Quantum Ecologies in Cosmological Infrastructures: A Critical Holographers Encounters with the Meta/Physics of Landscape-Laboratories

Quantum Ecologies interrogates the role of physics in the construction of an indifferent and disenchanted universe. It explores conceptual resonances within and between new materialism, Indigenous philosophy of place, science fiction, and art. Quantum Ecologies recognizes that the world is alive and wise and considers relevant modes of responsible address within and as the Earth. Through theoretical and historical analysis, site based research and a/v installation Quantum Ecologies has developed the heuristic of the ‘holographic’ as a way to attend to the multi-temporal, co-present, and multi-scalar pluralities and layers of knowing, agency, and landscape. This feminist, anti-colonial art-science framework for critically engaging (physics) sites and philosophies addresses the scientific cosmology of the West that (inadvertently) legitimates the exploitation, dispossession, and extraction of Earthly beings and bodies. Holography as critical interferometry is applied to experimental sites and assemblages known as ‘landscape-laboratories’ as a mode of both reading and (re)writing them. My field/work has taken place in remote environmentally protected sites that are entangled and instrumentalized as cosmological sensing arrays, experimental nuclear fusion energy, or dark matter particle physics laboratories in Russia, France, the UK, Germany, and Canada. By thinking through the strangeness of these planetary quantum assemblages alongside sciences inheritances and genealogies in magic, alchemy, and mysticism I argue for the necessity of ‘another science’ that is situated, compassionate, and responsible. Quantum Ecologies proposes a plural, poly-perspectival assessment of place, where accounting for the promiscuous more-than of materials, sites, forces, and energies is a necessary and continuous (re)configuring of meta/physics and respectful anti-colonial engagement with Land.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

PhD thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Westminster

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Thomson, Joel

Identifier

oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:vwq22

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:vwq22