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Caltech

Visual Culture Seminar

Tuesday, February 21, 2023
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Dabney Hall 110 (Treasure Room)
Almost Inhuman
Caitlin Berrigan, Winter 2023 Artist in Residence, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Caltech,
  • Public Event

Caitlin Berrigan will present her process and research behind recent videos, sculptures, and texts that reimagine relations among human and more-than-human life forms through the lens of deep time. Central to the talk will be the artist's ongoing research project, Imaginary Explosions (2018-present)—a speculative worldbuilding cosmology that blurs research science with art and fiction. Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through various technologies, sensory modalities, and mutual alliances, the project explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere. Her work speculates on the idea of becoming mineral and enlists sensory modes to attune to geological animacies, while the notion of deep time offers a critical lens to think beyond the time scale of the human. Berrigan draws connections across ecological disasters and various scales of violence and contamination, along with personal histories that are enfolded in earth histories. She projects imaginary landscapes onto existing ones to propose alternative geological temporalities and affinities, enlisting embodied knowledge towards ecological reparation and the subversion of dominant power structures.

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For more information, please contact Cecilia Lu by phone at 626-395-1724 or by email at [email protected].