Photography, Fungi and Social Ontologies: Wolfgang Tilmans’s  Neue Welt

In the late 1990s and early 2000s questions of nature and life morphed with contemporary art in new ways. Under the influence of new media technologies and digital networks, artists came to challenge modern ideas of nature in how it had been viewed and historicized. In an exploration of a body of photographic works—Neue Welt— made by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans in and around 2010, this essay argues that at this particular time, digital technologies came to be explored as autonomous machines that could produce new forms of connections, between living and dead matter on Earth. Within the context of digital art photography, the technology of photography presented itself as a quasi-living subject endowed with some social abilities to enter and construe new forms of alliances in the world, providing new perspectives to ideas of subjectivity and agency. Focusing on photography’s peculiar alliance with parallel ecologies connected via the machine, this essay argues that new conceptions of nature and social ontologies emerged at this time as photography entered its digital mode of existence.

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Sara R. Yazdani

Conference

Publication date: May 2018

Publication date (Print): May 2018

Pages: 1-9

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[1 ] University of Oslo, Norway

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.25

SO-VID: 7a811afb-09f0-42d6-9738-cf135d2cae91

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machines - Art and After

Conference acronym: EVA Copenhagen

Conference number: 7

Conference location: Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Conference date: 15 - 17 May 2018

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Digital arts and culture

History

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.25

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

References

B Buchloh 1999 Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”: The Anomic Archive October 88 117 145
J Cage 1968 Silence Calder and Boyars London
J CageL LongA. H Smith 1972 Mushroom Book Hollanders Workshop New York
G Deleuze 1988 Spinoza—Practical Philosophy Robert Hurley City Lights Books San Francisco
L U Gregory 1983 The Object of Post- Criticism in H Foster The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture Bay Press Port Townsend
B Latour 2005 Reassembling the Social Oxford University Press Oxford
B Latour 1993 We Have Never Been Modern C Porter Harvard University Press Cambridge, MA
M Lazzarato 2006 The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control M FuglesangB. M Sorensen Deleuze and the Social, Edinburgh University Press Edinburg
A Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Princeton University Press Princeton
A MelitopoulosM Lazzarato 2010 Machinic Animism A Franke Animism, Sternberg Press Berlin
T Morton 2007 Ecology without Nature— Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics Harvard University Press London & Cambridge, MA
W Tillmans 2012 Neue Welt Taschen Berlin
W Tillmans 1999 Wolfgang Tillmans, Total Solar Eclipse: Photographs and Drawings by Wolfgang Tillmans Galerie Daniel Buchholz Köln
H White 1973 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe Johns Hopkins University Baltimore

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[1] B Buchloh 1999 Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”: The Anomic Archive October 88 117 145

[2] J Cage 1968 Silence Calder and Boyars London

[3] J CageL LongA. H Smith 1972 Mushroom Book Hollanders Workshop New York

[4] G Deleuze 1988 Spinoza—Practical Philosophy Robert Hurley City Lights Books San Francisco

[5] L U Gregory 1983 The Object of Post- Criticism in H Foster The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture Bay Press Port Townsend

[6] B Latour 2005 Reassembling the Social Oxford University Press Oxford

[7] B Latour 1993 We Have Never Been Modern C Porter Harvard University Press Cambridge, MA

[8] M Lazzarato 2006 The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control M FuglesangB. M Sorensen Deleuze and the Social, Edinburgh University Press Edinburg

[9] A Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Princeton University Press Princeton

[10] A MelitopoulosM Lazzarato 2010 Machinic Animism A Franke Animism, Sternberg Press Berlin

[11] T Morton 2007 Ecology without Nature— Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics Harvard University Press London & Cambridge, MA

[12] W Tillmans 2012 Neue Welt Taschen Berlin

[13] W Tillmans 1999 Wolfgang Tillmans, Total Solar Eclipse: Photographs and Drawings by Wolfgang Tillmans Galerie Daniel Buchholz Köln

[14] H White 1973 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe Johns Hopkins University Baltimore

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Photography, Fungi and Social Ontologies: Wolfgang Tilmans’s Neue Welt