The travails, triumphs, and disappointments of eco-life, viewed through the prism of artistic research.In 2004, distressed by the insanity of capitalist consumerism but dissatisfied with mere utopian rhetoric, self-taught artist Paul Chaney went “back to the land” for real. During the next eight years spent creating FIELDCLUB, a self-sufficient four-acre off-grid settlement in the UK, Chaney continually scrutinized the travails, triumphs, and disappointments of eco-life through the prism of artistic research. What emerges from this durational embedded practice is a vision characterized by a delicate equipoise between irony and sincerity and shot through with absurdism, in which speculative materialist philosophies are reworked in close contact with the humiliating tribulations of “living with nature.” In a shifting experimental triangulation of the human, the non-human, and the technological, themes such as geotrauma, dark ecology, and accelerationism are stress-tested, reconfigured, a
