We are pleased to announce an upcoming one-day research seminar titled "Past, Present and Future Terrains: Speculative Fictions of the Earth's Surface," which will take place on Monday, September 16, 2024, at the University of Bergen.
The seminar aims to explore the intricate relationships between speculative fictions and the various terrains of our planet, examining how narratives can shape our understanding of both past and future landscapes. Through a series of interdisciplinary presentations and discussions with writers, artists, historians, and theorists, we will explore the role of speculation and fiction in imagining, constructing and modelling the surface of the earth.
Terrain is a concept that captures both concrete and transferred meanings. Concretely, it refers to land or simply the surface of the earth. In Norway, it is used colloquially to describe forests, bogs and other kinds of “utmark” – pointing to a demarcation of “out there” and “in here” that is deeply culturally and historically invested. The distinction tends to ignore, for instance, Indigenous Sámi use of land. The darker, but related, use of the term terrain relates to military technology which mediates and visualizes the land for surveillance, defense and occupation. In a metaphorical sense, terrain spatialises relationships or greater structures by referring to an underlying surface that binds them together. While the first definition fixes terrain in place, the second and technological definition also points to ways in which terrain is produced over time.
The seminar is organised by Dr. Helene Engnes Birkeli, the NorWhite project, and the Contemporary Aesthetics Research Group at the University of Bergen. This is the first event in the Research Group's planned series on “Terrain and Territory.”
Programme
9.15 – 9.30: Introduction and presentation of Contemporary Aesthetics
9.30-11.30: Session 1: Human and non-human in the landscape
Martin MacInnes - Novelist based in Edinburgh
Stephanie Heine - Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at The University of Copenhagen
Øyvind Vågnes - Novelist and Professor in Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen
11.30-12.30: Lunch
12.30 – 14.00: Session 2: Vertical and horizontal histories
Robert Law - Postdoctoral Researcher in Geosciences at the University of Bergen
Agnes Nedregård and Branko Boero Imwinkelried in Alt Går Bra - Artist collective/duo based in Bergen
14.00-14.15: Coffee break
14.15-15.00: Keynote: "Narrative and Machines for Seeing Down/Up/Across Terrains"
Karen Pinkus - Writer and Professor Emerita, Cornell University
15.00-15.45: Plenary discussion on the values and pitfalls of looking at landscape through the intersection of art, science and technology
More than visualizing changes or transformations from the past to the present, however, modes of mediating and thinking about/with the surface of the earth are also about imagining the future. Visual technologies such as geological maps and mining diagrams have projected potential extractive yield vertically while fixing the surface of the earth to a set of coordinates. Excavating the earth's geological layers, this form of speculative mapping layers multiple temporalities on top of one another, or even, folds temporalities in on themselves. It is therefore no coincidence that technologies of extraction feature prominently in many stories of science- and speculative fiction. The ways in which such imaginaries have unfolded in Western literary narratives has been explored recently by Karen Pinkus, and in the environmental humanities and art history, increasing emphasis is placed on artistic visual media's role in making the earth 'extractable.' Furthermore, Western capitalist mineral extraction relied on older mining knowledge outside of Europe often explicitly tied to crafts and creative practices. Today, digital data sets model and mediate changes to climates, glaciers, areas of permafrost and coastlines, moving away from more descriptive and material visualizations of the earth. In parallel, artists explore terrains using installation, land art, digital interfaces and sound.
What associations do the term “terrain” raise, and is it a generative term?
Which tools and devices allow artistic practices to operate in the boundary zone between known and unknown, past and future, or perhaps questioning those very distinctions?
What might a decolonial or postcolonial approach to terrain look like?
What happens in the various processes of mediation that turn earth into image, model and/or artwork?
Is art particularly equipped to explore the world with care, or is it just as complicit in its exploitation?
In what ways might art – whether literary, dramatic, sound or visual – be extractive?
The seminar is supported by the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, The University of Bergen.
About the research group Contemporary Aesthetics: https://www.uib.no/en/lle/168748/contemporary-aesthetics-research-group
Comments