ELEMENTAL Aesthetics

ELEMENTAL AESTHETiCS SUN, WIND, & TIDES BEYOND GREEN ENERGY ASTER HOVING Aster Hoving 10274227 Research Master’s Thesis in Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam Words: 23.857 Cover design: Nuno Beijinho Cover photograph: “At and As the Beach,” Aster Hoving Supervisor: Jeff Diamanti Second Reader: Niall Martin January 2020 1 Contents Acknowledgements / 2 Introduction. Notes to a Method The Elemental Aesthetics of Solar, Wind, and Tidal Energy / 3 Chapter 1. The Celestial Sphere Positions of the Sun in Green and Blue / 16 Chapter 2. The Atmosphere Sensing Air, Wind, Fog, and Clouds / 31 Chapter 3. The Hydrosphere A Conclusion by Way of Tides / 48 Works Cited / 63 2 Acknowledgements I am grateful to say that this thesis owes its existence to more than a few people. A first thank you goes to my teachers at the UvA, Jeff Diamanti and Niall Martin. I would be nowhere without Jeff’s committed guidance and his inescapably contagious enthusiasm. If I ever get to teach, I hope to emulate at least some of Niall’s pedagogical sensibilities. In addition, I wish to thank my teachers at NYU, Elaine Gan and Anna McCarthy, whose classes were indispensable to this thesis, and Brent Ryan Bellamy and Reuben Martens, who gave me the chance to present an earlier version of some of this work at the 2019 ASLE conference. I would also like to thank Dina, Eline, Marije, Suzanne, Zoe, Zinzi, Janine, Manon, Jaimy, Maartje, Maarten, the New Utopians—Tessel (thank you for proofreading!), Solange, David, and Wouter—, Max, Signe, Justine, Stefan, and Anna—I am grateful to have met this many fascinating and kind people while finding a way through various cities and universities. My roommates at Sonnehoekje and my quasi-roommates at Nørrebrogade 122, thank you for putting up with my life in two (or more) cities. A big thanks to Nuno for the perfect cover design. Floris, thank you for being an amazing friend and editor. Furthermore, I am thankful for my family. Alies, I am so glad for your texts, which tirelessly keep up truly twenty-first century family ties. Mieke and Frans, I am grateful beyond measure. Thank you, for all of it. I strive to be there for others as you have been there for me because, more than anything, I want to make you proud. Above all else, I owe everything to my mom, dad, and brother—Caroline, Harry, and Kars. There are no words to adequately express my gratitude for the lifetime of unconditional love and support you have given me. This thesis and everything I do is always dedicated to you with all my love. And finally, Jonas, my comrade, companion, and collaborator, thank you. Here's to extending, as long as we can, this peculiar perpetual fairest of the seasons stretching back to a spring in the Bay Area. 3 Introduction. Notes to a Method: The Elemental Aesthetics of Solar, Wind, and Tidal Energy … the times of the body and the ‘natural’ environment are characterized by rhythmic variation, synchronization and an all-embracing, complex web of interconnections. Linear sequences take place but these are part of a wider network of cycles as well as finely tuned and synchronized temporal relations where ultimately everything is connected to everything else … The ‘natural’ environment is thus a temporal realm of orchestrated rhythms of varying speeds and intensities as well as temporally constituted uniqueness … These time-spans extend from the imperceptibly fast to the unimaginably slow, covering processes that last from nanoseconds to millennia. - Barbara Adam, Timewatch, 128 … in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows this is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides. … The thinking of errantry conceives of totality but renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it. - Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 20-1 In the opera Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, songs about individual and collective human exhaustion, performed by vacationers in bathing suits, grow into a symphony. Below these singers, as the artists describe the work, we notice “the slow creaking of an exhausted Earth, a gasp” (Barzdžiukaitė et al.). The piece thereby addresses environmental harm as human and more-than-human exhaustion. The opera, which won the Golden Lion for best national participation at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is set on an artificial beach inside the Lithuanian pavilion. The beach is lit by bright lights suspended from the ceiling at about the same height as the balcony where viewers stand, looking down at the scene on the sand. A recording of waves and wind can be heard, but the beach of Sun & Sea (Marina) is little more than a pile of sand and vacationers. Strangely, the performance is characterized by the material absence of the elements that make up its title: the sun and the sea. 4 Image 1. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, Sun & Sea (Marina), www.drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X0UOkKnQfLep0HWPgBoqoP5G1O3Z2QTK Beaches, however, are a paradigmatic ecotone: a place where terrestrial and marine biomes meet. Ecotones are contact zones between different ecosystems, such as those of the sea and land, but also in an extended sense between those of the air and sun. The earth’s biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and celestial sphere do not simply meet at the beach as an intermediary space between separate entities. Rather, the beach comes into being as they permeate and co-constitute one another. Theorized as such, the beach is thus a place that comes into being only because the materialities of the sun, air, and water flow in and out of each other. By mediating the beach as the absence of these elements, Sun & Sea (Marina) figures the contemporary as a period of environmental crisis in which a radical disturbance and pollution of a pristine nature eventually causes the disappearance of ecological rhythms altogether. This contributes to the creation of an aesthetics of environmental harm, but at the same time risks reproducing the environment as an object that is either characterized as untouched nature or signaled through its absence.1 Such an aesthetics thereby presents culture, history, and society 1 William Cronon’s seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” traces how this kind of narrative often characterizes environmentalism: “Far from being the one place on earth that stands 5 as 1. previously separated from, and 2. incommensurable with nature, ecologies, and materialities. In this thesis, therefore, I am less interested in this fall from nature narrative, and more in what persists despite and within environmental harm. While Sun & Sea (Marina) mediates the environmental crisis as the absence of ecological rhythms, I am committed to an aesthetics that mediates ecological rhythms and entanglements that have always been and continue to be entwined with the social. I refer to this socio-ecological art as an elemental aesthetics. My research shows that this elemental aesthetics brings contemporary discourses about energy transitions into relief. Corporations that invest in green energy routinely suggest that if oil rigs and tar sands can be replaced by windfarms, solar panels, and tidal stream generators, there is no need for political and economic reorganization in response to the planetary exhaustion Sun & Sea (Marina) addresses. Because green energy cannot be exhausted, these corporations suggest, these are the fuels and technologies by which the social, as green capitalism, can continue to exist separately from the ecological.2 I thus use the term green capitalism to refer to a period of capitalist organization the wake of the 1970’s oil crisis and during the ongoing climate crisis. But if elemental artworks suggest that social and natural rhythms have never been independent from each other, how then should we think about energy transitions? Two types of questions emerge here. How to theorize the kind of work this elemental aesthetics does in relation to how we think about transitions from fossil fuels to green energy? How to historicize the intertwinement of culture and ecology, or more specifically, artworks with their specific material and temporal contexts? In order to respond to these concerns, I develop an elemental analytic as one way of fostering sensitivity to the continuously changing mutual constitution of artworks, (energy) infrastructures, and the lively materialities of the sun, wind, and tides. I thereby contribute to a wide range of contemporary elemental research. Nicole Starosielski, for instance, presents an array of these scholars in media studies in the essay “The Elements of Media Studies,” many of which I engage with in this thesis. They redefine the classic notion of the elements as timeless and essential material building blocks by working with “the elemental” as a framework for understanding materials as interconnected and dynamic (4). This is the initial definition of the elemental that I work with in this thesis. Starosielski, moreover, argues that the elemental opens up conversations in media studies to apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. … For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem” (69). 2 In chapters one and two, I substantiate this claim by looking at green energy enterprises by NASA and Google. 6 scholars outside the field (3). Pushing this last observation further, I argue that an elemental analytic is per definition interdisciplinary.

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