomdömet, att bli avgörande för 1900-talets konst. de Duves reso-nemang går i korthet ut på att Kant fick rätt i och med Duchamp, innan honom följde bildkonsten i högre grad smak än estetiskt omdöme och i Duchamps efterföljd insisterar konstnären på det estetiska omdömet som en avgörande kategori, genom att låta konsten bli till konst genom om-dömet snarare än smaken. Det är alltså inte objektets eventuella skönhet som i första hand blir avgörande utan huruvida ett visst fenomen eller objekt på ett meningsfullt sätt kan uppfattas inom en estetisk kategori. Successivt har det kommit att innebära att delar av 1900-talets konst blivit mer processuell och ibland även konceptuell, där idén bakom det utställda objektet är minst lika viktig som det faktiska ting som ställs ut. I många fall har konstnärer upprättat egna arkiv över sitt liv eller sin konst,

Recension av Martin Gregersen & Tobias Skiveren, Den Materielle
Drejning. Natur, teknologi og krop i (nyere)
dansk litteratur. University of Southern Denmark
Studies in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures
134, Syddansk universitetsförlag. Odense 2016

Samtida dansk poesi och nymaterialism, ekokritik och posthumanism.

Pellucid Paper offers a new history of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media practices in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the book. Pellucid Paper is informed by German Media theory and specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic.

This article studies the mapping of American natureculture in early Spanish colonial history by focusing on the critical aspects of media and anthropogenic altering of natural habitats as a discursive practice. The case of Francisco Hernández, General Physician of The Indies and director of the first scientific expedition 1570-1577, provides the base for a critical discussion of the onto-epistemology of the mapping impulse in early modern media. Hernández was sent out by Philip II to produce a natural history of the new world which resulted in over 20 volumes of text and illustrations. He also sent back a large number of plants and animals across the Atlantic. Simultaneously, the cosmographers at the Casa de Contratación in Seville were working on the same mapping project from a distance, using surveys to gather quantified data known as Relaciones geográficas. The decade of 1570-1580 in particular saw an intense activity of media practices of mapping the new world under the rule of Philip II, who became known as the paper king. He adopted the motto ‘Plus ultra’, meaning ‘further still’ in Latin, as an emblem of his transatlantic empire that came to reach over to the Pacific and the Philippines. The article draws on recent developments of media theory and environmental humanities and discusses how the colonial enterprise processed the geobotanical intervention associated with resource exploitation. It analyses the process, storage, and transmission of information and its material underpinnings and also draws on discussions of coloniality.

This article deals with historiography and layers of time based on a decolonial understanding of modernity and its relationship to the Anthropocene. The point of departure for my critical discussion of history is the geological evidence for an Anthropocene golden spike proposed by Lewis & Maslin (2015) known as the "Orbis hypothesis", as well as the discourse on futurity built into current policy on climate change. One of the problems with the Paris climate agreement is that it relies to such a large extent (ca 80%) on future Negative Emission Technologies which bypasses demand on mitigation in the present. This move can be related to the incommensurability of mitigation with a neoliberal growth economy. The article aims at proposing a critical temporality for the Anthropocene, drawing on work by historians on the contemporary crisis of time (Assmann 2013, Gumbrecht 2014, Hartog 2016) as well as insights from environmental and media history. I argue that the emergence of global political expansionism and extractionist politics  the Spanish colonial empire in the latter part of the 16th century marked the beginning of an era which is still affecting policy and politics, particularly in relation to climate change. I further argue that the systematic use of media and information technology for extractionist purposes is integral to what has been understood as modernity (Latour 2017, Haraway 2017, Moore 2015, Mignolo 2015, Sloterdijk 2015). At the same time, the established way of addressing climate change sustains coloniality and projects the cost of carbon intense living a century into the future, as most models end with 2100. The insights of an Anthropocene Historiography challenges traditional linear conceptions of time by highlighting how the current political eco-crisis is an effect of past political actions, just as current inability to properly address these issues will come into effect and cause damage in the future.

This essay analyzes three cases of the changing ontology and epistemic conditions of the practice of handwriting after digitization. It does so by developing a theory of post-digital handwriting, that is, writing on paper by hand which is then digitized as image and disseminated online. The theory draws on scholarship in media theory on the post-digital as well as insights from new materialism. The cases discussed are penmanship porn, bullet journaling, and the political signature, all phenomena which highlight the intimacy and singularity of handwriting as a physical and sensory practice reminiscent of the modern understanding of love letters.

In this essay, we provide an outline of historical and contemporary examples to illustrate the theoretical concept of environing media. We first discuss how humans have environed their surroundings long before the advent of scientific modernity and the rapid evolution of media technologies that helped in making the planet governable. Against this background, we argue that a fundamental shift in the human-Earth relation happened after 1500 and that this shift is attributable to the development of environing media employed in the process of terrestrial globalisation. We see the present profound renegotiation of the human-Earth relation as a continuity, albeit with a different intensity as exemplified by the work in Earth system science. Finally, we invert Mike Hulme's call for scientists to meet the humanities into an appeal to humanists to embrace the environmental sciences and pursue more integrative research. Recent developments in environmental history have seen an increased interest in the shaping of environments by means of technology. To this end, scholars have developed theoretical concepts like "environing technologies", which are based on the premise that the environment is a historical formation by people and societies who form their surroundings as well as their sense of place. In the same vein, historical ecology has shown that premodern peoples also shaped the natural world to their purposes far more than what has generally been understood. The central premise is that what is understood as the environment is the result of human intervention and that environing technologies structure the way that it is used, perceived, and understood. These insights resonate with core notions in media theory, but they have never before been brought together. Given that all of our understanding of the environment today is the product of several processes of mediation, the theory of environing technology would benefit from stronger theorisation of the role of media. While the scale and intensity of information storage, processing, and transmission by media today are unprecedented, the logic of mediated data processing essentially remains the same as five centuries ago when agents of the Spanish Empire took part in shaping the understanding of the environment of the Americas and the globe. For these purposes, we propose the concept of environing media, as a means of both joining intellectual forces and pushing theoretical analysis of both branches further. The paper outlines the theory of environing media using examples from the Global South, in particular the shaping and sensing of landscapes in and around the Philippines. From early modern to late modern times, this region of the world has been influenced by environing media, most importantly circumnavigating ships and orbiting sensing satellites. The result is landscapes made and remade according to colonial and later capitalist priorities operating on a global, and eventually a planetary, scale.