Susan Ballard

Helen Moore

Robert Carter

Vicki Smith

Tim Corballis

Tracey Benson

Zita Joyce

Julian Priest

In November 2015, ADA brought together eight artists and writers in post-quake Otautahi Christchurch, for a ‘book sprint’, the collaborative writing of a book over the course of five days. The result, A Transitional Imaginary, juxtaposes and interweaves its authors’ perspectives on the effects of the devastating series of earthquakes that began in 2010. Guided by the notion of ‘the digital’ in its broadest sense, this book offers a multiple view of the transitional city, attuned to the technologies, networks and virtualities that have always ordered our world.

Space, Network and Memory in Christchurch

A Transitional Imaginary

This book examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable—turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, narrative nonfiction, digital and media art, and the environmental humanities.

Planetary Aesthetics

Art and Nature in the Anthropocene

Christine Eriksen

This book explores how fire, plants and people coexist in the Anthropocene. In a time of dramatic environmental transformation, the authors examine how human impacts on the planetary system are being felt at all levels from the geological and the arboreal to the atmospheric. The book brings together the disciplines of human geography and art history to examine fire-plant-people alliances and multispecies world-making. The authors listen carefully to the narratives of bushfire survivors. They embrace the responses of contemporary artists, as practice becomes interwoven with fire as well as ruin and regrowth. Through visual, textual and felt ways of being, the chapters illuminate, illustrate, impress and imprint the imagined and actual agency of plants and people within a changing climate — from Aboriginal ecocultural burning to nuclear fire. By holding grief and enacting hope, the book shows how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to the interdependencies of fire, plants and people in the Anthropocene.

Fire, Plants, and People

Alliances in the Anthropocene

Susan Ballard

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