Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images

Starting from the premise that after modernism and postmodernism – in the Anthropocene – an artwork cannot rest upon its separation from the planet, this volume develops new ethical practice and thought with respect to art, philosophy and moving images. Practitioners and theorists examine how the relations between the ethical and the material figure in a context in which a dearth of ethical practice and thought has caused the materialities of the Anthropocene and the climate catastrophe.

Ethics are generally regarded as constituted through immaterial relations guided by moral imperatives. By contrast, this volume argues that the singular ethicalities that are manifested in a work cannot be captured by abstract ethics. The explorations of the ethical here are not prescriptive, but creative. Through artistic and philosophical thought and practice, the contributions move beyond the division between an active practice of ethics and a contemplative theory of aesthetics. They ask what ethicalities and materialities are at play in the relations between the artist, the art, their worlds and the planet after new materialism and posthumanism.

Rather than transcending the ethical through the material or the material through the ethical, the contributions articulate the singular relations between them and consider the inter- and intra-active ethical and material relations of art and images in biodiverse environments. They suggest that to bring out the ethical dimensions of the material and the material dimension of the ethical – without identifying one with the other –is a responsibility of art and images.