Paula Dawson, Hyperobject Detector

“Paula Dawson, Hyperobject Detector,” notes for Paula Dawson, Hyperobject:Homeland at Holoshop: Drawing and Perceiving in Depth (Sydney) and Holocenter (New York, 2013).

Paula Dawson, Hyperobject Detector Timothy Morton

A hyperobject is an entity that is so vast and so long lasting that we humans only see pieces of it at a time—spatial pieces and temporal pieces. There is a fundamental crack between these pieces and the whole of which they are parts. Hyperobjects thus allow us to examine, in empirical detail, the disturbing reality known as modernity: the one opened up in the age of Kant and Hume, which was also the beginning of the Anthropocene, the radical intersection of human history and geological time. In modernity, there are gaps between what things are and how they appear, gaps that we cannot close. This means that there is a disturbing mask-like quality to appearances, a quality that we cannot separate from things: we cannot peel the mask off, so to speak. Things come shrink wrapped in their

2 appearances, yet there is a gap between how they appear and what they are. A thing becomes very vivid, and at the same time, disturbingly “unreal.” Doesn't this double whammy accurately gel with how we feel about a hyperobject such as climate? We only experience pieces of climate at a time: this fire, that flood. Weather is not climate. But climate is downwardly causal on weather—global warming is responsible for catastrophic climate change resulting in droughts, fires, floods… There is a strange and irreducible gap between this drought parching my skin and the global warming of which it is a symptom. Thus an age of ecological awareness is an age of unncaniness, not of total, bland authenticity. A hologram is the perfect way to embody this uncanniness. Perfect, because strange. A hologram's image is distributed everywhere in the interference pattern: it cannot be directly seen, requiring instead that one beam energy through the pattern, and then the vivid yet empty holographic thing appears. In a way, a shower of rain is a hologram of the climate. A mouse is a hologram of evolution. An art exhibition is a hologram of the biosphere. Paula Dawson is a very important artist, because she forces us to see with this strange, dislocated, vivid and haunting vision—the kind that is truly ecological. The kinds of holographic technology she employs are

3 repurposed military tools: tools for the logistics of mass death. Yet the ploughshares wrought from these swords are, as it were, not even as violent as ploughshares. They are vibrant, feathery, smeared as if it is hard to tell where they stop and start—as if we can see how a thing is strung out in time, and as time. It is as if the things we see are found within the gigantic shadow of a hyperobject, a shadow that affects our idea of what a thing is in the first place. A thing floats in a swarm. It is this delicate feather, not that one. Yet it has wisps, trails—are they part of it or not? If we assume that to be a thing is to be totally consistent and never to behave weirdly, then these hologram things are just illusions. Yet this is already to have decided what a thing is in advance, and certainly to fly in the face of evidence. When we see things like frogs in the shadow of evolution, we also see feathery things that swarm and blur, such that it becomes hard to tell where the frog starts and stops, in time and in space. This is what is means to be a human with a functioning nervous system at a moment when ecological awareness begins to shade everything strangely. Paula Dawson drags us into this world with remorseless gentleness.

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