2015 Aesthetics After Finitude conference - exhibition proposal

I've submitted a proposal for the upcoming AAF conference taking place in Sydney, Australia early next year at the National Institute for Experimental Arts. Fingers crossed. The text of my proposal is below.


Project title: Econgeal


What does ecological knowledge “look like?” Based on background learning in biological science and validated and extended by the work of Timothy Morton, Eugene Thacker and others, the project I’d like to propose seeks to give visual form to the spatio-temporal collapse of the biosphere that results from contemplating current ecological thinking. The term "econgeal" implies a thickening or running together of ecology, a collapse in which every articulation of the living with itself is redrawn as continuous. Thus, all scales are flattened and their omnivalent/ambivalent complicity is revealed: pest, predator, disease, invader, saprophyte, opportunist, extremophile, colonizer, parasite, hive, all are maintained in an undifferentiated state. Simultaneously, bodies, cells, organs, meat, gristle, tissue, sensory apparatus, and empty space are elucidated in detail.


I see this work as functioning like a map, but one in which the overwhelming profusion of details and linkages engenders confusion, undermining itself as a useful model. In my attempt to create a ‘map of the world as big as the world’, I hope to posit something of a re-seeing of "the living" in a pre-classificatory sense in which nothing is particularly distinguishable and causal chains are linked in complex, intimate "meshes". One question that might emerge: are we looking at knowledge or its absence? Is there potential for a questioning of traditional aesthetic modes of seeing the world through simplified tropes (simply by proliferating them to an excessive degree)?  Trying to see complexity, trying to encompass the whole world within the visual as it is privileged by human beings, may be shot through with contradictions and paradoxes; it may be beyond our perceptual abilities.


This proposal is for a large-scale drawing, approximately 9’ h x 3’ w, ink on paper. Installation to be achieved with neodymium magnets and metal, flat-headed push pins. Work on the image is currently underway. Progress shots are enclosed with the proposal.


Short artist bio:

Lucas Korte is a 2nd year MFA student in painting and drawing at the University of Notre Dame (USA). He holds a Bachelors degree in biology from Wayne State University (USA). His work is concerned with the unhuman, particularly through the lens of invertebrate animals. More work and writing can be found at shoggothkinetics.weebly.com. email lkorte@nd.edu