Extinction Imaginaries – Mapping Affective Visual Cultures in Australasia

The Earth is currently experiencing an extinction crisis. Unlike previous mass extinctions, this global event is largely caused by us—humans. This human-caused crisis exceeds the event that wiped out the dinosaurs through pressures such as climate change, pollution, destruction of habitat, urban sprawl, and the introduction of exotic species. A conservative estimate is that current extinction rates are at least one hundred times greater than the prehistoric rates unaffected by human intervention.

Saffron Aid is partnering with the Circle of Extinction project to understand human emotions regarding extinction.

Emotions are felt in the co-constitutive relation of mind and body, person and world, affect and emotion. In other words, we are pursuing an embodied, cognitive and socially relational account of emotions.

• An emotion is defined as a mental-embodied state that involves a subjective orientation towards an object of attention. Here the notion of ‘attention’ is important. It makes an emotion different from an affect.
• Emotions are narrated responses, and always social.
• There is no small core group of emotions, but rather clusters of emotional fields.
• Emotions are not universal across different cultures, even if processes of globalization have brought commonalities and crossovers.

The analytical matrix used works with images in relation to emotions, imaginaries and practices—which means that we need a method of registering how people respond to images. This is where the ‘Circles of Emotions’ matrix provides a method for understanding patterns of emotion.

This project explores what extinction might mean for emotional wellbeing. It seeks to understand our emotional relation to animals. We confront a series of questions as to how people are likely to respond to a coming world where many species will be lost forever. What feelings are elicited by images of threatened species by comparison with those already extinct? What responses do such images prompt, and what do such responses imply for change in people’s everyday practices? How do such images affect the way people imagine their sense of local urban regions, and their place in the wider world?

By answering these questions, we hope to contribute to understanding how we can best communicate ideas about the future of all the species on our planet.