“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, February 28, 2011

We Live Inside a Monster



Marina Zurkow is a genius


Dark Chemistry has a characteristically fine analysis of my Hyperobjects 4.0 at his blog.

The more I look at them the more I think Marina Zurkow's Elixir series shows us something speculative realism is also showing. The fragile glass decanters, containing their cartoon line drawing humans in their bottled worlds, are correlationist ships in bottles, storm tossed inside the hyperobject of climate. Dark Chemistry discusses the Cthulhu allusion in my talk, in which I compare hyperobjects to Lovecraft's mad god. It's as if we have woken up to find ourselves inside a monster.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

Just came across this passage in H.P. Lovecraft that reminde me of Marina's spherical object floating on the ocean of being:

"...I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The grey half-light of a vast circular space..."

- At The Moutain of Madness