TechnoEcologies

and Sandmotor residency blog

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Cultural Geology

The Zandmotor expedition on the 29th of March saw presentations by Bert van der Valk, Josje Hattink, Esther Kokmeijer and finished with a rather wonderful ‘Mammoth Soup’ Sjim Hendrix and I presented to share with the audience what probably is the first tasting of Mammoth in over 10.000 years.

Sjim made a small ‘shot’ of pure mammoth-broth for everyone made from just the fossils cooked for a few hours in water, followed by a delicate soup with these ingredients:

assorted Zandmotor Fossils

Water

freshly picked Ramson (Daslook, Allium ursinum)

Birchwine (Berk, Betula)

fermented Cornel (Kornoelje, Cornus mas)

raw Reindeer meat (Rendier, Rangifer tarandus)

Sjim linked the experiment to writing by Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin ‘La Physiogie du Gout’ 1817 (Het wezen van de smaak) on three stages of tasting.

Many thanks to Satellietgroep, Villa Ockenburg, Lokatie Z for the amazing support and hospitality.

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Hunnebed Centrum

To explore past culinary practices I contacted Nadine Lemmers at the fantastic Hunnebed Centre in Borger.

She gave a quick tour of all the stuff they are working on. It is an innovative museum, with a great atmosphere. Outside are several reconstructions of prehistoric architecture some of the mayor farm-houses have only been finished in the autumn of 2014. The structures have an amazing smell and materiality. It really transports you back into time, much like I hope our culinary experiment at Villa Ockenburg will do. Nadine stressed the abundance of meat in the palaeolithic diet. Reindeer meat would be a great addition, but is harder to come by since it has a more protected status. Luckily I still have some dried reindeer meat from PixelAche in Finland! We quickly discussed prehistoric foods in the museum restaurant which actually features a mammoth. So I was in the right place!

We met Max who is setting up an ArcheoHotspot with his 3D printer. He gave me a printed ironeage barn he just finished. And we met Harry who works in a basement workshop about conserving bones and the huge collection of stones with feature scrachmarks and sand erosion and can sometimes be traced back to their place of origin.

Just behind the Centre is the monolithic structure known in Dutch as a Hennebed. It stretches out over some 15m. These things are the oldest remaining architecture in the country. It took some time to really get a feel for its age. And I wondered how they split the massive boulders to have a flat side that becomes the ceiling of the structure.

So below is a diorama that shows what the area could have looked like. The Netherlands were a very thinly populated area back then. A megalithic structure like this would be an immense gesture of human presence, which may be hard to fully appreciate in our overcrowded landscape today.

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George Monbiot on Trophic Cascades in Yellowstone Park

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I showed this object to experts at Naturalis during their monthly session where people can show things they've found. To my surprise it met with great enthusiasm. What I suspected to be some kind of horn, is infact the tusk of a very young mammoth; the part that isn't visible, where it grows from the skull. The material is notoriously difficult to preserve. I removed it shortly from the bottle of water I keep it in, to make this animated gif.

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Mammoth's Tusk

Jacqueline and I went to Naturalis for their monthly afternoon session where people can present their finds to experts. There were some very nice discoveries. The small objects that look a bit like beaver-tales are actually lamellae that are part of Mammoth teeth. The most spectacular object however turned out to be the fragile object which I thought could be some kind of horn, it was identified as a Mammoth's tusk, from a juvenile animal!!

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Finds

All the fossils I've found in November and December at the Sandmotor.

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Rib

This huge fossil was found during an early December storm. One of it's ends stuck out of the sand in the surf on the Sandmotor. I couldn't believe my eyes. Once I started dragging it out off the sand, it turned out to be what looks like a massive rib.

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Primordial Soup

I would like to explore what can be revealed of their past, to which animals they belonged, and somehow experience their origins. This leads me to suggest an experiment, to see if any taste can still be teased from these bones after such a long time? Is it possible to use ingredients of 35 thousand years old? Is it possible to taste the last Ice Age?

It is clear even to an untrained eye that these bones belong to different species. It would be great to get to know which animals they belonged to. They certainly include fragments of bones from mammoth and other mega fauna. I would be interested to prepare the bones with vegetables that were eaten by palaeolithic Europeans, such as parsnip. My knowledge of these ingredients is limited though. Any feedback is much appreciated..

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Gif

From some 500 photos, focus-stacked into 65 images, this is my first animated GIF.

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Macro

It's quite a powerful technique. Check out this tiny seed. I stuck it to some tape and photographed it as close as possible.

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an archeological view

Freezing on the Sandmotor with geological expert Bert van der Valk. He had some good news; the bones I've found definitely include Mammoth and best of all, the tooth is from a #‎Pleistocene Woolly Rhino! ‪‬ Bert pointed out distribution patterns at all scales and how to interpret them also by determining the various shellfish and other remnants. Eloquently building a picture of the NorthSea area over various time-scales.

Notes in Dutch:

gereduceerd milieu / reductie: toestand in de natte bodem na verloop van een chemisch proces waarbij het natte zand zwart kleurt door de reductie van van drie waardig ijzer (roestkleur) naar twee waardig ijzer (zwarte kleur) waarbij H2S vrijkomt. tweekleppigen: schelpdieren voorzien van twee meestal symmetrische kleppen strijklengte: lengte van windactie op een wateroppervlak stuifketel: een secondaire duinvallei, een zeer grote stuifkuil diatomeeënschuim: diatomeeën zijn eencellige wiertjes. Na afsterven van die wiertjes is het afvalproduct zichtbaar als schuim, een bruine waas op het natte zand, of gedroogd als een dunne korst op het stand. opperhuid: het dunne vlies op de buitenzijde van levende schelpen zandverplaatsing door wind is er in drie vormen: - in suspentie (fijn materiaal) - salterend (of stuiterend-gewone zandkorrels) - kruipend over de grond (de zwaarste korrels) wind granule ripple: ribbelvorm met alleen nog de grofste (zwaarste) korrels, die over de bodem rollen (omdat ze te zwaar zijn om de lucht in te gaan) sedimenterend/accumulerend landschap: er komt zand bij erosief landschap: er wordt zand weggeblazen of weggespoeld wet van superpositie: nieuwe lagen komen bovenop oudere, dus hoe dieper, hoe ouder. Basisveen: donkere stukjesveen met soms nog een stukje riet erin (oud-Holoceen) ijzeroer: roodbruine ruwe brokken ijzeroxide (Laat-Pleistoceen) soortelijk gewicht kwartszand: 2.1 g/cm3 en zand rijk aan zware mineralen : 3.6 tot 3.8 g/cm3 Wet van Badon Ghyben: in een zandig duinlichaam is de opbolling van de zoetwaterspiegel ongeveer 1/10 van de dikte van de zoetwaterbel onder de grond. Het zoete water drijft op het zoute water eronder en eromheen.

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cultural landscape

Remarkable afternoon of exploring and discussing the landscape, science and cultural circumstances of the Sandmotor with artists Jeroen van Westen and Marinus van Dijke and urbanist Jan de Graaf. The central issue posed by Jan: Can this landscape be liberated from a strict engineering interpretation towards a more broadly cultural of metaphysical interpretation?

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Amsterdam Swampmotor

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Fossil Remains

These remnants of ancient creatures evidently present an attraction to a certain type of elderly males readily identifiable by a non-linear walking pattern and the presence of some kind of bag. It's a thouroughly despiriting sight to behold. Moving from one attractor to another they mimic the 'brownian motion' of foraging coastbirds and absolutely comb the damned place from one end to the other. Unwittingly a novel fossil-searcher becomes part of a complex web of competition.

The first step is to check the Sandmotor webpage for accurate timing of the tides. To be sure you go at least an hour before low tide. Walking to the coastline the place seems deserted, until you reach over the last ridge of sand. Thats when your hart sinks. Looking down to the edge of the water at least two or three of these grey menaces already actively scanning the place. Now your only option is finding areas they haven't been scuttling around yet. Moving around fast desperate to find an end to the bloody footsteps.

Suddenly you realise there are two low tides each day. So sporting a small wind-up light-torch the hunt shifts to the dark of the night. The noise of the sea and light of the little torch makes you feel very much exposed. The only other lights are the blinking lights of ships at the horizon. Only an absolute idiot would come out at 11 at night with a shitty torch to look for any signs of the massive bones that must be here when the other guys are away. The full absurdity becomes evident when a police patrol shows up and you hide behind the only other object around, which is a large wooden pole. They've spotted you anyway ofcourse. Then comes the short interview about what the hell you're doing there. You go for the 'just having a night strole' option. That seems to work. Luckily they bugger off. And there's about 5 medium sized fragments in your bag, so not too bad right!

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Containment as a myth.

With the impact in mind, of sucking up 21 million cubic meters of benthic ecosystems from the North Sea and pouring them out on the coast, it may be hard to interpret the maxim 'building with nature' in the Sandmotor project description, but after spending a few weeks there a picture is taking shape.

A post on the open character of geoengineering.

The research methodologies applied to analyze the emergent island also reflect this ambition for openness. Scientists have exposed their research subjects and instruments to various levels of the onslaught that is the general public. Fragile wooden sticks marking out a research-area may be the only line of defense against the more sizable passers-by such as quads, kitebuggies, and the occasional teenage joyrider. Human pressures are taken as a given on the Sandmotor, both in terms of ecosystem dynamics and research conditions. The place is covered by a rich tapestry of tracks marking out various patterns of human activity. It's striking to see researchers driving straight through the fieldwork of others. At some scales anthropogenic markings almost fully erode the environmental exchanges. This level of openness must be challenging to research. Perhaps that is why indigenous research methods preclude full objectivity, because there are always particulars, disturbances and contributing factors.

Philosopher and critical theorist Timothy Morton coined the term “hyperobject" to describe objects so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend localization, like global warming or radioactive plutonium. To the mammoths, rhinos and other extinct megafauna that now lie scrambled all over the motor it probably would feel like that. It's a 4 million ton monster that slowly self-organizes like aggregate architectures, carrying an array of sensor-technology on its back. Excited scientists admit they aren't quite sure what its up to.. The semi-aquatic research arena with it's public sculpture garden of data harvesting devices represents a brave effort by the scientific community towards a shared space. Hopefully its reflected in the methodologies applied by us artists.

Epilogue: At the center of the anthropocene is a dazzling dichotomy; our influence on nonhuman life and natural processes is becoming apparent at a time when these 'other lives' have moved so far from our direct daily experience. David Attenborough can show them to us, but they are distant. We don't breath the same air. Our eyes don't meet on neutral terms. Maybe we are starting to let more life back in. Creating landscapes that do not contain life but allow it to find its way.

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Zndmtr @ DenHaag CS

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Lowpolybot

I fed a #GoogleEarth image of the motor to @Lowpolybot and this is what came out: