ABSTRACT
How to conceive of an aesthetics of the Anthropocene? Art in the Anthropocene, this article argues, cannot be limited to thematizing the many different dimensions of the current ecological crisis. Both the theory and the practice of art need to address questions of form. While the world is subject to a radical transformation by human interference, traditional categories of knowledge and experience are being called into question. How can aesthetic representation reflect this deformation of the human relation to the world? The article presents three formal challenges that art in the Anthropocene has to address: Latency—the fact that the fundamental processes of environment elude perception and representation; entanglement—the fact that humans are caught in the complexities of the Earth system and scale—the fact that we are dealing with objects and processes on scales of magnitude that cannot be directly accessed by human understanding or control.
