Why ambient poetics

Furthermore, this collapse of subject-object dualism, however temporary in experience, spontaneously gives rise to howsoever weak a sense of warmth towards one's world, in which one is included.

This world, to say more, is a world without center or edge that includes everything. Ambient poetics evokes this world by undermining that which Jacques Derrida calls the fundamental metaphysical distinction between inside and outside.

I believe that ambience persists in corrupted materialist forms, and also that these forms are what Walter Benjamin would have called dialectical images, Janus-faced.

They point two ways. On the one hand they offer a soothing panacea for capitalist and technocratic alienation. In music this ranges from New Age relaxation compositions all the way to the Beethoven that masks the screams in Auschwitz; or a direct incarnation of capitalism's abstract notion of value, for example in communitarian space where, for example, hanging out washing is forbidden , lawns, huge vacant parking lots, gigantic airport concourses, the Rauschenberg cracked black of tarmac, nuclear radiation or global warming itself--instances of an environmental suffering pervading even the experience of pleasure, an encroaching global creepiness sensed by the technocratic medium itself in the form of concepts such as Ulrich Beck's risk society.

On the other hand, ambient images offer a sort of gate into another dimension, a dimension that turn s out to be none other than the nowness that is far more radically "here" than any concept of "here," such as nation, race, gender--and even the universalism as neutral medium that holds these terms in place--or Martin Heidegger's concept of Dasein that implies history reified as destiny. Ambience exists beyond any notion of conceptuality.

Conceptuality of any kind, however subtle, implies an aggressive grasping and fixation. Thus, to put a label on the nowness, rather than experiencing it, is somewhat beside the point.

I am only too well aware that my own words here risk this trap--and that not using them and adopting a reverent silence would also be to solidify ambience into that which cannot be spoken. These dialectical images thus at once mask and open up the possibility of a more profound view, shocking to the egotism that separates human being and its life world.

Ambient poetics points out what the structuralist Roman Jakobson calls the contact or perceptual dimension, medium or environment in which communication takes place. By indicating that which in phenomenology is called the perceptual field, prior to any distinguishing of subject and object, ambient poetics troubles those processes of differentiation that are elemental to forming the subject.

The aesthetic dimension Use this link to get back to this page. Why ambient poetics? Outline for a depthless ecology. Author: Timothy Morton. It is in this spirit that I offer the notion of ambience for consideration. This ambient poetics decentres the human subject in order to produce the conceptual conditions for ecological awareness and action. This work has usefully suggested a way of framing events that produce particular modes of attention constituted by a situated awareness of the complex entanglements and timescales of climate change.

Importantly these forces and agents violently and urgently refute the anthropos and all his works, religion, society, science, state, corporation, humanity, in favour of stories founded on the intra-action of species, rocks and chemistry. An eco critical, ambient art form calls on us to attend to the complexity of the systems we inhabit and influence. It can be expected to produce tangled tales of rocks, microbes and petro chemicals; of bleached coral survivors, algae blooms and spider extinctions; of power and of resistance.

There is no overview for this moment in history, our anthropocene subjectivities are formed in flights over and through the complex systems that produce us.

In all the ambient literature experiences of walking, reading, attending, listening, marking and locating, the audience participant is shifting through different frames of attention; from right here and now to a distant time and place. The walking, discovery and agency of the interaction design of produces a powerful sense of the present. Of being present. Yet at the same time, we experience a shifting frame of attention between the scales of the very local to the very global, from the instant of the present moment to the time of the historic forces at work in our places.

It is precisely the tracing of these multi scalar modes of attention that produces what we might argue is a particular form of anthropecenic affect.