Speculative Energy Futures Co-Investigator Natalie Loveless is the 2018-2019 Visiting Scholar for the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture in Montreal, Quebec. She is presenting two talks in the series, Sensing the Anthropocene.  The first is titled “Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Form.”

This talk asks what artistic approaches and sensibilities can offer to debate surrounding Anthropogenic climate change, attending to the difference between art on ecology and art that is formed ecologically. As well as giving theoretical and art historical background for this distinction, Loveless speculates on how the politics of form (what a form does in the world) intersects with ecological ethics when the use of fossil fuel resources (as, in Olafur Eliasson’s 2015 Ice Watch, those needed to ship
300 pound blocks of glacier ice to the center of Paris) are central to the production of artworks addressing ecology, global warming, and climate debt. Offering nuanced reflection on such works, this talk highlights the importance of a multi-sensorial and multi-species understanding of ecological ethics that takes the question of aesthetic form seriously in the context of art on and in the Anthropocene.