Imaginary Explosions Cosmology Installation View: Cassandra with a flood in her mouth, JOAN Los Angeles, February 4 – April 15, 2023
Curated by Suzy Halajian with Hannah Spears
Photographer: Evan Walsh (2023)
Speculative fiction is a means of metabolizing the world from which new possible worlds emerge.
About Imaginary Explosions
Cosmology
Imaginary Explosions (2018-2023) is a speculative cosmology that blurs research science with art and fiction. Across episodic films, poetic texts, sculptures, and instruments of new technologies, the cosmology centers inhuman animacies and an alliance of transfeminist scientists who attune to the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. Improvised with real-life scientists and media researchers, the films follow members of the network as they traverse geological sites across place and time and attempt to interpret both embodied and technologically mediated signals they receive arriving from active volcanoes across place and time. Together they circumnavigate militarized and corporate infrastructures of technoscience to reorient the signals and data towards cooperation with the mineral earth.
The Imaginary Explosions cosmology translates aesthetic forms of communication across sensory modalities while being in relation to inhuman alterities and non-normative bodies. How can we understand and interpret the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being in a body? Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through technologies and mutual alliances, the cosmology explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled and co-created, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere. They collectively attune to what I call “affective geologies” towards a co-creation of subjectivity with inhuman forces that is always in excess of the self: being multiple, being-with, being unbounded.
The speculative cosmology of Imaginary Explosions is grounded within the dominant logics of the present, in which the lithic matter of the earth is exploited as a seemingly inexhaustible resource for capital gain and biopolitical technogovernance. Geological formations are widely conceived as inert, material substrata rather than as a complex, sympoietic system that sustains life and regulates the climate. There is a crisis in this logic that fails to recognize systems and scales of planetary interdependence. To depart from this closed loop and speculate otherwise, Imaginary Explosions seeks to ask, what forms of aesthetics can be composed for and with the inhuman?
An extended media archaeology of remote sensing data and time-based recordings of earthly movements and transformations in sound, image, text and material are found within the Imaginary Explosions cosmology. These include montages and materializations of computational vision, webcams, drones, cartography, three-dimensional laser scans, photogrammetry, satellite images, sonified seismicity, among others. These forms of media are woven into the narrative, questioned, transformed and translated into new forms of technopoetics.
The work was the subject of solo exhibitions at JOAN Los Angeles (2023) and Art in General (2019) both critically acclaimed in Artforum, an international premiere at the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020), a book published by Broken Dimanche Press (2018) among many festivals and group exhibitions. An in-depth critical essay about the cosmology, “Inhuman Appetites and Mineral Becomings,” was written by Bradley and Perkins in Antennae Journal (2023).
