In a climate-change allegory, the artist Anthony Discenza is using fossil fuels, which he calls "inherently spectral/demonic substances," to fabricate Renaissance-era scrying bowls, objects into which magicians would attempt to conjure demons.
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Conversation
"In an ongoing consideration of fossil fuels as inherently spectral/demonic substances, I'm exploring the production of various forms of divinatory objects composed from this material."
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In exhuming & burning these mineralogical resources (composed of the highly compressed residue of animals & plants that lived 100s of millions of years ago)...we’ve begun returning the planet to conditions approximating those that prevailed when these organisms were alive...
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...while rendering the environment increasingly inhospitable to our own existence. In this framing, the operative metaphor of haunting—or more pointedly, of a kind of vast goetic summoning (“never call up that which you cannot put down”)—seems particularly apt.
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Similarly, given the increasing pressure anxieties about the future are exerting on the present, a consideration of our longstanding relationship with divinatory practices as systems of meaning production also seems relevant.
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Anyhow, I think this kind of work is really interesting.
Here's Tony's website: anthonydiscenza.info
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