Monstrous Earth: Unsettling the Modern Gaze
Graduation Thesis Publication

This text investigates the influence of paradigmatic Earth images (namely “Earthrise,” “Blue Marble,” “Pale Blue Dot” and the black hole, “M87*”) on our contemporary collective consciousness to find ways to disentangle from the mindset of modernity. These “Whole Earth” images – images of Earth from outer space – were anticipated to provoke a renewed relationship to the Earth and the cosmos, a newfound humility developed in the face of the planet’s awe. Yet, despite the lofty promise of a cosmological shift, the Whole Earth discourse fell short of living up to the expectations of reckoning it was loaded up with, and instead, it reinforced the modern gaze of totality from a distance.

The thesis interrogates this failure, questioning how we might mediate the planet differently – not from the detached vantage of a God-like gaze, but from the entangled position of an Earthbound figure. Residing on a Monstrous Earth implies embarking on a post-Anthropocentric self-understanding, without neglecting our anthropomorphic condition. Our minuscule viewpoint can too contain within it the sky tales of the cosmos. In resisting tyrannical notions of wholeness and suffocating illusions of mastery, the Monstrous Earth is an attempt to fluctuate through various registers of scale: simultaneously the intimate and subjective, and the monstrously inhuman. It is an invitation to stitch together a partial script of fragmented and shifting voices and to, ultimately, relate to the Earth differently.

Presented at
Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, 2024
International Astronautical Congress, Milan, 2024