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Uncanny trans-corporeality and plastic waste in the visual arts
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This isn't a medical study—it's an analysis of art pieces that use unsettling, "uncanny" imagery to show how plastic waste has become tangled up with our own bodies. By making viewers feel a bit creeped out or confused, these artworks (like sculptures of "plastic meals" or microplastic-inspired pieces) drive home a point science has been showing too: plastic pollution isn't just "out there" in oceans, it's inside us. The takeaway for health-conscious readers is less about a new medical finding and more about why that idea—that we're physically connected to the plastic waste we create—is so hard to sit with, and
This article examines the role of the uncanny in visual artworks that invite the viewer to rethink the body in the light of environmental change and plastic pollution. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, I explore how the uncanny contributes to (re)imaging the body as inextricably enmeshed with plastic waste. My focus is on artistic portrayals of trans-corporeality that evoke uncanny feelings. I analyse three science-inspired artworks that exemplify uncanny trans-corporeality in contemporary visual art: Swaantje Güntzel’s artwork MICROPLASTICS II (2016), Christine Baker’s sculpture Micro Plastic Menu (2022), and Thijs Biersteker’s interactive installation Plastic Reflectic (2016). In the analysis of the case studies, I make two points: first, I show that the feeling of the uncanny arises from revealing the enmeshment of the body with plastic waste and the unpredictable agency of nonhuman matter; second, I consider several features that support and reinforce the uncanny effects of the artworks: distorted scales, the figure of the double, and the strange suggestive resemblances of plastic to body parts and other material things.
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