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Ursula Biemann, Timothy Morton: ‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms’
‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms’
(p. 99 – 110)

Ursula Biemann, Timothy Morton

‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms’
In conversation with Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton

PDF, 12 pages

  • ecology
  • contemporary art
  • global ecology
  • art theory

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English

Ursula Biemann

is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she engages with the political ecologies of forests, oil and water. In her video practice she interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Her video installations have been shown at the international art biennials in Istanbul, Liverpool, Sevilla, Shanghai, Gwangju, Montreal, and Venice, and are represented in museums worldwide. In 2013 she had a comprehensive solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k. In addition to other books, she has published Stuff it – The Video Essay in the Digital Age, and she is founding member of the collaborative art and media project World of Matter. Biemann studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In 2008 she received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea, and 2009 the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art. www.geobodies.org
Other texts by Ursula Biemann for DIAPHANES

Timothy Morton

is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Jeff Bridges, Sabrina Scott, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. He co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. His work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory at the Critical Theory Institute, University of California, Irvine.
Other texts by Timothy Morton for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Maria Muhle (ed.), ...: Hybrid Ecologies

The notion of ecology not only figures centrally in current debates around climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences. In its present reformulation it refers to the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nexus of reciprocities between living processes, technological and media practices, i.e. to the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents. The book Hybrid Ecologies understands ecology as an ambivalent notion, whose multivalence opens up new fields of action and yet, thanks precisely to this openness and vast applicability, at the same time raises questions not least concerning its genealogy. The interdisciplinary contributions seek to explore the political and social effects that a rethinking of community in ecological and thus also in biopolitical terms may provoke, and which consequences the contemporary notion of ecology might entail for artistic and design practices in particular. The present publication is the result of the fifth annual program of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was conceived in cooperation with the Chair of Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

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