Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life
- Edited by Elisabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse
Published on December 4, 2012 by punctum books
- Pages
- 262 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 7⤫10 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-0-615-76636-2 (Paperback)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: ART006010
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: AGC, FXE
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(opens in new tab), 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.
Contents
Frontmatter (i–x)
Elisabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse
Introduction (5–26)
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse
Enter the Anthropocene: Age of Man (28–33)
Elizabeth Kolbert
A New Element, A New Force, A New Input: Antonio Stoppani's Anthropozoic (34–41)
Etienne Turpin, Valeria Federighi
From Rock Art To Land Art/From Pleistocene To Anthropocene (42–45)
William L. Fox
Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time (46–55)
Don McKay
Modeling Collaborative Practices in the Anthropocene (56–61)
Bill Gilbert
Exposing the Anthropocene: Art and Education in the 'Extraction State' (62–66)
Erika Osborne
What is the Exponential? (68–68)
Seth Denizen
The Dark Flight of Micrometorites (69–71)
Ryan Thompson
Packaging Sludge and Silt (72–78)
Stephen Dredge Research Collaborative (Becker, Rob Holmes, Tim Maly, Brett Milligan
Inner-City Glaciers (79–82)
Chris Neal MilNeil
Imagining the Geologic (83–89)
Janike Kampevold Larsen
Ultra-Diamond / Super-Value (90–93)
Oliver Goodhall, David Benqué
The Not-So-Sold Earth: Remembering New Madrid (94–98)
Julia Kagan
Distributed Evidence: Mapping Named Erractics (99–105)
Jane Hutton
Landscapes of Erasure: The Removal-And Persistence-Of Place (106–110)
Paul Lloyd Sargent
Being With(in) the Geolithic: Internet as Shamanic Tool (111–114)
Anthony Easton, Rachel E. McRae
Land Making Machines (115–122)
Brian Davis
Space-Time Vertigo (123–129)
Brett Milligan
Fertilizing Earthworks (130–134)
Chris Taylor
Blank Stare (10 Images and Corresponding Notes on the Pensive in Photography and its Utility in the Face of Catastrophe, as Excerpted from A History of the Future) (136–144)
Susannah Sayler, Edward Morris, The Canary Project
Artifacts: Trevor Paglen's Frontier Photography (145–149)
Brooke Belisle
The Uneven Time of Space Debris: An Interview with Trevor Paglen (150–153)
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse
Autobiographical Trace Fossils (154–158)
Ilana Halperin
Live Through This: Surviving the Pleistocene in Southern California (159–162)
Rachel Sussman
Unconformities, Schisms and Sutures: Geology and the Art of Mythology in Scotland (163–169)
Matt Baker, John Gordon
Time and the Breathing City (170–172)
Chris Rose
Robert Smithson's Abstract Geology: Revisiting the Premonitory Politics of the Triassic (173–179)
Etienne Turpin
Jarrod Beck: Geologic Anxiety (180–182)
Anne Reeve
The Border Project (183–185)
Victoria Sambunaris
473 Inches at 60 Frames Per Second (186–187)
Wade Kavanaugh, Stephen B. Nguyen
Nothing from Nothing (188–192)
Katie Holten
Arts, Letters & Numbers: Situating Engagement with Material and Experiential Geographies (193–195)
David Gersten
Neo-Eocene (196–201)
Oliver Kellhammer
The Leslie Street Spit (202–204)
Lisa Hirmer
Trace-Cameraless Records of Radioactive Contamination (206–213)
Shimpei Takeda
Power of Configuration: When Infrastructure Goes off the Rails (214–221)
Jamie Kruse
The Nuclear Present (222–225)
Bryan M. Wilson
One Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik (226–237)
Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley
Terminal Atomic: Technogromorphological Mounds (238–242)
Center for Land Use Interpretation
Backmatter (243–258)
Elisabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse
Biographies
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(opens in new tab), 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).
Endorsements
João Ribas
curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
Additional resources
Interactive Companion Web-Book
Usage metrics
Genres
- Anthropocene
- Art+Aesthetics
- Biosphere
Keywords
- antropocene
- climate change
- ecology studies
- geology
- geo-philosophy