An invitation. A puzzle. A provocation to engage with unknown potentialities. At first encounter, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet as a physical artifact is deliberately indeterminate. Its format: a topsy-turvy/front-to-back/back-to-front arrangement, disrupts any notions of a point of entry, throwing the reader back on themselves to decide how to proceed, how far to apply learned templates of conventionality, or how far to take the opportunity to pursue less conditioned responses. From the outset, this book offers an explosion of possibilities.
Inspired by the conference Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2014, and a follow-up conference held in Aarhus, Denmark, later that same year, the book is divided into halves, each of which coalesces around the theme of “Ghosts” or “Monsters,” although, it seems, these themes are themselves inseparable. In each half, chapters rove through time, space and...
