A Brief History of Extinction

(In my work)

Extinction has been a theme in my work ever since it emerged in my graduation paper for the school of arts in Den Bosch (Netherlands) in 1998. It took some time before it appeared in my visual body of work. This post tracks extinction, and by extension ecological themes and climate anxieties in my body of work.

Children of Mother Earth

First, where did my fascination with extinction come from in the first place? Looking back, it must have been a combination of childhood interests and accidental encounters with the notion that life – the wonderful biological variety as we now know it – on our planet is more precarious than it seems.

I grew up in the Netherlands, near the German border which meant access to German tv stations which had a lot more to offer than the two Dutch national tv stations of the 1970s – especially when it came to films. Even though dubbed in German, the popular disaster movies of the time were all broadcast into our living room: as a child, I must have seen classics such as The Towering Inferno, and I in particular remember The Poseidon Adventure, because it was so scary to me. Perhaps they were not suitable for immature brains such as mine, but media awareness at the time was in an entirely different stage. In any case: it showed me that human constructs were capable of failing spectacularly, whether by human misconduct or natural occurrences.

However, the most influential to my budding ecological worries was the Dutch children’s book Kinderen van Moeder Aarde (Children of Mother Earth) by Thea Beckman: one of the only true Dutch-language science fiction authors, even though she mainly published young adult literature. Published in 1985, the book is deeply embedded in Cold War anxieties. It describes a postapocalyptic Earth that has rebuilt itself after a chain reaction of atom bombs set off planetary shifts that catapulted the survivors back into preindustrial times. It largely takes place on Thule, a future Greenland, that was now in a mild climate zone.

The first chapter describes, matter of factly, the run-up and unfolding of the nuclear disasters, and its consequent earthquakes and environmental collapses. It made an enormous impression on the 11-year old me, opening up the possibility of large scale annihilation and highlighting the role of human – impossibly stupid – behaviour in it.

On a library visit I found an encyclopedia of extinct animals, which demonstrated to me how species are not fixed but evolving: they change, they vanish, they disappear (the dinosaurs are a classic example, although Jurassic Park, as a so-called ‘disaster movie’, actually revives them, so not a disaster for dinosaurs at all – but I digress).

Museums for natural history became my favourite destinations (they still, in fact, are), and becoming acquainted with concepts such as evolution and astronomy gradually expanded my understanding of the world beyond my own lifetime and horizon. Things end (see also The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by astronomer Katie Mack: you will never laugh so hard about the end of everything than when reading this book) and then they begin again. That is how it goes. Things end, but it matters how. Our human role in our current extinction event calls for existential questions: what species are we to allow life that evolved with us to whither away like this? What is wrong with us?

Making art about extinction became a way for me to get at least some sort of understanding of what is happening. My work does not experiment with biomaterials, nor grows gardens. I am interested in metaperspectives: how did we end up here, and where do we go?

971220-980320, 1998

The title of my graduation paper – the bachelor and master system had not been implemented everywhere yet in the Netherlands – marks the writing period. I began writing on December 20, 1997 and ended on March 20, 1998. The original paper was a loose-leafed nonlinear piece of writing, with each page designed differently and printed (or copied) on different types of paper. At graduation, I won the award for best paper: it was published in an edition of 500, and available for free to students and staff. For the edition, the paper was bound, so with a fixed order, and presented as an archival file.

In many ways, the paper is a blueprint for my later works: the nonlinearity, for instance returns in my video works. Additionally, it combines speculation with the natural sciences – there is a distinct science-fiction component present, sometimes referencing sci-fi disaster movies. One page is illegible: it is a message from aliens.

The paper starts from a very vivid dream that I had prior to the writing process: staring through the window of my parents’ house onto the front garden and the street, I watch light posts slowly fall over as if they are set in syrup instead of solid ground. Suddenly, black rain starts to fall from the otherwise clear sky. It is eerily silent – there is a sense of slowness, timelessness. I am not panicked, I just observe.

But most poignant to the theme of this post is the paper’s description of an unusually mild January month, in which my mother’s chickens had hens. People were cheering: “Yay, Spring is coming!” Instead, I view the unseasonably warm weather as a sign of impending doom, exclaiming: “Don’t they see what is going on? We need to save what is salvageable now that we still can!”

We now have a word for that type of worries: eco-anxiety. In the mean time, warm winter days have become the new normal.

Note: sometimes a copy is available on a Dutch book selling site, like now.

Battlestar Antarctica, 2001

First, I would like to apologize for the terrible title! Battlestar Antarctica was my master of fine arts paper for the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, accompanying my master show at Hotel Mariakapel in Hoorn (NL). The show was a large scale analogue slide installation with an audio track. Through digital collages – made with a scanner and CorelDraw which came preinstalled on my first own computer (an old one from my father’s office) – I suggested a postapocalyptic narrative.

The paper consisted our of a series of letters that I sent to my supervisor, the wonderful Tineke Reijnders. The letters were written from a speculative near future or parallel reality, in which the Gulf stream had collapsed which led to a new Ice Age in the Northern Hemisphere but, for unknown reasons, caused Antarctica to melt and become inhabitable.

In the letters, I took up residence in the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam – a lover of the cold, I rather remained here than to migrate South, like most people. Those migrations became part of the slide works, which were half inspired by Mad Max and half by planetarium projections. There were a lot of numbers and diagrams involved, but also scans of toy cars and caravans. The soundtrack was made by Rolf Schuurmans; it was a subtle soundscape of dripping water and occasional planes that were flying overhead.

Its introduction ends with: “Today it is Thursday, and nothing is the same.” The letters include speculative news items, for instance reports on how North American climate refugees trying to flee the cold are blocked at the Mexican border (…)

At some point, the paper’s ambitions become a bit muddled, resulting in an ‘open ending’.

The 30.000 Miles Graveyard, 2005

I had just bought my first laptop when I went for an artist residency at Kunsthuis Syb in Beetsterzwaag, Friesland (NL). The Frysian landscape is flat – much flatter even than the rest of the Netherlands. I was struck by its wide-open views and the indistinguishable transition between land and water at its northernmost coast.

Not long before I went to the residency, I made my first animations – even though I did not yet realise I was animating. I wanted images to move, but I did not like the visibility and organisation of live video. I was already working with my digitally manipulated images, and used dissolves between separate layers and images to animate – I mimicked the dissolve-technique of analogue slide projectors.

The 30.000 Miles Graveyard was made by dissolving layers of scanned and cut out images and photos of the Frysian landscape and from natural history museums to present a trip through time from the end of the last Ice Age to the extinction of the dodo bird (around 1760). In the center, I stand still until the very end, when my arms slowly start to move to hold a dodo bird – the dodo and I both dissolve into a grey fog. The film is accompanied by a soundtrack by Ottorino Respighi, which adds a melodramatic touch.

The title, The 30,000 Miles Graveyard, was inspired by the many dead animals – victims of highway traffic – I encountered each Spring on my drive from Antwerp to my parent’s place a 100 kilometers away. I imagined one long ribbon of highway encircling Earth, and all of its roadkill. I did not check, so the 30,000 miles is a misrememberance of the circumference of Earth – it is in fact almost 25,000 miles (or about 40.000 kilometers).

The landscape of the Netherlands has extensively been shaped by Ice Ages, in particular the penultimate one, the Saale Glaciation, during which time the Scandinavian ice sheet covered half of the country. Its glaciers scraped over the land, depositing sand further down their paths – in the Netherlands the ice shaped both the remarkably flat landscape of its Northern parts and the slopes and dunes of its center region. Being a sand box mostly, the surfaces here are relatively malleable, compared to bedrock and mountains. However, the ice also crushed mountain ranges in Norway and Sweden, and transported bits and pieces Southwards – where the stones were used to build dolmen (hunebedden), later on.

I had read David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (published in 1997), of which in particular a passage on the last dodo on Mauritius made a lasting impression. Even though the segment is entirely speculative (vividly describing the lonely bird, her last eggs eaten by rats that traveled to the island with Dutch and Portuguese sailors), to me, it launched the dodo bird as a symbol for human-induced extinction. The bird returns in many works – as we shall see further in this post.

Behaviour (2008)

Between 2006 and 2011, I returned to drawing or experimented with combining drawings (murals) with digital videos. Trying to maintain an active presence in the overwhelmingly ‘traditional’ art world of Flanders meant that I compromised – sometimes a bit too much – on my work. Looking back, it seemed that I was more interested in learning to master 3D software than focusing on conceptual content.

Additionally, at the time, ecological themes, extinction and science fiction were very much under-appreciated. Most works of this period are subtly hinting at environmental relations, rather than putting them on the forefront. There are animals, and many landscapes, and a very important 5-screen 3D animated installation – although that one is more astronomy related than extinction themed.

Inertia (2014-2025)

Inertia is an homage to dystopian science fiction, the word referring to the slowing down of a pendulum. The work is a digital animation, entirely constructed with 3D software. It leans heavily on visual cues from Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, although it rather quotes some of its iconic shots and sequences in the same way as so many other sci-fi films post-2001 have done.

The film visits a derelict and lifeless planet – ours? In this barren desert, a large bunker-like building contains the remains of a lost civilisation. In countless glass cases, possible scenarios of the planet’s destruction are preserved. Hints of what might have happened are hidden in the film.

To be continued