With the appearance of the global warming, hyberobjects which can be thought but not touched emerge, therefore a new form of thinking, that is, object-oriented ontology which means a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existence is needed. In the global warming age which is called the time of hyperobjects, the implications for artistic practice have many different types. The new type of art is a strange asymmetry between the human capacity for knowledge and the gigantic hyperobjects. In the meantime, previous critical modes coexist distortedly with the new critical mode.
Thinking outside the human. According to Leibniz, everything must have a sufficient reason for its existence (page 38). This leads to the idea of correlationism which means reason is closely related with human subject. But correlationism is now impossible because the human subject is no longer the reason of why things exist. Therefore a new approach appears, that is, object-oriented ontology because every entity has something real for its physical form. Moreover, there are many hyperobjects such as global warming. With the appearance of many massive nonhuman entities, the time of hyperobjects arrives.
The time of hyperobjects. First of all, hyperobjects have many features including viscosity, molten temporality, nonlocality, phasing and interobjectivity. What the time of hyperobjects means is that it is “the historical moment at which hyperobjects become by humans”(page42). But this changes everything when humans go into a new age of sincerity which means humans can never reach the end of the world. Instead human live in a mesh full of human and nonhuman entities which are closely interconnective. Moreover nonhuman entities, that is, hyperobjects, are more powerful than humans. Therefore the time of hyperobjects is the time of irony.
Art in the time of hyperobjects. The main task of the art during the time of hyperobjects including the uncanniness of beings, the uniqueness of beings, the irony of relationships between beings and the ironic secondariness of the intermeshing between beings. Human art is full of objects because the art is by them, for them and about them. The time of hyperobjects is the fourth phase of art. According to Hegel, the three previous phases include symbolic art (phase one), classical art (phase two) and romantic art (phase three) (page45-46). Phase fourth resembles phase one because humans are incapable to grasp the essence of objects. But differently, in the time of hyperobjects, humans are glued to objects and cannot get rid of it. It is quite a sense of irony.
