A Dripping Dread

In an essay called “Weird Ecology,” the writer David Tompkins compares Area X to a “hyperobject,” a term philosopher Timothy Morton used “to describe events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on.” Global warming, black holes, and mass extinction are contemporary ex... See more

In his 1985 essay “To Shrink,” philosopher Vilém Flusser attributes the interest in the discovery of worlds within the infinitesimal to a kind of revulsion for the body, a contempt for physical size that, he argues, “represents a regression, a distancing.” It was a sign of how we were becoming “less solid,” diminishing the importance of the corpore... See more