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Hyperobject

To evoke the global warming that affects our environment and our perception of landscape, the principle of the hyperobject, as defined by Timothy Morton in 2013, is taken up in this body of work.



The term "hyperobject" refers to things that are astronomically distributed in space and time relative to our human scale. Its name could be used to characterize a nebula, black holes, and the solar system, yet it could also refer to all the nuclear matter on Earth, the plastic in the ocean, a coral reef, all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or global warming more broadly. Hyperobjects can be made by nature or by humans, but one of their most important characteristics is that they are colossal in size.


Timothy Morton also states that hyperobjects are not simply collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in their own right. Hyperobjects are real entities, and their inherent reality is hidden from humans. They exist outside thought. From a human point of view, we can only see pieces of a hyperobject at any given time, never the whole, so it's particularly difficult to think about them.



Hyperobjects are entities not accessible to our senses, and can only become visible through statistical language or technological extensions of our senses through instruments and measurements. There is no possibility of directly proving their existence. We can therefore remain in denial about their causality.


All entities at any scale are interconnected within a mesh. When an object is born, it becomes entangled in the mesh. This mesh floats above and in front of things. It is made up of links and gaps. Links enable causality to take place, and gaps between things make it easier for entities to grasp them. Because global warming is transdimensional, we can only see part of it at a time.



We can use photographs, videos, graphs, plots, maps or algorithms to try and project ourselves into this phenomenon, but the problem is that we can never see such entities when they are designed in this way.


Rendered data can reveal it to us, and these aspects they show are undoubtedly real, but we could never perceive them on our own.




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