Visions of Scale

A far-reaching collection of essays by diverse disciplinary authors and artists, examining how art can engage with questions of scale as concept, tool and problem

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.