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Esther Leslie: In Turbid Environments
In Turbid Environments
(p. 165 – 180)

Esther Leslie

In Turbid Environments

PDF, 16 pages

  • economics
  • ecology
  • capitalism
  • art
  • cultural critic
  • digital media
  • digital culture

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Esther Leslie

is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She studied for her BA in German and European Studies, MA in Critical Theory and PhD at the University of Sussex with some years also spent at the Free University Berlin. Much of her work has tracked connections between liberatory and repressive politics and forms of art. She has focused in the last couple of decades on an expanded sense of animation. This work developed out of a fascination with color, which led her towards political, aesthetic and interdisciplinary inquiries in the study of technology and science, under the mantle of what she calls a poetics of science. Newer work explores the poetics and politics of milk and butter production, specifically in Ireland, the metaphorical impulses of Fog and Cloud Computing, and what type of atmospheres they produce and are produced by, and the impact of chemical production on landscape and personhood in the North East of England.
Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

It has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. Placed at the intersection of art, media and cultural studies as well as economic theory, the volume investigates the Cultural Logic of Environmentalization. As flows, circulations and liquidity resurface in all aspects of recent culture and contemporary art, this volume investigates the hypothesis of a genuine cultural logic of environmentalization through these three concepts.
It thus brings together two areas of research which have been largely separate. On the one hand, the volume takes up discussions about ecologies with and without nature and environmentalization as a contemporary form of power and capital. On the other hand, the volume takes its cue from Fredric Jameson’s notion that each stage of capitalism is accompanied by a genuine cultural logic. The volume introduces this current of materialist thinking into the ongoing discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. By analyzing contemporary art, architecture, theater, films, and literature, the 15 contributions by scholars and artists explore different fields where liquid forms, semantics of flow, or processes of circulation emerge as a contemporary cultural logic.

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