Category: Research

Gioglyphs to live by chapter

process space, memory space, instruction space

While the most of the Nazca geo- glyphs have been long visible from surrounding mountains, or thanks to aerial flights, the case of the recent additions to the corpus of these monumental drawings embodies not just an augmentation, but an automation of vision – the labour of identifying the pattern is delegated to a machine.nn

Contrary to the preced- ing example, these accidental geoglyphs are not revealed by AI, but by another more-than-human agency – an overheating planetary ecosystem responding to an increase in CO2 emissions with the rise of temperatures and previously unseen weather patterns. It is the medium of the changing climate itself that suddenly makes these archaeological traces visible.

A diagram might be a systematic visualisation of some process, such as thinking, digestion, atmospheric phenomenon or geological change. However, as Ryan Bishop reminded me recently, the diagram might also be a plan, a sort of normative gesture – it can format, prescribe, direct attention or produce a habit.

MEMORY SPACE – The dyschronia of human history and geological time is irreversibly erased, privileging the exterior temporal scales of the geological over the interior temporalities of the cultural.

PROCESS SPACE – have a position within some process rather than simply representing it. For this reason, we might say they function as process-spaces. Every geoglyph on Nazca plane is an imprint of cultural activity of a past human community, and its purpose is not to depict something, but to do something. We can interpret them as sites of religious rituals or of astronomic observation, or we can leave the interpretation of their cultural purpose open, but in any case, they are primarily tools used to mediate some relation to spiritual entities or to enable a knowledge of celestial bodies (to give a few examples).

The cropmarks are also imprints of an activity, in this case, the one of changing climate; human architectural traces are mobilised as a diagram of climate emergency.

The planet narrates the climate change as it is unfolding, leaving traces around us and in us – a cropmark on a field, a swarm of medusas in an ocean, a bleached coral reef, an agricultural land turning to desert: each of them being an index of global heating. Even our lungs become – metaphorically speaking – photographic imprints of the polluted cities in which we live.

INSTRUCTION SPACE – ‘In other words, these visual traits of climate emergency might be capable of inducing or of instituting a cultural habit.’

Crucially, identifying instructions that these geoglyphs yield is condi- tioned by our ability to read them not as simple representations of climate emergency, i.e. as some surrogates or proxies of the process, but as spaces where this process itself unfolds. The message is very banal: Climate change is never out there; it is always right before our eyes. The cloud of smoke over the Australian bush is not a representation of the catastrophe – it is the catastrophe.

Following the Peircean
triad of icon-index-symbol, these are indices produced by the planet itself. Some pictures are disastrous; some pictures are disasters.

Thus, it seems that climate emergency is putting a pressure on our current understand- ing of visual cultures as the realm of indirect representations. When it comes to visible traces of ecological disasters, these traces are their direct imprints, and they are encodings of the process into the medium of planet Earth. They announce an aesthetic regime of the surface, claiming an immediate authority to inform our ways of plotting the escape from the Anthropocene.

Here comes also an urgency to reassess the role of humans as privileged observers, when the traces of the ecological emergency remain hidden: there might be artificial, technical agencies better suited to detect traces of the distributed climate disaster, as well as to translate these traces into an adequate prescription, thus somehow extend- ing the scope of machine-readable geoglyphs outside of the Nazca Plate.

  • example of phantom images?

Understanding the geoglyphic nature of climate emergency’s visual regime might finally help us to understand how the planet invites us to reconsider our relation to the assumed duality between the global and the local. So far, we have mainly treated the local as an opposite to the global, resulting in a (geo)political impasse when these scales are treated as hardly translatable (in the better case) or mutually exclusive (in the worst case). However, in the coming framework of the Planetary – as elaborated by scholars such as Jennifer Gabrys, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, William Connolly or Benjamin Bratton – the hope is that the local becomes just a clumsy term to express how our immediate surround- ings can be treated as an index of the Planetary. No place on Earth has a privileged position here. As a fractal image, every place hides the micro- cosm of the planetary relations; each locality is a garden within a garden, indexing the violence done to the planet.

  • really good end bit on how to see all traces through OOO, the local being the same as the global!!!!

re-shifting use of ‘the society of spectacle’ …

Guy Debord predicted our distracted society | Society | The Guardian

Could the ideas of Guy Debords spectacle be equatable to the structures of neoliberalism.

‘everything that we consume – and, if we’re not careful, most of what we do – embodies a mixture of distraction and reinforcement that serves to reproduce the mode of society and economy that has taken the idea of the spectacle to an almost surreal extreme. Not that Debord ever used the word, but his ideas were essentially pointing to the basis of what we now know as neoliberalism.‘

‘The words point up something very important: that the spectacle is much more than something at which we passively gaze, and it increasingly defines our perception of life itself, and the way we relate to others. As the book puts it: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

How we confront the spectacle is a subject for another piece: in essence, the Situationists’ contention was that its colonisation of life was not quite complete, and resistance has to begin with finding islands of the authentic, and building on them (though as what some people call late capitalism has developed, such opportunities have inevitably shrunk, a fact captured in the bleak tone of Debord’s 1989 text Comments on the Society of Spectacle, published five years before he killed himself). In truth, the spectacular dominion Debord described is too all-encompassing to suggest any obvious means of overturning it: it’s very easy to succumb to the idea that the spectacle just is, and to suggest any way out of it is absurd

can i begin my analysis of issues and suggestions for communicating the climate crisis with rhetorically statements about how guy debords text on alienated societies feel relevant to the western world inability to react to the obvious catastrophe of the 6th mass extinction. How this is in fact equatable with neolibersism – an economic informing ‘social relation among people’. Despite the depressing fact of the spectacles un-penetratable membrane, could

If the spectacle is a social relation among people, mediated by images, humans relationship to the environment is also medaited by these images. we are eternally disconnected from everyone and everything (in its most drastic of summarisation). Although it is understood that it is absurd to think we can break the spectacle, for the context of this report I wonder whether a speculative realist approach to concepts of ‘truthfeel’ and the ‘theatricality of identifying with aesthetics’ could be polemically stated as a a little crack in the society of the spectacle?

If a symptom of living in the society of the spectacle is a disconnect from each other and more general the world around us; are moments of engagement therefore an opposition to this? There is, apparently, little to no way of overthrowing the spectacle (or neo-liberalism for that matter) but are moments of thruthfeel moments of clarity? of vision beyond the mystification caused by commodity capitalims?

the spectacle as ‘mystifying’. (a sense of mystification of modern means of production through screen imager -Stephanie LeMenager)

Perhaps what Morton calls ‘truthiness’ is similar to the symptom of alienation caused by our society of the spectacle. A sincere alienation from information (not just the means of productions but spreading like a virus to mystify all interaction) and therefore a non-engagement with it. Information in Alexander Galloways use of the term; a process of in-forming, distinguishing it from data, which designates all that is given. ‘So, in contrast to data, information stresses less a sense of presence and giving forth, and more a plastic adaption of shape. Information exists wherever world things are ‘in-formed’, or ‘put into form’. (Susan Schippli’s Material Witnesses )

When I speak of a breaking through the spectacle, I am not speaking of the structures of neoliberalism and commodity capitalism actually breaking down at all, but am using it to exemplify a moment of consciously ‘feeling’ the information. A moment of ‘truthfeel’.

The way in which a person reacts to a feeling of urgency about the climate crisis is a ‘wicked problem’ complicated further by the concepts the spectacle. A clear articulation of how a person can be an ally or asset in a movement of change is constantly hindered by the fundamental mechanics of mass media or the so called ‘language of separation’. The ways in which to put change into action are as mystified as the reason we need to change in the first place. What routes a person can take to attempt to react to the urgency of climate change (ie; putting a lid on the stove pot or joining an XR protest) is seemingly a discussion for another report and therefore I am focusing my discussion on the macro / specifics of anthropocentric engagement. What forms of communicating the climate crisis have the potential to create a reactive interaction with an observer and what hinder it.

Jennifer Gabrys

articulating human as nature:

CLIMATE AS ASSEMBLAGE: IMAGINING AN ECOLOGICAL METAPHYSIC – takes from Jane Bennett ideas of assemblages

Human interventions have resulted in striking changes to the global climate. I work from the understanding of anthropogenic climate change as the product of 250 years of emissions brought about through industrialization and continued by our fossil fuel economies and lifestyles. The instrumentalism of such activities can be traced back to our modern metaphysic, where inanimate matter becomes object and falls away from ‘man,’ the knowing, active subject. In this thesis, I specifically address how this division of passive object from active subject pervades our understanding of climate and conditions the ethics of our human responses to climate change. I argue that our current frame of thinking about climate that I term climate-facing mischaracterizes climate and our position in it: climate-facing is inaccurately dualistic, separating climate from human life when the two are mutually constitutive and when other, nonhuman forces are also involved. Instead of climate-facing, I propose that we reimagine climate-as-assemblage, that is, as an ongoing, interactive process of co-fabrication that incorporates both humans and nonhumans. I draw from vital materialist Jane Bennett to explore the concept of assemblage, and I offer an indication of what this reconceptualization would look like for climate. Climate-as-assemblage brings to light numerous and diverse nonhuman forces, or actants, and taking these seriously requires a reconceptualization of agency that can be broadly disseminated across these instead of restricted to human subjects only. This revision—distributive agency—fits particularly well with climate, and I indicate how it might guide us on questions of climate engineering. I suggest that we should consider scholarship and action that complement climate as assemblage and that align with an ethic of distributive agency as we proceed in our relations with climate.

bio indicators in citys and the working workshop as participation:

https://www.academia.edu/2397638/Becoming_urban_sitework_from_a_moss_eye_view

This question of how cities are continually becoming urban stems from several theoretical deliberations that push at the edges of what is normally assumed to characterize urban ecologies or urban dwellers (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006); that relocate the sites, bodies, and processes of spatial participation or sitework (Woodward et al, 2010); and that suggestbecoming may be a more apt way to understand subjects as they are incorporated into and expanded through ecological communities (Braidotti, 2006).

Mosses are in- between and peripheral organisms that work across material, affective, political, socionatural, and imaginative registers of sites. In this sense, mosses become urban in multiple and distinct ways. They incorporate the materialities of London by responding to and serving as indicators of air or water pollution levels. They may also have varying distributions depending upon temperature and water availability, as well as urban development patterns and climate change. Their spores may make far-flung journeys or persist in sites to which they are particularly well adapted. Mosses may signal sites of inactivity and decay, of neglect or vegetal invasion. They inhabit urban ecologies analogous to cliffs or streambeds, or display a unique capacity for growing within urban-specific forms, including Astroturf and tarmac (Porley and Hodgetts, 2005, pages 124–125).

Bryophytes are distinct expressions and indicators of urban ecologies. With moss, detections, speculations, and projections of urban incorporations may be made. Incorporation is not just a material effect, in this sense, but also a register of urban process and experience. Incorporation, as will be discussed below, is at once an attempt to think through other types of ‘corporations’ in the City of London, but also a technique for registering the processes and sitework in which nonhumans are embedded. Moss, as an apparently valueless and marginal organism, provokes different encounters with the incorporative processes of the City.

  • seems like a nice example of participating non violently with the non human in a particularly vibrant matter kind of way.
  • incorporation is kind of similar to autographic – urban incorporating are evolving urban traces. but incorporating is more than the trace alone, ‘Incorporation is not just a material effect, in this sense, but also a register of urban process and experience. Incorporation, as will be discussed below, is at once an attempt to think through other types of ‘corporations’ in the City of London, but also a technique for registering the processes and sitework in which nonhumans are embedded.’ In this sense, ‘incorporation’ could be synonymous with the theatrical, participatory engagement of humans with non-human bio-indicating, material traces. If a trace is a corporation (never an isolated unit but an object of traces), a autographic intervention is an incorporation.

In what ways is it possible to ‘see’ and experience incorporation in process?

  • again; seems like this could be translated to ‘ in what ways is it possible to metaphorically become the autographic process or phantom image?
  • also, I should make the point that the intervention to visualise the autographic process is the workshop.. the trace is visualised through the indexical analysis of moss that is the provided to the participants. (must like metaphor, you must ‘participate’ in being a participant…

In the City of London, an urban district ostensibly devoted to the running of finance, walking the Square Mile in search of mosses during a busy Friday lunchtime is explored as a collective practice for engaging with concrete urban ecologies. In what ways does this mobile and situated method draw attention to expanded urban communities? Or, in other words, in what ways does a rather literal practice of “botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, 1999, page 372) reshape understandings of what constitutes “cosmopolitan bodies” (Clark, 2000)? The moss walk is a forum for asking: How might one overlooked yet pervasive group of nonhuman organisms provide insights into how specific urban incorporations take place? What new forms of urbanism emerge by studying these incorporations? And how might these alternative perspectives suggest possibilities for practicing new urban incorporations and ways of becoming urban?

  • walking workshop as forum

London is a city with a long and detailed history of walking practices, guides, and narratives. From wandering and rambling to loitering and sauntering, walking is often a practice for accessing overlooked parts of the city, and for plumbing the depths of urban inhabitations that are well outside the official narratives of city life (Mabey, 1973; Sinclair, 2003 [2002]). The moss walk draws on these resonant practices of walking in London to develop a material enactment and engagement with urban ecologies. Working from within a practical ontology, the paper revisits the moss walk itinerary, and brings together moss identification and lore discussed and encountered during the event, and works through theoretical resonances related to more-than-human urbanisms that informed the event and are discussed in more detail here. This paper develops a mode of site-writing that moves in space and time with the walk while digressing along the way.

  • what could I learn from this? take from a history of the meaning of embodiment of objects and meaning, and translate this into objects to be participated in through ‘wearing’

The walk did not have a singular narrative, but rather followed an itinerary where each moss-stop became a site for exploration, observation, discussion, and speculation. In this sense, this engagement with bryophytes in the City of London is not a process of ‘following’ scientists in the field. Anna Tsing suggests that a new type of “science studies” is emerging that engages with scientific practice as a way to mobilize publics, engage in philosophical speculation, and to “trespass across the boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities” (2011, page 19; see also Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012). This presents a much different way of engaging with scientific practice and “citizen science”—not necessarily as an ethnographic object of study (Ellis and Waterton, 2005), but rather as a multiply constituted, concrete, and practical ontology that seeks to contribute to the expanded development of new forms of environmental engagement and narrative.

  • citizen sensors. aestheticising the experience of incorporation, empowering the human and the non human into a symbiotic relationship that is neither natural nor technology, scientific nor humanitarian, ethnographic nor aesthetic but amalgamated and egging and accepting of contingency of outcome.

From this gathering site of urban community activity in east London, the walk participants set out to investigate the possibilities for encountering the more-than-human life of mosses in the city, and in the process to consider how to describe cities as incorporations of urban dwellers, materialities, politics, and ecologies.

  • the encountering g of more than human life is basically what autographic is. participation with the non humanness of material traces – not specifically unanthropocentirc but maybe a middle ground between the confused harnessing of supernatural embodiment of these signs and the total disregard and damage of them. it is obviously un anthropocentric to feel the desperate need to change our actions for the needs of the ‘climate’ because we are the climate. (reference to ‘climate as assemblage instead of climate facing’)
  • this necessary anthropocentrism needed to induce change humanity needs in order to not become the 6th mass extinction (past tense) is maybe equatable to the anthropomorphism needed for a non human to gain juridical rights… (the rights of nature example)

Whether shoring us up or predating our short if furious planetary transformations, a whole host of organisms works in and through dynamic environments with us. 

  • an autographic theory is ultimately trying to do this!

Nonhumans do not simply return to the city, but rather become urban as part of the urban political ecologies in which they are situated and to which they contribute (Gandy, 2002; Heynen et al, 2006; Kaika, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2006). 

  • interesting as because slow violence is sort of defined by its inability to be present, it is discursive of representation, it seems only right to try and display time slices of such a hyper object in the urban ambient forum. no one can participate in the witnessing and incorporating of melting ice caps… therefore acknowledging rises in urban air temperature or pollution may be more relatable …

Becoming urban then also involves rethinking forms of becoming through discussions of sitework and ecological views of subjects. This sitework, as I develop it here, is informed by Keith Woodward, John Paul Jones, and Sallie Marston’s discussion of the “work” of sites as consisting not just of given arrangements, but of actively laboring bodies that “participate in the production of the fields of force through which they aggregate” (2010, page 273). Here is a way of understanding sites as immanent and formed through situated practices that traverse and transform human and more-than-human materialities

  • concepts of site work… can I some how both make the point this is the sensor participation that is in opposition to aesthetic in some regards (in the timothy morton regard.. and also link it to participation through wearing…

But another version of urbanization emerges through these writings that points to the ways in which new urban subjects, bodies, spatialities, and temporalities emerge as distinct and shared forms of life. Cities are not fixed a priori agents acting on their urban inhabitants, but rather are sites of continually articulated ecological community.

This moss-eye view investigation is informed in some ways by the architectural perspectives that are standard fare in drawing classes: the bird’s- eye view from above, or the worm’s-eye view from below, each figuratively offering a different view on space. While these perspectives may seem to suggest simply contrasting vantage points, in other writings the politics of viewing from above and below are seen to open up possibilities for alternative spatial practices. p2929

  • could maybe bring back in this idea of spacial texture… sort of different but still about associating new sensual qualities of a imagination sensual object in order to grasp it better. not so much ontologically but in terms of feeling and experiencing it…

No longer a matter of viewing from high or low, instead in the process of viewing mosses new practices of receptive and situated vision emerge. 

  • a sort of metaphor for the new insight autographic visualisations gives us…

the practices of viewing here are embodied and emplaced (Ellis, 2011; Haraway, 2007; Hayward, 2010), but also incomplete and speculative, opening onto the perceptive capabilities of other urban organisms.

  • lovely summery of these new perspectives created through the very real participation with the non human… embodiment as participation!

As we pass through Cutlers Gardens, I note that Devonshire Square is the site of various ‘green’ or sustainability initiatives, including the placement of a stuffed polar bear in the main lobby as a way to remind office workers of the relationship of their environmental practices to the imminent if distant destruction of habitats and species. Here, the viewing of a relatively abstract if completely inert charismatic megafauna stands in for the environmental practices and more-than-humans to which we are meant to have a sense of accountability. And yet nearer at hand are any number of less charismatic organisms that already populate our cities. We live alongside a whole host of other forms of urban life, and we rely on more extended networks of urban ecologies that influence the spatial processes of the City of London—and the Arctic. The polar bear might be seen here as a detached entity, a symbol of environmental degradation and abstract obligation. Would a renewed attention and receptiveness to the multiple incorporations of urban life all around us provoke other types of environmental relationships through our encounters with more-than-human urban dwellers? p2929

  • she uses an example of a stuffed pole bear as an intended reminder of the broader effected network of environmental depredations… it could be seen that the polar bear acts in a similar ilk to what ice watch does. in the contexts they are received, they both act as detournment esq shock factor images that bring us to zoom out and access the issues of the globe – those unseeable by the body but instead by the symbolic stuffed megaforna, the phantom image or the autographic temporal access……

If corporations are entities that are formed through processes of incorporation, then what other corporations might emerge through different engagements and participants brought into urban incorporations? Karen Bakker has suggested that the “nature” that analyses of “neoliberal” economies take into account is often informed by distinct categorizations of more-than-humans that render them profitable. In this respect, an analysis of the role of the corporation in the city is already an analysis of human and more-than-human modes of incorporation—and a designation of which “co-constitutive” participants in urban life are seen to be most relevant to these economies (Bakker, 2010, page 717; Braun, 2008, page 668).

A multispecies view of moss, however, does not immediately reveal the ways in which these organisms may be ‘coconstitutive’, since bryophytes do not obviously provide humans with obvious material or resources through which coconstitution may be articulated. The hazy verdure and perpetual green that is present but often overlooked in peripheral urban space is typically composed of mosses and assorted weeds. Bryophytes are not of apparent relevance, but they are part of the processes whereby other urban incorporations become possible. Carpeting cities as well as exurban landscapes, moss accumulates and exchanges materials for ongoing urban transformations, since invertebrates inhabit moss and birds make nests with it; other plants take root within the substrates, water, and nutrients that mosses gather (Porley and Hodgetts, 2005, page 30). The most prevalent flora in the UK is without apparent relevance to its economies—and may not even neatly fit within an ecosystem services agenda (Yusoff, 2011). But other exchanges, economies, and incorporations emerge through these urban ecologies that exceed the ‘nature’ that might usually be visible within the corporation of London.

  • the idea of something like moss being relevant to the entire networked ecology of an urban space – ie even the 2008 financial crash… the idea of these urban ecologies ‘exceeding’ the idea of nature that most consciously encounter or ontologically acknowledge. speaks of the duality of human vs nature i refer to at the beginning of the report. participation as helping to acknowledge the incorporate realities of our ambient spaces.

If corporations might be understood as transformative bodies that undertake processes of incorporation, how might alternative approaches to incorporation point to new processes of urban formation? Becoming is a political and ethical focus in this sense, since the processes whereby urban natures emerge are connected with vested interests in mobilizing distinct types of natures. The making of urban subjects occurs through these neoliberal economies: what if we were to take into ‘account’ more-than-human subjects that are outside the usual for-profit economies, but instead are located in more ‘nonprofit’ relations: what other subject formations and ecological communities might emerge, and what forms of sitework would make this type of becoming urban possible

  • idea of ‘becoming’ as what I’m searching for. to participate in climate data is to ‘become it’, to be ‘in-formed by it’, to sincerely participate.

Part of the reason for mosses’ flourishing is their ability to withstand extreme and inhospitable landscapes. Not only do many species of moss inhabit potentially unaccommodating urban environments, they are able to grow on the edges of geothermic pools, in icy Arctic landscapes, in sites with metal and salt contamination, and directly on rock surfaces from maritime to alpine zones

  • one huge upside to workshop as intervention (something Offenhuber doesn’t explicitly state within his framework of categories of autographic intervention but I wonder whether it would under a form of ‘framing’ that meets ‘indexing’ or ‘registering’ maybe) is the fact that one is not only experiencing the trace infant of one but a discussion can arrise between intervener, object and participant. instead of an autgrpahic visualisation being intrinsically alluring of a broader object such as global atmospheric conditions – a discourse arrises out the exerpieience. leader can new implications to the metaphorical table.

(lots of specifics about mosses p2933)

In some cities in Europe mosses are suspended in cloth bags over freeway overpasses and later harvested in order to undertake mineral analysis and map air pollution levels at these sites 

  • feel like this could be a good example of Offenhubers combined approach to visualisations – information vis + autovis… (include his diagram?

Urban environmental health can then be registered through moss. This Wood Bristle-moss demonstrates the particular relationship moss has to sites and time, since it is an accumulator, collector and exchanger of minerals and pollutants in sites that may vary according to the ongoing processes of cities. Moss incorporates the material effects of urban ecologies, across time and space, so that the becoming urban of London settles into a much different register through the more extended time of vegetation, which stores, processes and makes available distinct forms of energy (Grosz, 2004, pages 217–220).

  • ‘registering’ – is this correct in terms of offenhubers categories ?

From here it is possible to consider this other, temporal and potentially allegorical dimension of moss, an organism that collects and sediments past events but also anticipates future resources, as well as decay and sedimentation

  • summarising the temporally distributive nature of autographic visualisations

In fact, an image of the Bank of England in ruins seems to have been a formative part of its architectural construction, when the former Bank of England designed by John Soane was developed with accompanying drawings by Joseph Gandy that make the Bank of England resemble a vegetated Pompeii, a ruined site in the center of the city. The appearance of vegetation overgrowing architectures stimulates and provokes imaginings of the city in ruins. Indeed, multiple forms of vegetation flourished in the bombsites of postwar London. Moss in particular has a relationship to ruins, covering them and indicating slow time in places that have become still and overgrown, inscribing the accumulation of time in place. This is a different type of green city, a city of remnants and remainders, of wildlife and unmanaged green.

  • seems to reference ideas that corraolat with mortons analysis of ice watch- symbolic imagery (double check the correct term for this from indexical design work by offfenhuber) that intersects with a universal imagination of sorts… the symbolic nature of ruins of moss is rather different to that of melting ice but why and how could this still work in the favour of a climate crisis agenda?

Passing the Bank of China adjacent to the Bank of England, we return to a consideration of the corporation and forms of lively incorporation in the city. Corporations are not just discrete entities, organizations, sites, buildings, brands, products, or services, but are also a set of interdependent spatial relations that may become explicitly evident or available for study in these concentrated urban districts. Of course, the economic power relations of the City of London are congealed into urban form—they have their materiality—but the solid edifices of corporations also have their relational fissures, gaps, and connective sinews that are intertwined with these architectures. In contrast to those allegorical friezes that adorn the pediments of grand City buildings, whether gargoyles or lions or ladies of Justice, the “Moss- eye view” walk nominates an unofficial allegorical figure that can be found throughout those less prominent but by no means less extensive cracks, gaps, and margins that run through the City. Moss carves its way, in an uninvited fashion, into the City’s stone, brick and concrete, suggesting that it too is a lively and provocative organism that embodies tales of the City.

  • okay so, quite an important passage as Gabrys begins to allude to the philosophical implications of understanding the over looked nonhuman through severe engagement – but writes about it metaphorically and aesthetically…. through the experience of participating with an intervention lead by Gabyrs, there is maybe potential for a experiential aestheticising of the moss.
  • she also sheds light on other traces implications such as areas that were bombed during wars or even broader history – From this site we pass through the Barbers Physic Garden, a site of which John Gerard was master in 1607. Here, we consider Gerard’s various uses for moss proposed in his Herbal, as he was particularly attuned to the tendency of moss to grow on bones and at charnel houses, and so proposed that this type of moss might be “a singular remedy against the falling evil” (1597). – she basically uses the tour and the lens of the traces of moss as a way into all forms of history and learning and human impact.

In this walk, mosses come into view as exchangers of urban materials, energies, temporalities, and imaginaries. From bio-indication of pollution, to stabilizing substrate and making nutrients available for other vegetative organisms, while also opening up other temporalities of becoming urban, moss and bryophytes are involved in dense material exchanges that take place across time and in relation to environmental change that is both localized and more widespread. 

Yet this is not a plea to recognize the usefulness of mosses as an organism or resource or service, as much as an attempt to draw out other (nonprofit) urban exchanges that are taking place within more-than- human urban ecologies. From a moss- eye view, these other exchanges and openings emerge across more-than-human and human spaces, which are distinct from the more restricted economies of the city.

  • …. okay so what am i doing? am I shamelessly taking a more exploitative view of moss? bio indication is about becoming the planetary diagrams but also about utilising their autographic properties… I am exploring how autographology could engage us with the signs of embedding climate destruction… moss eye walking seems to be passive yet a b ut exploitative way to do this. it is autographic in practice but what is it doing in regards to my report. interestingly; with typical visualisations of climate data, participants participate with agent-ness similar to stumbling upon a tile arranged wrong amongst a gridded floor. we don’t really think much of this encounter other than breeze are eyes across and internally acknowledge how ‘thats a bit of a shame’. It’s irregularity that isn’t really effecting us in a deep or meaningful way. If i am to argue that some if not all autographic practices have the potential to make us stop and actually engage with the realities of embedding and lived 6th mass extraction, how is moss walk doing this? Moss and the sub level nonhuman incorporations can exemplify vast amounts of expierencable data, including the of pollution and climate effecting traces – but to feel these realities one has to choose to participate much more readily than breeding past a few states on a new article. how do we get a person to participate in being a participant in the first place?

It may be that micrological yet processual encounters with embodied entities such as moss within the managed space of the Square Mile may help us to think about urban ecological communities differently—through shared incorporations. 

While much walking research focuses on the perambulations of solitary walkers, often with the intention of exploring phenomenological issues related to embodiment and self-landscape relations (Edensor, 2000; Wylie, 2005), other walking literature specifically emphasizes its role as a method steeped in ‘sociability’ (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Lee and Ingold, 2006) and politics (Cresswell, 2010; Pinder, 2011; Shehadeh, 2008 [2007]). In these accounts, walking is an event that articulates distinct forms of collective experience— and how by walking together, collectives may be incorporated, contested, and practiced in relationship to places, whether through protest marches or daily commutes.

  • really really great ideas coming through here about the broader implications of the action of walking. interesting relationship between the fact one outcome of engaging climate data may be collective action or protest… how walking is this intrinsic action. becoming the urban ecology as protest.

For Thoreau walking does not just facilitate the movement between places, but involves a transformation in the way we occupy places (2008 [1862]). These journeys are the basis through which it is possible to form relationships to environments and more-than-humans. While walking could be seen to “articulate”, as de Certeau suggests, urban practices and the possibilities for alternative everyday spatial practices (1984 [1980], page 94), because it is a highly textured urban practice it is not merely enacted at a discursive level—it is also embodied and incorporated through social, material, political, and collective encounters. Walking is a practical method that connects up places and experiences, but also permits for wandering, digression, and resonance—the point is that walking is a form of sitework where sites emerge through the relations that walking sets in motion (Ingold, 2010). 

  • taking the concepts I outlined about spacial texture to a physicalised level in that walking is the most physically texture way to experience a trace. if emotionally participating in the aesthetics of an autogrphic piece is one was to understand the social texture of a trace, walking from he moss eye is a way of becoming the spacial texture, the sensual qualities of these locals.

Walking activates an embodied and yet also collective relationship to places, which allows for the introduction of distinct ways of sensing and thinking places that might otherwise be entrenched within everyday urbanisms. Such a situational understanding of walking as sitework suggests that this is a method that is characterized by its singularity. It is a “practical” ontology, in which, as Braun suggests, by expanding on the work of Nick Bingham, “assemblages have no pregiven form, but emerge as the result of what people and things do” (2008, page 670; Bingham, 2006). Through practices, distinct and embodied worlds emerge that are entangled within what these practices make possible and available. This paper has discussed the walking event not as an illustrative case study, but rather as a practice for encountering and enacting urban incorporations.

as – climate data is intrinsically slow and difficult to ‘see’ due to its temporal distribution (a reality of hyper objects) – it is worth noting that theses autographic visualisations live within a system of relationality to climate change. They can be seen as directly metaphorical of the climate crisis (ice watch) and may go one of either way, make us more afraid or more emotionally evolved, or we can frame signs of localised sysmptoms of the crisis and maybe was people into the realities of the issue. a kind of subversive aesthetism verses a more agentic assemblage of becoming ecological environments and therefore maybe feelings their broader destructions ?

  • maybe reference the geoglyphs to live by paper – stuff on the local being an index for the global

SENSING LICHENS PAPER BY GABRYS

From specifying fertiliser to outlin- ing techniques for staking, insulating, watering, and labelling plants, the NASA ozone garden guide develops a methodical and standardised approach to cultivation in order to ensure the comparability of obser- vations when examining plants for ‘ozone-induced foliar injury’. This is a garden that requires particular practices as a means to generate insights into botanical processes, including the labelling of leaves as they emerge with small tags, studying plants with magnifying glasses for initial signs of ozone damage in the form of ‘stippling or purpling of leaves’, and photographically documenting plants as they undergo possible ozone- related air pollution. Levels of ozone exposure in the plants are indicated by studying the varying levels of spotting and turning yellow, thriving and wilting.1 Here, gardening becomes a means by which to engage with the specific vegetal operations of bioindication.

Bioindication is a process occurring across multiple organisms as they are affected by, sense and even transform their environments. Many vas- cular plants can be studied for ozone injury. Still other organisms such as bryophytes (or mosses) can be examined for evidence of air and soil pol- lution, while fungi can be assessed for indications of forest health, and molluscs can be probed as indicators of water quality.

Tuning in to these processes of world-making, here I analyse bioindication as expressed through lichens both to understand how other organisms experience pollution, and to articulate how environmental subjects and particular worlds are formed through indications of environmental pol- lution. Bioindication as a process in part then reorientates environmental sensing towards engagements that are less focussed on singular entities as they are influenced by pollutants, and more towards the sprawling affilia- tions that are worked and reworked through environmental pollutants. Environmental pollution as a ‘conflict’ in this way is expressed not merely through exceeding acceptable pollution levels or challenges made to polluters, but also through the transformations of environmental health, ecologies, diversity and more that occur when pollution trans- forms organisms and their environments over time (and as a register of ‘slow violence’)

  • reference to slow violence

Bioindication signals the ways in which there are multiple modalities for ‘taking measure’ of environments, which could in turn generate alternative and speculative engagements with pollution.

  • brilliant quote for how bioindicators can be both practical and speculative tool for new ways to measure the changing environment in a maybe reactive way regarding combatting a warming planet

In this register of reworking environmental conflict and environmental sensing, I ask: what does it mean to sense environments together with other organisms? What environmental inhabitations – and conflicts – are expressed with and through lichens? And how could these fungal-vegetal modes of sensing environments go beyond representational modes of politics, to more ecological and generative encounters with environmental politics and worlds in the making? This ‘going beyond’ representation points toward postcolonial debates about representation that unfold in this special issue, while also engaging with the literature on world-making. It is also part of the gardening and gardens that inform this article: how are worlds worked and reworked, not exclusively as human endeavours, but as the making and remaking of environmental subjects and relations?

  • what does it mean to become with traces or become the trace. how can we be truly anthropocentric in engaging with climate data
  • is it in a large part a good way to plant humans and non humans on a level playing ground in a collective imagination? if the bioindicator is seen as equal to biologist using the index of the bioindicator (and that facts this registering produces) then we have won at de anthropocentrising? bring the more than human down to the human level (or up if you a lichen or thinking in the traditional hierarchical structures of human as apex)

Processes of sensing pollution through organisms not only rework the boundaries of these organisms, they also amplify engagements with pollution to include questions of measurable values at any given time, addressing the ongoing and accumulative effects of pollution in lived environments. Such a shift in focus might also challenge the ways in which pollution as an environmental conflict is experienced and addressed.

  • was to access slow violence

Following on from this inquiry into how lichen-based bioindication generates particular registers for sensing environments, I consider how the spread and distribution of lichens demonstrates situated changes in environments both as pollution becomes evident in its accumulation and in its anticipated future effects. Much attention to environmental pollution evades issues of accumulation and change over time, focusing instead on abstracted indicators or technological fixes that are seemingly removed from the pollution-based conflicts that inform lived experiences. Lichens’ bioindicative modes of sensing expand the registers of environ- mental sensing to include these extended and relational effects of environ- mental change by demonstrating how organisms and ecologies transform through pollution. By extending the bioindicator garden with which I opened this article I consider how a speculative bioindicator garden – unfolding from a lichen point of view – could generate different approaches to environmental sensing by engaging with ecological relationality and organismal contributions to environmental-political pro- blems. This speculative bioindicator garden is developed in relation to prior fieldwork and practice in the European Arctic, as well as fieldwork and forthcoming practice, on the topic of environmental sensing.10

In addressing questions about bioindication as a means to engage with the conflict of environmental pollution, I develop a speculative approach to creative practice, both as a propositional way of addressing how to work with and through bioindicative modes of sensing, and as a method by which to engage with the modalities of creative practice that could be designated as ‘an experimental art’, following Stengers, which involves ‘reclaiming as the transformation of experience’. Such practices of experimentation can be applied across arts and sciences, as they search for responses to the ‘intrusion of Gaia’ in this time of planetary distress.11

  • bringing in an aestheticised perspective on ways of making traces engaging

An environmental citizen, in this view, would be less a responsible consumer-subject amen- able to behaviour change, and more an environmental entity or bundle of entities. 

If, as Jennifer Wenzel writes on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, ‘decolonization demands not only a new humanity and humanism but also a new materi- alism and political ecology: a shift in the valuation and disposition of nature’,14 then here TallBear points to the ways in which indigenising environmental subjects can be a practice for attending to earthly relations as a way to realise new political and social engagements. Environmental conflict, in this sense, can register as much and even more so in and through the more-than-human entities with which humans are in relation. Speculative environmental citizenship is an attempt to rethink the subject through these relations. Lichens are one group of organisms that can draw attention to these environmental attachments and formations of subjects through the signalling of pollution.

  • a feel as though jenifer garbys is a perfect example of a sencere attempt at a OOO autographic practice

(lots of highlighted bits on lichen facts)

Multiple indices now exist for assessing the bioindicative characteristics of lichens and what they indicate.22 The indices include the designation of ‘zones’ where lichens might be normal, struggling or absent (a lichen desert); as well as a ten-point scale of lichen sensitivity that identifies a gradient for the presence of sensitive leafy lichens to the presence only of hardy crusty lichens, or the absence of lichens, which also maps onto approxi- mate levels of sulphur dioxide.23 In addition to these indices, there are seven ‘clean air lichens’ that the Natural History Museum of London has identified as also providing a relatively good indication of the quality of air in London environments. Citizen scientists can identify and map these clean air lichens in order to contribute to ongoing docu- mentation not just of air quality in London, but also of the effects of air quality on urban ecologies

  • here we find the tools that prove it IS possible to use the autographic traces of pollution as climate diagramming its violence and speaking the broader issues – climate data localised – but the thing that is missing is the distinct form of visualising – or intervening – and this is what the report must assess?
  • maybe i begin the report under the assumption the endevear is to most successfully engage a public – but through my research decide it is about doing what garbs is doing – become with these ecologies, incorporate with them, how to learn a living with the none human – in order to feel the looming issue of the crisis… does it express enough urgency? maybe one has to choose between a passive becoming or an emotive aesthetic awakening ….

(must eventually read the section on speculative garners

the gallery as forum – MATERIAL WITNESS: VISUAL EVIDENCE AND THE CASE OF ERIC GARNER

BY NOW, IT’S A TRUISM to say that there are more images than ever before, a digital flood of pictures that shows no signs of slowing. But what about all the images that are blocked, elided, or destroyed? What about the resurgence of a kind of iconoclasm—the annihilation of the image? Such an assault on the visual was apparent when stark video footage of Eric Garner being arrested and put in a choke hold in Staten Island, New York, seemingly made no difference in the case against the police who killed him; and it was all too clear when, just before this issue went to press, the artists and journalists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris were the victims of horrifying violence.

  • the spectacle has gone so far as visual evidence of murder / ‘the video footage’ is equitable to the ‘thruthy factoid’ in its inability to not only engage but ability to prosecute and ‘prove’ accountability (in this case of murder in cold blood).
  • this is relevant to my investigation of autographic visualisations because the it disproves the use of ‘image’ and ‘fact’ as evidence.

Here, art historian DAVID JOSELIT takes up the case of Garner and its challenge to the very concept of visual evidence or representation—and its denial of images and objects as evidence of fact. Joselit considers the possibility of critical and artistic practices that may counter such failures of representation, instead staging a refusal of representation—a refusal perhaps nowhere more potent than in the performances of WILLIAM POPE.L, whether the artist is literally ingesting and expelling information, in Eating the Wall Street Journal, 1991–2000, or, in Foraging (Asphyxia Version), 1993–95/2008, covering his head with a white plastic bag that he clutches tightly below his chin. Is this act of self-erasure a gesture of annihilation, as the word asphyxia suggests, or is it a strategic subtraction of the body from a sphere in which that body cannot be represented anyway—cannot be visible or evident, or is subject to censure and repression?

  • aesthetic experience and the gallery as forum for accountability

As thought is inherently anthropocentric, we ‘think’ about de-anthropocentrising in order to influence anthropogenic actions. An object oriented approach is a way to understand and influence objects differently, de-antrhopocentrising merely being the ontological perspective.

Contractions of Time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective – Nato Thompson (E-Flux)

Article on how the relational aesthetics have attempted and are attempting to break away from the capitalocene temporality of attention deprived society of the spectacle….

If products demand to be produced and consumed in ever-expanding contexts, they may also be adapted to durations more suitable to electronics than to what our bodies can endure. And without a doubt, the accelerated pace of disembodied consumer desire ultimately alters the basic structure of our bodies. “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is a twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.”2 We are plugged in. We are in the matrix. We are atrophied hunger machines.

And in left-leaning art culture, pointing the finger at capitalism is no more novel a diagnosis. Certainly, the dominant social order is responsible for the present social order—the system perpetuates itself and we are its subjects. And the self- help industry would be much more compelling if its balm for depression and spazzed-out children included a radical redistribution of wealth, but that goes without saying.

Any cultural formation that comes into being now necessarily does so according to the terms of a general cultural shift toward the twitchy, the disinterested, the agitated, the dyslexic, and the bipolar.

The return of the body and of prolonged time resists the dematerialized, agitated nature of the current era. Abramovićʼs performance brought the world of spectacle into the two forms of experience many considered beyond its purview: the body, and time. If spectacle is meant to be consumed rapidly, and from a distance, then Abramovićʼs performance rendered the spectral character of fame human flesh, placing it front and center for the long term.

the phrase “The Artist is Present” captures a heightened sense of engagement—as though,

  • how does he know it captured a heightened sense of engagement

Operating against the grain of contemporary temporality may not only be a hallmark of the arts, but also the delineation of their discursive boundary. How do we know it is art? Because it takes so long to appreciate, it couldnʼt be aimed at a typical consumer. Because it is so annoyingly long it must be interesting.

At times in tension, at times in collusion with capitalist scarcity, the scarcity of experience encourages forms of art that are not as easily distributed as—and thus more distinguishable from—the mass produced goods of the broader market. Massive installations, sculptures, performance, civic institutions (the museum), time-based relational aesthetics all find value in their experiential distinction from larger markets. Museums offer special opportunities to experience the body in space. In this spasmodic era, we find the arts recalibrated as a temporal, spatial, and bodily escape.

  • place. spacial opportunities to expeierence the body in space. We need to experience these things against the body? seems to boil down to scale – temporality structure is just a translation of or allusion to another temporal metabolism.

At Creative Time, Paul Ramirez Jonasʼs project titled Key to the City allowed the general public in Times Square to briefly participate in a ceremony that provided them with a key to the city of New York. This object, to all appearances an ordinary house key, awarded to the public in a brief but intimate moment at the heart of NYC spectacle, is not only symbolic, but also functional, in that it opens a myriad of locks across the five boroughs. These unmediated interpersonal projects take as their starting point a specific experience, a poetic moment, that is registered, digested, appreciated, and completed.

But what else can a museum or public art organization do? Without question, certain temporal limits are necessary for artistic projects to be brought to a general audience. Were the discreet embodied moments of Abramovićʼs retrospective limited simply by the duration of a conventional museum visit? Is there really any value in a critique that calls for a duration so extensive that no public institution can actually host it?

  • surely concepts of outdoor, autographic interventions are an answer to this?

Can it really be the case that market-friendly forms are simultaneously, and conveniently, the highest form of political content? Now that information has become a

commodity and advertising codes have penetrated the very essence of what it means to communicate, we can no longer pretend that art remains magically outside this logic. While it would be wonderful if the gesture could somehow escape this trap of cultural production, the museum and gallery are not safe-zones immune from capital and power. As a result, we must continue to view artistic gestures with the special skepticism reserved for all cultural production. Reflexivity alone wonʼt save it. An advertisement that tells you itʼs an advertisement is no less edifying, just more contemporary.

  • very nice quote explaining the skeptisms necessary of all ‘products of culture’… even those with intention to inform and engage an audience with something like the 6th mass extinction

So while there are certainly merits to discussing the limits of the gesture, the commodification of the present nevertheless plays out across the body and time.

Slowness has emerged as a strategy for resisting the consumable flow of information and developing a form of social cohesion that withstands the frenetic needs of capital

The artist Tania Bruguera has said that it is time to put Duchampʼs urinal back in the bathroom. That is to say that bringing life into art can no longer be considered an important gesture. Rather, life should be viewed from the epistemological vantage point found in some contemporary art. If one is interested in a more ambitious and meaningful project, perhaps it isnʼt enough to depend on the niche market that is art. As accelerated time comes to characterize not only survival in the arts, but also the default condition of the public, we find forms of meaning that resist the tide of capital and gravitate toward not only the long term, but also the profoundly civic.

Jakob Jakobsen and Henrietta Heiseʼs Copenhagen Free University, which closed its doors in 2007, used a long- term approach to emancipatory public education; the Chicago-based artist collective Incubate works as “radical arts administrators” on alternative funding models for cultural production; the artist Caroline Woolardʼs skill-share trade site OurGoods offers a Craigslist approach to swapping services in order to escape the logic of capital. In all of these approaches, we find a civic form of participation whose goals are infrastructural in scope. They all propose a means of connecting people over an extended period, and offer a response to the problem of shrinking time. In the long run, these works may find their resistance to consumable capitalism to have worked all too well. The production of cultural meaning that resists the flow of capital will need to ultimately produce forms that contribute to radically altering culture. If the civic is a space of long-term engagement with subjectivity, then perhaps the cultural producer interested in producing meaning must find a way to overcome the economic and temporal logic of the attention-deprived.

Introduction of Human Perception in Visualization – Sternadt & Manuel R. S. Tavares2

However, these attributes are not frequently characterized by space or temporal component. That makes the task of representing them with an adequate graphical approach even more complex. Thus, the attributes of the data to be represented must be characterized according to different criteria. 

The adequate identification of those criteria is considered determinative to characterize them visually, and, because of that, it is considered one of the most important and complex steps of any computational visualization system. 

  • idea that ‘attributes of the data’ must be counted for so that they are relevant to the reaction wanted… 

The perceptions are different according to the physical characteristics of the stimulus and they are interpreted in function of the previous experiences associated to that stimulus, making the brain able to extract knowledge. This continuous flow of sensations generates what it is known as perception. 

“The perception process acquires information from the environment through the use of the sensorial mechanisms of vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. This information is integrated and interpreted.”, (Gupta 2000: 221). The reply of a specific sensorial organ is the consequence of its adaptation to the stimulus type involved. Thereafter, there is an expected agreement between a sensation and the stimulus that produces it. 

  • this just confirms and opens up thoughts on sensual and interactive designer objects

The Gestalt Theory is based on the following principle: It is not possible to have knowledge of the whole through the parts, but of the parts through the whole; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 

  • look up what t.moprton says about this … can’t remember whether he agrees or disagrees 

Petro-Melancholia- The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief – Stephanie LeMenager

Rob Nixon refers to the “slow violence” of neoliberalism as the occluded referent of “disaster,” which in a modern risk society is often a misnomer.4 From the Greek astron, or star, “disaster” suggests an unforeseen calamity arising from the unfavorable position of a planet. The BP blowout confirms disaster criticism’s focus on the expectedness of the so-called unexpected while pointing to a different aspect of how ecological collapse can obscure human social and technological histories. Here the prob- lem is proximity. The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body.5 Decoupling human corporeal memory from the infrastructures that have sustained it may be the primary challenge for eco- logical narrative in the service of human species survival beyond the twenty-first century. 

  • must look up ‘incorporating practices’ Paul Connerton. sounds quite like Judith Butlers performativety
  • also decoupling human corporeal memory (from the coded understanding of nature as separate and oil as engrained and distant etc) is probably the term idea I was looking for when subverting Debords ‘spacial alienation’ or spacial amnesia… (i used spacial memory)
  • (what better way to re-encode/incorporate practice/perform than to literally embody. WEARABLE. Companion. Interactive. Autographic.

The BP blowout poses a unique representational challenge be- cause it follows an unusual episode of de-reification, a failure of the commodity form’s abstraction. This “disaster” did not work as spectacle, in Guy Debord’s sense of the mystification of modern means of production through screen imagery.6 The continuous vid- eo feed available on the Internet of oil shooting out of the damaged well—however that might have been manipulated by BP—read as a humiliation of modernity as it was understood in the twentieth century, which is largely in terms of the human capacity to harness cheap energy. Unlike anthropogenic climate change, which resists narrative because of its global scale and its as-yet-limited visibil- ity, the Deepwater Horizon rig localized a plethora of visible data, more than could be disappeared by the hundreds of thousands of pounds of Corexit that BP poured into the Gulf. The BP blowout resembles Hurricane Katrina in its manifestation of “events” that support predictions of environmental catastrophe (e.g., peak oil, global climate change) that otherwise might be dismissed as effects of scientific modeling or Left fear-mongering. Yet, just as Katrina did not result in a changed national affect toward black, urban pov- erty, the BP explosion has not, it seems, spurred Americans to re- consider loving oil. 

  • despite the spectacle in this instant technically not holding up in the typical way – the means of production and infrastructure that fuel the colonial capitalistene lying unseen behind the ‘appearances’ of mass media culture and its blurriness/confusion/automoisation – the fact we are totally and entirely desensitised to imagery of this sort and receiving it on this medium meant we took no serious notice or action (despite it manifesting an “event” that support predictions of environmental catastrophe.
  • Also aligns itself with susan schoppi and ‘nature represents itself’. Interested in the sincere ways we can anthropomorphise in order to reduce this inherited gap between humans and their technology and nature and it’s resources. 

Poem – Someone will lay a plaster vault for me to ride, like long boxes children pull down flooded roads. In my plaster boat I’ll ride Gulf shores
till I vanish like a rig in the sun.22 

The poem suggests the Leeville cemetery, one of many Cajun burial sites that have floated out to sea due to subsidence. Serpas’s poetry invites an openness to personal extinction (“If only I could give the land my body— / . . . I would lie against the marsh grass and sink, / . . . and welcome the eroding Gulf—”), as if humans count primar- ily as matter, our corpses sandbagging the wetlands (79). To live in such a world is to be sculpted by subsidence, with that geological artist linked tenuously to the rigs, whose silhouettes against the sun make them appear as symptoms of distant intelligence. Serpas and the MMS interviewees offer a vernacular poetry of human species collapse: heroic, Catholic, melancholic. Feeling ecological means the discomfort of surrendering historical thinking, with its linear- ity that honors the perceived arc of human lives, and welcoming breakdown of the human into “marsh grass and sink.” This or- ganicist vision is not unfamiliar in environmental discourse, yet it takes on force, and threat, in a place where human bodies literally fight back the ocean because of the technologies meant to extend human energy and comfort. Feeling at home in a petrol “world” creates an affective drag on thinking through human survival. 

  • I think she is stating some interesting points about a ‘vernacular poetry of anthropocentric manifestations of the effects of the slow violence of oil extraction

Jennifer Wenzel’s analysis 
of Nixons Slow Violence

Instances of slow violence considered here include climate change, soil erosion and deforestation, bioaccumulation of industrial toxins (including the long aftermaths of spectacular disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl), marginalization of local communities in the name of resource extraction or infrastructural development, and ‘‘precision’’ or ‘‘smart’’ weapons like cluster bombs and depleted uranium that keep killing indiscriminately long after the cessation of hostilities. In addition to the physical damage done to people and ecosystems, Nixon consistently draws attention to the discursive aspects of slow violence: the representational regimes of invisibility, ‘‘spatial amnesia,’ 

  • links between spacial amnesia and studio practice experiments that use the senses to engage with spacial memory…
  • also almost direct link the ‘the spectacle’ as Debord calls it ‘spacial Alienation’

Slow violence, Nixon writes memorably, is violence ‘‘in the passive voice’’ (131). Its dilated temporalities demand that we rethink, in yet another way, the post in post-conflict, post-Cold War, postcolonial, postapartheid. 

What most distinguishes Nixon from other postcolonial ecocritics in the US and the UK is his unapologetic anthropocentrism. This stance reflects not an antipathy to nature an sich but rather a strategic rejection of the ‘‘antihuman environmentalism . . . (under the banner of universalism)’’ (5) that has characterized some Western environmental thought and policy, from colonial conservation to deep ecology. 

  • inline in an indirect way with morton and defo inline with peter frame (must eventually read communism chapter) (oh and maybe how to b anti capitalist)
  • being unapologetically anthropocentric is what autographic, human centred design is. harnessing the world of affecticious objects via anthropocentric frames … routes to get us nearer to making change

Even if the seconds-long attention spans of the digital era pose an additional, urgent challenge to apprehending the dilated temporalities of slow violence, new media’s potential for instant connectivity promises the emergence of a new generation of ‘‘writer–hacktivists. 

‘‘the multiple temporal orders that we inhabit’’ 

Like Edward Said, Nixon writes as a public intellectual with a ‘‘belief in the value of multiple publics’’ and ‘‘varied public registers’’ for creating ‘‘imaginative coalitions that may help redress environmental injustice’’

Nixon helpfully identifies several literary modes and genres salient to this kind of activist work—the postcolonial pastoral, the environmental picaresque, the movement memoir. 

  • (and I’m proposing an autographic approach via wearable, interactive design…?)

19/11/20 – quick thought on touch and Debords S.O.T.Spectacle

Guy Debord writes about sight being the sense with the highest potential to abstract us from reality. I think this is relevant to my project in two ways:

  • I’m thinking about sensorial (or sensual, haven’t quite decided what word yet) experiences of data sets and the lack of connectedness to information and ways of doing this through ornamentation and how personal and intimate ornamental embodiment practices are/have the potential to be… ie; touch, hearing, taste etc – places to interrogate engagement
  • SECODNLY – I studied Graham Harmens tripple O during lock down and our practice viva and came to some interesting conclusions on what it means to touch something when in the contact of consumption… ie; the local market vs. the online experiences of purchasing something. I concluded that touch was necessary to access the real qualities of an object.
  • I now wonder whether using a sensory perception of ‘sight’ (which in Debords view is a weakest and most easily manipulated sense) may merely allow us to access the sensual object… whilst the metaphorical and/or aesthetic experience alludes to the real object (essence of) that is the subject matter.
  • Should this be something I discuss with Sean? ACTUALLY first, in order to answer this question i think look up ‘real qualities’ section in a new theory of everything book… (below are the diagrams I redrew for the essay that helped me understand the practical nature by which harman thinks the aesthetic experience happens)

Quote from medium website: https://medium.com/@mdowns1611/commentary-on-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle-chapter-1-37b2e105614a (has good definitions of marxist terminology)

Other website that helps translate issues spoken about in the spectacle

‘Alienation is separation — separation from ourselves — and the spectacle is the perfection of this sort of separation’

  • nice summery of what the issue of the society of the spectacle really is 

18. For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings — tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behav­ior. Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seenvia different special­ized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adapta­ble to present-day society’s generalized abstraction. This is not to say, however, that the spectacle itself is percep­tible to the naked eye — even if that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule. We live in an inverted world. If the real world becomes images, then images become the most real of things. These images attract and entrance us precisely because we take them to be real. We cannot experience the real directly anymore. The real is not something we can reach out and touch. The “real” is only visible in spectacular images. This is why the spectacle puts all the emphasis on visual experience. This is a very McLuhanite insight. McLuhan pointed out that different media-forms produce different types of societies as well as different types of subjectivities. For Debord, sight is the most abstract of the senses, that is, the one most capable is distancing itself from concrete experiences. Consider how we use the word “see” to refer to understanding abstract truths, for example, “I see why the circle cannot be squared”. We often say we can “see” these truths, but never that we can touch, hear, taste or smell them. Thought and seeing have long been associated. Given how abstract things have become in the consumer society, it’s no wonder the spectacle puts us in a sensory mode wherein visual experience is dominant. This is also no coincidence, since sight is the most easily tricked of all the senses and the spectacle is in the business of deception. However, the spectacle is not itself visible to the eye. This sounds strange, but what he means is that the spectacle is ultimately the way in which images are arranged and configured in relation to one another and, more importantly, how human beings are brought to relate to each other in consumer society. Remember what Debord said in thesis 4: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle is a social system, a social network, and not just a huge stockpile of images. I mean, it is a stockpile of images but one that mediates social relations among people. To say that the spectacle is “immune from human activity” means that any effort on our part to get control of the spectacle, to bend it to our will instead of to capital’s, is an effort in futility. The spectacle is far too pervasive and elusive for us to regulate it. Our simple concrete activities cannot correct it. When it comes to the spectacle, our activities do not factor in. Baudrillard was always quick to highlight the unilaterality or irreversibility of the code, of the simulation. Debord is getting at this as well. Average human activity cannot force the spectacle into a dialogue. If “dialogue” enters the equation, then it’s a simulated type of dialogue like that of a call-and-response format. If the dialogue is scripted, then it’s not really a dialogue at all — it’s a monologue in the simulated guise of a dialogue. Think about how scripted and predictable arguments on the internet are. No one is really engaging in active dialogue. Monologue is the structural default setting of the spectacle. If flows into us, it gives to us, and nullifies every attempt we make to give something back to it. It does not want us to be able to openly challenge it, reverse it, actively problematize it. It wants us to shut the fuck up and simply enjoy what it gives. This is precisely the issue with representation taking on a life of its own — the spectacle, imagistic capital, is like Ultron. Once representation usurps reality, real referents, once it has become unmoored from concrete things, it makes all the rules.

  • The types of aesthetic experiences I am interested in simulating aren’t specifically un reified… they still entirely intend to have an mystic aura but I guess one that is ‘speculatively more real’

19. The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tra­dition gave rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spec­tacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation. The spectacle is not just the zenith of capitalism but also has a deep connection to Western philosophy. The Western philosophical tradition has all sorts of blindspots in it. These have been pointed out by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. The spectacle inherits all of these weaknesses. Western metaphysics has always been visucentric (based on sight). Think about how substance ontology describes everything in terms of visual properties. Substance ontology is visual ontology. This is one of it’s presuppositions. It never argued that reality itself is structured in the way that visual experience is, but, instead, blindly presupposed it. Why isn’t reality like hearing or touching? Why must it be like our experience at all? Don’t get me wrong. There have been philosophers that have challenged the validity of our experience, but I don’t really know of any that approached this in something like a McLuhanite manner. Activity, both nonhuman and human, might not be reducible to the parameters of visual perception. Just a thought. The spectacle is the technological outgrowth of the technical rationality that grew out of Western metaphysics (this is something Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, etc., would agree with). Debord claims that the spectacle doesn’t realize philosophy — it philosophizes reality. But what does this mean? What’s important is not that the spectacle is the purest realization of the technological rationality of Western philosophy, but, rather, that the spectacle comes to undermine what philosophy took reality to be. Put differently, the spectacle inverts reality and representation. It makes images into realities and realities into images. This is what it means for the spectacle to philosophize reality. This also involves negating concrete human reality by turning us into detached speculators of images. The spectacle turns all of us into “philosophers” insofar as it distances us from reality and forces us into never-ending contemplation of the consumer world. You’re not concretely living when you’re abstractly contemplating.

  • Also I like the word visucentric!!! (based on sight… Im interested in anti-visucentricity)
  • Also the idea of pseudocyclical time – is also applicable to data visualisations as well as commodified goods

Quotes from the actual texts: (in order that they appear in the text)

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign
to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, …truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.” 

  • thinking about ‘what people engage with’ and how representations are key… how can I prove that they are more key when they are more illusionary, representationally visceral as opposed to ‘trunfullinessly’ allured to via data and graph 

 But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation. 

  • things such as false consciousness align with anthropocentric/cosmological confusion confusion

The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle-the visual reflection of the ruling economic order-goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. 

  • good argument / reference for neoliberalsim’s void of forwards thinking yet has ‘development and progress’ (Ie GDP growth) stamped all around this void’s rim. Doughnut economics esque argument for the necessity of visualisations due to the power of them.

(17) The first stage o f the economy’s domination o f social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having­ human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually real. 

  • ontological shifts…

The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autono­mously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunite 

  • the spectacle creating a lack of community and unconscious – a bid for why the opposite to the spectacle – the sensual and the connectedness – may allow for a reversing of this and an engendering of COLLECTIVE ACTIONS

(28) The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. ….. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the condi­ tions that engender “lonely crowds.” The spectacle is simply the common language ofthis separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. 

  • this I think holds true to ‘connectedness’. Different terms but this ‘language of separation’ is contemporary communication and comparison that exists on social media platforms and the way in which we interact with news and upsetting yet equally distant and temporally elongated information

(153) like all spectacular com­modities, at a distance and as desirable by definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life, whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itselfat a higher level ofintensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life. 

155) While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the pseudocyclical consumption of developed economies con­ tradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in their sys­ tem of production. Cyclical time was the really lived time of unchanging illusions. Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality 

161) As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation, the ter­ rain where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed on the producers of an estranged present. In this spatial alienation, the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it steals from him is in reality separating him from his own time. This potentially surmountable social alienation is what has prevented and paralyzed the possibilities and risks ofa living alienation within time

163) The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all­ embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of a federation of independent times-a federation of playful individual and collective forms ofirreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization ofauthentic communism, which “abolishes everything that exists in­ dependently of individuals.” 

^ Translation: Citizens of the Spectacle are estranged from the present through spatial alienation that separates them from their own time. What is needed is a federation of independent times all simultaneously present: the authentic temporal realization of authentic communism which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals” 

  • I find this interesting because he not only identifies this spacial alienation that separates us from our own time. He claims under authentic communism there would be no grand order of time (what he calls pseudocycical time) because everyone would have the fulfilment and consciousness to be able to have ‘playful individual and collective’ forms of time (that he calls irreversible time that is simultaneously in the present 
  • maybe the idea of the spectacle is too dated and reductionist in lots of way but it does nicely align itself with temporality dictation which is almost exactly what slow violence speaks to. we all live on pseudo cyclical time and therefore find it next to impossible to see the perspective of / care about metabolism that are vastly distant in both relational spectrum of time frame and distance from the souse the information is reaching us via. (eg phone screen, graph, data, factoid)

169) The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own special technique for molding its very territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of this project. Urbanism-“city planning”-is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor. 

(170 The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanism’s con­ spicuous petrification of life can be described in Hegelian terms as a total predominance of a “peaceful coexistence within space” over “the restless becoming that takes place in the progression of time.” )

  • This could be a useful quote if I mention the ‘conservation’ dialogue of certain environmentalist movements – something that is irrational and un ecological in Peter Frase’s opinion as evolution in defined by the forwards notion of time and therefore there is no retracting to a previous form of ‘the environment’ and should therefore maybe gun to think more thoughtfully about the choice of ‘environmental decor’.

171) While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation. 

179) The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itselfurbanistic, technological or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory dialogue.

  • he wasn’t very hung up on planetary needs, those beyond society

192) The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form, including co-opted rehashes ofits negative manifestations, gives overt expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable …….. The critical truth of this destruction-the real life of modern poetry and art-is obviously concealed, since the spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory, applies its own essential strategy in its promotion of modernistic pseudo­ innovations

  • feel these phrases have some poetic utility.
  • also the spectacles function as

215) The spectacle is the material “expression �f the separation and estrangement between man and man.”

220) In contrast to the logic of false consciousness, which can­ not truly know itself, the search for critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies ofthe spectacle, and admit that it is nothing without them. By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudo-revolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws ofthought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears within the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

  • Im not sure I agree or at least my project is to prove why this might not be true. I guess I”m not attempted to our throw capitalism, merely exploring strategies to outstretch an arm of understanding across and through the thicket of thorns that is the society of the spectacle…

Ultra-Black: Towards a materialist theory of oil – Oxana Timofeeva (E-Flux)

She was basically outlining the different materialisms in order to get to an argument where nothing and everything is materialsim… the nature of matter lies so far and beyond and around us that it is entirely amongst us. Then, in a subversive way she brings in oil as a core element of the movement and value of matter to humans… therefore its shared materialism and agency with labour and slaves (all under capitalism)… and then links back oil in that it has this edge to it, as a living, throbbing, agency of and within materialism.  

The nature of nature as such can be thought as agential (Karen Barad’s agential realism); as ancestral or as a real that was already there before us (Quentin Meillassoux); or as objectal, when everything, subjects included, turns into objects (Graham Harman), or even into hyperobjects (Timothy Morton) that now, at the end of the world, rise beyond all our measurements (global warming, etc.). It can be described in older oppositions of subject and substance, or subject and object, or subject and thing (materialist dialectics and transcendental materialism, critical Marxism, psychoanalysis). It can be approached as forms of life (vitalism), as bodies (corporeal, transcorporeal, and incorporeal materialisms, or what Alain Badiou ironically calls “democratic materialism”), or as media and technology. It can be dialectically or nondialectically opposed to technology, or identified with it. It can be represented and symbolized as a constant lack—a lack of resources (extractive economy), a lack of desire (libidinal economy), etc.—but at the same time as an irreducible excess; as a realm of need and necessity, or of hyperchaos and contingency; as something to be defended and preserved (ecophilosophy, deep ecology), or as a threat—a complex of unknown, blind, and potentially destructive forces (dark materialism).

In his book In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker presents a dark materialist philosophy of nature through the lens of horror. The word “world” has, according to Thacker, three different meanings. The first is the world-for-us, or simply the World; the second is the world-in-itself, or the Earth, and the third is the world-without-us, or the Planet. The World is anthropocentric, the Earth is natural, and the horrifying Planet is supra-natural, or fantastic. Regarding the Earth, or nature, that in a significant part is “grounded by scientific enquiry,” Thacker says that it is “a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-it-itself and becomes the world-for-us.

Today these meanings are maintained in the paronymous words “economy” and “ecology.” Both economy and ecology are concerned with nature—either as a living world, environment, Umwelt, or as a source and resource. They are conjugate—beyond ecology there is always economy, and vice versa: this is our earthy home, here we keep slaves and exchange oil for money. But this is not the whole story, as beyond the doors of nature, the Greater Outdoors stands and creates anxiety. How is it possible, the world-without-us?

The fact that it is a fantasy does not mean that it can be neglected. As psychoanalysis teaches us, fantasy is at least as important as what we call reality, and perhaps even more so. The phantasmatic world-without-us is not only attached to the world-for-us, but presents its internal truth. It is uncanny and unhuman and unnatural, where the prefix un- does not merely negate, but produces a kind of displacement or resistance that dialectically turns canny, natural, human, etc., into their opposites, while maintaining the ostensible clarity and significance of the original. This is why these new concepts of nature continue to revolve around an old concept of the human, in various directions, including the transhuman, the nonhuman, the antihuman, the posthuman, or the inhuman. Such concepts seem to start from the dismissal of the human, but often end up with what I would call negative anthropocentrism, i.e., anthropocentrism of a centrifugal, rather than a centripetal, type.

  • if i want more references I can re read Mark Fishers the weird and eerie

In the world-for-us, where things operate according to the domestic laws of restricted economy, the unconscious becomes a capitalist unconscious.19 Existence under a capitalist regime is bound to a general equivalent, or a value form that can be attached to any piece of living and nonliving matter. The world as we know it consists of commodities, and among commodities there is one for which all other commodities can be exchanged: money. Money is both abstract and real; it is a real abstraction that, even if it does not really exist, produces effects in reality. However, this does not give us an entire picture of the structure of the world-for-us. The fact is that money is not an ultimate commodity. It is not an autonomous being. Behind money, there are three main commodities upon which it grows: the first is matter, the second is labor, and the third is time. All three of these are of principal interest, but here I will only address the first one.

In contrast to money, matter is not an abstraction; otherwise, it would not be matter, but an idea—this is the meaning of what Bataille calls “senile idealism.” Matter as an ultimate commodity is a concrete piece of substance, to which money clings in order to prove that it is real. Such a piece of substance historically stands for the whole material world exchanged for money. It is a material side of the general equivalent, or the Thing of the economy. In old times, the general equivalent was represented by gold. Now such a commodity is—not “officially,” but conventionally—oil.

Remember Marx, who, in his Economic Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, does not really make an essential distinction between a worker and a slave: the point is that exploitation transforms living labor into dead capital. What do a slave, a worker, and oil have in common? The very fact that they are not only the repressed, but the oppressed, not only the unconscious layer of a society in which we exchange matter, labor, and time for money, but that which is exploited, consumed, and burned up in the production of surplus. The worker is exploited as a labor force, the slave is exploited as a “black” labor force, and oil is exploited as a natural resource. If we want to grasp oil, as Hegel would say, “not only as substance, but equally as subject,” not only as the thing from the Greater Outdoors but as “the Real that is already right here,” we must admit that oil—which, like money, now stands for the whole material universe—is not a master, but a kind of ultimately inhuman black slave, one that literally occupies the lowest—and the biggest—strata of the pyramid of exploitation, and creates the very core of our capitalist unconscious.

  • brilliantly tied back in!