George Gessert

Bio: George Gessert is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Global warming & Domestication. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 13 publications receiving 767 citations.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Abstract: Susan Goethel Campbell’s exhibition Field Guide explores the nature of art and the conceptual process through a multimedia installation that also reflects upon temporality, art history, ecology and science. Introduced with a time-lapse video of weather patterns captured by web cam over the course of an entire year, atmospheric effects assume the quality of translucent washes that blur distinctions between opacity and transparency, painting and technology. Aerial views of built environments set against expansive cityscapes present essential imagery for large-format digital woodblock prints realized in monochromatic tonals and saturated grids of yellow and blazing orange. Some combine undulating wood grain patterns with pinhole perforations to admit light; others consist of diaphanous walnut stains applied to hand-crafted paper, a self-referential allusion to art’s planarity and permeable membrane. The evanescence of these views is echoed in pristine impressions of filtered dust and shimmering milkweed assemblages contained in Plexiglas light boxes. Known as Asclepias, milkweed is an herbaceous flower named by Carl Linnaeus after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, due to its efficacious medicinal powers. Like the weather, the milkweed’s reflective silver filaments respond to shifting currents of air paired with gently wafted treetops projected in the viewing room. Here pearls of light corresponding to the spheres and pinpricks of the prints on the walls float randomly over the fictitious frame of a cubical vitrine. Orbs appear and disappear amid nocturnal shadows as figments of the imagination, their languid dispersion eliciting not-ofthis-world sensations of suspension, ascent and transcendence. This joined to the mesmerizing stillness of a gallery pierced occasionally by the sound of supersonic aircraft, a reminder of the machine in the garden. Beyond, the history of landscape photography and the Romantic sublime are encoded in works titled “Old Stand” that render minuscule figures of stationary box photographers against the grandeur of ice-capped Rockies. In some of the works the human figure is effaced as a historical memory through exquisitely modulated rubbings whose unbounded spatiality contrasts with the reflexive interiority of the viewing room. Campbell’s incandescent vision of nature asserts the phenomenal power of art to elevate the human spirit in the presence of heart-stirring beauty. It dares to reaffirm the timeless union between the material and immaterial substance of the universe, between human life and the ephemera of the natural world. f i l m

The Sixth Extinction

Abstract: I must admit when I first saw the title of this book, I was a little skeptical as to whether anything much “new” could be said about poetry and poetics, especially in respect to an analysis of how the latest neuroscience findings can be applied to the creative poetic impulse. However, the book covers a huge amount of ground and does discuss some new and important aspects of the nature of poetry creation. New Guide to Poetry and Poetics has 19 chapters and an excellent index and extensive bibliography. It is, in one sense, a truncated history of modern poetry that brings to the reader’s attention some quite obscure writings and quotations from famous poets. Chapters are arranged so they discuss all aspects of poetry making and appreciation, starting with creative impulses and how poems begin, and assessing the relevance of the conscious and unconscious mind. It then moves on to imagination, poetic vision, madness, emotion and thought in poetry. These are followed by Chapter Nine, “Meaning in Poetry” (p. 147), which, in my view, is the most important chapter in the book. I discuss this chapter later on in this review. Then the book covers discussions on imagery, rhyme, rhythm, technique, and poetry and reality, and finishes with a chapter on how reading poetry engages and then connects the reader and the poet. Aitchison set for himself a mammoth, ambitious task in writing this book. Given the scope and complexity of the issues involved, he has managed to achieve his goal fairly successfully, and the resultant book is an important addition to the literature. I have two criticisms of the book: The first, perhaps a subjective one, is that he concentrates too much on the traditional, famous “greats” of poetry—Wordsworth, Keats, Yates, Coleridge, Eliot and so on. The very little attention Aitchison pays to contemporary avant-garde, postpost-modernist poets gives the book a kind of “been there, done that” feel. Poets such as Charles Simic and Les Murray and poetry of non-English origin—Japanese haiku, for example—do not get a mention. The second criticism is more important: The book purports to show how the latest findings in neuroscience, involving as they do both brain and mind, inform the process of poetics and how and why the poet produces a poem. This area is discussed fairly narrowly and superficially. Again a few of the popular gurus in this discipline—Damasio, Sacks and Dennett—are discussed, and I suspect other readers will gain no real in-depth insights into how the brain actually works in the process of artistic creation. For example, Aitchison does not mention the cholinergic-aminergic neurotransmitter system of the brain discovered by Hobson. I have done fairly extensive research in this area myself, and I believe Aitchison’s understanding of how the brain functions in creative mode would have benefited from a reading of my published papers in this regard [1]. My unpublished thesis “The Myth of the Freudian Unconscious and its Relationship with Surrealist Poetry” [2] would also have been quite an eye opener for Aitchison, especially as he discusses Freud in some detail and, to his credit, shows the absurdity of certain aspects of Freud’s doctrine regarding literature and creative writers. In Chapter Nine, “Meaning in Poetry,” Aitchison engages his finest analytical powers in indicating just how absurd much of modern literary theory and theorists are. Aitchison writes: “Literary theorists’ fear of meaning and the language in which they express that fear, show that much of modern literary theory editor-in-chief Michael Punt . managing editor Bryony Dalefield associate editors Martha Blassnigg, Hannah Drayson, Dene Grigar, John Vines A full selection of reviews is published monthly on the LR web site: . leonardo reviews

Gathered from Coincidence: Reflections on Art in a Time of Global Warming

Abstract: How will global warming affect art? The author proposes that the effects will be continuous with other human-caused threats to civilization such as nuclear weapons. Such threats have already contributed to devaluation of the human figure. In many different times and places, the primary focus of art, with the notable exception of Western art, has been on nonhuman imagery. Global warming will give this new significance. Questions of permanence and impermanence in art are also likely to become more relevant.

Notes on Genetic Art

Abstract: In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, an extraterrestrial named Salo is marooned on a moon of Saturn. As he waits for help to arrive from his distant home planet, he whiles away the time sculpting lifelike statues and breeding daisies. "When Salo arrived on Titan in 203,117 B.C., the blooms of Titanic daisies were tiny, star-like, yellow flowers barely a quarter of an inch across. [Now] ... the typical Titanic daisy had a stalk four feet in diameter, and a lavender bloom shot with pink and having a mass in excess of a ton" [1]. The Titanic daisy is an example of imaginary genetic art, or art involving dioxyribonucleic acid (DNA). A more fantastical example occurs in The Garden of Time. In this short story, J. G. Ballard describes a kind of flower that can temporarily stop time. A small group of these flowers grow in the garden of a count and countess who have devoted themselves to a purely esthetic existence. The time flowers both support this existence and seem to require it for their own survival. The Garden of Time and The Sirens of Titan were written before the biological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. That revolution has brought new speculation about the genetic art to come. Vilem Flusser, writing in Art Forum in 1988, predicted that biotechnics will become an instrument of artists and that biotechnical artists may someday create "an enormous color symphony ... in which the color of every living organism will complement the colors of every other organism" [2]. The new artists will lay the "foundations of mental processes that have never before existed" [3].

Flowers of Human Presence: Effects of Esthetic Values on the Evolution of Ornamental Plants

Abstract: The author explains how esthetic values have affected the evolution of ornamental plants. In this century, ornamental plant breeders have come to have pervasive influence upon urban environments by producing, in the form of living organisms, imagery of nature for our culture. As we move into the era of biotechnics, the values and assumptions of traditional hybridizers may at least temporarily become even more influential, because biotechnicians have not had sufficient time to develop their own esthetic values.

A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities

Abstract: What are the parameters that define a posthuman knowing subject, her scientific credibility and ethical accountability? Taking the posthumanities as an emergent field of enquiry based on the conver...

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime

Abstract: Contents Introduction First Lecture: On the Instability of the (Notion of) Nature A mutation of the relation to the world [yen] Four ways to be driven crazy by ecology [yen] The instability of the nature/culture relation [yen] The invocation of human nature [yen] The recourse to the natural world [yen] On a great service rendered by the pseudo-controversy over the climate [yen] Go tell your masters that the scientists are on the warpath! [yen] In which we seek to pass from nature to the world [yen] How to face up Second Lecture: How Not to (De-)Animate Nature Disturbing truths [yen] Describing in order to warn [yen] In which we concentrate on agency [yen] On the difficulty of distinguishing between humans and nonhumans [yen] And yet it moves! [yen] A new version of natural law [yen] On an unfortunate tendency to confuse cause and creation [yen] Toward a nature that would no longer be a religion? Third Lecture: Gaia, a (Finally Secular) Figure for Nature Galileo, Lovelock: Two symmetrical discoveries [yen] Gaia, an exceedingly treacherous mythical name for a scientific theory [yen] A parallel with Pasteur's microbes [yen] Lovelock too makes micro-actors proliferate [yen] How to avoid the idea of a system? [yen] Organisms make their own environment, they do not adapt to it [yen] On a slight complication of Darwinism [yen] Space, an offspring of history Fourth Lecture: The Anthropocene and the Destruction of (the Image of) the Globe The Anthropocene: an innovation [yen] Mente et Malleo [yen] A debatable term for an uncertain epoch [yen] An ideal opportunity to disaggregate the figures of Man and Nature [yen] Sloterdijk or the theological origin of the image of the Sphere [yen] Confusion between Science and the Globe [yen] Tyrrell against Lovelock [yen] Feedback loops do not draw a Globe [yen] Finally, a different principle of composition [yen] Melancholia, or the end of the Globe Fifth Lecture: How to Convene the Various Peoples (of Nature)? Two Leviathans, two cosmologies [yen] How to avoid war between the gods? [yen] A perilous diplomatic project [yen] The impossible convocation of a people of nature [yen] How to give negotiation a chance? [yen] On the conflict between science and religion [yen] Uncertainty about the meaning of the word end [yen] Comparing collectives in combat [yen] Doing without any natural religion Sixth Lecture: How (Not) to Put an End to the End of Times? The fateful date of 1610 [yen] Stephen Toulmin and the scientific counter-revolution [yen] In search of the religious origin of disinhibition [yen] The strange project of achieving Paradise on Earth [yen] Eric Voegelin and the avatars of Gnosticism [yen] On an apocalyptic origin of climate skepticism [yen] From the religious to the terrestrial by way of the secular [yen] A people of Gaia ? [yen] How to respond when accused of producing apocalyptic discourse Seventh Lecture: The States (of Nature) between War and Peace The Great Enclosure of Caspar David Friedrich [yen] The end of the State of Nature [yen] On the proper dosage of Carl Schmitt [yen] We seek to understand the normative order of the earth [yen] on the difference between war and police work [yen] How to turn around and face Gaia? [yen] Human versus Earthbound [yen] Learning to identify the struggling territories Eighth Lecture: How to Govern Struggling (Natural) Territories? In the Theater of Negotiations, Les Amandiers, May 2015 [yen] Learning to meet without a higher arbiter [yen] Extension of the Conference of the Parties to Nonhumans [yen] Multiplication of the parties involved [yen] Mapping the critical zones [yen] Rediscovering the meaning of the State [yen] Laudato Si' [yen] Finally, facing Gaia [yen] Earth, earth! Works Cited

Anthropologists Are Talking - About the Anthropocene

Abstract: Love it or hate it, the Anthropocene is emerging as an inescapable word for (and of) the current moment. Popularized by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen, Anthropocene names an age in which human in...