Ceramic Beach, part 1: DIVING IN NEW NATURE = theoretical research
Ceramic Futures is an online/offline workshop and competition which in 2013 involved students of 4 European schools: Glasgow School of Art, Politecnico di Milano, Abadir Academy, IED Rome. Full info can be found at http://www.ceramicfutures.com/1/
Here I reconstruct (without any editing) the archive of my own project posts starting with the theoretical research on selected topic — New Nature.
I made this little table to summarize all my theoretical part of research so that it will be clear in my own head and can clarify the things also for those who couldn’t get through all my writings =)
The main idea is that I passed 4 steps starting with research on what is going with our environment superficially if I might say so. Then I got to the point of Anthropocene and deep geological changes made by us to the planet. And here people get entangled by nature and fall into the definition of it. Then also objects are added. On the fourth step the definition of object stretches to include “incorporeal species”.
SO actually in terms of regular common sense thinking it turned to be a journey from Nature, as we tend to usually define and imagine it as a “natural environment”, to the Culture. And the discussions of where does the nature end and culture starts can last for ages, but in the end in my opinion much more important is the idea of Ecosystem as a whole thing including everything. Not only all the “natural” living species, but things constructed by us. Changes in the environment through some number of steps change culture and on the contrary depending on culture we affect environment in different ways. And ceramics is an awesome medium which comes from nature, is shaped by humans, then live in the world of objects and stores the culture in it.
Step 1: reflections on future environmental issues (in collages =))
Visual exploration of various topics as the relations between resources extractions and ecosystems, technological dominance over the “green”natural environment, autonomous city megastructures and their relation to the geology of Earth, planetary scale catstrophes.
Step 2: Anthropocene
I have a feature or a problem of always getting too deep in my research finding philosophical and academic grounding for everything. It doesn’t necessary bring any results and affect the final project at all but otherwise I feel like my work is kind of shallow.
First I thought of three directions: new nature as the future of nature, climate change and everything we’ve done to earth which brought me to more general view of anthropocene, second one was modified nature with all our attempts to change the rules of the game, affect genes, create ceramic bones, etc, and the last one was the direction of “artificial” nature — the built environment and more importantly technium which tends to get as advanced as “nature” systems are.
But as soon as I approached the first one everything changed as all three directions came together and got entangled involving also many other things.
Anthropocene is a very “hot” thing now both in science and culture, it’s “an informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems” It was first used in print in 2000, but is widely discussed nowadays.
It makes think that definition of “nature” as “trees and plants and everything green”, existing on itself and externalized from us which we have in our heads was never actually true. If we accept the timing of anthropocene as suggested from 12,000 before present from the moment of Neolithic Revolution, then all the history of human culture has been bound to the reconstruction of the whole planet according with our needs. Nature was being constructed by us as well as culture and technium and civilization in general and we are the nature as well. And this understanding of entanglement of everything and connection and interaction of all the things is actually also the core idea of many other thought directions which are developed now as well as anthropocene idea itself. And about this connections and how at all it relates to ceramics I will try to talk more in the next post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
http://www.anthropocene.info/en/home
Steps 3: Including Objects into Ecology
Now going deeper and deeper.
Actually first of all I should have admitted that I’ve been researching not properly the New Nature topic, but more the new definition of it, but I believe that the way we define things directly affects the way we should be designing them.
Continuing with the Anthropocene idea exploration here is a quote I’ve stumbled upon:
“Nature as we know it is a concept that belongs to the past. No longer a force separate from and ambivalent to human activity, nature is not an obstacle nor a harmonious other. Humanity forms nature. Humanity and nature are one, embedded from within the recent geological record.”
So the first conclusion that can be drawn from here is that we shouldn’t think of nature as external thing, but include people into it.
Second thing is that humanity forms nature and we pass from biblical genesis to “the new stories of the permanent recreation of the world”. But if so and now we shape the “natural” environment and even planet itself, then where’s the difference between it and the other things we’ve constructed. Nowadays this is being developed and discussed as for example “Ecology without nature” or Object Oriented Ontology. But the main idea is that of including all the objects into the holistic system and accepting their roles and influences on each other.
And here we come to ceramics as a very peculiar and curious “object”. Interestingly even though the first applications of ceramics date back to 25 000 years ago or even more, the age of functional pottery is the same of Anthropocene in its oldest interpretation — around 10–11 000 years ago, starting with Neolithic revolution and development of civilization as we know it. It is fascinating for me already to think of how “functional” ceramics has evolved through these years together with our culture and needs. If in the beginning it was only the vessels for milk and food, now we have the functional piezoceramics in the atomic microscopes, special ceramic materials for the space ships and body implants and so on and so forth.
Along all the way of its development ceramics was affecting society as well. There are different books and researches on the topic which can be called “Sociology of pottery”. They investigate how the process of pottery making was influencing the social status of people involved, shaping their houses in order to optimize production, forming the villages, etc. And on the other hand social processes were affecting pottery, for example trade system had direct relation to the spread of different styles as it was defining how far each vessel could reach to be copied by the other master.
And of course ceramics has strongest connection to the landscapes as it comes from the ground and depends on which kind of raw material is available at different location. But then it also goes back and even though taken from Earth it doesn’t easily degrade back into it. Instead it is stored unchanged for centuries preserving the stories and meanings which were put into it by its creators. Reflecting on the environment and situation in which it was shaped. This leads me to further exploration of nature of intangible forms and their survival in time through the physical embodiment. In ceramics this time ^^
Step 4: Incorporating Incorporeal
Get yourself a mind-bathyscaphe as pressure rises!
In the previous parts we’ve already observed how first of all we should include into the new notion of nature ourselves as well as nonhumans. And here comes an interesting point as talking about the “objects” in philosophy they name so regular tangible things as well as ephemeral ideas.
So I was reading Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies” where he develops Bateson’s idea of an Ecology of Mind and got some insights. He doesn’t talk of the shapeless ideas as just parts of our cognitive processes embedded in human brains, but instead he calls them “incorporeal species” therefore emphasizing their independence of any one man’s mind and equality with all the other species. And here’s a quote that I liked really much:
“humanity is in charge of its own survival and survival of all the planet as well as of the incorporeal species: music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love, compassion for others, the feeling of fusion in the heart of the cosmos…”
After that at some point he talks about one’s mind again and its relation to the world mentioning such thing as Introjection — the process by which the external world is incorporated into individuals psyche. And so my free associative process took over and industrial designer in me connected it with injection molding. So I thought how about introjection molding? Is it possible to incorporate the incorporeal into some ceramics? But can we talk that pottery has its psyche? Does it have a character? Is the soft clay — a young and sensitive child while old vessel with cracks is an old lady covered with wrinkles? And then the ceramic dump is a graveyard… But unlike the human remains that taken without any clothes and artifacts can tell you only about physiological parameters of human being, ceramic shards really tell the stories of the previous ages — ancient myths, someone’s dreams of not existing animals and gardens and much more. They represent our development in different stages and become time capsules due to the quality of ceramics to stay inert physically while taking so much in itself culturally.
Though paradoxically the most revolutionary piece of art ever (Duchamp’s Fountain, yes…) probably won’t be distinguished by the recycling factory workers in the heap of toilets…
Ceramic Beach is my project developed during Ceramic Futures 1.0 — an online/offline workshop and competition which in 2013 involved students of 4 European schools: Glasgow School of Art, Politecnico di Milano, Abadir Academy, IED Rome. Full info can be found athttp://www.ceramicfutures.com/1/
