INTRODUCTION
What is a global crisis?
Diablo (1957), 17 kT. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Takashi Homma, from Mushrooms from the Forest (2011). Photograph of mushroom harvested from the region around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, shortly after the reactor's meltdown in March 2011.
“Matter fell from grace during the twentieth century.”
—Karen Barad
What is a global crisis? A global crisis is a human-instigated event that operates on such a large scale that it is impossible to perceive through everyday experience. Global crises can be extremely fast, such as an atomic explosion that lasts only a few milliseconds. They can also be painfully slow, such as the warming of the planet or the melting of polar ice caps due to climate change. In either case, it is impossible to tell with the naked eye that these events can—and do—unfold.
Global crises leave physical traces of their existence on every square inch of the surface of the Earth. The entire planet is now dusted with trace amounts of radioactive isotopes that did not exist (at least not here on Earth) before the first nuclear explosion in July of 1945. It would be difficult to find a patch of land or water that seems unaffected by changing temperatures, loss of species diversity, ocean acidification, or any other hallmark of climate change.
Why are global crises important? Global crises force us to consider how our individual actions can affect the planet as a whole. They are proof that billions of individuals, making decisions whose consequences they will not be able to perceive, can have a profound effect on the world at large.
Global crises are also intimately tied to the development of new technologies, to scientific advancements, and to the sharing of technologies and discoveries with the public in a transparent way. Because we cannot perceive them through regular experience, we need to invent new tools to detect and report the traces of global crises. We need high-speed cameras that can record an atomic bomb’s fireball with an exposure that lasts a millionth of a second. We need Geiger counters and chemical analysis methods to detect radioactive isotopes as well as pollutants in the atmosphere. We need supercomputers and sophisticated climate models to predict changes in global wind patterns due to warming polar ice caps. And—perhaps most importantly—we need ways to make these technologies and discoveries accessible to everyone, because everyone influences the outcome of a global crisis.
What can artists tell us about global crises? Artists play an extremely important role in communicating the existence and effects of global crises to the public at large. We cannot detect global crises using our unaided senses, and art deals (almost) exclusively with sensory media (you see a painting, hear a song). Artists who take global crises as their subjects, then, ask how something invisible can be given visual form, how something quiet gains a voice.
Artists are also acutely aware of the ways in which new technologies change the way we understand global crises, and are often some of the first adopters of new techniques and ideas. It is not uncommon for artists to push the boundaries of technology in directions that scientists and engineers have not considered. So artworks can provide fresh new ways of understanding global crises in ways that press releases and scientific articles cannot.
References
- Barad, Karen. “No small matter: Mushroom clouds, ecologies of nothingness, and strange topologies of spacetimemattering.” In Arts of living on a damaged planet (Tsing, A., Swanson, S., Gan, E., and Bubandt, N., ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Print.