#post-anthropocene

[expansivemouthfeel]

The things we left behind, Kearny Marsh.

[rockhyrax]

All the things we left behind.

(A survey, September 4, 2020)

[ladythatsmyskull]

The most significant architectural spaces in the world are now entirely empty of people. The data centers, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialized agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driver-less tractors and taxis. This issue is an atlas of sites, architectures and infrastructures that are not built for us, but whose form, materiality and purpose is configured to anticipate the patterns of machine vision and habitation rather than our own. We are said to be living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet. This collection of spaces, however, more accurately constitutes an era of the Post-Anthropocene, a period where it is technology and artificial intelligence that now computes, conditions and constructs our world. Marking the end of human-centered design, the issue turns its attention to the new typologies of the post-human, architecture without people and our endless expanse of Machine Landscapes.

[rockhyrax]

landscape.174, biome rupture that which had been changed could no longer be put back

[rockhyrax]

Car carcass loop, Marine Park, 2022. As seen in my broken slit-scan sci-fi nature film ywnhx.

[rockhyrax]

Scenes from a temporally unstable post-Anthropocene. (Featuring  @longunevenhair as Vulpine Chorus!)

[rockhyrax]

landscape.115, emission totem

Their forgotten structures continued a process of miasmal venting for centuries afterwards.

On Etsy.

[towardsaspeculativenature]

In General Intellects, I offer condensed versions of twenty-one leading thinkers across a range of fields. but I did not include figures in anthropology, as I am still working my way through reading in what's going on there. I have been finding some exciting stuff. Elsewhere, I wrote about Anna Tsing and Achille Mbembe and Eduardo Viveros de Castro. Here I offer a critical account of the recent work of Bruno Latour on the occasion of the publication of his lectures Facing Gaia.

“We would have to be able to introduce an opposition, not between nature and culture this time (since the incessant vibrations between the two are what drives us crazy), but between Nature/Culture on the one side and, on the other, a term that would include each one of them in a particular case. I propose to use the term world, or ‘worlding,’ for this more open concept, defining it… as that which opens to the multiplicity of existents, on the one hand, and to the multiplicity of ways they have of existing, on the other.” 

“For Latour it is a problem that the sciences withdrew from historicity and lost connection with a lived world, but there is a risk here of losing touch with the deep strangeness of the nonhuman world that the inhuman practices of labor and science touch and model.”

“As Paul Edwards notes in his account of it, earth science is a simulation science. It is dependent on the inhuman technics of the stack, of third nature, of planetary computation, satellites, the no less difficult technics of international scientific cooperation. Stack-based, information-based conflict puts one simulation up against another: earth science versus financialization.”

“The global view of the universe is one that is abstract, universal, and not situated. It ignores the immunological functions necessary to life. And indeed that may be the case. The decision here is whether to further develop the artifice of the sphere to include in the simulation its conditions of existence, or to think without it, and return to the territoriality of the past — and all that implies.”

“This bubble world, inherited from Christianity, has an odd complication. It is reversible. Are the heavens or the earth where God is to be found? What is peripheral to what? It’s a duality that persists into modern philosophy: Materialism versus idealism. Is nature or reason at the center of the sphere?”

“Modernity is not a passage from mystification to enlightenment, but rather a passing from mutual revelation of the city of man and of god, to that of realizing city of god on earth.”