What is teleocene?
Some time in the 2010s I became interested in deep history (and deep time), the past which preceded humanity and human history as I had studied until then. This interest rose when many of my colleagues were becoming involved in GIS technologies, when a general rethinking of history from the perspective of space and geography was taking place. Coincidentally, my latest contribution to the field of Ottoman studies history at the time was an essay published 2017 that examined the Ottoman sailors perceptions of the geography of the Ottoman Aegean, its islands and water sources in particular as described by a 15th century manuscript.
As the world grew more and more concerned about the climate change and the term "anthropocene" was introduced to our vocabulary, I started to follow the debates more closely. Many alternatives to the term anthropocene were offered by critical thinkers, like capitolocene, chutulucene and traumacene. Each term tried to capture the human influence and condition on climate change and suggested that we were having a paradigm shift.
I have always enjoyed thinking about paradigm shifts because they pin point historical moments in which a society collectively changes its mind and becomes open to debates that may enabled it to rethink itself.
Nevertheless, in the debates surrounding anthropocene, I also saw something was missing. The emerging awareness of the geological change caused by human actions was directly influencing human perceptions and aesthetic choices. A good example of this was how the color green became so popular in mass market good, implying an awareness of nature. Yet the debates were silent about this transformation in aesthetics (to my knowledge the first concrete book about this subject was published in 2021, Mark Bould's The Anthropocene Unconscious. In other words, a dialectical component of the paradigm shift were were experiencing was being ignored. So, I made up the term teleocene, and started to experiment wether I can turn it into an artistic practice.
Teleocene was first invented to help myself understand what I was trying to say, what I was seeing in a fast transforming era. I am not a philosopher but an artist. I like conceptual thinking, concept history and my work may refer to philosophy, but it is not intended to philosophize. For me, teleocene refers to the general human resolution, helplessness and inertia as they face near or permanent human extinction. It refers to the present hypnotic state of staring at the nature (the horizon) as the earth as we used to know it slips through our fingers.
In conjunction, Studio Teleocene is dedicated to producing art and thought, in hope of abandoning this mortal stare and embracing the nature as an ally.