“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


Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Dust as Hyperobject


Marcus Nilsson suggests, very wisely, that particulates, dust and bacteria, since they aggregate and swirl, could be considered as a hyperobject. This would account for phenomena such as dust storms and epidemics. More on this soon, when I think about it some more. But a good case could be made for such entities as interobjective phenomena, involving translations between wind, human and nonhuman vectors.

1 comment:

ulrich said...

If you are interested in dust you should read Didi-Huberman´s "Génie du non-lieu: air, poussiére, empreinte, hantise" on the artist Claudio Parmiggiani who uses it a lot in his works.

Didi-Huberman shows for instance how dust escape "normal" physical porperties