STUDIOTOPIA RESIDENCIES
Palaeoplasticene
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by: Kat Austen, Artist in residence with Scientists Indrė Žliobaitė and Laurence Gill 25.05.2021 |
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Palaeoplasticene is a project co-developed by the artist Kat Austen and the scientists Indrė Žliobaitė and Laurence Gill. Together, they collaborate as part of the Studiotopia Art&Science Residence programme hosted by Ars Electronica. Recent research has shown the presence of microplastics at the outskirts of human reach: at the bottom of the Mariana trench and on top of mountains. What we consider to be our natural environment unequivocally and ubiquitously contains plastic. The situation is such that the phrase “plastisphere” has been coined to denote the contemporary pervasive dispersal of artificial plastics around the globe. Designed to be durable and unreactive, plastic outlasts its surrounding flora and fauna, yet ecosystems are already adapting to this new materiality with microorganisms evolving to feed on plastic, and plants being shown to take microplastics into tissue.
This new materiality raises questions about "Long Time" - timescales so big that they are beyond human experience. Timothy Morton refers to plastics as hyperobjects; phenomena so large and distributed in time or space that they are beyond our human experience. We encounter time-scales beyond our reach through the ramifications of plastics' release in the environment, and also through geological processes such as weathering, rock formation, the hydrological and carbon cycles. What happens when plastic coincides with these processes?
Evolutionary palaeontology looks into the fossil record to understand evolutionary tipping points, and conditions that trigger them. And more broadly, it aims to understand how the world was in the past and, via that, how the world works in general. The world today gives us only a snapshot of the living worlds that can exist in harmony and through changes. Analyzing the fossil record and the history of life allows us to see what other worlds have worked in the past. As an example, millions of years ago large mammal communities existed where five or even seven species of rhinoceroses and elephants lived together. Such ecosystems have no analogues today.
Living systems of the past can be seen and reconstructed through analyzing the fossil record -- remains or imprints of organisms preserved in sedimentary rocks.
Perhaps the best popular known palaeontologist, Stephen J. Gould, proposed a thought experiment known today as "replaying the tape of life". He asked, if somehow the history of life could be rewinded to its starting point, would the history of life turn the same way again.
Here we propose another thought - and art-science - experiment: to rewind the tape of Earth and add pre-human plastics.
Seen through a lens of global, rather than human, history, plastic can be considered an environmental change that is an impetus for adaptation. Its production can be seen as an adaptation itself; an improvement on the durability and resilience of bio-polymers like lignin and cellulose. What if this evolutionary step had come far earlier? What would the consequences have been on the Earth's ecosystem and landscape if plastic had been produced in prehistory? How would plastic over Long Time interact with other long-lived materials such as bone and stone? How would plastic's own global biogeochemical cycle have evolved?
Find out more about Kat Austen. Read more about Indrė Žliobaitė and Laurence Gill. Find out more about Ars Electronica.
Image credit: Kat Austen
"Palaeoplasticene" hosted by Ars Electronica is part of the STUDIOTOPIA project supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
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