Making the Geologic Now
Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life
Edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse
Print Book Design by Reg Beatty & Jamie Kruse
Web-Book Design by Alli Crandell
Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2012/2013. 262 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615766362. OPEN-ACCESS download + interactive web-book + $39 [€35.00] in print: paperbound/7 X 10 in.
INTERACTIVE WEB-BOOK HERE: GeologicNow.com.
punctum books relies on your support
Before you start to download your new book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, a non-profit independent press. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will be used to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can't find a welcoming port elsewhere. Vive la open-access.
Donate now* (opens in new tab)
Download "Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life" book now (opens in new tab)
*All donations are voluntary and not required to download this book.
Surveying a vast range of topics and practices—from humans as dominant geomorphic agents, to forces and time scales that challenge the very limits of an anthropocentric worldview—Making the Geologic Now argues for the central place of a geological imaginary in contemporary culture. From metaphor to material, the “geological turn” in art, design, architecture, and poetry, a result of the increased presence of geological realities in everyday life, is shown to be a catalyst for new considerations of how the human and non-human, the ecological and the ethical, are increasingly intertwined. The volume’s engaging selection unpacks the layers of our urgent relationship to the geologic, with its deep time and prospective futures, from our destruction of coral reefs and the storing of nuclear waste, to meteoritic dust that fall on us daily, and the hundreds of man-made satellites now in geostationary orbit around the earth.
~João Ribas, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are actively exploring and creatively responding to the geologic depth of “now.” Contributors’ ideas and works are drawn from architecture, design, contemporary philosophy and art. They are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable or possible if humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as a partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences.
Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. As a condition of contemporary life in 2012, the geologic “now” is lived as a cascade of events. Humans and what we build participate in their unfolding. Today, and unlike the environmental movements of the 1970s, the geologic counts as “the environment” and invites us to extend our active awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core.
*Image from Trace – cameraless records of radioactive contamination: Shimpei Takeda, 2012 (photo by Keisuke Hiei)
A new cultural sensibility is emerging. As we struggle to understand and meet new material realities of earth and life on earth, it becomes increasingly obvious that the geologic is not just about rocks. We now cohabit with the geologic in unprecedented ways, in teeming assemblages of exchange and interaction among geologic materials and forces and the bio, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. As a reading and viewing experience, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move through culture, sounding an alert from the unfolding edge of the “geologic turn” that is now propagating through contemporary ideas and practices.
*Image from Art and Environment and Place: Appalachia (Kayford Mountain, West Virginia), Erika Osborne, 2011
Contributors include: Matt Baker, Jarrod Beck, Stephen Becker, Brooke Belisle, Jane Bennett, David Benque, Canary Project (Susannah Sayler, Edward Morris), Center for Land Use Interpretation, Brian Davis, Seth Denizen, Anthony Easton, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Valeria Federighi, William L. Fox, David Gersten, Bill Gilbert, Oliver Goodhall, John Gordon, Ilana Halperin, Lisa Hirmer, Rob Holmes, Katie Holten, Jane Hutton, Julia Kagan, Wade Kavanaugh, Oliver Kellhammer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Janike Kampevold Larsen, Jamie Kruse, William Lamson, Tim Maly, Geoff Manaugh, Don McKay, Rachel McRae, Brett Milligan, Christian MilNeil, Laura Moriarity, Stephen Nguyen, Erika Osborne, Trevor Paglen, Anne Reeve, Chris Rose, Victoria Sambunaris, Paul Lloyd Sargent, Antonio Stoppani, Rachel Sussman, Shimpei Takeda, Chris Taylor, Ryan Thompson, Etienne Turpin, Nicola Twilley, Bryan M. Wilson.
Elizabeth Ellsworth is an artist and Professor of Media Studies, The New School for Public Engagement, New York City. Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer, and independent scholar working in Brooklyn, New York. Ellsworth and Kruse are co-directors of smudge studio, an art collaborative founded in 2005. smudge works across graphic and web design, data and field research, public pedagogy and communication (including blogging), and aesthetic response. They use media to visualize or “signal” invisible forces (earth forces as well human forces) that shape natural and built environments with great consequence, but about which there is little cultural awareness. smudge’s current projects invent ways to think and act at junctures of public media design and use, the social production of knowledge, and disruptive change. They translate abstract and complex ideas, situations, and data into images, objects, experiences and environments that support experimental thinking. Within smudge’s hybrid practice, they are concerned with how to invent aesthetic provocations that assist humans in feeling for themselves the reality of contemporary forces and scales of change (natural and human-made).
Anthropocene, architecture, art, climate change, deep time, design, Earth studies, eco-studies, environmental studies, geo-philosophy, geology, media studies, photography, terra-forming
Trackbacks For This Post
68 Comments
-
Hi. I would like a copy of the printed version. Thanks
-
I would like to order the printed version – how shall I do so?
-
Hello, I would like to pre order a copy of the printed version of the book.
thanks -
As soon as the print version of the book is available [likely mid- to late December], we shall re-contact everyone who leaves a message here and share the link for purchasing the book. Signed, the punctum development team
-
I’d love to preorder a copy. So excited for this publication!
-
Hi there: please let me know. Thanks.
-
Hi! I would like a print copy of the book please
-
-
Hello, I would also like to know about the printed version of this publication. Thank you!
-
Hi. I would like to order a copy of the printed version. Thanks
-
I would like to order a printed copy! Congrats to all involved! Paul Lloyd Sargent rules.
-
Please let me know when the book is published.
-
Yep I would like a printed copy please! thanks
-
interested in the pdf link and the publication, thanks.
-
Yes, I’d like to order the print book. Thanks.
-
Yes, I too would like to order the print version.
-
Would like to order copies for our University Library please!
-
More info on ordering the printed book? Thanks!
-
Hi Everyone: just a quick update to say that we are very close to finishing the e-version of the book [both a downloadable PDF version of the print book as well as a special interactive web-based version of the book], which will be available tomorrow, Tuesday, Dec. 4th, and shortly thereafter, we’ll have info. on how to purchase a print version. Best, Eileen Joy, Director, punctum books
-
I want to order one printed copy, Please!
-
I would love a printed copy
-
Hi there.
I would LOVE a printed copy. (One of my photos is in the book – courtesy of the Land Arts of the American West program- p.61 !)
-
Please let me know when the printed version is available
-
I would like info on the print books. Thanks!
-
I would like to per-order a print copy
-
I would like to order a printed book. Thank you.
-
I would like to buy a print version of Making the Geologic Now. Thanks!
-
Would like to pre-order printed book, please.
-
This looks fantastic, I would also like to pre-order a paper copy
-
I would like to order the printed book
-
would like the printed version
thank you -
Hi, I would like to preorder 2 printed copies please. Thank you
-
I’d like to order the book. Thanks!
-
I’d like to order the printed version and, depending on the price, order some to sell at the gallery.
-
This is wonderful work and I would love a printed version (actually 2).
-
I’d like to get at least 5 copies of the printed version of the book.
Let me know when and how! -
I would like to order 3 printed copies of the book.
Thank you. -
Hi – this looks fantastic, I’d like to order a printed version.
-
I would like a print version too- thanks.
-
I would like to order a print copy of the book.
-
I would like to order a copy of the book. Thanks
-
I would like the printed book please!
-
Looking forward to the announcement of the print version.
-
would like to order a print copy.
great project! will be recommending to people. -
When will the print copies be available?
-
Hi Lindsay [and everyone]: the print version IS forthcoming; it’s just taking a little longer than we had anticipated, but we’re almost there!
-
-
Yes please.
-
We would like to purchase a print copy.
-
I’ll take a book when they become available.
-
dot for preorder!
-
I would love to preorder a copy of the book. Thanks so much.
-
Hi, I would like to order a print copy of this book. Thank you!
-
I would like to order the printed version. Thanks.
-
I would like to pre-order a copy of the book. Thanks!
[...] contamination” is featured in smudge studio’s forthcoming edited collection of visual essays, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life. For Trace, Takeda, exposes soil contaminated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to [...]
[...] image, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (punctum books 2012,), from the Feasibility Project (Rachel, NV), smudge studio [...]
[...] Making the Geologic Now. Share this:ShareTwitterFacebookDiggRedditStumbleUponEmailPrintLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. [...]
[...] is the day! We’re unleashing our edited collection Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life and the domain GeologicNow.com tomorrow evening. All are invited to join us at Studio-X NYC (180 [...]
[...] Ellsworth’s co-edited book Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, published by Punctum Books, is being launched tonight at Columbia University’s Studio X [...]
[...] Ellsworth’s and Jamie Kruse’s (MA 2005) co-edited book, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, was published by Punctum [...]
[...] by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, has many entries on waste. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many of what Samantha MacBride [...]
[...] has made us, as well as ‘we’ becoming agents of geology (this seminar was fun; here’s free in-tray fodder for rock [...]
[...] printed book is available for order directly from the punctum website for $39 + shipping. We’re very excited to have this third mode of distribution available for the project, in [...]
[...] new book, with an impressive line-up of contributors is now out from Punctum. It is available as a download or purchase here, and has a great [...]
[...] Thomspon’s short but sweet article, “The Dark Flight of Micrometeorites,” in Making the Geologic Now, illustrates the mundane commonality of tiny debris from outer space. Xenogarbology, or the study [...]
[...] of you know, smudge projects have tended to be text-intensive (a deck of cards, a field guide, a book etc.). Look Only at the Movement is also backed by tall stacks of research, maps and documents. [...]
[...] thrilled that Friends of the Pleistocene, Oliver Kellhammer, our friend and a contributor to Making the Geologic Now, and Oliver’s compelling essay and project “NeoEocene,” are all woven into the narrative [...]
[...] publisher google books [...]
[...] This essay forms part of ‘Making the Geologic Now’ online publication; a Smudge Studio project. Buy Now! [...]