Beyond the World's End. Arts of Living at the Crossing

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises.

Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

Table of contents
Introduction. The World's End, and Beyond  1
1. Feeding the Ghost: John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea  23
2. Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction  43
3. The Visual Politics of Climate Refugees  68
4. Gaming the Environment: On the Media Ecology of Public Studio  96
5. Animal Cosmopolitics: The Art of Gustafsson&Haapoga  116
6. To Save a World: Geoengineering, Conflictual Futurisms, and the Unthinkable  137
7. The Great Transition: The Arts and Radical System Change  163
Acknowledgments  195
Notes  199
Index  249

T. J. Demos is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, including The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, also published by Duke University Press, and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today.