"Possible Worlds" in The Time is Now: Public Art of the Sustainable City

Book chapter and juror's essay - "Possible Worlds" -  for the Land Art Generator Initiative, UAE, 2010.

"Intimate Strife: the unbearable intimacy of human-animal relations" in Leonardo's Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals (C. Gigliotti, ed.)

Essay - Intimate Strife - the unbearable intimacy of human-animal relations"

Chapter Abstract:
Each day species go extinct. Countless non-humans suffer and die in industrialised farming and laboratories. Life forms are also used by artists as media. The freedom to utilize whatever we like in our own interests is largely unquestioned. But one must ask: are all of the practices of industrial culture desirable or even acceptable? And if they are acceptable, why do we find them so? Also largely unquestioned is the status of human as subject, and of all else as object – as a “what”, instead of a “whom”, the value of which is determined by its utility to the subject human.

Discussion of how to better human relations with non-human animals is not new. My overall goal in this essay is to look elsewhere for revision and change in human-non-human relations (and in the non-human I include not only what we consider the animate world, but all of nature as we think it). Hence, I argue that an alternate ontology is what is required for radical and lasting change. I also briefly consider some ideas that I think might aid us in locating such an ontology.