Allen, Jamie
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Being Eaten
Of the concerns of the project of Western, modern design, archi- tecture and culture, procuring food for ourselves and keeping ourselves from becoming food for other creatures, is central amongst them. How we eat and avoid being eaten, keeping our- selves on top of the food chain(s), constitutes metabolic anthro- pocentrism, or metabolic privilege, that also clouds and trauma- tizes the communal act of consume(ation). Yet the acts of eating and being eaten can help understand life «as in circulation, as a gift from a community of ancestors... flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins» (Val Plumwood). The whole planet is conceived as a giant stomach, pre-preparing photosyn- thetic energies and unpalatable materialities so they can be ab- sorbed into our digestive system, our bloodstreams, our organs and neural tissues. «Plants and the space they occupy are just as much a part of man as his mouth, his teeth or his stomach... The whole globe in splendid flight around the sun is a part, an organ, of every individual human» (Silvio Gesell) As ecologically related and embodied beings, we also exist as food for other beings, even as «the human supremacist culture of the West makes a strong effort to deny [...] that we humans can be positioned in the food chain in the same way as other animals.» (Val Plumwood) Thinking and connecting anew with our own eco- logical intimacy couples the «gut-level intimacy» human beings have with deep-time planetary processes and with the globally systematized, mediated, infrastructural existence. These are imaginaries with potentials, as Huiying Ng writes, to «metabolize hope».
Shift Register: The Eye Altering
Depuis des millénaires, les vertus préservatrices et thérapeutiques des distillats de pétrole ont donné lieu à d’étranges pratiques corporelles: embaumer les morts de goudron, baigner les vivants de naphtalène, et enduire les nouveaux-nés de vaseline. De manière similaire, la plupart des traitements pharmaceutiques à prise entérale (interne) dérivent de matières premières d’origine pétrochimique. À travers la fabrication de produits d’application cutanée à partir de substances pétrolières, ce workshop proposé par Shift Register (shiftregister.info/) observera l’empreinte mutuelle des matières fossiles terrestres et des corps humains. Il permettra de discuter le paradoxe suivant lequel les combustibles fossiles, d’origine naturelle et organique, retournent aux corps pour alimenter leur régénérescence, leur santé et sublimation.
Fieldtalks, at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia
What would a conversation with a piece of asbestos, or a piece of plastic stranded on the shore of the Schuylkill River be like? And how could a conversation transpire, between things and researchers and other things, if they landed in the same place and found for themselves a common language? Imprinted by Philadelphia’s singular industrial and technological history, the soils, water systems, and infrastructures of the Delaware Valley tell a story of the Anthropocene, the contentious and debated terminology for this new and anthropocentric geological era in which human activities have forever altered the Earth. For the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia (ACP), continent. attempts to listen to the material utterances of sites that voice intertwined economic, technological, and political histories of The Athens of America, a city, a factory, a riverbed, a valley, an escarpment. Collaborating with researchers, activists, scientists and student groups, continent. conducts a set of field walks and discussions that gather objects, samples, sounds, stories, and conversations. We might visit former asbestos production areas at Ambler, call on the developments around Philly’s harbour and waterfront developments, check out conditions along the Schuylkill River and will perchance examine archives at the Academy of Natural Sciences, amongst other areas of interest. Brought to the APC to constitute an anthropocenic evidence locker, a sample table for the technosphere, these artifacts will provide material interfaces and witnesses in the institutional ecosystem of the campus.Inviting more human and linguistic beings to think with and through these collected materials, continent. will issue a series of recorded audio interviews, subject and objects in discussion: Fieldtalks is a continent. podcast at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia. Based on observations and collections of materials at symptomatic and Anthropocenic sites, continent. hosted and recorded Fieldtalks in and around the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia. Participants were invited to think about and bring along documents, objects, artifacts, images, texts that speak to their experience of industrial activity and ecological interactions in the region. Fieldtalks, at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia is a collaboration the ANTHROPOCENE CAMPUS PHILADELPHIA (ACP), Scott Knowles and his students preceding the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.
Nature as Ecological Infrastructure
"I have already said that we think like the world; now I am saying that the world thinks like us." — Michel Serres A number of problematic, all-too contemporary terminologies have emerged of late to attempt description of conditions on a planet Earth that has been rendered the object of human manipulations. In the ‘anthropocene', which precipitates and is precipitated by the ‘technosphere', the earth is manipulable, informational and mediatic relations to nature are turned into an infrastructureal relation of access and exchange. This just as human infrastructures proliferate at reticular scales, making them seem more and more ‘natural.’ Our activities of communication and networking, signal-derivation and algorithmic computation provide ample empirical conditions wherein the difference between the materiality of biospheres, lithospheres and hydrospheres and the media, signaletic and ‘cultural' activities of humans tends toward the in finitesimal. Specifically we witness with increased frequency places and spaces where ’technical infrastructure’ and ‘environmental ecologies’ interact, are antagonistic or are indistinguishable. Our all-over informational environments of data and our situated, earthly geologies of media and communications overlap in a thinking of the world as what it always has been: in-formation. The increased frequency of encounters between nonhuman ecologies and media infrastructures (sharks and undersea cabling, cloud computing servers and actual clouds, AC power transformers and magnetoreceptive ants) recount a geopolitic of the nonhuman and technological that is as violent as it is revealingly constructive. These are ambiguities that need to be operationalised, subverting and reorienting techno-capitalism toward more equitable, polyvocal and ecological means and ends.