O-OO

A mapping of themes, histories and aesthetics that define the relevance of Object-Oriented Ontology in the art world today

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Solarpunkish

An idea that has been continuously presented to me in the streams I inhabit is an aestheticization of vertical forests in a sea of harmonious techno-based cohabitation between plant/animal/human… images like these are produced by people who decidedly and rebelliously choose to imagine a "hopeful" future, despite the overwhelming evidence that Business As Usual has no foreseeable end and we are heading for multitudinous catastrophe with a side of apocalypse. Although I find these utopian manifestations ravishing, I don't see them as palpable or realistic, and I worry that they might simply be feeding an educated upper-class fantasy based in the historic idealization of the sublime aspects of nature, and the conception that electronics and architecture would be the ultimate solution to all human problems.

Could it be just as hopeful to imagine the thriving of alternative lifeforms, as is quite likely?

What if the cognitive humanoid whose existence persists reveals itself to be an evolutionary descendent of seals, or octopi? What if seals and octopi are already humanoids, or in Peter Singer's sense, members of personhood? (1)  Do we need something to be sentient to extend our empathy toward it? As moral agents, by what criteria do we choose moral patients, and why? Is it to avoid moral corruption in ourselves, or is it because we in fact see the value of the subject, object, thing, in itself? What might it mean for a person to be moral towards a plant, a chair, a building, a river, a biosphere, a virus, a political system, a moth? We don't even know a world where we extend the same level of empathy to all people, so it is very difficult to even begin to imagine the logical next steps.

In order to deconstruct and to question, in the way that Derrida bulkily alludes to, we need to point and create terminology.(2) Morton says that it is important to acknowledge wholes, holism, but it is just as important to see the parts, and seeing to that the parts might add up to the whole, unlike the label of humanity, where human individuals add up to more than the conception of humanity. Morton coined the term Agrilogistics which is the idea that we have blended things together in order to colonize them more easily to further the existence of human-kind. This ideology seeks to eliminate contradiction, fear and anxiety; it smooths the world out for us, exchanging ambiguity for industrialized perception. We need to find new ways to talk about entities that capture their animacy.(3)

Erased in the process of white Western Agrilogistic development has been the contradictory narratives of other peoples' cultures. The movement for counter-cartography has been one of many tools in aiding the reclamation of territorial sovereignty for many indigenous folks, such as the aforementioned Zuni, and also several nations within Canada. (4) The extraction of big data to exploit ecological resources is not new to Google Maps, the only difference is that now people are either unwittingly or voluntarily subjecting themselves to the mining.

In Teran's 2012 cartographic work The Little Yellow House, a narrative was constructed about this image of a yellow countryside house somewhere in Denmark by democratic participation of the work online. The user can only fully experience the narrative if they provide Terran with some data through an online form. Once submitted, the user receives instructions from the artist. The first 100 participants became a part of a publication which told the story of the house. Teran's goal with this piece was to "create a work that causes us to reflect on storytelling and the distances manifest in the physical and the digital online worlds respectively. How communication changes according to speed and distance, as well as how stories can be created over the network."(5)

I am interested in creating space-time representations for the quarantined, alternatives to the evil pervasive maps that dominate broadband activity, that do not undermine or overmine the subjects, and are able to peer into inter-object relations, without anthropocentric leanings. This might mean creating a virtual object, one that exists in electron pulses, as a self-contained network, with viscous manifestations in the minds of the participants. A map does not need to be used as an economic tool, it can also be a spiritual reckoning.

1. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. London: The Bodley Head, 2015.

2. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology Without Nature.” Ecology Without Nature (blog), October 11, 2015. http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-is-agrilogistics.html.

3. Lawlor, Leonard, "Jacques Derrida", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/derrida/>.

4. Kirk Jalbert, Douglas Shields, Matt Kelso, Samantha Rubright. (2019) The power to plan: mineral rights leasing, data justice, and proactive zoning in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Environmental Sociology 5:2, pages 164-176.

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Crystallize and Emboss is a series of aerial satellite photos which have been digitally manipulated, by Olia Lialina. The title of the piece is a reference to two popularly used filters in Photoshop, one of them (Crystallize) being the precise treatment that G-Maps uses to censor its landscape photography. This piece seems to be mocking the censorship, and playing around with its potential, pushing it to an aesthetic extreme. Some of the filters make the 2-D landscapes take on a strange reflective illusions of other types of 3-D surfaces, reviving the dimensionality and reminding me that this is not in fact a view of the world, but a picture of a view of the world-- I become aware of the medium, and can see at it past its alleged content.

Lialina, Olia. Manipulated Screenshots. 2009-2012.Teleportacia. art.teleportacia.org. 

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Hyperobjectification

When looking at the aerial satellite view of their property on Google Maps, one thing that became immediately apparent to the mother of the Zuni painter Jim Enote was that it was incredibly disorienting, and she commented "I'm not a bird. That's not how I look at things, what am I looking at?". Enote saw this as a great opportunity to challenge the intensely pervasive mapping system to create his own personally relevant maps, the Zuni Map Art Project, where he incorporated subjective perspectives, historical and spiritual references to Zuni culture such as songs and petroglyphs. (1) These paintings undermined the most forceful attributes of google maps that completely flatten and restrain the landscape into one moment of space-time and empirical calculation of distance. He also brings human memory into the dimensions of the maps.

Geddy Epaloose, K’ya’na: K’yawakwayina A:dehya (Ojo Caliente), 2009

Something that this makes abundantly clear to me is that people and landscapes are inextricably tied. If each person is a collection of narratives, and those narratives are a product of time, space, location, then landscapes are essential to defining our individual humanity. I will also add here that it might be necessary for us to do away with the distinction between man-made and natural spaces, humans and nature, since humans are in fact animals, and animals are natural, and there is no ecological system that isn't impacted by us, or vice versa, and so on and so forth.

An unforseen aspect of Google Maps is that we don't just use it to get to a location that we have predetermined, but it will influence us in our decision of where to go, and therefore determine our daily routes and in turn our memories. It typically prioritizes what we currently label as "man-made", with officially sanctioned roads and their corresponding laws deciding a "best" route. It also not only categorizes based on commercial influences, constraining us to see landscapes as a series of businesses, but it also listens to our every search using metadata profiles to analyze our insecurities and present us with false hopes for quenching our desires. In this sense, we must regain autonomy, because these systems are not designed with our best interests in mind.

What else do digital maps completely fail to embody?

According to Timothy Morton, we have entered a time of hyperobjects. A hyperobject is "an entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place". Morton argues that once we understand a hyperobject, it should completely shift how we interact with one another as well as nonhuman entities, and how we experience politics, ethics, and art. Viscous non-local entities that are distributed in time and space. They have different temporalities than the human scale ones and they exhibit they effects inter-objectively. Examples of hyperobjects include the biosphere, Climate Change, the coronavirus, of all scales. Viscosity refers to their actions through other entities. The hyperobject produces symptoms that we perceive it through, and the more we know about it the stranger it becomes. Statistics and data about global warming are what make it tangible, and yet these are only small windows of access into the hyperobject itself. (2) There is always some alteration made of the object when we try to articulate it, so there is no way to pin down all that it is, without leaving something out. This is partly why art is considered one of the best fields of study to act in accordance-- because it creates distance between itself and the subject at hand, because it doesn't try to describe or embody the subject, and it is not inherently relational, so the art object itself might speak for itself.

What would a map look like if it started to consider inter-object-relations and the existence of hyperobjects? What does a non-anthropocentric map look like, or is it even possible?

Considering that the internet is a hyperobject, one that is deeply viscous with coexisting hyperobjects, and in many ways also a map, I see it as incredibly fertile ground to explore the idea, and to potentially find more questions.

1. Loften, Adam, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Jim Enote, and Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder. “Counter Mapping.” Emergence Magazine. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://emergencemagazine.org/story/counter-mapping/.

2. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. N.p.: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

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Shifting Maps

During a period where an officially sanctioned world-wide stay-at-home order has been enforced, people naturally spend much more time with their most intellectually engaging and economically useful personal tool, their computers. In April, the number of world-wide social media users has reached 3.8 billion, and general internet usage has gone up by 7%, penetrating 59% of the earth's human population. (1) The devices used to acquire access typically have the superficial composition of two main attributes: an input system (a keyboard) and an output system (an LED screen), or the two functions combined into a touch screen. Together these components produce the most general user interface. The content applied to the greatest knowledge distributing system of all time, the internet, is subsequently formatted for this general interface (although aspects will be programmed to adapt to slight changes in aspect ratios and accessibility). This means that the majority of the uploaded content is optimized and biased to a 2-D surface, regardless of what aspect of the 3-D world it is meaning to represent. The most common representations of the outside world are through language and graphically manipulated, categorically organized maps. If we take for granted that there is a very high possibility that large portions of populations all over the world will only continue to be forced to stay in their personal living spaces for extended time periods due to droves of anthropocenic effects which are yet to be indulged (such as an increase in poor air quality restrictions, heat-waves and other extreme weather events, subsequent pandemics, etc.)(2), then a serious question must be posed: alone with our electronic tools, how do we shape the tools (and the content they house) to meet our needs, and how do we combat the forces contained in said tools that are designed to configure our personal desires?

As a case study, I think looking to digital maps could make a fascinating starting point. Cartography may be one of the most popular uses of the internet; in 2020 thus far, Google Maps has been reported to have been used by 1 billion people every month. (3) According to Kantians, human representation of objects is finite, and we cannot fully describe their essence; "things in-themselves can be thought but never known". In addition, they believe that philosophy privileges human relations (which are mediated by time, space and categorization), and philosophy mainly concerns humans' access to the world, or at least uses said access as the starting point. (4) If maps are one of the most commonly utilized representations of objects and their relations in the world, then I believe that we should start to rethink how we design them, knowing that they will have global impact on human perception, which in turn impacts all other organisms and matter.

One way to do this would be to try to break out of the current dimensional interface paradigm by making alternative interfaces, such as virtual reality goggles, more widely accessible so that we do not have to optimize a 3-D space to be consumed as a 2-D plane. Until there is a design that works for the many, we must work within the constraints of what people already have, and in that case I find the most compelling compromise to be Web-VR, which is an open-source framework that makes it possible for the average citizen to create a 3-D scene and make it viewable to the masses, right in their web browser, without any special extension device. VR is especially intriguing to me because it is able to bring perspective into a landscape, and therefore empathy. One project which embodies this quite well is Marshmallow Laser Feast's In The Eyes of the Animal. In this VR experience, the user is carried through a woodland scene in a way that mimics  the sights and sounds that might be perceived by another creature.

 1. “GWI Coronavirus Research April 2020.” globalwebindex. Global Web Index, April 29, 2020. www.globalwebindex.com.

2. Gat tuso, J.P. et al., 2015: Contrasting futures for ocean and society from different anthropogenic CO2 emissions scenarios. Science, 349(624 3), doi:10.1126/science.aac4722.

3. Rijo, Daniel. “Google Maps Now Used by over 1 Billion People Every Month.” PPC Land. PPC Land, February 15, 2020. https://ppc.land/google-maps-now-used-by-over-1-billion-people-every-month/.

4. Behar, Katherine. Object-Oriented Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

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if a tree falls and no human perceived it . . .

Object-Oriented Ontology (arising from ὄντος, the Greek word for "being"), also known as Speculative realism, is a school of thought spearheaded by the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman. Unlike all previous western philosophies, OOO rejects anthropocentrism, or the privileging of human perception above all other existing object relations.(1) Since the 18th century, beginning with the subjective idealist George Berkeley, we’ve asked ourselves the question:

If a tree falls and no person is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

George might say “to be is to be perceived” (2)

But to OOO this is an arrogant question, since there are plenty of other perceptive beings in the world such as plants and animals, as well as other objects that have multifaceted power relations with that tree, such as the stones it displaces and the dirt that reverberates, and humans, despite our historic addiction to the self-aggrandizement of our own species, are just another object among the others. In other words, human subjectivity does not elevate our status among all the things in the world, everything is of equal importance, according to Object-Oriented Ontology. Harman acknowledges that we are thus constrained by the human subjectivity utilized when attempting to understand objective reality, but he insists, try we must.

OOO has been of special interest to the art world because art embodies the philosophy in a way that is not evident in other fields of study. Just as math is highlighted in Poincaré’s explanations of the world, Harman believes art can point to the reality of the world. This is because art does not claim to represent the subject of which it is referring to-- it creates the appropriate distance from it, without “undermining” (trying to explain it from its smallest components upwards like physics) or “overmining” it (reducing an object to its effects on the world). Similarly to philosophy, art can form a path to a conclusion by negating the conclusions of others, without ever providing an articulate end. (3)

Escher, M.C. Woodcut 24 x 31.9 cm. (9.4 x 12.6 in.). 1952.

“ If nothing else, a counterfactual art history in which Escher looms large is a delightful thought experiment.” -Harman

1. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: a New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books, 2018.

2. Flage, Daniel E. “George Berkeley (1685—1753).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. James Madison University. Accessed May 3, 2020. https://www.iep.utm.edu/berkeley/.

3. “About the Artwork: The Little Yellow House (2012).” Net.Specific. Accessed May 3, 2020. http://netspecific.net/en/communication-paths/michelle-teran/about-the-artwork-the-little-yellow-house-2012.

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