MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS
Creating Counter-Environments for Regenerative Re-Imagination
by Celebrating Empathy, Intra-Agency, and Multi-Species Entanglement
since 2024 and ongoing
The works created under the umbrella of MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS are responses to and challenges of my feelings of intimidation and helplessness in the face of accelerating climate change and environmental degradation on the one hand and the progressive estrangement from each other and the world of which we are a part through expanding digitization and increasingly invasive AI on the other. Originally inspired by the interdisciplinary edited collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, and further spurred by the posthumanist approach to "spacetimematter" developed in Meeting the Universe Halfway and the intermedia research project Spectacular Data: Fascism and the Coded Present, I step out of my comfort zone to create visual counter-environments for regenerative re-imagination.
The works presented here reflect the different approaches I am following in a non-linear mode of creation. They are samples/prototypes of a growing body of work.
For the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, "monsters" point to multi-species assemblages that highlight our embeddedness in the webs of life. "Ghosts" refer to what haunts us in landscapes shaped by past destruction and today's debris. Together, these "creatures of ambivalent entanglement" expose and tackle the phantasmal twin myths of human progress and individuality. In addition, for me, actively acknowledging creatures that commonly qualify as monstrous or ghostly implies transcending entrenched conceptions and tapping into unbiasedness, flexibility, and unconditional empathy instead. Moreover, I think of phenomena that evade the human eye or common sense (or both) − such as quantum effects or molecular biotic processes and principles − as "ghostly" without meaning to suggest that there is anything unreal or otherworldly about them. Finally, I equally draw on the concepts of monsters and ghosts to capture both the elusiveness and the dangers inherent to the digital.
To become intimate with monsters and ghosts, I am working towards a deeper understanding of and feeling for the diverse ways of physical and ecological embeddedness, and interspecies connectedness. To this end, I draw on selected approaches from environmental humanities and sciences and sharpen my actual and metaphorical senses for reading the signs and narratives of both human-made environmental devastation and the miracles of life. To approach the monsters and ghosts of the digital, I focus on the impact of social media platforms and the AI that governs them on our modes of interaction.
The urgency and frustration I feel, paired with the desire to honour and celebrate the natural-material world of which we are a part, is changing the pattern of my artistic practice: distanced rationality, and personal invisibility give way to informed spontaneity and playfulness, and the involvement of my physical self. Leaving beaten paths of reasoning by entering affective terrain and exposing myself convey our shared vulnerability and limits of power. At the same time, they point to the potentialities inherent to shedding detachment and passivity by embracing insecurity and taking risks to advocate for resilience, commitment, and care.
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