Sonic Acts 2020: Lukáš Likavčan – Introduction to Comparative Planetology

Sonic Acts Podcast

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Lukáš Likavčan – Introduction to Comparative Planetology 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Errata: The lecturer would like to correct the crediting for Holly Herndon's 'Extreme Love’ track from her PROTO album and add co-authors Jenna Sutela and Lilly Anna Haynes. Theorist Lukáš Likavčan collaborates on art projects, including the simulation alt’ai, questioning machine protocols in communicating with environments. Exploring imaginations of Earth from the impersonal, totalising view to one in which humans are environmental accidents at home anywhere, he finds resonance in a line from Holly Herndon’s Extreme Love (2019): ​‘We are completely outside ourselves, and the world is completely inside us.’ In his lecture Introduction to Comparative Planetology, Likavčan looks into how as a philosophical genre, comparative planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different ​‘figures’ of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth. These five figures function simultaneously as visual paradigms, geopolitical regimes and design briefs; each of them has different prospects in guiding our interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction. While engaging in this conceptual, cosmological endeavour, comparative planetology seeks to become one of the navigational tools in plotting our way out of the impasse of modernity. Lukáš Likavčan is a researcher and theorist who writes on the philosophy of technology and political ecology. Concluding his PhD in environmental studies at Masaryk University, Brno, he now teaches at Centre for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU in Prague and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, a graduate of their experimental New Normal programme. As a researcher, he was based at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Oscillating between academic practice and a broad zone between art and design, he focuses on infrastructural conditions of subjectivity, abstraction and imagination. Likavčan just released a book Introduction to Comparative Planetology (2019, Strelka Press) that presents an analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and the geopolitics of climate emergency.