New lexica, imaging tools and data infrastructure have helped us navigate the veracity of ‘hyperobjects’, a term coined by British philosopher Timothy Morton as things that possess tremendous scales of time and space relative to humans, triggering a new sense of ecological awareness. In contrast, other scholars have taken a microscopic approach in response to the Anthropocene. Theorists and creative practitioners like Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, David Campany and many more, have focused on material agencies that occupy a rather miniature dimension, such as mushrooms, pigeons, and dust. Their approach experiments with scale, and refuses to be stapled at a given vantage point.

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In all these theoretical debates it seems that only through juggling between tangents, of the explosively amplified or the extremely confined, that new views might be born. The continuum of zooming in and out is a contemporary cult in the age of mechanical reproduction. Within which lies not only the liminal optics as Walter Benjamin denoted, but an antagonistic attitude to subvert the established, patronising, colonising perspective, the ‘immense and unexpected field of action’ in Benjamin’s words.

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How about weeds, the everyday, ritualistic greenery that exist universally beyond boundaries? Mediating through their relationships with urban constraints such as concrete cracks, paving slabs, drain systems, weeds signify a specific type of complicit intelligence anterior to anthropocentric planning, offering an alternative imagination from the mainstream spectacle, one that is hopefully always rendering and becoming. Relentless and dynamic, they resonate with the ceaseless drive nowadays to redefine the relationship between human and nonhuman thingness.

 

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