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well hello everybody and I'm very happy to be here be here this talk is called dawn of the hyper objects and the title is supposed to be somewhere between dawn
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of the dinosaurs and Dawn of the Dead possibly with a little bit of dawn of the age of aquarius thrown in I'm not exactly sure where that is but perhaps we'll find out as well proceed tectonic
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plates global warming nuclear radiation evolution these are hyper objects entities that are massively distributed in time and space at least relative to human scales hyper objects appear in the human world as a product of our thinking
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through the ecological crisis we have entered the ecological crisis is best thought as the time of hyper objects why because this is the moment to which massive non-human non-sentient entities
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make decisive contact with humans ending various human concepts such as world horizon nature and even environment art in the time of hyper objects isn't simply art about hyper objects but our
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that strives to provoke hyper objectivity in its very form I'll try to explore some of this art in my talk in particular I'll show how what we thought of as postmodern art is often better thought as the first stirrings of a
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truly ecological art and why irony hasn't gone anywhere at the time of hyper objects in fact it's even more poignant than ever hyper objects are viscous molten non-local phased an inter object if
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let's go through these properties one by one one viscosity the more we know about them the more we find that we are glued to them we find ourselves unable to achieve a piston illogical escape velocity from their ontological density
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just as we were beginning to enjoy our ironic FreePlay no fair to molten temporality Salvador Dali's paintings of melting clocks corny as it is rather elegantly depicts how any massive object
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distorts space-time many hyper objects really are massive enough to do this for real with visible effects as in the case of planet earth itself so time runs faster on a plane and on Earth's surface but all objects melt and rebel time like
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this there is no such thing as a rigid body extended in time and space for this reason and for every object there is a radically unknowable space and time because the speed of light sets limits on what objects can apprehend hyper
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objects end the idea of absolute infinite time at space as neutral containers three nonlocality hyper objects can't be localized and local phenomena such as rain become a levi brian calls a local manifestation
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of these non-local objects those hyper objects play a mean trick they invert what is real and what is only appearance thus the wet star falling on my head is less real than the global warming of which it's a
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manifestation this is not cool as they say for phasing hyper objects occupy a high dimensional phase space this is why they are partly invisible to us 3d humans they seem to come and go like
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seasons yet really they continue to unfold elsewhere than we look five inter objectivity hyper objects are shared by numerous entities in a common central space this shared space is a vast
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non-local configuration space that I call the mesh more on this in a moment phenomena such as human subjectivity into subjective phenomena that is occupy small regions of the space of enter objectivity we should dwell on this last
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one a bit because perhaps it's the most interesting for thinking about art every inter objective phenomenon requires one plus a and real objects this means that for every interrupt ejected system at least one real object is withdrawn for
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example consider a beat a beat occurs when one tone is canceled by another tone you make a beat by cutting a continuous tone the gap between the two is a bead now every event in reality is a kind of inscription in which one
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object leaves its footprint and another one interrupts Directive reality is just the sum total of all these footprints criss-crossing everywhere it's non-local by definition and temporarily Moulton the print of a dinosaur's foot in the
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mud is seen as a foot shaped hole in a rock by humans 65 million years later there is some sensuous connection then between the dinosaur the rock and the human despite their vastly different timescales now when we return to run on
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in our minds eye to the time of the dinosaur ourself we discover something very strange or we find there is another region of interrupted space in which impressions of the dinosaur are transmitted tooth marks in some hapless
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prey the frozen stare of the dinosaur as she looks at her next victim the smooth scaly feel of her skin more dinosaur prints even when the dinosaur is alive even the dinosaur doesn't know herself entirely only in a
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rough translation that samples and edits her being or mosquito or an asteroid has their own unique sample of dinosaur nurse and these samples are not dinosaurs why because there is a real
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dinosaur withdrawn from access even from herself black holes are right here in magazines and on the web as JPEGs and jeebies pop science essays and sci-fi movies yet they are not here evidently but even if
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you could somehow climb into one with a video camera you couldn't know the whole story about black holes why because your video of a black hole is not a black hole black because black holes are real
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now here's a very fresh example of a hyper object an ancient bamboo forest on chilly mountain in central Taiwan what you're going to watch in here is the wind in the bamboo what you're going to
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watch in here are the bamboo stems clicking one another where you're going to watch in here is a quicktime movie which samples visual images and sound at a certain rate translating them into a more or less perforated version of themselves where you're going to watch
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and here is my hand moving slightly as the muscles in my right forearm failed to maintain stillness what you're going to watch are photons from the Sun reflecting from quanta in the chloroplasts that make the bamboo green
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what you're watching are chloroplasts black tear bacteria hiding from the environmental Cataclysm they created the Cataclysm called oxygen one and a half billion years ago you
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