2 Ecologies of Change BERNARD DIONYSIUS GEOGHEGAN ECOLOGIES OF DISCLOSURE: ON AESTHETIC COMPOSITIONS OF TECHNICS AND LIFE "Renegotiating data ecologies through trees, soil, and pigs' lungs," by Thomas Bjørnsten and Jan Løhmann Stephensen, models an anthropocenic epistemology suitable to our present-day scientific and environmental situations. Their analysis of three artworks that integrate earthly compounds, organisms, and information technologies offers a preliminary aesthetic program for

more »

... g to terms with our contemporary and composite world picture and contributes to a recent surge of interest in ecocritical aesthetics. 1 The first of the three works considered by Bjørnsten and Løhmann is The Environmental Sentinel (2014-2016) by Frances Whitehead. This permanent installation in Chicago deploys 453 apple serviceberry trees as living sensors, whose sensitive and variable blossoming cycles will allow them to register environmental changes. As the authors put it, the "trees function as the prime interface between intangible fluctuations of temperature [and] air quality." Human observers not only perceive these changes; in a sense, they also become an element in the apparatus of disclosure, both as indirect agents of climate change and as living links in a system of bio-