Field Aesthetics

Michael Kjær

Related terms: Blue Humanities, Critical Zone, Environmental Aesthetics, Gaiagraphy, Geo-Aesthetics, New Materialism, Sympoiesis

In recent years, in consonance with the development of critical theory related to the Anthropocene, diverse yet somewhat similar aesthetic engagements have emerged that can be characterised by their attempts to develop aesthetic insights and expressions through fieldwork. Let me therefore here propose the term Field Aesthetics to encircle and better understand some common features of these aesthetic engagements that fall within the wider category of Environmental Aesthetics.

In contrast to definitions of aesthetics as applied to human experiences of the beauty of ‘nature’ and art in the narrower sense, field aesthetic approaches take their cue from anthropology. Obviously, the term consists of two parts, and the order mentioned is intended: Any field aesthetic work is first and foremost rooted in the field from where it will develop its aesthetics. Field aesthetic approaches are hence informed by the methodological dictum of modern anthropology to move research away from the analytically clean surface of the desk and into the diverse topography of the field (Malinowski 1944). But where anthropological fieldwork was originally descriptive in nature, a field aesthetic approach expands its aim to also be prospective and proactive. A change that can likewise be registered in recent years’ development of an Anthropocene-oriented anthropology. Whereas anthropological fieldwork initially aimed at analysing already existing cultural and social dynamics, Anthropocene-oriented anthropology has lately shifted its attention. It is now working with current as well as imaginable future encounters and entanglements between human culture and Earth’s nonhuman actors (Gentilucci 2025), to the degree where such distinction between human and non-human domains no longer applies (e.g. Swanson et al. 2017, Tsing 2021).

But I am already moving too fast, too operative, too anthropocentric here (Stengers 2018). To define field aesthetics, as I have begun to do above, goes against the very fundamental redistribution of agency away from human intellectual domination that field aesthetic approaches depend on. What we can do instead is to trace and try to learn from existing approaches that are trying to develop aesthetic insights and expressions via fieldwork. Let me try to proceed a little slower.

Following from its anthropological inspiration, field aesthetic approaches will always be situated (Haraway 2016). They will further be trying to counter and, if possible, perform a disruption of the anthropocentric geographical imagination (Yussoff 2023) that has reduced the Earth to a globe in the abstract mathematizations that prevailing cartography relies on. Hence, field aesthetic approaches are in line with ‘gaiagraphic’ mapping strategies that emphasise the surface of the Earth as one coherent, fragile critical zone (cf. the entries ‘Gaiagraphy’ and ‘Critical Zone’ in this glossary). Staying within this critical fragility, pioneering work is being carried out by, e.g., the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture. Proposing the term ‘investigative aesthetics’ to cover their method, Forensic Architecture tries to recover and make sense of the offset sensuous situation ruling after violent traumatic events (Fuller and Weizman 2021). Focusing on the Earth’s cryosphere, Susan Schuppli transposes this strategy of recovery to investigate the traumatic state of the Earth in the epoch of the Anthropocene. Through fieldwork, she tries to learn to sense and perceive with ice – to follow and describe what she terms ‘cryoception’ (Schuppli 2014; https://susanschuppli.com/Works). Ice is considered here as especially sensitive and hence indicative of the anthropogenic geotrauma that we, belittling, term ‘climate change’. With Schuppli’s work as an example, we have now moved beyond the strictly field-related component of field aesthetic approaches and into the aesthetic part of the term: Cryoception is a proactive sensuous tactic to move beyond dominant Western anthropocentric perceptions of ice. To sense and perceive with ice is to try to move the aesthetic transport and agency out of human control.

Schuppli’s almost semiotic work to discover a cryoception beyond human geotraumatic neglect and violence is but one example in a very diverse field of contemporary field aesthetic approaches. Another important approach is driven by sensuous and ontological empathy in trying to place humans in apparently powerless positions of empathic sensibility towards Earthly forces as ways of “honouring whatever it is that makes us think and feel and imagine” (Stengers 2018, 131), e.g. in the work of Estonia-based sound and performance artist John Grzinich (https://maaheli.ee/main/powerless-flight-at-sonic-acts/). In Grzinich’s own words: Can e.g. weather-responsive instruments like wind harps give voice to the “often unseen and unheard forces of the geophysical, allowing us to listen and hear the more subtle aspects of earthly processes?” (Grzinich 2022).

Field aesthetic approaches are always situated in the field, and here, in the field, they are furthermore open to Earthly actors, forces, matter and milieus that can potentially move the aesthetic transport and agency out of human control. The philosophical forerunners of such redistribution are many. To highlight just two, the material vibrancy independent of human mediation suggested by, among others (cf. the entry ‘New Materialism’ in this glossary), Jane Bennet (2010) is central, as is the earlier suggestion by Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) of an earthly elemental imagination. In a series of books about the four elements, earth, fire, air and water, he developed his theory of an earthly elemental imagination (Bachelard 1938, 1941, 1943, 1948). According to Bachelard, it is not we humans who imagine the elements of the Earth, but the elements of the Earth that imagine themselves through us by toning our imagination. For example, being by or in water tones our imagination in a viscous, fleeting manner different from the toning present when being by a fire or in the airy surroundings of mountains. For this elemental imaginative energy to flow through us, we must, however, give up the rational grip on the world that keeps it at a manageable distance, a distance that we are used to. Instead, we must, again according to Bachelard, open ourselves up to let the elements of the Earth dream through us, before we can thereby awaken to the world in its full depth and bandwidth.

Now we have arrived at the double potential that lies ahead of field aesthetic approaches: To recover and make sense of the field in its current traumatic state indicative of anthropogenic devastation, while at the same time striving to be open to let the imaginative forces of the Earth run its courses through the field and through us to enable less anthropocentric aesthetic explorations of Earthly futures.

My own work focuses on exploring extreme marine environments in the Arctic (Kjær et al. 2025). Extreme marine environments are places where conditions are very harsh and challenging for life, especially from a human point of view. These areas can be incredibly hot, cold, deep underwater, or have high levels of chemicals that most living organisms would find toxic. Examples of extreme marine environments are cold seeps and hydrothermal vents, areas on the ocean floor where fluids and gases seep out of the Earth (Panieri et al. 2025). Not only are such extreme environments sources of interest to current oil and gas industries, but they are also places of potential exposure to future practices of deep-sea mining. While these environments are highly important places from ecological, political, and business perspectives, they are often poorly studied, rarely represented, and little present in the public imagination and in the minds of those not directly engaged with them. In collaboration with marine scientists and researching artists, I try, as an art historian, to develop a field aesthetic approach that aims to visualise and auralize the geobiological forces that are in operation in these extreme environments. Forces that are, or at least up until very recently, have been literally beyond the scope of direct human experience and imagination. Can extreme marine environments like these teach us, humans, to respect and appreciate Earthly imaginative forces before we, through deep-sea mining or other extractive perturbations, destroy yet another Earthly habitat in our quest for a ‘better’ world? Before we realise that it is too late to understand that we have never been modern (Latour 1993)? But the stakes of doing field research are high. Art and art history have a long and troubled historical alliance with explorations of the world, where artists and art historians have participated in scientific expeditions to produce colonising images of the new worlds that were ‘discovered’ (Hamilton 2022; Kjær 2024). This project instead has a reverse non-colonising exploratory goal which revolves around being invaded and changed by earthly forces and environments (Aït-Touati et al. 2022).

Field Aesthetics: Maybe one of too many terms in the field of environmental humanities that is already slowly sedimentizing in its own intellectual lingo. If this is the case, however, field aesthetic approaches will answer with the impetus to try to keep moving research away from the analytically clean surface of the desk and into the depths, encounters and entanglements of the field.

References

Ait-Touati, Frédérique, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire. 2022. Terra Forma: A book of speculative maps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1938. La Psychanalyse du feu. Paris: Gallimard.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1941. L'Eau et les rêves : Essai sur l’imagination de la matière. París: José Corti.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1943. L’Air et les songes : Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement. París: José Corti.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1948. La Terre et les Rêveries du repos. Paris: José Corti.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1948. La Terre et les Rêveries de la volonté. Paris: José Corti.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter – a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Extremes. n.d. Extremes.

Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. 2021. Investigative Aesthetics. London and New York: Verso.

Gentilucci, Marta. 2025. “Deep sea.” In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Hanna Nieber.

Grzinich, John. 2022. Powerless Flight at Sonic Acts.

Hamilton, Andrew B. B. 2022. “The Mineral Sublime.” Figurationen 1/2022. Special issue: Mineral Aesthetics, edited by Stefanie Heine: 16-31.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kjær, Michael. 2024. “Motor of Darkness: On the Cartographic Visual Drive of Anthropocene Culture.” In Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances in the Pulsatile Imaginary, edited by Nicoletta Isar. Berlin: Springer.

Kjær, Michael et al. 2025. Extremes

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press.

Malinowski, Bronisław. 1944. The Scientific Theory of Culture, University of North Carolina Press.

Panieri, G., Argentino, C., Savini, A. et al.: Sanctuary for vulnerable Arctic species at the Borealis Mud Volcano. Nat Commun 16, 504 (2025).

Schuppli, Susan. 2014. “Can the Sun Lie“, Forensis, Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Schuppli, Susan. Works.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. Another Science is Possible - A Manifesto for Slow Science, Polity Press.

Swanson, Heather Anne; Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt; Gan, Elaine; Bubandt, Nils (eds.). 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet - Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2021. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press.

Yussoff, Kathryn. 2023. “Geotrauma, or Geology as a Praxis of Struggle”, Environmental Humanities 15:3 (November 2023).