_Sites/Sights of Ecology_: Introduction (Preface and First Interlude)

This preface and opening interlude from 'Sites/Sights of Ecology' introduces a philosophical and aesthetic method for reading visual culture at the intersection of ecological crisis, materialist critique, and speculative perception. Drawing on Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Aristotle, Barad, and Derrida, the essay explores how composite artworks—those that traverse painting, poetics, artist books, sound, and moving image—operate not just as aesthetic events but as ontological provocations. Attuned to the political and philosophical stakes of perception, the piece develops a sensory methodology for encountering ecological breakdown through images. It theorizes “speculative infrastructure” to name the perceptual labor required by artworks that document, distort, and reimagine environmental experience. Examples from William Blake and Zachary Cahill frame artmaking as a mode of witnessing, shaped by post-Romantic and post-conceptual lineages. The essay contributes to conversations in environmental aesthetics, media philosophy, and critical theory, offering a conceptual toolkit for understanding how art and philosophy might co-construct new modes of perception and resistance in the Anthropocene.