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 second talk is titled “Aesthetic Attunement in an Age of Urgency.”

This talk will describe a new research project on art and ecology with the working title of Sensing the Anthropocene. Instead of outputs that draw on textual and site research but that are solely artistic in form, or ones that draw on artistic practice but result in only a published paper, Sensing the Anthropocene will work responsively across practice-theory lines with academic, artistic, and curatorial outputs. Grounded in a distinction between art on ecology and art that is formed ecologically, the project investigates four “dematerialized” artistic methods — durational performance; deep listening; soundwalking; and Fluxus instruction scores. In addition to describing these practices in terms of both history and form, this talk makes a claim for their importance as practices of aesthetic micro-political attunement, generating affective resilience in the face of the denialism or
despair that too often accompanies a topic of such scope as we are facing with Anthropogenic climate change today.