Conference | 9-10 May 2025

If the term "ecology" historically designated the relations of an organism to its organic and inorganic environment, it would seem evident that it today has evolved, way beyond the sciences, to signal an ever-expanding global field of factors and forces at the intersections of nature and technology, politics and economies, media and aesthetics. Throughout the humanities, considerations of the concept's reach and impact abound from various vantage points-from charting the "critical zones" of our "New Climate Regime" (in the writings of the late Bruno Latour), to considerations of the changed "Climate of History" (in the recent work of Dipesh Chakrabrty) to proposals for interspecies companionship (put forward by Donna Haraway and Anna L. Tsing) and analytics of a media-saturated "general ecology" beyond nature (mapped by Erich Hörl, among others). The visual arts obviously are not exempt from the current ecological paradigm's far-reaching repercussions. Quite to the contrary, considerations of the aesthetic play a pivotal and prominent role across a host of disciplines concerned with navigating the new terrain of multiple ecologies and the "realism of relations" (Hörl) propelling them: By consequence, both the histories of landscape painting and Land Art, of system aesthetics and site-specificity concomitant with key terms such as object and context, space and site, authorship and agency are in process of being reformulated from an expanded environmental perspective informed by debates around the notion of "Anthropocene", the rise of Artificial Intelligence and other concatenations of living organisms and technological entities in milieus of cohabitation and interdependence in digital culture. Bringing together contributions from art history and philosophy, this international conference aims to address to role of art and aesthetic theory in rethinking the realisms of ecologies. In doing so, it poses and pursues the question in how far contemporary confrontations with ecological thought might find a nexus and corrective in the epistemic, perceptual and critical capacities of art in the aftermath of modernity.