SUN, WIND, & TIDES
BEYOND GREEN ENERGY
ASTER HOVING
Aster Hoving 10274227
Research Master’s Thesis in Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam
Words: 23.857
Cover design: Nuno Beijinho
Cover photograph: “At and As the Beach,” Aster Hoving Supervisor: Jeff Diamanti
Second Reader: Niall Martin January 2020
Contents
Acknowledgements / 2
Introduction. Notes to a Method
The Elemental Aesthetics of Solar, Wind, and Tidal Energy / 3
Chapter 1. The Celestial Sphere
Positions of the Sun in Green and Blue / 16
Chapter 2. The Atmosphere
Sensing Air, Wind, Fog, and Clouds / 31
Chapter 3. The Hydrosphere
A Conclusion by Way of Tides / 48
Works Cited / 63
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to say that this thesis owes its existence to more than a few people. A first thank you goes to my teachers at the UvA, Jeff Diamanti and Niall Martin. I would be nowhere without Jeff’s committed guidance and his inescapably contagious enthusiasm. If I ever get to teach, I hope to emulate at least some of Niall’s pedagogical sensibilities. In addition, I wish to thank my teachers at NYU, Elaine Gan and Anna McCarthy, whose classes were indispensable to this thesis, and Brent Ryan Bellamy and Reuben Martens, who gave me the chance to present an earlier version of some of this work at the 2019 ASLE conference.
I would also like to thank Dina, Eline, Marije, Suzanne, Zoe, Zinzi, Janine, Manon, Jaimy, Maartje, Maarten, the New Utopians—Tessel (thank you for proofreading!), Solange, David, and Wouter—, Max, Signe, Justine, Stefan, and Anna—I am grateful to have met this many fascinating and kind people while finding a way through various cities and universities. My roommates at Sonnehoekje and my quasi-roommates at Nørrebrogade 122, thank you for putting up with my life in two (or more) cities. A big thanks to Nuno for the perfect cover design. Floris, thank you for being an amazing friend and editor.
Furthermore, I am thankful for my family. Alies, I am so glad for your texts, which tirelessly keep up truly twenty-first century family ties. Mieke and Frans, I am grateful beyond measure. Thank you, for all of it. I strive to be there for others as you have been there for me because, more than anything, I want to make you proud.
Above all else, I owe everything to my mom, dad, and brother—Caroline, Harry, and Kars. There are no words to adequately express my gratitude for the lifetime of unconditional love and support you have given me. This thesis and everything I do is always dedicated to you with all my love.
And finally, Jonas, my comrade, companion, and collaborator, thank you. Here's to extending, as long as we can, this peculiar perpetual fairest of the seasons stretching back to a spring in the Bay Area.
Introduction. Notes to a Method:
The Elemental Aesthetics of Solar, Wind, and Tidal
Energy
… the times of the body and the ‘natural’ environment are characterized by rhythmic variation, synchronization and an all-embracing, complex web of interconnections. Linear sequences take place but these are part of a wider network of cycles as well as finely tuned and synchronized temporal relations where ultimately everything is connected to everything else … The ‘natural’ environment is thus a temporal realm of orchestrated rhythms of varying speeds and intensities as well as temporally constituted uniqueness … These time-spans extend from the imperceptibly fast to the unimaginably slow, covering processes that last from nanoseconds to millennia.
- Barbara Adam, Timewatch, 128
… in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows this is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides. … The thinking of errantry conceives of totality but renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it.
- Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 20-1
In the opera Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, songs about individual and collective human exhaustion, performed by vacationers in bathing suits, grow into a symphony. Below these singers, as the artists describe the work, we notice “the slow creaking of an exhausted Earth, a gasp” (Barzdžiukaitė et al.). The piece thereby addresses environmental harm as human and more-than-human exhaustion. The opera, which won the Golden Lion for best national participation at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is set on an artificial beach inside the Lithuanian pavilion. The beach is lit by bright lights suspended from the ceiling at about the same height as the balcony where viewers stand, looking down at the scene on the sand. A recording of waves and wind can be heard, but the beach of Sun & Sea
(Marina) is little more than a pile of sand and vacationers. Strangely, the performance is
Beaches, however, are a paradigmatic ecotone: a place where terrestrial and marine biomes meet. Ecotones are contact zones between different ecosystems, such as those of the sea and land, but also in an extended sense between those of the air and sun. The earth’s biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and celestial sphere do not simply meet at the beach as an intermediary space between separate entities. Rather, the beach comes into being as they permeate and co-constitute one another. Theorized as such, the beach is thus a place that comes into being only because the materialities of the sun, air, and water flow in and out of each other. By mediating the beach as the absence of these elements, Sun & Sea (Marina) figures the contemporary as a period of environmental crisis in which a radical disturbance and pollution of a pristine nature eventually causes the disappearance of ecological rhythms altogether. This contributes to the creation of an aesthetics of environmental harm, but at the same time risks reproducing the environment as an object that is either characterized as untouched nature or signaled through its absence.1 Such an aesthetics thereby presents culture, history, and society
1 William Cronon’s seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” traces how this kind of narrative often characterizes environmentalism: “Far from being the one place on earth that stands
Image 1. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, Sun & Sea (Marina), www.drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X0UOkKnQfLep0HWPgBoqOP5G1O3Z2QTK
as 1. previously separated from, and 2. incommensurable with nature, ecologies, and materialities.
In this thesis, therefore, I am less interested in this fall from nature narrative, and more in what persists despite and within environmental harm. While Sun & Sea (Marina) mediates the environmental crisis as the absence of ecological rhythms, I am committed to an aesthetics that mediates ecological rhythms and entanglements that have always been and continue to be entwined with the social. I refer to this socio-ecological art as an elemental aesthetics. My research shows that this elemental aesthetics brings contemporary discourses about energy transitions into relief. Corporations that invest in green energy routinely suggest that if oil rigs and tar sands can be replaced by windfarms, solar panels, and tidal stream generators, there is no need for political and economic reorganization in response to the planetary exhaustion Sun
& Sea (Marina) addresses. Because green energy cannot be exhausted, these corporations
suggest, these are the fuels and technologies by which the social, as green capitalism, can continue to exist separately from the ecological.2 I thus use the term green capitalism to refer
to a period of capitalist organization the wake of the 1970’s oil crisis and during the ongoing climate crisis. But if elemental artworks suggest that social and natural rhythms have never been independent from each other, how then should we think about energy transitions?
Two types of questions emerge here. How to theorize the kind of work this elemental aesthetics does in relation to how we think about transitions from fossil fuels to green energy? How to historicize the intertwinement of culture and ecology, or more specifically, artworks with their specific material and temporal contexts? In order to respond to these concerns, I develop an elemental analytic as one way of fostering sensitivity to the continuously changing mutual constitution of artworks, (energy) infrastructures, and the lively materialities of the sun, wind, and tides. I thereby contribute to a wide range of contemporary elemental research. Nicole Starosielski, for instance, presents an array of these scholars in media studies in the essay “The Elements of Media Studies,” many of which I engage with in this thesis. They redefine the classic notion of the elements as timeless and essential material building blocks by working with “the elemental” as a framework for understanding materials as interconnected and dynamic (4). This is the initial definition of the elemental that I work with in this thesis. Starosielski, moreover, argues that the elemental opens up conversations in media studies to
apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. … For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem” (69).
scholars outside the field (3). Pushing this last observation further, I argue that an elemental analytic is per definition interdisciplinary. Attending to materialities requires that a researcher refrains from starting out with a predetermined generic analytical apparatus. An elemental analytic is never general because it is sensitive to how particular materialities require and open up specific research trajectories. The broad array of texts that I engage with in this thesis have this sensitivity in common. My approach to the concept of analysis is thus defined by a certain improvisational response to the ways in which the elemental composes an inquiry.
My definition of elemental aesthetics similarly begins with that its formal qualities are not orchestrated by a ruling human artist but emerge as part of material flows and entanglements. Throughout the various analyses of this thesis, I argue that because an elemental aesthetics materializes out of a sense of ecological vulnerability or precarity, its formal qualities do not master but instead adhere to the affordances and constraints of materialities. Forms in this sense are, as Lyn Hejinian puts it, “not merely shapes but forces” (42). In the essay “The Rejection of Closure,” Hejinian argues that form provides an opening by which one both formally differentiates and acknowledges the overwhelming undifferentiated incompleteness and ambiguity of the world (41). This understanding of aesthetic form as force helps to understand the kind of knowledge that an elemental aesthetics generates. Throughout this thesis I will argue that the supposed separation of nature and culture in green capitalism is connected to a notion of knowledge as representation independent from material forces. An elemental aesthetics, however, is always situated within and in relation to the ecologies that it mediates. The knowledge yielded in this aesthetics therefore does not claim an overview and leaves a sense of incompleteness.
In this introduction, I stay with the ambiguities of Sun & Sea (Marina) in order to further unpack the challenges of analyzing elemental art. Sun & Sea (Marina) brings into relief the two central concerns of this thesis: first, analyzing an aesthetics interested in ecological flows, movements or rhythms, albeit in absence; and second, holding the historicity of ecological crisis in focus. My aesthetic archive and my choice of theory respond to these two concerns. The objects share, first, an attunement to solar, atmospheric, and tidal rhythms across a variety of localities, including countries such as the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United States, England, and Scotland. Second, common to my interpretations of the artworks is that I read them in conjunction with theory that allows me to align the objects with concepts known from historical materialism, particularly accumulation, utopia, the commons, surplus, and scarcity. These concepts afford historicization of the artworks’ material entanglements in ways that open up a discussion of the relationship between new(er) and old(ish) materialisms. In other words,
I argue that an elemental aesthetics invites conceptual and methodological tools from both the environmental and energy humanities.
I have so far stayed with the first two terms of the title of the opera, the sun and the sea. But to show the historical work that an elemental analytic demands, I turn to its final bracketed word: (Marina). From its original Italian meaning, i.e. “coastal region,” marina typically refers to a built infrastructure of docks, usually for pleasure boats (OED). These docks could be located in the Mediterranean or more precisely the Adriatic Sea, since we, as viewers of this artwork, are in an archipelago in the Venice Lagoon in northern Italy. The ambiguities of this specific location for the artwork are clear. Historically, the marina of Venice evokes the image of a harbor that is known for its role as port of the first mercantile state from around the thirteenth to fifteenth century. In this context, placing marina in between brackets in the title serves as a subtle reminder of the surplus that circulates through these transit zones. If we inscribe the (Marina) of the artwork in that genealogy, in these flows of commodities, capital, and labor that characterize the early modern history of Venice, it signifies regimes of accumulation. Sun & Sea (Marina) is inseparable from these histories. By way of the opera’s location and its occlusion of the elemental conditions of the beach, the exhaustion of the earth that the vacationers sing about is thus connected directly to the dynamics of capitalism.
Along these lines, Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr argue that what some call the Anthropocene is actually the name for capital turning some ecological entanglements productive at the expense of others. They specifically theorize the ecotone as a place where value can flow. In their account, the ecotone—the beach as a space of flow and ecological entanglement—thus becomes historical: not external to but constitutive of capitalist production and circulation (161). In the context of Sun & Sea (Marina) we recognize this in how this period of value generation simultaneously marks the rising seas that increasingly threaten the very existence of the coastal city where the opera is performed. From such a standpoint, the ecological crisis the piece performs is a historical condition that, as I have suggested, is characterized by the double logic of separating elements and economics to allow capital to profit from precisely this externalized nature. In the following chapters, I continuously consider historical and ecological specificities to theorize how the embeddedness of an elemental aesthetics in specific temporal and material contexts counters this double logic.
The broader claim that emerges here that this elemental aesthetics reframes discourses about energy transitions, focusing on solar, wind, and tidal energy. We need to understand the elements that we extract as energy from a perspective that is more sensitive to the specific rhythms, contexts, and histories that define the elemental. The ongoing argument in my
analyses of artworks that mediate these particular forms of energy is that they show how we need to move this discussion from a merely technical issue, to a social relation that comprises not only human but also more-than-human, or in other words elemental co-existence. I thus shift from historicizing the elemental to an anticipatory mode based on a poetics of relation between social forms and elemental affordances. The aim here is to show that an elemental aesthetics brings to discourses about energy transitions precisely what these tend to lack: a sensitivity to place, history, material entanglement, and ecological rhythms or, in short, elemental conditions
One of the issues that emerge here is that historical definitions of fossil fuels miss precisely these sensitivities. The ways in which capital renders ecological flows productive has been central to historical readings of energy infrastructures, which focus on fossil fuels as the means by which the otherwise fluctuating movements of the sun are, to an extent, continuously accessible and transportable. Timothy Mitchell offers a perceptive definition of oil as “buried sunshine,” emphasizing that fossil fuels are a materialized accumulation of solar cycles (12). From the early eighteenth century onwards, Mitchell argues, this compressed form of concentrated space and time radically changed the speed of production, in comparison to previous epochs in which the productive apparatus relied almost completely on renewables.3
Industrial use of coal, he shows, decoupled production and circulation from the sun, the regeneration of crops and biomass through photosynthesis, and the lifespan of animals (15). Further unpacking the conceptual difference between fossil fuels and renewables, Andreas Malm refers to the compression of space and time that characterizes coal as “the stock,” as different from “animate power” and “the flow” (Fossil Capital 38-42). Malm argues that the appearance of the flow, such as wind or water, is conditioned by space and time and defines its spatiotemporal profile as “a practically immediate result of solar radiation, existing prior to or apart from human labor, incorporated in the landscape, captive of the cycles of the weather and seasons, undiminished at its source by consumption” (Fossil Capital 38-40). In opposition to this, Malm argues that the stock, though it requires labor power to transport, deposit, and turn it into energy and while it is destroyed a soon as it has been converted into motion, stands outside space and outside of time: it can be freely moved and stored and is cut off from diurnal, seasonal, and historical time (Fossil Capital 41-2). These are provoking definitions that open
3 In addition to the term “green energy” I occasionally use “renewable energy” or “renewables” to designate wind, sun, and tidal energy. My argument about green capitalism’s notion of infinite energy applies both to the language of green and renewable energy
up our understanding of what fossil fuels are beyond the abstractions that justify their extraction. But, as I will further demonstrate in subsequent chapters, they are also incomplete. The stock indeed allowed capital to accelerate the uniformity and speed of production and circulation with little regard for the spatiotemporal profiles of the planet, but the stock only seemingly stands out of space and time. What is referred to as the depletion, finiteness, or exhaustion of fossil fuels is not a problem of quantity, but of time: they are continuously in the making, but their generation is almost imperceptible from the anthropocentric perspective of an accelerating economy, since it takes millennia of circadian and annual fluctuations. As Barbara Adam reminds us, the temporalities of the environment range from the infinitesimal to the interminable (Timewatch 128). When green capitalism constructs green energy as an alternative to fossil fuels it is therefore not in response to depletion, or an external natural boundary, but rather because capital cannot make fossil fuels work harder, as Jason Moore phrases it (15). The problem, for capital, of the limit of coal and oil is that the rate at which they are extracted is much faster than the time it takes to regenerate them. In chapter three, I return to this thinking in terms of energy surplus and scarcity in relation to a range of tidal art and argue that an elemental aesthetics allows us to perceive energy not as isolated, finite, or infinite resources external to time but rather as ecological flows and entanglements.
Insofar as the stock is indeed the materialization of vast stretches of geological time, emissions are our term for the release of time and space into other cycles. From this perspective, techno-utopian responses to the oil and climate crisis emerge as another example of how green capitalism seeks to discipline and enclose the spatiotemporalities of the world. In other words, when green capitalism, in response to the oil and climate crisis, starts to pay attention to the fluctuations of the sun, wind, and water, it develops knowledge to represent, predict, and control their entangled rhythms and materialities. As such, this epistemology renewables as continuously accessible, as standing reserve, as oil was perceived to be. In chapter one I explore the tensions between these techno-utopias and utopias of socio-economically just solar societies. I argue that the solar elemental aesthetics found in photographs by Rosemary Horn and Carolin Lange and poems by Isobel Armstrong and Lyn Hejinian requires us to recognize the extent to which capital aligns extractive infrastructures and ecological flows but also, importantly, allows us to see the persistence of rhythms that escape the disciplining power of capital. They do so by pulling us in to experience ecological rhythms and entanglements, rather than representing them.
The exhaustion of humans and the earth of which the performers of Sun & Sea (Marina) sing can thus be seen as the product of capitalism’s contempt for the spatiotemporal profile of
human and more-than-human worlds. As my complication of the clear difference between fossil fuels and other energies urges us to take serious, capitalism persists in a green mode which perceives green energy as infinite and therefore conceives of energy transitions as a technological solution by which extraction of and from ecological rhythms can be perpetuated in the service of regimes of accumulation. In this perception, green energy is constructed as just as continually accessible to and transportable by humans as we have grown used to think fossil fuels are, but, at the same time, inexhaustible. What fossil fuels and green energy thus share, from the perspective of capitalism, is that both are epistemologically constructed as universally accessible and extractable. Insisting that both fossil and green capitalism rely on an epistemic model which perceives the elements as merely energy, the central challenge of this thesis is therefore to come up with ways of thinking the elements beyond capital accumulation.
Historically, I therefore see a continuation of developments, which various historians argue are intricate to the development of modern capitalism, in contemporary discourses on energy transitions. If in Europe around the fourteenth century the technology of abstract universal clock time was supposed to regulate working hours (Thompson 56), if in the eighteenth century British industrialists preferred coal over hydropower for its disciplinary potential (Malm 146), and if in the second half of the twentieth century governments switched to oil to restraint democracies (Mitchell 236), then the recent enlistment of green energy by capitalists to promise an inexhaustible modernity continues the promethean conceit of fossil capital. We need, therefore, to interrogate how green energy infrastructures can be aligned with permanence as mode of exploitation. Moreover, decontextualized time freed up the future as realm of monetary speculation (Le Goff 152, Adam, “History of the Future” 365), the coal-based fossil economy fueled ideas of economic progress as self-sustaining which already existed in relation to hydropower (Malm 47), and the seeming inexhaustible energy derived from oil played a decisive role in post-war conceptions of financial growth as unhindered by material limits (Mitchell 140). This means that we also need to ask how an economic ideology of infinite expansion coordinates with capitalism’s understanding of a transition to green energy. The intervention of the energy humanities is to insist that fuels, resources, and their infrastructures are never mere technologies but bound up with society, politics, economy, and culture.4 This means that an energy transition that adequately responds to the current
environmental crisis only takes place when these social systems transition too.
4 Consider, for example, Living Oil (2014) by Stephanie LeMenager, Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (2017) edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, and Energy Humanities: An Anthology edited (2017) by Szeman and Dominic Boyer.
Despite that Malm and Mitchell enable us to see how politics and economics are entwined with certain types of energy, I object to the ways in which these historical materialist thinkers conceive of capitalism. Echoing the ideas of material feminists, natureculture theorists, and multispecies ethnographers, I argue that to speak of capital(ism) as if it is a thing, an object to be analyzed from a distance, a totality, is to repeat what Donna Haraway calls the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere and thus to repeat the abstractions we aim to criticize (“Situated Knowledges” 581).5 The primary unit of analysis of this thesis will therefore not be
a totality but relations. I propose not to resolve this analytic disjunction between historical and relational approaches but instead allow for a precarious tension to persist between the two. Precarity is not only a state induced by capital, but also signifies ecological indeterminacy or life without the promise of stability (François, “Unstored Energies” 125, Tsing 2). This reading may thus be understood as a mode of ecological thinking in itself. Precarity then refers to a suspension between two analytic perspectives, something Édouard Glissant refers to as the thinking of errantry, in which a precarious mode of thought reminds of the threatened beauty of the world (20-1). In a sense, this is a precarious analysis as ecotone that comes into being at and as the conjoined differences between the theoretical and methodological considerations of historical and new materialisms.
The relational thinkers I am inspired by emphasize that the world comes into being through “intra-action” (Barad 49): the observer and the observed emerge simultaneously and their connection precedes them, as do nature and culture (Haraway, Companion Species
Manifesto 12) and the material and the discursive (Alaimo and Hekman 6). The human and
discourse are not transcendental exceptions but rather one expression of the activity, productivity and creativity of matter (Coole and Frost 9). In Exposed (2016), Stacy Alaimo coins the concept “transcorporeality” to refer to such entanglement of bodies and environments (113). Alaimo’s concept “exposure” furthermore theorizes how a sense of political agency emerges from the vulnerability of this perceived loss of sovereignty (5). Following such a relational approach, not only the beach but also the human body is in a way an ecotone, as it is not separate from an inert natural background but embedded into lively materialities. The elemental composes the human body as much as the beach. In the case of Sun & Sea (Marina) this feminist perspective opens up the question of how, if the elements that human bodies consist of and depend on have disappeared, these human opera singers have continued to exist independently from the elemental absence they address. Similar to this detached position of the
5 Starosielski in a talk at the 2019 “After Oil School” similarly suggests that a sole focus on infrastructural reading may contribute to the reification of those same infrastructures (“Harvesting Sunlight”).
singers, the audience of the piece is not situated within the beach but instead hovers above it, almost hidden, able to see the scene without being part of it. If bodies, infrastructures, art, and materialities are mutually constituted, then neither the singers, nor the audience, nor the lyrics of the opera can be external to the scene of an exhausted earth. Elemental aesthetics, instead, give us a sense of how forms emerge from elemental entanglements and thereby perform a material politics of exposure. As such, an elemental understanding of energy can help open up even further the intriguing (re)definitions already put forward in the energy humanities.
We thus need to cultivate other ways of knowing energy than its dominant modern definition by expanding into entangled ways of knowing energies. Fuel, resource, and energy are words that in different degrees obscure how humans and resources are embedded in an intricate web of interconnections and temporalities in excess of scientific measurement or quantification. With this excess I mean that they are not continuously and completely accessible for extraction. Laura Watts, in one of the few studies of energy informed by natureculture theories, aptly emphasizes the crucial difference between fuels as reserve and embedded energies:
Hydro-powered and fossil fuel-made electrons can appear the instant you drop water from the top of a dam, or burn more coal or gas, whereas electrons made from renewable energy rise and fall with the movement of the wind and tides, with the weather, and with the turning of the Earth. Renewable energy-made electrons don’t appear when you need them. (32)
A recurrent question in this thesis is therefore to discuss to what extent the elemental can be experienced through embodied and aesthetic mediation. Thus, the sun, which I think with in chapter one, is not a sun as seen continuously from space but rather lived on earth as it comes up and goes down. Similarly, in chapter two, I am interested in the ungraspable rise and fall of the wind as it changes continuously. Finally, in chapter three, and by way of a conclusion, I end with artworks that allow us to contrast the ebb and flow of water with hydropower generated at will through dams.
In line with the concerns outlined above, my suggestion is that in order to avoid reproducing an analytic separation in the study of energy, we need modes of elemental attunement to the spatiotemporal patterns and entanglements that persist despite and within a relentless drive to impose standardized temporalities and cultivations. Multispecies anthropologist Anna Tsing refers to these as “salvage rhythms,” forms of unregularized
temporal coordination and cooperation between human and more-than-human patterns (131-5). Instead of focusing on singular capitalist imaginaries of progress (and how they are bound up with energy infrastructures), the art, as Tsing argues, is to notice latent commons that happen around us continuously in all the precarious modes of existence that use and refuse capitalist governance (131-5). Attunement to these circadian, seasonal, and other rhythms, Tsing suggests, is central and “such sensibilities will be needed for the end of global progress’s easy summer: the autumn aroma leads … into common life without guarantees” (Tsing 2). If, as Serpil Opperman argues, the world is storied by material agencies as narrative agencies (29), the work to be done is to let these agencies sensitize our conceptual vocabularies to an elemental world. I propose the elemental is one such sensible concept. I return to the commons in chapter two, where I look at a fog installation by Fujiko Nayaka and a fog poem by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge in order to suggest modes of attunement to atmospheric commons.
To show how the historical and relational affordances of the elemental—as I have discussed them in this introduction—are manifested in other research as well, I offer a brief exposition of elemental analytics. Glissant, for example, voices how ecological entanglements and rhythms persist despite and in the face of linear, progressive, appropriating knowledges and practices when he states that “[t]he elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely” (43). An affiliated relational reading of the elemental comes from Amanda Boetzkes, who in a study of environmental art employs the term Earth Art rather than Land Art since land is only one of multiple elementals that reveal the sensorial plenitude and irrepresentability of the earth, such as the sky, light, water and weather (16). Boetzkes theorizes the elementary as a concept that brings out the earth’s alterity, which does not imply a return to an untouched nature nor a denial of the mutual constitution of humans and nature, but rather emphasizes that the whole of nature cannot be contained within limited human parameters (17). Earth art, Boetzkes argues, holds on to the tension of the simultaneous sensibility and alterity of the earth: it can open the senses to the temporalities, rhythms, and materialities of elementals through aesthetic mediation while retaining a definite sense of these phenomena escaping the artwork representing it (20).
And yet, though the elemental asserts its status of radical alterity, elements are both appropriated by and serve as infrastructures. In a study that reads rising temperatures as guide for thinking material entwinement, Denise Ferreira da Silva experiments with the correspondence of the classic elements to the four typical phase transitions to figure change as material transformation rather than the temporal progression informed by Universal time (n.p.). What Da Silva refers to as elemental thinking reads the accumulation of atmospheric gases as the form of global capital itself (n.p.). Related to this reading of elements as capital is Derek
McCormack’s interpretation of Google’s Loon project as an infrastructural experiment, in which elemental agencies are infrastructural conditions themselves (202). The project, which tests the use of balloons as high-altitude platforms for the distribution of wireless internet, has the ambition to use the wind to allow the balloons to move and therefore draws from datasets that predict the trajectory of wind (McCormack 199-201). Again, what I am interested in regarding green energy is the friction between elements-as-infrastructure and the ways in which the elements exceed the efforts intended to seize them, including both wind turbines and the wind prediction datasets used by Google, because the quasi-autonomy of the elemental is what requires us to coordinate our co-existence with ecological rhythms. In later chapters, I return to this friction in readings of other elemental infrastructures such as greenhouses, solar farms, Google wind, and tidal harbors.
The elemental thus encompasses both the excessiveness of the elements and the ways in which they are put to use. “The elements gather the slow and swift, the durable and the ephemeral, the flowing and the deceptively still,” write Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, the editors of the collection Elemental Ecocriticism (2015) (8). As such, in the words of Cheryll Glotfelty in the introduction to Veer Ecology (2017), these editors encourage us to regard “the elements as fellow actors rather than props or backdrop” (ix). Materials matter not because they are valuable, but because their elemental components compose as much as they are composed. As Michael Marder argues, designating solar, wind, and hydropower as renewables rather than as elementals lumps together biofuels and human cohabitation and cooperation with the elements of water, air, and solar fire (51). The concept thus emphasizes the requirement of coordination between human and more-than-human spatiotemporal profiles. Therefore, a truly sustainable energy transition cannot be compatible with ideologies of permanence or infinite expansion.
In sum, I argue that the elemental moves beyond arguments about the analytical supremacy of time or space, beyond the bifurcation of temporality and permanence, and opens up questions of energy to a mode of attention to spatiotemporal profiles that oscillate between limits and limitless renewal. The elemental gathers the durable and the ephemeral and fosters thinking in which the ephemeral is perhaps paradoxically as close as we get to permanence, since it is precisely by fluctuating that worlds perpetuate themselves. The artworks that I work with in the subsequent chapters show that an elemental aesthetics is particularly powerful in reframing discussions about energy transitions from a question of depletion, or quantity, to living with the spatiotemporal patterns of materialities. The forms of elemental aesthetics, to return to Hejinian, render the rhythms of elements known but simultaneously alter and thereby
reorient the premise of these discussions from only technical to political. The point is therefore not to incorporate dissenting materialities into the political but to nurture the politics that is the antagonism between the political and the materialities exceeding it.6 It is important, though,
that since an object is never a mere resource, every specific instance of such aesthetic translation complicates the conceptual generalizations outlined above. My readings are therefore attuned to the specific tenses and contexts of each object and refer, when possible, to my own situation and/or experience of them.
In chapter one, I analyze photographs and poems that counter the idea of unlimited solar availability by mediating the changing intensity of the sunlight that reaches the surface of the earth during the day and the seasons. In chapter two, I engage with the atmospheric elemental aesthetics of art, poetry, and various other texts that problematize quantified accounts of wind energy by way of their exposure to elemental conditions. In chapter three, I trace a range of tidal art and argue that these elemental aesthetics demand acknowledging our entwinement with ebbs and flows as well as the quasi-autonomy of this rhythm. As the rhythmic intervals which I think with in this thesis manifest themselves as precarious analytic movements between different or even incommensurable theoretical sensibilities, so are the elemental aesthetics I trace a formal requirement for my own stories about the patterns of the sun, wind, and water. In the following chapters, the celestial sphere, the atmosphere, and the hydrosphere should appear to you as interconnected, yet unique—sensed, but never fully grasped.
6 This way of phrasing makes clear I am arguing against a Latourian “parliament of things” (“Parliament of Things”).
Chapter 1. The Celestial Sphere:
Positions of the Sun in Green and Blue
Our solar system is predicted by physicists to continue to exist for another four and a half billion years. With this scientific prediction, Hermann Scheer, the German former social democratic parliament member known for his work for the promotion of solar energy, opens chapter two of his book The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Future (2002). Every year of this unfathomable time span, Scheer argues, the sun produces 15.000 times more energy than the total amount of energy currently consumed by what he refers to as the “human population” (62).7 Scheer pushes this quantified notion of the sun in tandem with his argument
that the technology for a full-scale switch to solar energy is already there—all that lacks, according to Scheer, is political will (63-64). In this chapter I put pressure on this quantified account of the sun by arguing that it reveals a point of convergence between the way science constructs energy as an object of knowledge and capitalism’s ambition to internalize energy sources for continued and continuous production. In fact, as will become clear over the course of this chapter, these scientific measurements seem to find their correspondence in contemporary green capitalism’s claim to a seamless energy transition that requires no social or political change. In other words, though Scheer recognizes the political potential of a switch to solar energy and argues that its universal availability could free societies from control by capitalist corporations that centralize energy infrastructures (86), his way of arguing counters his political demands.
I analyze photography and poetry that counters these fictions of unlimited solar availability by evoking the fact that the intensity of the sunlight that reaches the surface of the earth varies during the day and the seasons. Planetary rotation, these artworks teach us, challenges fantasies of solar limitlessness. I work with chlorophyll prints by Rosemary Horn, in which chloroplasts in foliage are the aesthetic agent of seasonal colors in response to planetary rotation around the sun, and the cyanotypes of Carolin Lange, in which a chemical compound materializes into the color blue in response to fluctuating sunlight. I juxtapose these photos with excerpts from poems by Isobel Armstrong and Lyn Hejinian, whose attention to solar temporalities gives me a language to discuss these artworks as resisting the extractive
7 As I argue in line with critiques of the Anthropocene concept in chapter two, this notion of the “human population” is problematic since it presents the human as species instead of accounting for historical relations.
epistemologies of green capitalism. The aim of this chapter is thus to explore how the elemental aesthetics of these artworks allows us to experience the sun differently. In the two subsections of this chapter, I argue that these artworks help us theorize solar elemental aesthetics by creating an elemental epistemology that is ephemeral, context depended, and always in excess of itself. This excess, I argue using various theorists of this and related concepts, resists the notions of surplus, representation, and extraction that otherwise define the capitalist relation to solar economies, whether in form of industrial agriculture—the focus of the first section—or large scale solar energy infrastructures—the focus of the second. In my analysis I moreover counter this utopia of unlimited energy in which capital accumulation can continue business as usual, with no regard for environmental rhythms and entanglements, by redefining the concepts utopia and accumulation in the contexts of attention to ecological processes.
The earth turns around the sun and around its own axis, which means that the hemispheres of the earth experience seasonal and diurnal variations. When, in the approximately 365-day circumference of the earth around the sun, the northern hemisphere moves closer towards the sun in summer, winter begins in the southern hemisphere and vice versa. In the 24-hour clock time roughly marking a planetary day, the earth turns around its axis once. Many places on earth experience the change between day and night within this abstract clocked timeframe, though crucially all at different moments, but in the regions north of the polar circle8 the sun is up continuously for at least one day during summer and does not appear,
for one day or more, in winter. A central paradox of the sun emerges from this prosaic yet astronomical account of seasonal and diurnal rhythms. The sun is the central gravitational force that keeps the solar system in its place, pulling all its matter together, and yet on earth there is no such thing as a universally lived sun, only differential, embodied, mediated experiences of the sun’s changing positions in the horizon over the course of a day and a year.9
The artworks that I work with in this chapter afford such celestial differential solar relationalities, and these counter green capitalism’s claim to complete access. I use the term photography to refer to these relationalities and thus not only refer to the act of taking pictures, but also to poetry and plants as heliotropic mediations. Heliotropes, plants that grow or turn towards the sun, designate a certain way of relating to light. I thus use the term photography as one of our terms for differential mediations of sunlight; from the Greek photo, light, and graphy,
8 For an account of light, darkness, and energy in polar regions, consider Sarah Pritchard’s “Field Notes from the End of the World.”
9 As this brief narrative demonstrates, post-Copernican astronomy is one such mediation—I have adapted its term celestial sphere as a name for how celestial bodies are experienced from the surface of the earth.
drawing—drawing or writing with light (OED). In Life After New Media (2012), Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska argue that mediation is a “vital process”: it is a concept for understanding the intra-active becoming of nature, technology, and society and the historically situated acts by which this process is temporarily stabilized (xv-xvi). Following such view of mediation, photographs, as mediated solar cycles, are an entryway into understanding the historical and ecological forces by which photos become objects. Contrary to its more common characterization as inanimate snapshots, this way of seeing photography shows that it is a process of lively differentiation: “it is, paradoxically, precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture or still the flow of life … that photography’s vital forces are activated” (Kember and Zylinska 72). In other words, the point is not to understand photography as a representation of an object but rather as materialized imprint of the socio-ecological forces in which it is embedded.
In Camera Lucida (1981) Roland Barthes states that photography exists at the intersection of two distinct procedures: one chemical, in which certain substances react to light, and one physical, in which an image is created through an optical device (10). If chemistry is interested in the behavior of elements or compounds, and if physics studies matter in space and time, this intertwinement of chemistry and physics is one way to understand the elemental aesthetics of the photographs that guide this chapter. Following Timothy Neale, Theo Phan, and Courtney Addison, who in the essay “An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: An Introduction” argue that an elemental understanding of chemicals emphasizes the relationality of matter, this elemental aesthetics counters the usual visualization of a periodic table of isolated elements in chemistry (2-3). Instead of elements as timeless and compartmentalized in a grid, the photographs that guide this chapter emerge out of the intra-action of elements, time, and space. I suggest that the only way to think about the elements as separate is to regard them as external to spin and place.
The elemental aesthetics of Horn’s chlorophyll prints and Lange’s cyanotypes thus demonstrate different ways of experimenting with the chemical and physical process of photography. Both bypass the mediating function of an optical device, the camera, and let photographs emerge out of elemental conditions. Thereby, chlorophyll prints and cyanotypes are especially productive when exploring environments as processes of mediation. These mediations happen as colors their pieces are defined by monochrome color scales in either blue or green. Common to both of their practices, thus, is that their photographs materialize out of a meeting between sunlight and materials that either occur in biomass, such as the pigment chlorophyll, visible the eye as the color green, or as man-made compounds, such as ferric
ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, visible as blue. These colors are therefore crucial to their practice and to an ecological reading of their work. As demonstrated in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s introduction to Prismatic Ecology (2013), colors do more than describe an inert property: they designate environmental actants with material effects (xiii). Building on these insights, this chapter follows entangled socio-ecologies of green and blue as they emerge in a Horn’s and Lange’s elemental aesthetics in a comparative reading to poems that likewise negotiate how seasonal and diurnal variations are mediated.
I am, in other words, interested in the tension between these photographs and other practices of writing with light that aim to make available resources from the sun external to a condition of flux and by extension disarticulate the present from elemental conditions. As I will demonstrate throughout the chapter, attention to embodied experiences of the sun’s position in the sky challenges not only the abstract forms of temporal mediation that are inscribed in modern time keeping but also the ways in which we perceive solar energy as being unlimitedly available for capital. To rephrase this, solar fluctuation is phenomenologically dependent on an embodied relation to space and time. Industrial agriculture aims to sever biomass from its diurnal and seasonal existence, while the solar energy industry works on permanently exposing silicon, the chemical element most commonly used in photovoltaic systems, to the sun.The central task of this chapter is to render visible how capitalism’s mediation of the sun underscores current forms of ecological violence and to posit the elemental aesthetics of various poems and artworks as alternative relations to the light and energy of the sun.
I.
The Seasons: Green
the trees’ past is alight incandescing in cell and fibre
blazing veins and capillaries squander aura
the year’s store of sun leaves weightless
time falls radiant
light’s afterlife flares from the ground
Image 2. Rosemary Horn, Fences Protect, “One Sun, One Leaf, One Afternoon,” n.p.,
- Isobel Armstrong, “Defining Deaths,”
Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets, edited by Carrie Etter,
18
Horn’s work takes my analysis south of the Equator to New Zealand, where she is based.The place where I live, the Netherlands, and New Zealand are located roughly on opposite sides of the planet: when it is winter here, it is summer in New Zealand—when the sun is going down here, it is coming up there. In chlorophyll printing,10 a positive film, or another high contrast
image printed on transparent paper, is placed over a leaf, and combined they are exposed to the sun.11 A positive image is one in which the areas most exposed to light are the lightest areas of
the transparent print. This process causes the leaf to retain its green color in the areas of the image that let light pass through and lose it in other parts.
I argue that these various shades of green render an elemental aesthetics that is interested in the reaction of organisms to the changing position of the sun and varying hours of sunshine throughout the year. As in the excerpt from Isobel Armstrong’s “Defining Deaths” quoted above, from the collection Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (2010), the sun is ever present in Horn’s images, but not directly in the form of rays of sunshine. Rather, the sun appears embodied or materialized as the process of photosynthesis in the photographs’ biomass. In so doing, the photos speak to how deciduous trees store sunlight in leaves, a process in which chlorophyll is the essential substance, since it allows plants to transform the energy from light into to chemical energy. But the tree in Armstrong’s poem is not described as being covered in thick green foliage. Instead, it’s past is seen alight, referring to the moment in fall when the tree’s leaves flare in red, yellow, orange, and brown. This happens when the amount of sunlight and temperatures drop, and deciduous trees as a response produce less chlorophyll. Since chlorophyll is responsible for making leaves appear green, the substance reflects the blue and red wavelengths of light, other pigments make leaves in this season appear as the fall’s colors.12 Xantophyll, yellow, carotene, orange, anthocyanin, red—the first have been present
in the leaves all along, while the latter is produced in response to light and cold. Hues of yellow, orange, or red remind the speaker of the poem of the blazing fire of the sun that provided the
10 Horn’s account of chlorophyll printing in the lecture “One Sun, one Leaf, one Afternoon” taught me most of what I know about the process.
11 The process is thus not necessarily completely camera-free since this positive film could have been made by using a camera.
energy for the leaves to grow, but this fire of colors also signals the discharge of this year’s work of photosynthesis.
The attention Horn’s prints draw to seasonal processes of accumulation and release in biomass figure always already entangled socio-ecologies rather than pristine natures. Instead of thinking humans as a lone actors in the carbon cycle that only become entwined with nature as they destroy it, the elemental aesthetics of Horn’s work reinstates the social as part of the capture and release of carbon that plants use to photosynthesize over the seasons. As Natasha Myers reminds us, plants are a powerful actor in the carbon cycle (n.p.). Humans come on the evolutionary stage much later than plants and are more of a by-product of the breathing of plants than their masters. But there is another way they counter the idea of an isolated nature. Horn’s research shows that especially leaves of plants that grow in the understory of the forest such as Arum Lily and Rengarenga Lily, leafy green vegetables such as spinach and bok choy, and weeds tend to work well (Horn n.p.). Many of these plants are labeled as invasive species in New Zealand. In the print shown above, Fences Protect (2016), an image of a sign that designates the presence of the invasive species Arum Lily is printed on a leaf of that same plant. Horn, in her lecture, states that the damage these invasive species inflict on native species is catastrophic (n.p.). She thus utters a critique of British colonization of the islands, since the plants’ presence is not likely to stretch back to before the colonizers arrived. The prints, however, effectively emerge out of these kinds of “contamination” (Tsing 27). Since the chlorophyll prints turn out best on the leaves of invasive species, their form is tied to the messy disturbances of colonial capitalism in which species and plants are moved from their native environments and introduced elsewhere. This means that rather than evoking a nature that is first untouched and then degraded, the prints are a result of entangled socio-ecologies.
And yet, in industrial farming, vast amounts of borrowed spacetime—energy, fertilizers—are consumed in service of a sense of control over the spatiotemporal patterns of isolated spaces. The Westland region in the Netherlands, north of the major port of Rotterdam, has the highest concentration of greenhouses in the world. Though the history of horticulture covers millennia, these intensive forms of cultivation in the Orangeries of Holland originate in the 15th century (Muijzenberg 37-57). Regions like the Westland that grow crops all day and
all year round, semi-independent of the weather, night, or seasons, contribute to the Netherlands’ status as the second biggest exporter of fruits and vegetables after the US despite covering approximately 200 times less land mass (Viviano n.p.).13 Donna Haraway refers to
13 Though not all of the export from the Netherlands comes from the country itself—goods that have not been produced in the Netherlands also move out of its harbors.
this sense of independence and control as a plantation logic: a plantation, she argues, strives for the detachment of all its generative units, such as plants, microbes, animals, and people (Haraway et al. 557). It also strives to keep out ecological rhythms (weather, day and night, seasons) by glass enclosures heated and lit by energy consumption and regenerated through carbon-based fertilizers. In a greenhouse, the growth and harvesting of organic material paradoxically appears to become independent from planetary rotation precisely by extracting accumulated spacetime.
This harvesting independent from time and place is also suggested by solar geoengineers, whose solar energy powered capitalist futures Jamie Cross critically refers to as “pastoral” (16) and “ecological-economic utopias” (17). The pastoral as a concept is especially helpful in the finetuning of historical continuities between the long history of plantations, industrial agriculture, and limitless solar imaginaries. It is Raymond Williams, in The Country and the
City (1975), who teaches the difference between a classical pastoral literature and the later
Renaissance pastoral image. Though classical pastorals idealized images of nature to some extent these still contained traces of labor and loss, but the conventional Renaissance pastoral image rather represents only a bountiful nature (18). This timeless rural order with unmediated harvests, Williams continues, depends on ignoring laborers and obscures the “turning produce of the seasons” (33). The Renaissance pastoral thus shares with solar energy utopias a vision of harvest and consumption that obscures both the human labor and seasonal and diurnal fluctuations that are inseparable from the reproduction of elemental conditions.
We can recognize how this seasonless pastoral imagination seeps into accounts of green energy in historical materalialisms, for instance, when Andreas Malm states that since the flow “hangs like a fruit for anyone to pick, there is little surplus-value to extract in its production” (Malm, Fossil Capital 372). For Malm, this explains why industrial capitalism relies on the extraction of fossil fuels. Malm’s thinking about the spatiotemporal profiles of the stock, which he associates with fossil fuels, and the flow, solar, tidal, and wind energy, suggests to him that the latter by definition “does not allow for anything as lucrative as the primitive accumulation of fossil capital” (Fossil Capital 372). However, contrary to this pastoral image of nature, a piece of fruit does not continuously simply hang there for anyone to pick. Fruit grows seasonally. Moreover, the stark line that Malm draws between fruit—and other biomass such as vegetables, flowers, and leaves—and fossil fuels fails to acknowledge that that some fossils were at some point in time fruit. Furthermore, fruit and fossils are both solar mediations. Since a piece of fruit is also an accumulation of solar cycles, fruit, like fossil fuels, allows for the spatial decontextualization or transportation of the sun’s energy. From that perspective,
metabolic practices such as eating and digesting fruit are also forms of temporal decontextualization of the sun’s energy in the sense that it carries energy beyond its initial flow.
It is therefore important to maintain that just because biological or geological processes are mediated, this does not mean they stand out of spin and place. In other words, the ontological difference between the stock and the flow that Malm makes a claim to only holds when considering some elements as external to space and time. The practice of decontextualizing to gain control relies on the assumption that mediation separates an object from space and time. Mediation is neither separation, nor an intermediary of separate entities, but a temporary accumulation of planetary spatiotemporalities. The difference between fossil fuels and fruits and vegetables is therefore not so much that one is stock and the other is flow. What is important, rather, is that both are subject to capitalist appropriation. My intervention here is to insist that Mam’s understanding of green energy fails to account for the complexity of ecological mediations of energy and thereby reproduces the same regime of accumulation he interrogates.
One way to phrase a returning question of this thesis is therefore how to think traditionally Marxist concepts, in this case accumulation, in the context of attention to ecological processes. The concept of accumulation, in Marxist analysis, is productive in its insistence on social forms of appropriation but has difficulties addressing ecologies that rely on rhythms between storage and release. One challenge that I address, therefore, is determining what distinguishes these forms of accumulation. This is precisely the work the elemental aesthetics of Horn’s prints and Amstrong’s “leaves weightless” (18) help us do. By designating leaves as weightless Armstrong offers a vision of a gathering of time and energy that far from serving accumulation or even being harvested departs weightless as falling leaves. 14 This
departure is not simply a flow but is an accumulation of energy that is in excess of the needs of a plant.
Similarly, Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share (1949), argues that when productive activity is considered in its ecological context, the “general economy,” the capitalist economy in which material resources are understood as restricted and scarce and have to be used productively, turns out to be at odds with living matter (20). Organisms ordinarily receive more energy than can be used for growth and when a system can no longer grow this wealth needs to be lost without profit (Bataille 21). Bataille’s analysis of the general economy is thus based on a notion of excess rather than restriction and scarcity, which allows us to recognize acts such
14 My interest in these aesthetic mediations of ecological processes of retention and release owes much to Anne-Lise François’ “Ungiving Time: Reading Lyric by the Light of the Anthropocene.”
as Armstrong’s falling leaves as accumulations of energy that bypass the requirement of capitalism to make capital of such effort. In her analysis of Bataille’s text, Amanda Boetzkes translates this restricted economy, “capitalism’s failure to acknowledge our innate solarity,” as a “fundamental prohibition of expenditure” which “results in the extreme pressure to accumulate energy without waste (in the form of profit)” (“Solar” 315). Capital, in other words, prohibits the work of releasing as in leaves falling weightlessly, since all excess has to be rendered productive, given weight, and serve accumulation.
Another definition of a capitalist economy in the context of natural cycles comes from Jonathan Crary, who in 24/7 Capitalism (2013) argues that contemporary capitalism depends on “permanent expenditure, … endless wastefulness for its sustenance” (10). With the catchphrase 24/7 Crary captures the logic by which capital relies on continuously disposable resources. In this sense, the disruption of the gradual cycles of build-up of chlorophyll that I have looked at in this section declares the permanent falling of leaves in the service of accumulation. In that way, Bataille and Crary characterize the economy by either continuous wastefulness or the prohibition of waste. Both thereby show that these mechanisms of expenditure work in the service of growth and profit. Taken together, their thinking shows that the problem lies with the notion of permanence itself. Permanence allows neither excess nor waste, since nothing should escape capitalization. In the case of the production and release of energy in the forms of leaves, we can recognize this in thinking that bifurcates and isolates either the permanent growing or falling of leaves.
The significance of Horn’s aesthetic for my argument is thus that it creates another way of thinking the rhythm of growth and fall. Since in Horn’s prints, chlorophyll remains more present in uncovered areas while the amount of chlorophyll in the areas of the leaf that are shaded by the dark parts of the image decreases, the image appears on the leaf as a range of more or less chlorophyll in different parts of it. The leaf-print encompasses both an abundant presence of the sun in summer, in the form of green biomass, and the scarcer availability of the sun during the winter months, in the form of biomass in other colors than green transitioning to different stages. Moreover, the aesthetic agent responsible for the aesthetic economy of seasonal color is not a human artist but the chloroplasts of the leaves. The elemental aesthetics of Horn’s chlorophyll prints, by embodying not one part but a range in a cycle of buildup and release, challenges our conceptual vocabulary to understand social processes not in the context of a static environment, but in the context of interchanging accumulation. In this solar elemental aesthetics, we see a rhythm of excess and release of which the human is not a master but instead immersed in chlorophyll and other materialities.
II.
The Day: Blue
The quest for knowledge couldn’t be satisfied with familiar things; little as the nature of familiar rains, the everyday rising and setting of the sun, etc., has been understood, the quest for knowledge has remained primarily attracted to novelty, difference … The sun hangs from a dangling filament torn from a web. … For anyone interested in the unfolding of ideas, and in their subsequent displacement under the pressure of alternative ideas, and in the contingent materials that destabilize the contexts in which they are ideas about something, nothing can be entirely literal.
- Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun, 28
In the harbor city through which much of the produce of the Westland is likely to move, Rotterdam, many of Lange’s works from the multi-year project Under the Same Sun (since 2017) were made. The project consists of a series of cyanotypes which explore the relationality of time and space as the earth orbits around the sun. Technically speaking, a cyanotype is created by first applying a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to a cloth. When these chemicals encounter sunlight, they develop a deep blue color also referred to as Prussian blue (Ware 20). Characteristically, cyanotypes are also referred to as sunprints.
Image 3. Carolin Lange, sluizhuis, Under the Same Sun, www.carolinlange.com/under-the-same-sun-2017
Lange’s use of the technique to mediate the sun thus puts her work in a genealogy of cyanotypic thinking about the relations between space, time, and matter trough the fluctuations of the sun.15
The print above, from sluizhuis (2018), exhibited in Gallerie Le Clerq in Rotterdam, was made by placing a chemically treated cloth in the the Parksluizen complex in Rotterdam. As this complex is also home to two hydrological sluices, Lange’s work exemplifies the intertwinement of the elements and (energy) infrastructures that I am here engaging as elemental aesthetics. 16
Lange’s prints are made by exposing a piece of cloth to varying intensities of light through the day. As the sun moves in the horizon, the angle of light that falls into the building and the shadows cast by it change, creating a dynamic rendition of how light changes over the course of time. Placing cloths that have been exposed at different times of the day next to each other generates a sense of a particular solar rhythm.17 For me, the experience of seeing another
work in this series, created in and exhibited at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, made me aware of a movement that plays out so slowly and casually that it’s hard to realize it is involved in my experience of a built environment. In her own writings on her work, Lange aptly describes the cyanotype as both a material and a method: it’s sensitivity to light captures how the experience of a place changes with the shifting light conditions as the earth moves around the sun (n.p.). In that way, her work allows for an understanding where space, time, and matter appear not as separate entities but as co-dependent as they change with each other. As sunlight is always differentially experienced and mediated, so is a Prussian blue imprint that emerges specific to a geographical location, (architectural) environment, time of day, and time of year. Unlike Lange’s cyanotypes, capitalist solar energy technologies render the mediation of sunlight spatially and temporally decontextualized, independent from a location on a spinning earth. Scheer, in his book, argues against infrastructural plans such as GENESIS (Global Energy Network Equipped with Solar Cells and International Superconductor Grids) and an orbiting solar farm conceived by NASA since they aim to centralize and thereby control and profit from solar energy (83-84). GENESIS implies a belt of photovoltaic panels that convert light into electricity across the equator, while the solar farm would consist of solar panel platforms with a surface area of multiple square kilometers that orbit the earth. Projects like these, however, do not only attempt to scale-up solar energy, but also aim to satisfy capital’s
15Consider, for example, Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes.
16 The complex is located in Delfshaven, an area incorporated as part the Rotterdam harbor in the early twentieth century but since long outgrown by the postwar annexation of the Botlek, Europoort and, from the 1970’s on, newly reclaimed from the sea, the Maasvlakte. In the conclusion I adress questions of tidal infrastructures. 17 In the context of this chapter’s engagement with both seasonal and diurnal rhythms, it would be very interesting to see Lange execute a study like this one over the course of a longer period.
