The “Contemporary Conditions” part of the research project's title refers to the assumption that globality is a historical condition and a state of affairs in which we now live following many years of globalisation, due not least to developments in communication technologies. Our historical present – the present understood as having come into being historically – is characterised by the intensification of mutual global interconnections and exchanges between all the cultures and regions in the world, generating a planetary sense of contemporaneity which has also been underlined by the effects of climate change on our existence as a species (we now share a potential planetary extinction). Awareness of the globalised conditions of the present situation has helped to divide the modern attitude to art history in the singular into several related art histories, and to expand our understanding of the practices which can be said to participate in what we call art (e.g. documenta 15 in 2022 is a, complex, case in point). The contemporary present is a present with different prehistories of which Western modernity is but one.

The modern Western regime of chronological progress may be said to have been replaced by a kind of planetary contemporaneity, an intensified interconnection of different times, human and non-human, and scales and experiences of time. A condition of contemporaneity, of intensified temporal cohabitation, which we – at least those of us whose minds have been formed by the temporal logics of (post)modernity – are still only beginning to grasp.

We need to imagine the world otherwise, to use our imaginative capacity to create and represent possibilities other than the actual, but – I argue – we need to adjust the temporality of our imaginary practices to our earthly existence. In its focus on emancipation from the constraints of the past, the modern Western imagination presupposes the possibility of producing a temporal distance or divide between human world and Earth, of detaching an imagining, history-making human subject from an objectified, relatively unchanging Earth as its material foundation, and has therefore, and for other intra-human world-political reasons too, become untenable under contemporary conditions (see planetarity).

We are in need of developing an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents and recognises that we are bound to Earth and inescapably entangled in its dynamic being, but without letting go of human responsibility and political agency.

As indicated, my overall claim is that our historical present is defined by a condition of con-temporaneity, understood as an intensified global or planetary interconnectedness of different times, temporalities and histories, which fundamentally challenges ways that time and history have been experienced throughout modernity (and postmodernity). It is about a changing temporal quality of the historical present.^[1]1Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 17. Our present is being composed by interconnected coexisting forms of time, cultural histories and competing periodizations and historical narratives. Another important factor in the production of contemporaneity – which at the same time aggravates the environmental damages – is the development of planetary-scale computation, a global infrastructure which brings together a number of different temporalities, including the omnipresent co-presence of others via digital technologies.^[2]2On the website of antikythera, a think tank on planetary computation directed by Benjamin H. Bratton, planetary computation is described in this way: “Computation is not only more than calculation; it is a planetary-scale cognitive infrastructure that impacts structures of knowledge, geopolitics and ecologies. Its scale extends from the global to the intimate, from the nanoscale to the edge of the atmosphere and back again. As you stare at the glass slab in your hand, you are, as a user, connected to a planetary technology that both evolved and was planned in irregular steps over time, each component making use of others: an accidental, discontiguous megastructure. Instead of a single megamachine, planetary computation can be understood as being composed of modular, interdependent, functionally-defined layers.” Antikythera, accessed July 30, 2024, https://antikythera.org/planetary-computation.