The following is an essay that accompanies the work, beyond gestell, which can be viewed here.

beyond gestell is a sculptural installation that addresses the complex, contemporary issue of the climate crisis, and by natural extension the anthropocene and globalization. The term, “Gestell” – coined by Heidegger in a seminal 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology – is derived from “stellen” meaning “to place” and “ge” denoting a “gathering” or “collection” [1]. Heidegger describes the essence of technology as Gestell – an enframing [2] of the world as a standing-reserve, a calculable resource to be exploited [1]. 

Oil is one such resource, whose major derivatives are plastics: they weave through every industry, a foundation of contemporary life. Tossing plastic into a blue bin then forgetting about it, is a privilege. The reality however is that most plastic ends up as waste. Plastic that moves along complex global networks of supply and demand [4] often ends up floating down the same exploited rivers [1] that produced it, then back out to the rest of the anthropogenic world: an industrial symbiosis? 

The pervasiveness of plastics has a similarity to other traded goods throughout history. Food enables life, and the vessels that contain it are vital. Originating from Persia and China as early as the 7th century, porcelain flowed to Europe through global networks of trade by the 14th century. Designs evolved from the notable Ming Dynasty, cross-breeding and adapting to new forms such as Talavera de Puebla from Mexico, 15th century Iznik fritware from the Ottoman empire, “failed” 16th century Medici porcelain, 17th century Delftware and 18th century French Porcelain ( to name a few) [6-13]. The difference between the globally-entangled lives of plastics and porcelain, is of course their impact on the climate crisis.

Plates (like plastic containers) are designed to be used. On walls or floating down rivers as microplastics, they no longer contain [14]. beyond gestell is a body of work consisting of 35 distinct pieces that allude to fine dinnerware. Created using a variety of rounded, plastic containers as molds, the pieces are intentionally cast in plaster; a naturally occurring material [15] whose raw quality contrasts and partially conceals [16] the disposable materiality of the original [17]. By using a variety of plastic forms, the casts embody the key challenge posed by a lack of regulation around the hundreds of plastics in existence, that makes it impossible to design a single system to recycle them all [18]. Furthermore, plaster and its derivatives come from a long tradition, transforming the plastic original to something worthy of attention.

Other ways to draw attention are with scale. It is no coincidence that contemporary artists tackling the climate crisis employ this device: from Olafur’s affective-experiential works like The Weather Project (2003) [19] or Ice Watch (2018) [20], Burtunsky’s large format photography of industrial landscapes [21], to Agnes Denes’ ecological art that transforms expanses of land [22]. By working on a larger scale, the artists honor the complexity and scale of the climate crisis.

Although beyond gestell also stretches past individual perception, the intricacy of the individual pieces bring the viewer intimately close. The designs are a product of a custom, generative model whose data-set encompasses blue-and-white ware carefully selected [23] across ages and cultures to reflect the homogenizing effects and entangled realities of globalization [24]. The use of a generative model was intentional, as were the variety of reductive and additive methods of translating the digital images onto the physical casts [25]. The creative process embodies the subject of the work: the breaking of binary oppositions – a symbiosis [26] (Fig 21-24). And so, a vast array of symbiotic imagery, unified through a referential cobalt blue [27], echoes the “Chthulucene'' described by Harrawa [28]. Lives are interwoven: a deer is intimately entangled with a plant, a zebra alludes to a human-like form, and plant-like birds traverse skies. 

Harraway’s Chthulucene can be traced back to Heidegger, and his destruction of anthropocentrism through the critique of Descartes’ binary oppositions of human, animal and machine [29]. Implicitly, Heidegger is Harraway’s intellectual predecessor [30]. By opposing humanist, binary divisions Harraway builds a language grounded in (and for) the social science [31] to describe the symbiotic nature of beings. 

Unlike Harraway however, beyond gestell does not deny the Anthropocene. The intentional installation of the work begins with a lone human figure that lets the viewer place themselves within the intricate web. The installation’s overall layout hints at a narrative arc: an origin (a hero?) that balloons out - diverges - then converges. Upon closer inspection, the narrative falls apart: there is no ‘action’ or ‘resolution’ amid the disparate designs. Perhaps instead there is “a leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag”...a “continuing process” [34-35]? 

Art (like Le Guin’s science fiction) tries to describe “what is going on” [36]. The climate crisis is complex; its solutions nuanced and contradictory. Plastic isn’t just used for disposable containers, it is responsible for improving and saving lives (think: syringes, IV bags) [37]. Instead of the clarity that we yearn for amid such complexity, beyond gestell instills wonder, and a point of entry “to think about some of the bigger questions surrounding our existence today” [38]. 

While Harraway’s somewhat idealistic “flattening of hierarchies” [39] establishes the necessary empathy toward other species and the natural world, it doesn’t provide “convincing solutions to such great problems” [40]. But neither does beyond gestell. Where the Chtulucene falls short is in undermining whose shoulders the challenge rests on. It won’t be the Octopus cyanea or Hawaiian bobtail squid who make the decisions to adjust course. They may however inspire the manypeople [42] that will; because what beyond gestell, the web, and carrier bag [43] all affirm, is that existence on earth is an entangled, interdependent reality — that lives on.

Endnotes

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. , trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 16.

2. Rae, Gavin. “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery: Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben.” Human studies 37, no. 4 (2014): 511. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9327-z..

3. Zoë Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (May 2000): 195, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00322.x.

4. Peter Vanham, “A Brief History of Globalization,” World Economic Forum, 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/how-globalization-4-0-fits-into-the-history-of-globalization/.

5. Christian Schmidt, Tobias Krauth, and Stephan Wagner, “Export of Plastic Debris by Rivers into the Sea,” Environmental Science & Technology 51, no. 21 (October 11, 2017): 12246–53, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368. The majority of microplastics found in oceans globally can be traced back to ~10 rivers.

6. Denise Tsui, “A Short History of Chinese Imperial Porcelain,” Sothebys.com, September 25, 2023, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/a-short-history-of-chinese-imperial-porcelain. Blue pigment was made from cobalt imported from Persia and Iran via the Silk Road. In turn, Chinese blue and white ware designs also have an entangled past, bearing evidence of Middle Eastern stylistic influences.

7-8. Jeffery Munger, “East and West: Chinese Export Porcelain,” 2021, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ewpor/hd_ewpor.htm.

9. Johanna Hecht, “The Manila Galleon Trade (1565–1815),” 2020, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mgtr/hd_mgtr.htm.

10. Ortal Bensky, “Iznik Ewer,” September 9, 2015, https://smarthistory.org/iznik-ewer/.

11. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Steven Zucker, “Medici Porcelain, a Failed Experiment,” October 6, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/medici-porcelain/.

12. Courtney Harris and Steven Zucker, “Asia in Holland, 17th-Century Delftware,” November 22, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/17th-century-delftware/.

13. Munger, 2021.

14. Sofia, “Container Technologies,” 188. The notion of containment is intimately tied to the history and philosophy of technology whereby “the prototype tool is not a [feminine] cup or bowl but typically some kind of [dynamic, masculine] stick or probe” perhaps, as Sofia points out, due to a “misogynistic metaphysics that has represented space as a passive, neutral receptacle”. The exception in this line of thinking is Heidegger; an “unlikely ally” to Sofia who reframes “containment as an (inter-) active process…[one] that emphasizes an interdependence of organism and environment”. (For Le Guin, the container technology is the carrier bag.)

15. Barak, P, and EA Nater. 1997-2024. The Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules. https://virtual-museum.soils.wisc.edu. For this work Hydrocal (Plaster of Paris) was used, also known as gypsum — mainly calcium sulfate hemihydrate found in the mineral bassanite.

16. Sofia, “Container Technologies”, 184. Referring to Heidegger’s notions of concealing/revealing; Heidegger gives the example of an artisan producing a chalice is “a way of revealing the world in a creative ‘bringing forth’ of the thing” which contrasts modern modes of production where the world reveals itself “in the form of resources and information for consumption”.

17. the original in mold-making refers to the object from which the multiple was made, here the original refers to the plastic containers.

18. Judith Enck and Jan Dell, “Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work,” The Atlantic, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use-plastic-chemical-recycling-disposal/661141/.

19. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, Installation, Tate Modern, London, https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/the-weather-project-2003.

20. Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014, Installation (2018), Bankside, outside Tate Modern, London, https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/ice-watch-2014.

21. Edward Burtynsky, Dam #6, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2005, Chromogenic print, 2005, Washington, National Gallery of Art (Not on view), https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.191472.html.

22. Agnes Denes, Wheatfield a Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan Blue Sky, World Trade Center, 1982, photograph (of public art), 1982, https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/wheatfields-for-manhattan.

23. A key aspect of working with generative models is curation; final designs were selected and adapted from many model iterations and ~300 output images.

24. Use of a generative model also grounds the work in the here and now. After all, plastic is not a recent phenomenon, as demonstrated by Tony Cragg’s 1981 work, Britain Seen from the North; discovered after work on beyond gestell had begun. (Small artifacts native to earlier generative models are intentionally left in the final designs as clues, find the “double” teapot…)

25. Namely: hand-painting, carving, direct laser etching, custom designed stamps and stencils

26. "The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature." (McLuhan, 1969) as seen in Essential McLuhan (London Routledge, 2006), 272.

27. Also, notably, the color of recycling bins in Toronto, Canada.

28. Donna Harraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble ,” Delivered May 9, 2014, Transcript of speech: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/.

29-30. Rae, “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery: Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben”, 505.

31. Epigenetics is a branch of biology that studies how environments affect DNA through chemical modifications; the entwined nature of humans and their environment is a scientific fact.

32. Ursula K Le Guin, Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (S.L.: Ignota Books, 1986), 1.

33. Referencing “action” and “resolution” as described throughout Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

34. Le Guin, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, 2.

35. — 4. This statement is personally significant because the bedstone of chemical engineering is the reduction of complex systems to processes; something that enters, transforms, then exits into another process. Worth noting too is the similarity in Le Guin’s sentiment to Heidegger’s aforementioned“being” as “becoming” (Rae, 511).

36. — 5.

37. Casey Crownhart, “In Defense of Plastic (Sort Of),” MIT Technology Review, December 1, 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/01/1063933/in-defense-of-plastic-sort-of/.

38. Anicka Yi as heard in: “Ask the Artist: Questions for Anicka Yi,” Tate, January 14, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwL-9rimPc4&ab_channel=Tate.

39-40. Oliver Basciano, review of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna Haraway, Book Reviews, February 28, 2017, https://artreview.com/books-jan-feb-staying-with-the-trouble-donna-haraway/.

41. Harraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble”.

42. Referring to Le Guin’s comparison of the ‘Hero’ vs. ‘people’.

43. Can be extended to Latour’s actor-network theory and Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’.