Nonhuman Creation: Images from the End of the World

Today, in the age of drone media, satellite photography, and CCTV, imaging is increasingly decoupled from human vision and agency. It can also literally show us the end of the world.

The notion of "non-human creation" proposed in this talk will broaden the human-centric idea of image-making to embrace imaging practices from which the human is absent: from the high-tech contemporary examples provided by traffic control cameras. , space photography and Google Earth, going through processes of taking impressions in deep time such as fossilization.

The “Anthropocene”, understood as a global ecological-economic crisis in which humans are said to have become a geological agent, will frame the analysis to highlight the interweaving of imaging processes with chemistry, minerals, fossil fuels and the sun. Examining a number of visual projects, including some from her own practice, Joanna Zylinska will argue that the 'Anthropocene' is made visible to us through altered light and through the particulate matter that is reflected from it.

In keeping with the theme of this ISEA symposium, he will also suggest that post-humanist and experimental image formation may allow us humans to "dismiss" our own narcissistic parochialism and take some steps to contemplate new forms of Bio -creation and peace.