Speaker
Description
The everyday experience of pushing a button and starting an electrical appliance, or turning on the lights or air conditioning, is in practice very simple. Yet, in trying to explain how they actually work, or what is energy, one needs fairly complicated expert knowledge. As fossil fuels still remain the ordinary energy source for the world, the accelerating climate crisis haunts all energy questions.
In this paper I consider how artworks can outline the intangible experience of energy and give an aesthetic form to it. Through the concept of enchantment, I consider the potential to connect the ordinary, or disenchanted, energy questions with the central sensibilities of art: wonder, imagination, and creation. I will delve into the some artworks of the 1950s and 60s, ranging from performance to kinetic art and painting, and analyze them in juxtaposition with contemporary artworks of the 2020s.
The artworks elucidate that the aesthetics of energy are not confined to mere documentary representation and instructive illustrations of the complex technical-economical systems that dominate current understandings of energy. I argue, that addressing and approaching energy questions aesthetically, is one way to transport and entangle energy questions into our cultural imagination where they have largely been absent.
| Presenting author | Anna-Kaisa Koski |
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