Plastic is the intimate manifestation of our cultural fixation with and dependency upon oil. And yet it is a material beyond oil, a material that effectively effaces its origins in oil; it is the afterlife of oil, the ineradicable residue of the era of petrocapitalism. Through infrastructures and imaginaries, plastic has built the world that we inhabit, including the digital networks upon which we increasingly rely. But it also refuses to let us go, for plastic can also be understood as a medium, in the sense of a clairvoyant, communicating with long-dead organisms to make their vital presence felt amongst the living, where the haunting legacies of plastic are voiced. In this talk, Heather Davis will consider the relationship between plastic as a media and plastic as a medium, where the plasticization of matter reorganizes our notions of time. 

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at the New School. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Her current book project, Plastic Matter, re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Image courtesy of The Scottish Heritage Foundation

Toyota Endowed Series | ArtCenter Dialogues