EP 010: TIMOTHY MORTON

Image Culture

My guest is Timothy Morton. Timothy’s work spans the fields of ecology, Romantic literature, and ontology, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential living philosophers. In his book Ecology without Nature he calls for us to cease considering nature and humanity as separate entities, and instead foster a kind of ecological awareness, a sense of the interdependence of all things. I met with Timothy in Marfa, Texas on the occasion of Hyperobjects the new show at Ballroom Marfa, which he co-curated with Executive Director Laura Copelin. Organized around his concept of the same name, Hyperobjects explores entities so large and complex that we lose our ability to understand our individual relationship to them; things such as global warming, plastic, and nuclear waste that have grown to such a scale as to defy comprehension. Morton argues that in order to understand such things, we have to shift the way we understand our relationship to the world. To this end, artworks in the show, including work by Tara Donovan, Postcommodity, and Emilija Skarnulyte, seek to de-center human perception and our idea of what constitutes an object.

I’d like to thank Timothy Morton, Laura Copelin and the entire team at Ballroom Marfa with special thanks to Peyton Gardner and Gabriela Carballo. You can see my portrait of Timothy at Ballroom with Tara Donovan’s work Untitled (Plastic Cups) on Instagram @william.jess.laird as well as at williamjesslaird.com/imageculture