Cary Wolfe and Adam Nocek: On Environment, Complexity, and Perception

The events will explore how art and design mediate human perception and intervention within environmental systems that exceed anthropocentric frameworks. Wolfe addresses James Turrell's Roden Crater as an invitation into the radical "outside" of geological time and celestial events, questioning its status as environmental art through perception and biopolitics. Nocek explores social and ecological interventions in urban agroecology, examining tensions along the urban-rural divide as a philosophical meditation on design agency within complex ecosystems.

The events are free but registration is reccomended due to the limited spaces.

For any questions: [email protected]

Each of the two conversations will be kicked of by a short lecture from one of the speakers, followed by a seminar-style conversation among them and with the attendees.

This talk offers a philosophical meditation on social and ecological interventions made in the relatively new field of urban agroecology. Specifically, the talk shows how urban agroecologies are situated at the intersection of complex debates in urban design/planning, the agricultural sciences, and social and political activism on the ecological and political stakes of food production. While some of these stakes will need revising given the technological and social complexity of twenty-first-century urbanization—especially in relation to the urban-rural divide--the talk ultimately reframes this debate in terms of important philosophical questions urban agroecology raises but is generally unequipped to answer: namely, the nature and scope of design in agroecological urbanism. This is not merely a technical challenge, but it's also and fundamentally a philosophical problem that concerns the agency of design in truly complex ecosystems.

James Turrell’s artwork is unabashedly metaphysical in ambition. And it is, at its core, paradoxical. His well-known sky spaces are built to enable us to “see seeing,” as he puts it, and yet his most ambitious project, Roden Crater, is calculated to rivet our attention on the radical “outside” of geological time and celestial events that exceed the world of the human in the most dramatic way imaginable. But is it “environmental” art, and if so, in what sense? I will attempt to address that question by working through a number of contexts: the autopoiesis of perception and its biopolitical connection to so-called “situated knowledges”; what has been called the “attention economy” of the current mediascape; and the difference between the experience of an art work and the meaning of an artwork, dramatized in the storied history of Minimalism’s connection to Land Art (and critiques thereof). From this vantage, we might ask: Is Turrell’s oculus a “frame” or a “screen,” or is it both? And what difference does it make for “environmental” art?

Light refreshments will be provided.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Feb 5 @ Brakhage Center ATLS 311 / Feb 6 @ CASE E351, 1725 Euclid Avenue, Boulder, United States

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