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| dust_and_shadow:fieldnotes_2 [2019-08-30 10:26] – maja | dust_and_shadow:fieldnotes_2 [2019-08-30 14:04] – cite nik |
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| <blockquote>Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. | <blockquote>Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. |
| —J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition</blockquote> | <cite>J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition</cite></blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>The Anthropocene is the time at which the human becomes truly thinkable in a non-teleological, non-metaphysical sense. The waste products in Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense, as if what the human becomes is a flickering ghost surrounded by a penumbra of flickering shadows that seem to hover around it like a distorted halo. | <blockquote>The Anthropocene is the time at which the human becomes truly thinkable in a non-teleological, non-metaphysical sense. The waste products in Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense, as if what the human becomes is a flickering ghost surrounded by a penumbra of flickering shadows that seem to hover around it like a distorted halo. |
| –Tim Morton, Humankind</blockquote> | <cite>Tim Morton, Humankind</cite></blockquote> |
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| What are the environmental politics in the North American South West, specifically to life in the desert? What are the implications for the people, plants, plastics (etc) and the environment they live in? What peculiar futures or parallel presents exist in this “Valley of the Sun”? What new worlds can emerge from a region swayed by the unpredictability of heatwaves, poor water distribution and over-enthusiastic promises of the tech industry? | What are the environmental politics in the North American South West, specifically to life in the desert? What are the implications for the people, plants, plastics (etc) and the environment they live in? What peculiar futures or parallel presents exist in this “Valley of the Sun”? What new worlds can emerge from a region swayed by the unpredictability of heatwaves, poor water distribution and over-enthusiastic promises of the tech industry? |
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| <blockquote>[T]he importance of propositions is not limited to matters of truth and falsity. Language is used to evoke attention to features of the world that another person may be missing. Perhaps someone wants me to look up at a branch in a nearby tree. She has propositional feelings of a rare bird being there. Her interest may be in my entertaining the same proposition, but the most effective method may be just to point with a certain expression on her face, or to say “look quick” with some excitement. These gestures may lead to the result better than the sober statement that there is a rare bird there. Of course, it may be that the proposition the speaker entertained was false. Perhaps the bird in the tree is of a common species. […] The propositional feeling is always clothed in some emotional tone. These are often communicated with the propositions.” | <blockquote>[T]he importance of propositions is not limited to matters of truth and falsity. Language is used to evoke attention to features of the world that another person may be missing. Perhaps someone wants me to look up at a branch in a nearby tree. She has propositional feelings of a rare bird being there. Her interest may be in my entertaining the same proposition, but the most effective method may be just to point with a certain expression on her face, or to say “look quick” with some excitement. These gestures may lead to the result better than the sober statement that there is a rare bird there. Of course, it may be that the proposition the speaker entertained was false. Perhaps the bird in the tree is of a common species. […] The propositional feeling is always clothed in some emotional tone. These are often communicated with the propositions.” |
| – Gorgias Romero, That is interesting but is it true </blockquote> | <cite>Gorgias Romero, That is interesting but is it true</cite></blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness | <blockquote>To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness |
| -Ursula Leguin, The Left Hand of Darkness </blockquote> | <cite>Ursula Leguin, The Left Hand of Darkness</cite></blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. | <blockquote>Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. |
| -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations</blockquote> | <cite>Marcus Aurelius, Meditations</cite></blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>I have also tried to make the desert my own. But none us will be able to capture and resell the lonely magic. That belongs to the High Desert and to experience it, you will have to let yourself get lost. | <blockquote>I have also tried to make the desert my own. But none us will be able to capture and resell the lonely magic. That belongs to the High Desert and to experience it, you will have to let yourself get lost. |
| – Ivy Pochoda, In the California Desert | <cite>Ivy Pochoda, In the California Desert</cite></blockquote> |
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| The purity (and dread) of the Wilderness kept at arms length, only to be occasionally appropriated for solitary transcendence, urbophobian escapism and utopian experimentation. Where both nascent and long gone ways of life overlap, a “Tech Bro Guru” becomes “The polyamourous cult leader” of Sedona wrapping a very contemporary hollowness around huckster tricks and Barnum effects. Alongside King Clone (the unassuming 11,700 year old creosote bush) lie the ruins of a vanished Pueblo Grande. And yet, here too could be found the American Gods, time-unbinding desert monks and the Dionisian world of the Carnivàle. | The purity (and dread) of the Wilderness kept at arms length, only to be occasionally appropriated for solitary transcendence, urbophobian escapism and utopian experimentation. Where both nascent and long gone ways of life overlap, a “Tech Bro Guru” becomes “The polyamourous cult leader” of Sedona wrapping a very contemporary hollowness around huckster tricks and Barnum effects. Alongside King Clone (the unassuming 11,700 year old creosote bush) lie the ruins of a vanished Pueblo Grande. And yet, here too could be found the American Gods, time-unbinding desert monks and the Dionisian world of the Carnivàle. |
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| <blockquote>All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. | <blockquote>All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. |
| — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet</blockquote> | <cite>Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet</cite></blockquote> |
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| Autobiography of Red\\ | Autobiography of Red\\ |
| Staying with the trouble\\ | Staying with the trouble\\ |
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| <blockquote>In this time of diminished expectations, I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest. | <blockquote>In this time of diminished expectations, I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest. |
| —Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World</blockquote> | <cite>Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World</cite></blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial [multispecies] recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble, (...) with less denial and more experimental justice. | <blockquote>I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial [multispecies] recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble, (...) with less denial and more experimental justice. |
| —Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble</blockquote> | <cite>Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble</cite></blockquote> |
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| {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/25203130778/ ?maxwidth=1000}}\\ | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/25203130778/ ?maxwidth=1000}}\\ |
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| <blockquote>BUILDINGS SELF-AGGREGATED OUT OF ANGLES AND shade | <blockquote>BUILDINGS SELF-AGGREGATED OUT OF ANGLES AND shade |
| –China Miéville, Kraken</blockquote> | <cite>China Miéville, Kraken</cite></blockquote> |
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| A city in a city living the experiential time of spiders, snakes and saguaro. The variable abundance of time is sensed and modulated by the antennae-centric tech industry. Deep listening technologies. Nomad tech on smart grids accustomed to oscillations of resources. | A city in a city living the experiential time of spiders, snakes and saguaro. The variable abundance of time is sensed and modulated by the antennae-centric tech industry. Deep listening technologies. Nomad tech on smart grids accustomed to oscillations of resources. |
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| <blockquote>… machines themselves – rather than destroying aura or hastening the disenchantment of the world – were granted an uncanny power to animate the inanimate, to emancipate and spiritualise “vibrant matter.” The powers of technology triggered aspirations toward an intersubjectivity that would embrace more than just humans; they lent support to the view that all elements of the world would participate in a single, living, intelligent, and perhaps divine substance. (...) Rethinking technology meant rethinking the basis of the social bond and the order of the universe and, potentially, living very different lives. Updated to the present, mechanical romanticism suggests that even if solutions must be small and local, they require a conceptual and aesthetic frame that is deep and wide." | <blockquote>… machines themselves – rather than destroying aura or hastening the disenchantment of the world – were granted an uncanny power to animate the inanimate, to emancipate and spiritualise “vibrant matter.” The powers of technology triggered aspirations toward an intersubjectivity that would embrace more than just humans; they lent support to the view that all elements of the world would participate in a single, living, intelligent, and perhaps divine substance. (...) Rethinking technology meant rethinking the basis of the social bond and the order of the universe and, potentially, living very different lives. Updated to the present, mechanical romanticism suggests that even if solutions must be small and local, they require a conceptual and aesthetic frame that is deep and wide." |
| - John Tresch, Romantic Machine</blockquote> | <cite>John Tresch, Romantic Machine</cite></blockquote> |
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| <blockquote> Spectrality, the way a thing keeps exceeding itself, or is displaced from itself, or is ecstatically outside itself (ekstasis, “ex-sistence”), doesn’t just belong to human being […] Humankind is flickering, displaced from itself, ecstatic, rippling and dappled with shadows. Shadows made not only by some other entity interacting with it, like the sun through the trees, but shadows that are an intrinsic part of the thing.” | <blockquote> Spectrality, the way a thing keeps exceeding itself, or is displaced from itself, or is ecstatically outside itself (ekstasis, “ex-sistence”), doesn’t just belong to human being […] Humankind is flickering, displaced from itself, ecstatic, rippling and dappled with shadows. Shadows made not only by some other entity interacting with it, like the sun through the trees, but shadows that are an intrinsic part of the thing.” |
| –Timothy Morton. Human Kind </blockquote> | <cite>Timothy Morton. Human Kind</cite></blockquote> |
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| Occult sciences, fictocriticism, coven studies and dust theory are common fields of study. Entrepreneurial alchemists embrace the long process of transforming zombie-utopias into compost for regenerative heterotopias. | Occult sciences, fictocriticism, coven studies and dust theory are common fields of study. Entrepreneurial alchemists embrace the long process of transforming zombie-utopias into compost for regenerative heterotopias. |
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| <blockquote>As the day comes to an end, the twilight dissolves the surfaces, absorbing their colors, leaving their reflections suspended in space. The luminous transparency in open spaces condenses into beams and phosphorescence. Things lose their separatedness. The shadows advance over the colors and the contours that they outlined are lost. Darkness infiltrates the landscape, obliterating its paths and filling up its open planes. Overhead the blue of the atmosphere recedes and the starlights drift over unmeasurable distances. | <blockquote>As the day comes to an end, the twilight dissolves the surfaces, absorbing their colors, leaving their reflections suspended in space. The luminous transparency in open spaces condenses into beams and phosphorescence. Things lose their separatedness. The shadows advance over the colors and the contours that they outlined are lost. Darkness infiltrates the landscape, obliterating its paths and filling up its open planes. Overhead the blue of the atmosphere recedes and the starlights drift over unmeasurable distances. |
| —Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative</blockquote> | <cite>Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative</cite></blockquote> |
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maja