Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the Aesthetics of the Future

Abstract

I begin in hope, and end in hope. In the middle, I consider the way we look at the future as a time-scape that stretches before us, at how we regard the future in some ways like a landscape with various aesthetic possibilities as either, to cut a long story short and simplifying to the extreme, a pleasing prospect (with the double spatial and temporal meaning of ‘prospect’) or a terrifying prospect with also the same double meaning. Along the way, I draw from the past on the work of Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams who both provide some resources for a journey of hope through the landscape of the future. These resources have a different spatial and temporal orientation than pleasing or terrifying prospects. The photographic minescapes of Edward Burtynsky, including his aerial photograph of ‘the Super Pit’, are terrifying prospects since they do not provide much by way of resources of hope as they aestheticise mining and its impacts on and in the earth, though they do demonstrate the monumental threat that the depths of mining pose to human habitation on the surface of the earth, not least in and for Kalgoorlie. The surface of landscape photography portrays and betrays the depths that mining goes to in its greedy lust for resources of ore just as landscape and portrait painting and photography reduce depth to surface, diachrony to synchrony, life to death. By contrast, resources of hope have a different bodily orientation in what Benjamin called a ‘work of bodily presence of mind’. Despite the doom and gloom of Burtysnky’s minescapes, hope lives on — the note I end on.