1/03/21

hmmm where have I got to.

I have reached a point where I now roughly what I want from this project;

I want to create an object that questions temporalities of resistance. I’m interested in the juxtaposition of acts of residence… sandwiching these different forms into on object. acts of resistance can be as simple as disturbing the usual speed of action and production under capitalism. slow acts of resistance could be as simple as walking. as listening. as simple as finding ways to BE with non humans. this idea interesting has some connection to traditional protest whereby that accumulation of bodies, walking, disrupt spaces…

traditional social protest is often about the multiple bodies working together. its about body to body. walking can also be a individuals acts of protest. about the body to non body. this has a different time scale associated with it. often not appearing to be pretest but acting as resistence in the process…. (how can i bring sound into this…)

I’m interested in how an object could be designed with this purpose in mind.

how could this object then also enact other forms of resistance. how could resistance manifest as a a disruptive forces in a more outward sense. objects that use materials that have the potential to degrade and return to the earth in a practical way, changing the physical cartography of the site and even the way in which a community use that space

  • a history of bio bombs… and bio terroisms
  • other industries that are being developed that fly in the face of the ups climate agreements

Im currently most interested in how I might use both the action of walking and the action of planting as two forms of resistance. the walking may allow for a protester to feel a place in a new sense. the action of gardening (perhaps the tabocco plant) may allow for a community to become involved in the conditions of a place more personally – creating new cartographies as the garden…

  • what know more about cumbrias relationship to its colonial history – as a large port for the importation of tobacco

It seems what I’m mainly interested in is the way in which relating to local ecologies and understanding their autographic qualities has the potential to to create community engagement in the issue at hand. an individual can be involved both in the ‘slow act of resistance’ and in the future acts of ‘resistence” through disrupting a place.

Cumbrian coal mine

am thinking about more specific governmental decisions that are gestural of the lack of action of top down order… and how the cumbrian cola mine is a perfect symbol of this.

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this coal mine is the first to be constructed in 30 years and is due to close the year before the uk target of net 0 emissions…

 communities and local government secretary is Robert Jenrick.

from the independent

‘and the government’s decision not to intervene flies in the face of Boris Johnson’s new climate targets for the UK, which would see a reduction of 68 per cent in annual carbon emissions by 2030.’

^ https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/cumbria-coal-mine-2050-climate-change-b1801364.html

‘The mine is projected to increase UK emissions by 0.4Mt CO2e per year.1 This is greater than the level of annual emissions we have projected from all open UK coal mines to 2050.’

‘The decision to award planning permission to 2049 will commit the UK to emissions from coking coal, for which there may be no domestic use after 2035. 85% of the coal is planned for export to Europe.’

Letter: Deep Coal Mining in the UK

Ed Gemmell, the managing director of Scientists Warning Europe, said: “[It] would be disastrous for the net zero plans for the UK and send an appalling signal to the rest of the world in this critical year for the climate. Many top scientists now regard even 2050 as recklessly too late [to reach net zero emissions] if there is to be any chance of keeping the world under 1.5C. The majority of councils in the UK have made climate emergency declarations – Cumbria county council risks being the black sheep of the family if it allows this coalmine to go ahead.”

The proposed £165m mine would produce 2.7m tonnes a year of coking coal, for use in industrial applications such as steel-making, as opposed to thermal coal for burning in power stations. Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, told MPs last month that this meant the mine should be allowed to go ahead, as it fell outside government pledges to phase out coal for electricity.

climate scientist James Hansen wrote to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, saying that pressing ahead with the mine would show “contemptuous disregard for the future of young people”. Developing country experts also said that for the UK to open a new coalmine would be “shocking”, and would damage its credibility as host of the Cop26 summit

^ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/county-council-to-reconsider-cumbria-coal-mine-application

information I would like to gather on this site

  • reasons for unemployment – as conservatives are using the card that the mine will provide 500 jobs for the citizens of Whitehaven – but why is unemployment so bad in cumbria
  • reason for wanted to provide our own coking coal for steel production as we need steel to make renewable energy infrastructure like wind turbines. to avoid having to import the coking coal needing for the the steel production the government claim that creating our own would save on emissions on importing (and therefore transporting) coal… YET there has been vast developments, especially in Sweden, on fossil-free steel production.
  • look into the planning permission
  • what is the effect of coal mining on local environments ie how will the environment of cumbria affected/impacted?
  • what is the local environment of cumbria like more broadly – in terms of wildlife, local craft, history
  • Whithaven locals perspective on the plan. they are traditionally a mining town and as employment is so high it is unlikely its swings in the direction of the anti’s…

I would like to find relevant environmental information about cumbria in order to come up with the correct and most effective protest intervention – one that can be weaved into the an intervention that is ‘slow’ and resistant.

^ such crap information visualisations… would it be useful to re design these… would more compelling imagery make an impact?

  • Historically Cumbira and specifically Whithaven grew great economical potency due to coal mining and its colonial importation of tobacco….
    • also apparently evaporating brine in pans to make salt… should i do this?

what do i still want to know….

  • easy in which unemployment could be resolved in cumbria…
  • ecological circumstances

22/02/21 – juxtaposed acts of resistance

could contrast the types of protesting the action or inaction of governmental bodies. choose site to protest an issue of compare types of resistance.

being ‘in habitat’

how can slowness and and sensory experiences of ecology transform that relationship and act as an inactions of resistance as much as actions are.

embodying this through the garden. the habitat. how can wearing become a reconnection and a slowness, an understanding of a place through an embodiment

reading: isabella stengers, hélène Frichot, lisa blackman

how to compare different temporalities of protest

objects that hold potential for both slowness and fastness. incorporating disruptive actionable qualities into objects that infer slowness.

could use lichen as the symbolic basis… the structure gestured to in th design of a wearable resistance body armature. the nature of feeling the being with the habitat of local lichens to a given place… but this structure could also hold the potential to be distractive… find a way to fuck with the cite… the cite maybe being the Cumbria coal mine.

very early sketches of this idea… would like to do a speculative drawing of it and perhaps research better how it might be modular… and how to embed lichens/cultivate them in a biodegradable structure

22/02/21 – temporalities of protest

thinking about what it means to protests. watched all day symposium of talks by artists and thinkers dealing with environmental degradation.

the talk from lydia hallow really resonated with me. her practice is around a specific site, and slowness as an act of resistance – taking from isabella stingers work on slowness and acts of resistance. i wonder how this can apply to traditional types of protests and how one can enact different practices as a way to enact different types of protests

protest

action

resistence

inaction

where do this words fork off into different directions?

FORECASTING EARTH FUTURES paper

cartographies and instrumental sensing environments becomes and become with the cosmology of a given place. these are malleable and can be unmade, remade, demade… this comes relevant as if i were to deconstruct a cite to understand how best to re relate us to it, to attune to it.

Adam Bobbette

FORECASTING EARTH FUTURES ….

Cosmologies make worlds in their own image. They are not just interpretations of the world or ideas projected onto the world. The cosmology that states that mantle convection determines crustal movement, the shape of continents, earthquakes and volcanoes, is a product of modern earth sciences, and modern earth sciences are the product of the spaces made by global networks of instruments and laboratories. This is the modern cosmology of the earth, our myth of earth, that is enacted in space in these networks, laboratories and instruments. Forecasting earthquakes, eruptions, and tsunamis, then, becomes material performance of the cosmology of plate tectonics and a means of testing it in the world. 3 In other words, forecasting becomes a way of testing the veridiction of a cosmology. Cosmologies are models of the earth that are built and extended in real space and transform the earth into their own image. Landscapes, then, are these built models made inhabitable and lived in.

18/02/21

At this point I’ve come to a bit of halt.

I know I want to research the science behind genetic modification some more.

I know I would like to grasp a better understanding of what outcomes i really want to make so I can’t work towards them more pragmatically. although i stand by my natural process of letting the project lead the outcome, i think it would be beneficial for me as a designer if i found a stronger sense of what i really enjoyed making in terms of craft. why do I like creating speculative jewellery? I think i see body ornamentation and body-object interconnection an obvious output because it marries the possibility of making physical objects that feed my desire for aesthetics (in a reductive, i-like-to-ornement-my-own-body kind of way) and the myriad of oddities that happen when we intimately interact with physical things.

jewellery is symbolic, intimate, sensory, instructory.

it holds potential for instumentaltisiton, comradeship, community cohesiveness, pretest.

How can I find an alliance between one or some of these principles with the trustworhty nature of natural indication.

autogpahic means that something needs no translation. its index is apparent.

is it as simple as finding something that needs amplification and finding autographic means to visualise it? why would it be on the body? perhaps the body is a sensual intimate place for the new connection to information? or perhaps the body is a communal and symbolic places? perhaps the traces constricts the wearer? pass the traces releases the wearer? the gas mask is an body ornament that releases the human body. how could other ecological traces help to release the body?

another alternative to wearable objects is a metaphorical/critical reason. the object is tied and ingrained in a greater narrative. for instance; the object could gather information as its passed from person to person, worn in different ways gathering different microbial data.

the object could be critically designed to be bough and the proceeds generated reinforce the negative system the objects represents. plastics necklace profits fund fossil fuel company. naff.

I think i ulitatly want to make beautiful and word bodily objects that infer the damage of human kind though addressing something localised.

lastly, i realise i must find a more concise subject matter. this will be the largest task. to do this i might browse various websites – medium, eflux, thane with the accent bacterial article, natural geographic, new sientic ETC

the fatberg

https://strelkamag.com/en/article/fatberg-material-ecologies-and-the-complexities-of-waste

strange creatures that are an unconstrained and unintentional ecological manifestation of human activity. they are indicative of human infrastructures and wasteful tendencies, usually flushed and unseen yet here emerge as a horrifying and wondrous object of fascination. they are exhibited as if they are an achievement when they are much like the floating island of plastic waste gathering in the ocean. they hold implications for the long and enduring future make left by anthropogenic activity. like geological finds of past interveners on this planet but found far too soon. found an exhibited within its own age as if its a speculative prank…

OFFSHORE studios, demystification.com

https://demystification.co/mmittee/

outputs i really admire. they conceptually embed their project backbone into objects and how those objects are used. the beach ware they created, seemingly insignificant, is purchased a the money threads through a chain of offshore accounts and the money saved through the process of tax evasion gos back to the public and the system that this is based on is printed onto the the swimware

I’d like to be able to create objects that reflect the system their in such ametaphioicaul and physical manner.

15/02/21 – WIP

Decided that the best way to tie in all the bits and bobs would be to envision a future retrospective exhibition whereby these autographic interventions became swept up in the capitalist system yet style broke ground in turning the public attention to the intensity of the natural indications of degrading environmentals. a wrote a short bio for the work I have made so far:

Autographic means self inscribing. I am searching for a practice the looks to ways of visualising climate degradation knowledge in ways that engage and attune to publics through the power of the material world’s natural inscription. I have envisioned a future where a movement begun around this idea of ‘self-inscribing’ material traces; artists, designers and activists join to distribute and disseminate new ways to gather knowledge about our environments, especially those that engage with the climate emergency and its symptoms. As capitalist realism maintains: the lack of an ending to capitalism is apparent in this future but this does not negate a science fiction where the planet’s biodiversity prospers despite this. Below is a retrospective exhibition from one of these futures, remarking on the long and awaited turning point of humanity. Autograffitists is the name given to those that autographically graffitied our environments – this movement happened within the long and damaging years of the plastic age; also known as the Anthropocene epoch. 

Red moss GM rebellions

exploring future utilisations of gentetically modified GM plants that have autographic capacities. Red moss is a speculative material that thrives in conditions of high nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter (as opposed to most types of moss that are sensitive to such conditions and usually descries in these areas).

I have both photoshopped and physically painted moss samples to infer this speculate material.

using mapping software such as QGIS and openstreetmapper to depict a coronation between the release of this material into sewage systems and the overlap between this new natural aesthetic and the pollution of these areas. the supposed future is one where a public react to the natural occurrence of red moss and therefore drive less in these areas now that they have a visual indicator of the intensity of the areas pollution…