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• 1 2021-03-10T16:39:12-08:00 Chapter 4 E-concept: Apocalypscene – Photos, Assemblage and Painting 58 John W plain 2021-04-29T12:53:19-07:00 Chapter 4
  
  Photo and Painting
  Apocalypscene is an e-concept, designed to draw like-minded photographers and painters together to contribute ecologically significant photos and paintings that embody an apocalyptic undertone, to give them agency to voice their concerns that the epoch of Anthropocene is really here. It is a subcategory of the E-Cart which comprises all the ecologically relevant arts including visual, literary and performative, catastrophic or otherwise. 
  
  Etymologically, the word "apocalypse" derives from Greek: apo = un-; kaluptein = to cover. According to Oxford Reference, "apocalypse" means "The complete final destruction of the world, especially as described in the biblical book of Revelation." The word "scene" derives from Greek: skēnē = stage. It has multiple meanings and connotations, depending on the context. Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication defines it as "The physical location and setting of an incident in real life or fiction." Whereas The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance defines it as "a unit of segmentation in drama, normally involving a change in the configuration of characters on stage." Apocalypscene in the context of the Anthropocene, therefore, would best be defined as "The complete and final destruction of the configuration of the world in real life." The living trees would be the ideal ecodiegetic media (see Chapter 10) to represent the health of the Earth.
  
  For trees, bush fires are not their only enemies, there are deforesters – human, fungi or arthropods, amongst others. On the high peaks and plains of the Australian Alps, the sudden death of the snow gums is a cause for concern. Over time, they have developed the ability to endure the snow, ice and wind, and they are icons of the beloved Australian snow country. However, within the last few years, they have started to fall apart, literally. And possibly will become extinct as a species. Although the culprit is the longicorn beetle (a wood borer), scientists believe that climate change may also be responsible. Wood borers do not normally attack high-altitude forests, but this might have changed with the recent drought and unusually warm weather.
  Snow gums (Eucalyptus pauciflora  – "few flowers" – a misnomer) normally look colourful as shown in the above photo taken five years ago near Charlotte Pass. Ecologically, they play an important role in accumulating snow in "snowpack" processes to limit evaporation and runoff. Their decimation will obviously impact the hydrology and water resources of southeast Australia. 
  
  I conclude this page with an , anthropomorphised as “a knight on flying insect's back” – which served as a model for the eponymous painting (bottom).
  
  
  
  
  Apocalypscene, acrylic on canvas (122 x 92 cm) depicting an apocalyptic scene. 
   
• 1 2021-03-21T01:26:06-07:00 Dismantling the idea of the subject 6 Note by Claire - z3393668 plain 2021-04-18T19:48:11-07:00
  I would like to elaborate on this important point about what happens when the poetic tradition of anthropomorphising non-human entities in order to explore them through poetry is inverted by instead metaphorizing a woman as water.
  
  I would argue that through this subversive move, the idea of the subject is performatively taken apart by the water’s physically vast, fragmented and amorphous presence, which thereby deconstructs the idea of the human as a foregrounded subject against the objectified background of ‘nature’.
  For this ‘woman who was water’ is described in such a way that they may metaphorically take on the qualities of repressed women that ‘lived on the edges of rooms’, in that they were pushed to the margins of natureculture in terms of the level of agency and presence they were permitted to have, but they also literally take on qualities that no human could possess by implicitly living inside pipes inside the walls of rooms, or ‘the edges of rooms’.
  In this way, the premises that underly patriarchy are aligned with the premise of subject-object relations through this amorphous identity of a woman as water; the way in which water is relegated to the role of servant of the Anthropocene is aligned with the same process that relegates women to the role of servants to the idea of society – used as backgrounds against which the exploits of men are foregrounded.
  And yet, this water-woman entity actively destroys the constructs of men/the patriarchy by destroying the buildings that represent the false dichotomy of nature-culture – this water-woman entity ‘gnawed through foundations’ and ‘burst out of pipes’, ‘could power a city,/or drown it’. Thus the identity of women and water converge to represent all that is backgrounded by the false dichotomy of nature-culture and embody the ways in which this foreground of culture owes its entire existence to this easily destroyed premise.
  
  By Claire - z3393668