Whimsical truthiness aching for slippy ease

To question our understanding of the world surrounding us, and to show how weirdly weird it is, Morton brings up the ‘sorties logic’. The sorties paradox is a logical paradox concerning things like heaps (or parking lots or forests). It’s about how vague things are. When does a collection of things become a heap (or when does an assemblage of trees become a forest)? And if you take a single rock away from a heap of rocks, is it still a heap? What if you take ten rocks away? Where does the heap start and where does it end?  As you can see, this creates a lot of vagueness, and some philosophers don’t like vagueness, so they just don’t believe heaps exist at all. But, as Morton puts it; „if you think about it global warming is a heap of actions: one car doesn’t cause global warming. Two? Three? No. You can work your way to one billion, and the same logic will hold. So global warming doesn’t exist  - or (Drumroll) this logic sucks. Why does it suck? Because this logic has no time for things that are in between true and false. Ecological beings like lifeforms or global warming require logics that allow for some degree of ambiguity and flexibility. Sentences can be kind of true, slightly false, or almost right. It requires a whimsical truthiness.“
A queer logic. A logic that does not only regard nature in terms of dualistic notions like „natural and unnatural“, „alive or not alive“ or „human or not human“. Nature exists in a continuous state. The idea of „natural“ arises from human perspectives on nature, not „nature“ itself. Through the lens of queer ecology, all living things are considered to be connected and interrelated. Timothy Morton, All art is Ecological

 „The aesthetic experience is about solidarity with what is given. It‘s solidarity, a feeling of alreadiness, for no reason in particular, with no agenda in particular - like evolution, like the biosphere. There is no good reason to distinguish between nonhumans that are ‚natural‘ and ones that are artificial‘, by which we mean made by humans. It just becomes too difficult to sustain such distinctions. Since, therefore, an artwork is itself a nonhuman being, this solidarity in the artistic realm is already solidarity with nonhumans, whether or not art is explicitly ecological.“ - Timothy Morton, All art is Ecological

„We live in an age of mass extinction“ is the statement underlying this project. We all know exactly what is meant by this; everywhere on the planet, we can feel the causes of the destruction of our environment. But at the same time, we experience festive seasons like Christmas that are marketed as contemplative, relaxing, festive, and mystical. But these are times of ecological disaster like any other, which are additionally marked by stress, responsibility, and obligation; Be it the stress of finding gifts, visiting friends and relatives, living up to the festive spirit, or simply that mundane worrying about the planet we call home. All in all, these last decades were not particularly happy ones, but every effort is made to delay the onset of realization and the cold sadness that it brings. 

And yet, every year, as soon as the lights and Festoons of the illusional Christmas time are taken down, the cold comes down with it. But these decorations and conversations often have something unreal, even fake about them. Quite as if they don‘t belong here. It is the reflection of those efforts to distract from the impending catastrophe and to transform these weeks into something magical and extraordinary, all with the help of plastic and light. Undoubtedly, there is something to be said for it, in that the obfuscation tricks certainly seem to work. But if you look twice, it‘s just plastic and light. Plastic and light are everywhere. It is human-made magic, just like it’s human-made nature that surrounds us in this time (actually not only in this time, nowadays every nature is human-made to a certain extent²) And yet this nature is real. In any case, it is real the moment we walk under the reindeer lights and see it with our own eyes. Who knows if it would exist if nobody was there?

The work tries everything to create a space of tranquility, sensuality, and, above all, contemplation. The work needs light as an important element. So, in a way, it depends on the electricity pulsing through the wires - just like your relaxation and denial, which also cannot function without technology.

Luminous, transparent hands, overgrown with flowers, shells, and other organic shapes, rise from the sockets. Human hands are the hands of the species that is responsible for all this nature. But the hands were reproduced in plastic to serve as an advertising medium for clothing or jewelry, whereupon they were now plastered with plastic flowers and fake shells only to be then reproduced again in plastic. To top it all off, there is a slight glow coming from the hands - a bit melancholic (literally) but also because these glowing objects are reminiscent of those night lights found in children‘s rooms to protect them from darkness and fear. It makes you think of a time when you needed this waste of energy to fall asleep peacefully. And to close this weirdly strange loop, all of these processes are done by human hand. Timothy Morton talks about similar loops, or „strange loops“ in their book Dark Ecology.  Morton argues that a strange loop is one in which two levels, that appear utterly separate slip into another. „A strange loop is weirdly weird: a turn of events that has an uncanny appearance.“ Timothy Morton further argues that the strange loop metaphor defines emerging ecological awareness occurring to „civilized “ people at this moment.