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11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate Emergency

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Photography Off the Scale
This chapter is in the book Photography Off the Scale
11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate EmergencyLukáš Likavčan and Paul HeinickerIntroduction: The Earth Revealing Itselfon A PeDestAL in Musée d’Orsay in Paris stands a sculpture by Louis- Ernest Barrias called Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (1899). It depicts a heavily gendered imagination of nature, personified by a young woman who reveals her breasts to the male gaze of Western science. Seduced by their instruments, she is imagined to be ready to reveal her secrets to those who approach her. Since the end of the nineteenth century, this trope of nature unveiling itself has mutated many times. Its most recent instantiation is the climate crisis; a situation when the planet turns into a massive diagram of anthropogenic destruction, revealing itself in hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, sea level rises, loss of wildlife or the acidification of the oceans. Defying patriarchal reveries of the nineteenth century, the Earth responds to our celebrated technologies of modernity and progress in a rather destructive manner.An original and contemporary variation on this trope is Susan Schup-pli’s Nature Represents Itself (2018), a piece that investigates aesthetic and jurisdictional aspects of BP’s Deepwater Horizonoil spill of 2020 in the Gulf of Mexico. This video, commissioned by the SculptureCenter in New York, confronts us with a massive, literal oil painting: streams of petroleum diagram the ecological disaster on the surface of the water (Schuppli 2019a), while underwater cameras live-streaming the oil bubbling up from corrupted pipes provide us with a glimpse of the Anthropocene in action. In this chapter, we wonder whether we can read
© 2022, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate EmergencyLukáš Likavčan and Paul HeinickerIntroduction: The Earth Revealing Itselfon A PeDestAL in Musée d’Orsay in Paris stands a sculpture by Louis- Ernest Barrias called Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (1899). It depicts a heavily gendered imagination of nature, personified by a young woman who reveals her breasts to the male gaze of Western science. Seduced by their instruments, she is imagined to be ready to reveal her secrets to those who approach her. Since the end of the nineteenth century, this trope of nature unveiling itself has mutated many times. Its most recent instantiation is the climate crisis; a situation when the planet turns into a massive diagram of anthropogenic destruction, revealing itself in hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, sea level rises, loss of wildlife or the acidification of the oceans. Defying patriarchal reveries of the nineteenth century, the Earth responds to our celebrated technologies of modernity and progress in a rather destructive manner.An original and contemporary variation on this trope is Susan Schup-pli’s Nature Represents Itself (2018), a piece that investigates aesthetic and jurisdictional aspects of BP’s Deepwater Horizonoil spill of 2020 in the Gulf of Mexico. This video, commissioned by the SculptureCenter in New York, confronts us with a massive, literal oil painting: streams of petroleum diagram the ecological disaster on the surface of the water (Schuppli 2019a), while underwater cameras live-streaming the oil bubbling up from corrupted pipes provide us with a glimpse of the Anthropocene in action. In this chapter, we wonder whether we can read
© 2022, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Series Editors’ Preface viii
  5. Notes on Contributors ix
  6. 1 Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of Images 1
  7. I Scale, Measure, Experience
  8. 2 Mass Image, Anthropocene Image, Image Commons 23
  9. 3 Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture 41
  10. 4 Living with the Excessive Scale of Contemporary Photography 61
  11. 5 Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood Capture 77
  12. 6 Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics 97
  13. II Metapictures and Remediations
  14. 7 Photography’s Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries 111
  15. 8 The Failed Photographs of Photography: On the Analogue and Slow Photography Movement 140
  16. 9 Strangely Unique: Pictorial Aesthetics in the Age of Image Abundance 158
  17. III Models, Scans and AI
  18. 10 On Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See: Practices of Light beyond Photography 183
  19. 11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate Emergency 211
  20. 12 Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond Computation and AI 231
  21. Coda: Photography in the Age of Massification 253
  22. Names index 289
  23. Subject index 293
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474478847-014

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Series Editors’ Preface viii
  5. Notes on Contributors ix
  6. 1 Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of Images 1
  7. I Scale, Measure, Experience
  8. 2 Mass Image, Anthropocene Image, Image Commons 23
  9. 3 Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture 41
  10. 4 Living with the Excessive Scale of Contemporary Photography 61
  11. 5 Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood Capture 77
  12. 6 Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics 97
  13. II Metapictures and Remediations
  14. 7 Photography’s Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries 111
  15. 8 The Failed Photographs of Photography: On the Analogue and Slow Photography Movement 140
  16. 9 Strangely Unique: Pictorial Aesthetics in the Age of Image Abundance 158
  17. III Models, Scans and AI
  18. 10 On Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See: Practices of Light beyond Photography 183
  19. 11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate Emergency 211
  20. 12 Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond Computation and AI 231
  21. Coda: Photography in the Age of Massification 253
  22. Names index 289
  23. Subject index 293
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