Joshua DiCaglio – författare

In our hyper-connected world, where huge distances are traversed in a virtual instant, industries are founded on molecular and planetary interventions, and people carry supercomputers in their pockets, how do we relate to the scale of change around us? Can ‘scale’ itself remake our world-view?The essays in this book focus on scale as both theoretical concept and artistic tool, exploring how technoscientific ways of viewing the world are critiqued, extended, and interpreted through art practice. Contemporary artists and scholars engage scale not only as a source of awe, but as an essential component in approaching a host of issues including ecological crisis, global pandemics, inequities in globalized economic and sociopolitical systems, and upheavals brought by computing and communication technologies. Visions of Scale explores the scalar aspects of innovative ideas including AI hypnosis, interspecies relations, permaculture and education, race and infrastructure, and offers a fresh take on perennial concerns such as attention and mortality, through a wide range of art and design practices from AI and architecture to performance, sculpture, and video.Visions of Scale offers a toolkit for critically analyzing and working with scale to address important socio-political issues in and through contemporary art. It provides a model for applying scale as an epistemological tool and as a means of visioning new realities, introducing a vital new approach for addressing interconnected issues within the critical humanities in a time of planetary uncertainty, reconsidering our relationships with other beings and systems, both proximate and distant.

A pioneering call for a new understanding of scale across the humanitiesHow is it possible that you are-simultaneously-cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? In this way, we routinely transform reality into things already outside of direct human experience, things we hardly comprehend even as we speak of DNA, climate effects, toxic molecules, and viruses. How do we find ourselves with these disorienting layers of scale? Enter Scale Theory, which provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale refigures reality-that teaches us how to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. Joshua DiCaglio takes us on a fascinating journey through six thought experiments that provide clarifying yet provocative definitions for scale and new ways of thinking about classic concepts ranging from unity to identity. Because our worldviews and philosophies are largely built on nonscalar experience, he then takes us slowly through the ways scale challenges and reconfigures objects, subjects, and relations. Scale Theory is, in a sense, nondisciplinary-weaving together a dizzying array of sciences (from nanoscience to ecology) with discussions from the humanities (from philosophy to rhetoric). In the process, a curious pattern emerges: attempts to face the significance of scale inevitably enter terrain closer to mysticism than science. Rather than dismiss this connection, DiCaglio examines the reasons for it, redefining mysticism in terms of scale and integrating contemplative philosophies into the discussion. The result is a powerful account of the implications and challenges of scale, attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.