A Project by Kylie King

You Can't Photograph the Future

Kylie King’s project proposal You Can’t Photograph the Future is a video installation that questions our understanding of the immense problem of environmental destruction through the visual register. Her point of depature is the new geological turn of the anthropocene, a proposed epoch that begins when human activities started to have a significant global impact on earth’s ecosystems.

“I am interested in the role of aesthetics and visuality as complicating an overwhelming and disembodied scientific rationality. At what scale do we come into contact, as individual bodies, with global issues that seem to confuse the distinction between the human and non-human?”

 

You Can’t Photograph the Future will include indexed images from five anthropocentric scales to draw the attention of the viewer to the scalability of jurisdiction, governance and public action in a shifting climate. Special attention is paid to the medium of photography. Kylie King describes that with new questions being asked about the consequences of global capitalism and environmental catastrophe, photography becomes evidence as well as a speculative motivation for political action. From the “dust bowl“ to the “blue ball“, the history of the environmental movement can be traced through photographic events. Kylie King understands photography as a visually motivated science of the past in a rapidly changing data landscape. In her installation, Kylie King wants to make infrastructures and forms of capital visibile on multiple scales and in motion. The ongoing index of You Can´t Photograph The Future is supposed to operate as an access point to the power of aesthetics in understanding and acting on current climate issues.
Kylie King´s research-driven work combines forms of spatial practice, critical architecture and aesthetic geographies. The interaction between planetary macro scale projects and the human micro scale is one of the main subjects from which several of her projects have emerged. Her recent work Hydro-mediations documents and archives the role of water in everyday life. In Drone Archeology, she analyzes the visual culture of militarism combined with experimental geography to form a new surface for understanding violent spaces.

Kylie King is an artist living in San Diego. You can browse other projects mentioned in her portfolio kylieking.net.

Photos: Kylie King