Solarpunkish
An idea that has been continuously presented to me in the streams I inhabit is an aestheticization of vertical forests in a sea of harmonious techno-based cohabitation between plant/animal/human… images like these are produced by people who decidedly and rebelliously choose to imagine a "hopeful" future, despite the overwhelming evidence that Business As Usual has no foreseeable end and we are heading for multitudinous catastrophe with a side of apocalypse. Although I find these utopian manifestations ravishing, I don't see them as palpable or realistic, and I worry that they might simply be feeding an educated upper-class fantasy based in the historic idealization of the sublime aspects of nature, and the conception that electronics and architecture would be the ultimate solution to all human problems.
Could it be just as hopeful to imagine the thriving of alternative lifeforms, as is quite likely?
What if the cognitive humanoid whose existence persists reveals itself to be an evolutionary descendent of seals, or octopi? What if seals and octopi are already humanoids, or in Peter Singer's sense, members of personhood? (1) Do we need something to be sentient to extend our empathy toward it? As moral agents, by what criteria do we choose moral patients, and why? Is it to avoid moral corruption in ourselves, or is it because we in fact see the value of the subject, object, thing, in itself? What might it mean for a person to be moral towards a plant, a chair, a building, a river, a biosphere, a virus, a political system, a moth? We don't even know a world where we extend the same level of empathy to all people, so it is very difficult to even begin to imagine the logical next steps.
In order to deconstruct and to question, in the way that Derrida bulkily alludes to, we need to point and create terminology.(2) Morton says that it is important to acknowledge wholes, holism, but it is just as important to see the parts, and seeing to that the parts might add up to the whole, unlike the label of humanity, where human individuals add up to more than the conception of humanity. Morton coined the term Agrilogistics which is the idea that we have blended things together in order to colonize them more easily to further the existence of human-kind. This ideology seeks to eliminate contradiction, fear and anxiety; it smooths the world out for us, exchanging ambiguity for industrialized perception. We need to find new ways to talk about entities that capture their animacy.(3)
Erased in the process of white Western Agrilogistic development has been the contradictory narratives of other peoples' cultures. The movement for counter-cartography has been one of many tools in aiding the reclamation of territorial sovereignty for many indigenous folks, such as the aforementioned Zuni, and also several nations within Canada. (4) The extraction of big data to exploit ecological resources is not new to Google Maps, the only difference is that now people are either unwittingly or voluntarily subjecting themselves to the mining.
In Teran's 2012 cartographic work The Little Yellow House, a narrative was constructed about this image of a yellow countryside house somewhere in Denmark by democratic participation of the work online. The user can only fully experience the narrative if they provide Terran with some data through an online form. Once submitted, the user receives instructions from the artist. The first 100 participants became a part of a publication which told the story of the house. Teran's goal with this piece was to "create a work that causes us to reflect on storytelling and the distances manifest in the physical and the digital online worlds respectively. How communication changes according to speed and distance, as well as how stories can be created over the network."(5)
I am interested in creating space-time representations for the quarantined, alternatives to the evil pervasive maps that dominate broadband activity, that do not undermine or overmine the subjects, and are able to peer into inter-object relations, without anthropocentric leanings. This might mean creating a virtual object, one that exists in electron pulses, as a self-contained network, with viscous manifestations in the minds of the participants. A map does not need to be used as an economic tool, it can also be a spiritual reckoning.
1. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. London: The Bodley Head, 2015.
2. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology Without Nature.” Ecology Without Nature (blog), October 11, 2015. http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-is-agrilogistics.html.
3. Lawlor, Leonard, "Jacques Derrida", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/derrida/>.
4. Kirk Jalbert, Douglas Shields, Matt Kelso, Samantha Rubright. (2019) The power to plan: mineral rights leasing, data justice, and proactive zoning in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Environmental Sociology 5:2, pages 164-176.












