Anthropocene Artifact Analysis

Anthropocene Artifact Analysis Research in process and Writings by Eli Block & Nicole Merola

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A RISD Research Project

Notes

Anthropocene Artifact Analysis Research in process and Writings by Eli Block & Nicole Merola

Produced in collaboration with RISD Research.

Citations

1. Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson, Charles H. Kelly, London, 1918, p.44 2. Various Contributors, Allegory of the Cave Painting, Mousse Publishing, 2015, p.1 3. Olafur Eliasson, ‘Your Waste of Time,’ 2006 4. Unknown Fields Division, Studio Description, Collaborated with Aram Mooradian for the realisation of ‘Gold Fictions,’ Unknown

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Additional Content

Artifacts Analyzed 04

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As is the Sea

Your Waste of Time

“Have you not often heard, that salt water and absence always wash away love?” (Horatio Nelson to his young wife, Fanny, 1787)1

“When we touch these blocks of ice with our hands, we are not just struck by the chill; we are struck by the world itself.3”

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The Future Will [...] Wait

Flowering Transition

Anthropologists will hypothesize whether the structures were for celebration, for gathering, for healing, for the remembrance of the dead, or for demonstrating the power of their creators.

There is pressure to make room for artificial life in global ecosystems, and, with it, the biostratigraphy of the Anthropocene will depart from anything yet recorded on Earth.

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Rare Earthenware

Allegory of the Cave Painting

The Anthropocene will witness an explosion of unconventional sediments that will disrupt established craft traditions while promoting extraordinary new ones.

“But are these indeed figures— of bodies afloat between different planes of experience [...]

Another humanity was possible and we are what it did not become.2”

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Materiality of a Natural Disaster

An Atlas of Gold Fictions

Hilda Hellström’s The Materiality of a Natural Disaster questions how human activity, the world’s natural environments, and the current makeup of the Earth’s surface influence modern craft and, through it, the planet.

“These distant landscapes—the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine ? are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives.4”

Revised:

Notes:

Written Anthology, 2014.

Building Proposal, 2015.

Ceramic Objects, 2014-5.

Ceramic Objects, 2014-5.

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Installation, 2006.

Monster Flowers, 2014-5.

Written Anthology, 2015.

Comprehensive Atlas, 2011, 2015.

As is the Sea Critical Writing in Art & Design Program Graduates, Forward by Philip Hoare.

210 pages, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-907342-85-1

Above: As is the Sea, Anthology.

“And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.1�

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Compiled in 2014, and guided by the analysis of a spectrum of past and current events, As is the Sea attempts to understand and to map the ocean, an entity so vast and so deep that it cannot be grasped in its entirety from any one experience. Throughout the anthology, students of the Critical Writing in Art & Design program at the Royal College of Art discuss the sea from a human perspective; “encompassing memoir, art criticism, fictional narrative, drama and cultural analysis—[this pocket book] draws the reader through the ocean’s strata, from the sunlit surface to the darkest abyss” (214). The writings in the book are collected into individual layers of the sea—the bright epipelagic, the twilight filled mesopelagic, the darkening bathypelagic, and the violet-black abyssopelagic— and yet together they register as a sequence stratigraphic indicator of a much larger contemporary geological shift. By presenting a series of oceanographic snapshots, the MA student contributors grapple with the restlessness of expansive waters—waters that are at once constant, having been present on the Earth for billions of years, and ever-changing, feeling somehow more unique now than at any point previously. As is the Sea puts present humanity’s relationship with the ocean on display. Approaching the sea from a range of geographic and temporal scales, the book highlights the diversity of human-marine interactions while simultaneously establishing the ocean as endlessly rearranging. Because the works of As is the Sea are presented through a constant human lens, the movement and tumult of the ocean is made visible. The anthology makes clear that the sometimes-calm sometimes-tempestuous and always-variable sea, at once entity and metaphor, is itself an agent of change. We look into the sea and see ourselves. As the climate of the planet shifts, the oceans writhe and make their movements felt—movements that indicate a new era defined more by the human in the context of the natural than by any previous natural history.

05 — As is the Sea

Top: Multiple copies of As is the Sea. Bottom: As is the Sea—Midnight stratum: Bathypelagic.

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Top: Betsy Dadd’s Strata, commissioned for As is the Sea, the image divides up the publication.

Bottom: Humpback whale near Réunion Island by Gaby Barathieu.

07 — As is the Sea

Top: Becoming Wilderness IX C, 2013.

Bottom: The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth III, 2012–2013 by Inka & Nickas.

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Both above: The Ocean Cleanup Array. Pictured is the center of the V, including the collection station (Erwin Zwart/The Ocean Cleanup).

09 — As is the Sea

The Future Will Just Have to Wait Alice Theodorou. Digital renderings, 2015. Royal College of Art Graduate Thesis

Above: “The Future Will Just Have to Wait” by Alice Theodorou. This image depicts a scenario where world surface temperature has risen by 4 degrees by the year 3000.

“The future will just have to wait’ explores an alternative scenario for the controversial Mount Pleasant site in Farringdon. In stark contrast to the current consented scheme, this alternative proposal has been considered in the context of a 10,000-year master plan. This prolonged construction sequence aims to promote long-term thinking in the planning and development of our cities by existing as a constant reference point within the ever-changing urban fabric. By anticipating the challenges that London will face over the next 10,000 years (including population growth and then decline, rising sea levels, stricter energy targets, future space exploration and language obsolescence), the building addresses generational-scale questions and sets the agenda for the sustainable growth. To ensure its own longevity, the building utilises a series of caryatids and atlantes as its structural support, exhibiting the evolution of the human form as a constant reminder of our own temporality.” ~Alice Theodorou

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“The Future Will Just Have to Wait” generates a speculative future in order to draw attention to flawed thinking in the present. Prompted by the economically driven short term planning taking place in contemporary London, the piece sets out a contradictory yet more ideal long term plan for sustainable architecture. Rather than seeking to design a building for the current era, Alice Theodorou, the architect and conceptual designer behind “The Future Will Just Have to Wait,” establishes a near-permanent habitable monument for the next 10,000 years. In so doing, Theodorou responds to human-induced climate change challenges that are beginning to be felt across the globe, altering the geology and biology of the planet. “The Future Will Just Have to Wait” therefore responds to the same phenomena that prompted scientists and cultural and environmental critics to declare that the Earth is entering an unprecedented geological epoch brought about by only a single species: Homo sapiens.

“The Future Will Just Have to Wait” functions as an Anthropocene artifact, indirectly calling attention to lithostratigraphic, chemostratigraphic, biostratigraphic, and sequence stratigraphic concerns while simultaneously registering as a lithostratigraphic signal itself. Large and imposing, with the visual weight of a stone henge’s sarsens, and yet open and spacious, borrowing from the optical precision and rational order of doric temples, the towers that Theodorou designed for her 10,000 year buildings feel truly timeless. Employing large scale human colossi, the structures are at once referential, iconic, and modern, resulting in something new that harkens to a neoclassical age.

In the post-corporate enlightenment of “The Future Will Just Have to Wait,” global longterm thinking has overcome the pitfalls of greed. The guardian kouros within the structure uphold its righteousness, aiding each other and supporting human progress—a democratization of Atlas supporting the World. And yet the ideal pillars of men and women crumple and strain under the weight of the towers; Alice Theodorou doesn’t deign to suggest that confronting environmental challenges is easy. Rather, the form of the building suggests that producing stability through the rise and fall of populations, the swelling of the sea, and the turnover of information is hard work. Still, the piece asserts that a sustainable future is worth striving for at all points in time.

Ultimately, “The Future Will Just Have to Wait” functions as a gateway into considerations of the long now, an age in which longterm thinking comes into balance with the rapid development of the present. It places human agency on par with the geologic, asserting that, despite grave cultural and environmental hurdles approaching in the near future, humanity has the potential to generate appropriate responses to future challenges. In the fullness of time, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years from now when Alice Theodorou’s hypothetical monuments have crumbled, they will be wondered over by future archaeologists, who will come to recognize their materiality but speculate over what precedent impelled the people of the past to construct such enduring structures. Like Stonehenge itself, anthropologists will hypothesize whether the structures were used for celebration, for gathering, for healing, for the recognition and remembrance of the dead, or for demonstrating the intelligence, sophistication, and power of its creators; in reality, we can only hope the answer will be all five.

11 — The Future Will Just Have to Wait

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Clockwise from top left: All images from “The Future Will Just Have to Wait” by Alice Theodorou— The Collapse of the European Union, 2040; The Threat of Nuclear War, 2049; The Depletion of World Lead Resources, 2049; The Great Exhibition, 2151.

13 — The Future Will Just Have to Wait

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Clockwise from top left: All images from “The Future Will Just Have” to Wait by Alice Theodorou— The Depletion of World Sand Resources, 2200; The English Language Has Become Unintelligible, 2930; 20m Rise in Sea Level, 4500; Underwater Lighthouse, 12,000

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Rare Earthenware Unknown Fields Division, Kevin Callaghan (Ceramicist), Toby Smith (Photographer). Black stoneware and radioactive mine tailings, 7 minute film, 2014-5. Shown at “What is Luxury?” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2015.

Above: The highly restricted Bayan Obo Rare Earth mine. The treasure mountain deposit is certainly the worlds largest and, as of 2005, responsible for 45% of global rare earth metal production. Image from “Rare Earthenware” by Unknown Fields Division.

“Rare Earthenware” traces the origins of those unique materials required for the production of high-end consumer electronics and green technologies.

Liam Young and Kate Davies, the founders of Unknown Fields Division, Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, and Liquid Factory, follow the supply chains of tech goods from stores to ports to container ships to warehouses to factories all the way back to the source of the rare earth metals found in the products themselves. Tracking down the source of these materials, Unknown Fields Division arrives at a massive radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia. On the banks of this semi-liquid mine, refineries distill the valuable but extremely dilute rare earth elements that become concentrated in modern electronics.

A departure from any naturally occurring process, the refining of rare earth elements produces stockpiles of unique materials unprecedented in the history of the Earth. This new industrial diagenesis results in undeniably modern sediments that, due to their temporal isolation to the present, represent a novel stratum indicative of a new geologic age.

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By collaborating with ceramicist Kevin Callaghan, Unknown Fields Division crafts a series of thrown Ming vases—objects representative of past cultural production, contemporary material waste, and future craft traditions. Callaghan and Unknown Fields Division created three ceramic vessels each of which is in proportion with the amount of material required to distill enough rare earth metals for one of three pieces of consumer electronics: a small vessel for a mobile phone, a medium vessel for a laptop computer, and a large vessel for a car’s battery. The vases create a direct visual link between seemingly wholly artificial technological devices and their raw clay precursors. Human manufacture, design, and engineering have transformed the rare elements that pepper the earth into unrecognisable machines in a near alchemical transmutation. Elevated from dirt to commercial gold, rare earthenware alludes to the power of human industry in the 21st century. Humanity is reshaping the geological makeup of the planet at a rapid pace, collecting thin surface materials and generating opulent new objects.

As time marches on, the technology humans produce will become recycled back into rich ores that may be used themselves for yet unknown crafts. Similar to the future suggested by Yesenia Thibault-Picazo in her speculative fiction “Craft in the Anthropocene” and to the minerals generated by Cohen Van Balen for “Rare Earth,” the Anthropocene will witness an explosion of unconventional sediments that will disrupt established traditions even as they promote extraordinary new ones. Through deep time, rare earthenware will come to mark a distinctive period of human craft—a period that will either continue into the future, generating new cycles of material evolution, or that will end with the reconstitution of the Earth’s surface. In either scenario, the geologic heritage of the past will be disrupted, and a new epoch will begin, distinguished from previous eras by the distinct chemostratigraphy of globally available rare earth elements.

17 — Rare Earthenware

Background: Landscape rendering, source unkown.

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Clockwise from top left: Baotou Rare Earth Mineral Refinery tailings lake; 2 days aboard the Gunhilde Maersk; radiation scientists test the toxic clay collected from the tailings lake and find it to be 3 times background radiation; molten Lanthanum and Steel forge for production of polarized magnets. “Rare Earthenware” by Unknown Fields Division.

19 — Rare Earthenware

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Clockwise from top left: “B/NdAlTaAu” synthetic conglomerate produced by Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen for the exhibition “Rare Earth” in 2015; elaborated material tales which speculate about future potential substances to be mined in a far future from “The Anthropogenic Specimens Cabinet” by Yesenia Thibault-Picazo’s—from the 2013 collection “Craft in the Anthropocene”; synthetic marble in Marmoreal Black by Max Lamb for Dzek, partial slab 120 x 150h cm; technological remnants from which materials for which Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen’s “B/NdAlTaAu” synthetic conglomerate were sourced.

21 — Rare Earthenware

The Materiality of a Natural Disaster Hilda Hellström; Radioactive soil, 2012. Royal College of Art Design Product Thesis

Above: Vessels made from radioactive soil from “The Materiality of a Natural Disaster” by Hilda Hellström.

Similarly to Unknown Fields Division’s “Rare Earthenware,” Hilda Hellström’s “The Materiality of a Natural Disaster” questions how both the places from which materials are sourced and the current makeup of the Earth’s surface influence modern craft. However, Hellström’s objects go further, commenting on the negative ways humans have impacted the globe by creating unusable objects form what would otherwise be perfectly suitable material. Unlike “Rare Earthenware,” where purely the material, rather than the object makes the statement, in “The Materiality of a Natural Disaster,” it is Hellström’s choice to produce tableware from polluted ground that draws the viewer’s attention.

Hellström’s vessels are primitive and rough, derived from the soil of one of the last rice fields left within the Nuclear Exclusion Zone surrounding the melted Daiiji powerplants of Fukushima, Japan. The soil is contaminated with radioactivity, and cannot be used for the production of food; in the same way, Hellström’s vessels are contaminated and thus unusable for food storage—a true waste of earth.

By indirectly polluting the environment with a thin dusting of radioactivity, human activity is changing the chemostratigraphic signature of the Earth. “The 22

Materiality of a Natural Disaster” registers this pollution by calling attention to the disconnection between humanity and the natural world. A single earthquake, the eponymous natural disaster, wrecked the human constructs of an entire geographic region and spilled radiation into the worlds oceans. Hilda Hellström’s tableware effectively communicates the contemporary disconnect between humans and the natural environment by forcing the production of craft objects that should never have been made, and yet are the true, complete result of several facets of human industry. Rather, Hellström’s vessels convey the truth in the changing relationship between humanity and the world; they elucidate how human activity and the natural world, in this case a single natural disaster, bristle, conflict, and create tension when it comes to design. Nature has destroyed the human and the human simultaneously changes the face of nature—and yet not in a constructive way. As freshly radioactive soils from the Fukushima wreckage can attest, a new material age is beginning. “The Materiality of a Natural Disaster” creates and identifies some of first key artefacts formed directly from the results of this new geologic paradigm.

23 — The Materiality of a Natural Disaster

Above: “The Materiality of a Natural Disaster”

by Hilda Hellström. Left: “Rock urns” by Hilda Hellström made from a solid cast and cnc-cut block of Jesmonite. Right page: “De Natura Fossilium” by Studio Formafantasma; “Mount Etna is a mine without miners—it is excavating itself to expose its raw materials.” “De Natura Fossilum” investigaes the culture of lava produced by the eruptions of Mount Etna and Mount Stromboli, two of the last active volcanoes in Europe. The vessels Studio Formafantasma produced (seen bottom right) are an indirect result of natural disasters.

Background: Landscape rendering, source unknown.

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Your Waste of Time Olafur Eliasson. Glacial ice, 2006.

Above: A broken piece of Icelandic glacier in transit, “Your Waste of Time” by Olafur Eliasson.

“It is a challenge to verbalise time itself, even though, paradoxically, talking takes time.

Describing time in conversation tends to take away the duration from it, as it is mostly described as an idea or concept. For me, the idea of time becomes especially abstract when we consider the history of our universe, the vast time of deep cosmology, the geological time in the history of the planet, the history of the atmosphere, the history of mountains. Vatnajökull, the glacier from which the blocks of ice in Your waste of time come, formed some 2,500 years ago; the oldest ice that still exists in it is from around AD 1200.

This span of time lies at the limits of comprehension. But it is possible to stretch our frame of reference. When we touch these blocks of ice with our hands, we are not just struck by the chill; we are struck by the world itself. We take time from the glacier by touching it. In a sense, Your waste of time is a ‘waste of time’ because I shipped the ice across the world for it to be on view for a short period of time, after which it melts away – a nanosecond in the life of the glacier. Then there’s another way in which time is wasted: we take away time from the glacier by touching it. Suddenly I make the glacier understood to me, its temporality. It is linked to the time the water took to become ice, a glacier. By touching it, I embody my knowledge by establishing physical contact. And suddenly we understand that we do actually have the capacity to understand the abstract with our senses. Touching time is touching abstraction.” ~Olafur Eliasson 26

Olafur Eliasson stresses the connection between deep time and glaciers in his magical, if short-lived, work: “Your waste of time.” He simultaneously explores time as abstracted by the almost unimaginably long lives of natural monuments, the relationships between individuals, time, and age-old ice, and the role people play in determining the state of the environment. The installation plays delicately with these themes, ultimately making the viewer, who undoubtedly becomes drawn in by the wonder and mystery of the glacial fragments, touch the ice and thus become complicit in the destruction of the thing they are seeking to understand.

Layers of metaphor conceal the darkness within the installation, which draws its philosophical authority from the force of Eliasson’s will. The artist mustered the strength of human industry to move immense chunks of frozen water, only to have them melt when felt and experienced by people. Eliasson’s intention is clear, he sought to generate an environment whereby its exploration is its simultaneous ruination.

The work is made more conceptually complex when one contemplates the time required for the glacier from which the ice blocks were taken to form, the time the glacial ice remained in place on the Southern Coast of Iceland, and the time it took to move the pieces from their place of origin and install them in a museum. The first two of these time sequences are long, and the final is quite short. As Olafur Eliasson writes, the glacier formed over 2,500 years ago, yet it un-forms in fewer than 12 months. The human interaction with the glacier quite literally undoes it. Still, these interactions offer an opportunity for people to grapple with the concept of time in the abstract.

While Eliasson posits that touching the pieces of glacier allows for individuals to understand deep time, in all reality, it seems more to imbed within the viewer a feeling of restlessness gained by the passing of time in the present. The viewer does in fact experience a wasting of time, but it is the sight of the ice melting, and not its storied history that is stressed. The inevitability of the waste of time lends the installation weight. Inevitably the ice will melt, and yet it is left up to the viewer to decide whether to speed the process, wasting time, or let it pass slowly.

By witnessing the slow destruction of the natural ice, the onlooker is reminded of environmental devastation wrought by man and of the momentum that causes events carried out in the past to continue to effect the future. Much like the glacier being moved to a warm refrigerator, so too the poles of the Earth are warmed by human activity. In his masterfully complex exhibition, Eliasson wants you to be “struck by the world itself,” but not by only the world; Eliasson also wants you to feel the immense power and potential that humans have for shaping the world they inhabit.

27 — Your Waste of Time

Background: Crater rendering by Liam Young.

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Clockwise from top left: All photos from Camille Seaman’s “Melting Away,” made over the past decade while working as an expedition photographer on small ships in the Arctic and Antarctic—here an iceberg breaches off Greenland; Evigheds Fjord, Eternity Glacier in West Greenland in September 2009; Neko Harbor, on the Antarctic Peninsula, in December 2007; In southern Greenland, thanks to warming, glaciers not only retreat but also shrink in height, leaving behind scoured rock.

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Flowering Transition: 1. Monster Flower Marcin Rusak, Andreas Verheijen (Flower Engineer), Ignazio Genco (3D Sculptor). Various flowers and materials, 2014, 2015.

Above: “Flowering Transition: 1. Monster Flower, A02 Anthurium Cymbidium Vanda 023” by Marcin Rusak.

“Longer vase life, better smell, less light blocking bacteria carrying leaves, more saturated colour, available year round for all occasions, cheaper, controlled stem sizes for easier harvesting, shipping requirement tolerant, packing efficient floral structures. This wish list, though sometimes contradictory, is a small part of all the demands we want from flowers. The decision making process, once controlled by nature, was taken over by numerous parties from the cut flower industry chain. Growers, retailers, regulators, and clients, with the help of technology, redesigned and engineered flowers for their own needs. This speculative project, looking further into the future of genetics and imagining where this path could lead, tries to incorporate all of the requirements that we have for flowers while questioning if this is really what we want them to be” (Marcin Rusak).

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With his Monster Flower series, Marcin Rusak investigates various outcomes for the genetic manipulation of flowers; in doing so, Rusak generates cultural biostratigraphic artefacts that suggest a global material transition into the Anthropocene.

The Monster Flowers that Marcin Rusak produced, in collaboration with geneticists, flower engineers, and 3D digital sculptors, are eye-catching and beautiful, and yet, like most manufactured organisms, are undeniable uncanny, possessing elements of both the familiar and the foreign. The flowers are at once alluring and repulsive, intriguing and confusing. A strange combination of the natural and the artificial, the flowers are carefully crafted from existing biological specimens, but feature traces of synthetic materials—plastic zip-ties and bits of polymer wrap—that give the viewer a sense that the transitional process Rusak suggests is not yet complete. The flowers are true biological experiments—leaves, stems, and petals grafted together but not yet healed.

Nonetheless, Marcin Rusak’s Monster Flowers, in their post-surgical state, indicate that the essence of biology is changing. No longer does time and biological function dictate form. Humans are a fierce selective pressure and are changing the biological makeup of species on Earth. Rather than working over long periods of time, the changes science is making with technologies like synthetic biology are short and forceful, acting on timescales hundreds of thousands of times shorter than their predecessors.

Ultimately, Marcin Rusak’s Monster Flowers are but a single example of a much broader cultural shift towards an engineered nature. Like most powerful emerging technologies, bioengineering was feared at first for its unpredictability and many cautionary tales were told (see “Jurassic Park,” “Splice,” etc.). Still, with time and increased exposure comes a shift towards a public familiarity that undermines aversive reactions and promotes acceptance, even if passive. While synthetic organisms driven by commercialism might spell extinction for their less fit, naturally occurring counterparts, they also inspire hope for animals and our world. There is pressure to make room for artificial life in our global ecosystems (“Designing for the Sixth Extinction: Rewilding with Synthetic Biology”), and, with it, the biostratigraphy of the Anthropocene will depart from anything recorded previously on Earth.

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“In the not too distant future a majority of the foods we eat will be genetically modified. In many countries, crop plants, including wheat, corn, and soy have long been grown from genetically modified (GM) seeds.

The growth of these patented organisms has ignited a global debate over the impact of GM technology on food safety and on social justice, public health, and environmental sustainability.

Many scientists point to the urgency of developing plants and animals that can feed the surging human population and survive the effects of climate change; now they are asking, when, not if, genetically modified (GM) foods will become normalised.

Crop Constructs explored the role rapidly evolving GM food crops may play in our future societies. By constructing future scenarios of ten of the world’s most important plants such as coffee, soy, wheat and rice, the project examines genetic modification as a technology set to redefine our engagement with the natural world.”

Above: “The Enclave” by Richard Mosse, 2013.

Below: “Crop Constructs” by Mariah Wright.

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Above: “Autonomous Seed Disperser” from “Designing for the Sixth Extinction” by Alexandra Ginsberg.

Below: “Self Eater (Agave Autovora)” from Troika’s ‘Plant Fiction,’ 2010.

33 — Flowering Transition

Allegory of the Cave Painting Haseeb Ahmed, Ignacio Chapela, Justin Clemens, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jonathan Dronsfield, Christopher Fynsk, Vincent W.J. can Gerven Oei, Natasha Ginwala & Vivian Ziherl, Adam Staley Groves, Sean Alexander Gurd, Adam Jasper, Susanne Kriemann, Brenda Machosky, Mihnea Mircan, Alexander Nagel, Rosalind Nashashibi, Tom Nicholson, Jack Pettigrew, Rachaël Pirenne, Susan Schuppli, Lucy Steeds, Jonas Tinius, Marina Vishmidt, Christopher Witmore, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. Publication, 2015.

Extra City Kunsthal/Mousse Publishing 2015.

Above: “Allegory of the Cave Painting” published by Extra City Kunsthal and Mousse Publishing.

“In which Celan’s time-crevasses shelter ancient organisms resisting radiocarbon dating, forming and reforming images, zooming into the rock and zooming out of time. But are these indeed figures—of bodies afloat between different planes of experience, of mushroom heads, dendrianthropes and therianthropes, of baobabs traveling thousands of miles from Africa to the Australian Kimberley; are they breathcrystals, inhaling and exhaling in the space between the mineralogical collection of the museum and the diorama of primitive life; are they witness to and trace of the first days and nights of soul-making; are they symbioses of mitochondria and weak acids, of one-celled nothings, eyes and seeds, of nerves and time and rock walls?

Another humanity was possible and we are what it did not become” (Allegory of the Cave Painting 1).

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“Allegory of the Cave Painting” was produced following a two-part art exhibition of the same name that took place in the winter of 2015 at Extra City Kunsthal and the Braem Pavilion, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp. The two exhibits asked a group of artists to respond to a 2010 discovery made in North-Western Australia by Jack Pettigrew and his team from Queensland University: that the prehistoric Gwion Gwion paintings initially drawn by humans over 40,000 years ago are now colonised and continually redrawn by several species of symbiotic red bacteria and black fungi. The “Allegory of the Cave Painting” exhibitions and reader channel philosophical thought about the origins of art, modernity, and the significance of beginnings themselves—the cave paintings provide a “mental model” for questioning life, creation, sustainability, symbology, allegory, recorded history, and time, among others. The breadth of academic debate the Gwion Gwion paintings spark and the spirit of the anthology itself is reflected in the titles of the essays contributed: “Symbiotic Art and Shared Nostalgia,” “To Preserve Effacement,” “Lonely Rocks,” “Unhinging Prehistory, Unbecoming Humanity: Bataille on Lascaux,” “‘A Strange Image You Speak Of, He Said’: Cave Painting and the Allegory of the Cave,” “Allegories of Knowing and the Desire for Meaning,” “The Absolute Hand of Poetry,” “Living Paint, Even After the Death of the Colony,” “The Fable of Bacteria,” “Returning to Reading,” “The Custodian and the Fixer (on Petrolio),” “Forty-eight Million Years of Biopolitics,” “Colonial Copies and Ethnographic Conceptualism: Artistic Experiments at the Intersection of Anthropology, History, and Science,” “Incidents of Time-Travel in the Long Anthropocene,” “Descending Through Densities,” “The Tree, The Stone, The Dog, The Man: On ‘Social Sculpture,’ Joseph Beuys, and Pierre Huyghe Works,” “Dear ____,” “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” “Philology of the Cave,” “No Past But Within Things: A Cave and Archaeology in the Form of a Dialogue,” “The Negative Floats: Questions of Earth Inheritance,” “The Distant Past,” and “Slick Images.” Packed together in 422 insightful pages, these essays function collectively as an Anthropocene artifact, emphasizing the current global human-dominated cultural climate whilst simultaneously dissecting how the collaborative artwork of men, women, and bacteria subtly taking place over millennia challenges traditional conceptions of biological and sequence stratigraphy. In a press release for the dual art exhibitions, curator Mihnea Mircan speaks to the complexity of what the living cave paintings represent: “[…] they perturb the ways in which modernity frames prehistory as allegorical interlocutor, so that it can establish an uninterrupted descent from it. This rhetorical edifice and constructed inevitability obscures a continuum of zigzagging histories, forgotten technologies and unintended outcomes—a mirror effect between, in the words of David Lewis-Williams, ‘the mind in the cave’ and ‘the cave in the mind.’” The tension between the ancient and the current is felt throughout this ideological tome, and, within it, as artists and theoreticians dig to unearth semiotic truths, the reader sees that humanity is dealing with novel issues of agency in a new intellectual age; the question remains however, when this new age began: whether it began when life originated, when the first humans brought neolithic paint to stone, or when science and technology advanced sufficiently for mankind to realise our revolutionary impact on the planet.

35 — Allegory of the Cave Painting

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective.� ~Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

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All above: “Allegory of the Cave” Painting published by Extra City Kunsthal and Mousse Publishing.

37 — Allegory of the Cave Painting

A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions Aram Mooradian with support form Unknown Fields Division, Future Archaeologies Department. Various media, gold, gold leaf, faux swede, paper, 2011. Shown at “What is Luxury?” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2015.

Above: “A Comprehensive Altas of Gold Fictions” by Aram Mooradian.

“The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes—the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine ? are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives.” ~Unknown Fields Division (collaborated with Aram Mooradian for the realisation of ‘Gold Fictions’) Aram Mooradian’s “A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions” draws attention to the power with which humans change environments; in his investigation of the gold-industry of the Australian Outback, Mooradian focuses on the profound ways that global economies shape the natural landscape. Tearing into the earth, digging cavernous mines, and piling mountains of talus, the world gold market actively reforms Australia’s surface with a range of massive machines, mechanical excavators, and an insatiable human lust. Whilst simultaneously 38

changing the landscape, the gold economy changes the lives of the Australian people, particularly the Aboriginal Australians who have inhabited the geologically rich country for millennia. As the earth is combed for gold, the relationships between, the traditions of, and the future for the people in the context of the land changes.

To emphasise the changing Australian physical and cultural landscapes, Mooradian produced a range of precious objects, drawing on gold’s history as a prized commodity in the luxury, craft, science, and technology industries to document the changing narrative surrounding modern materials. Responding in part to the commodification of nature, “A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions” seeks to develop new narratives of value tied to culture, dreams, wishes, hopes, and memories rather than rarity, lustre, or aesthetic appeal.

In Aram Mooradian’s speculative future archaeology, objects are unearthed that speak to the human narrative within matter. A gold headphone jack is charged with a lost Aboriginal songline, a gold DNA implant records a woman’s lifelong desire, a gold bullet is inscribed with a humble suicide note, a gold pendant contains the sound of a lost love’s laughter, and a gold spinal brace allows a wounded soldier to return to war. Perhaps most cogently of all however, the fading languages of Aboriginal cultures are inscribed on the gold bricks whose excavation forever changed their homeland. Mooradian explores the complex interactions between humans, his fictional gold artefacts, and established understanding of material worth, writing that: “our relationship to our finite resources is re-examined with this new dispersed geology of artefacts encoded with the cultural rather than economic values of the contemporary world.” In Mooradian’s future, objects are valued for the human element they contain, rather than the properties of the material itself. Transferring the root of value from matter to narrative changes the worth of gold considerably. Base matter can now become elevated through interactions with people and gold devoid of meaning begins to feel worthless. In this new value paradigm, not only does the ethical sourcing of materials becomes imperative, but, more philosophically significantly, the boundary between the human and the geological begin to blur. Just as tectonics, heat from the mantle, pressure from mountains, and the stochasticity from weather produce value in materials over millions of years, so too can peoples’ interactions under the pretence of Aram Mooradian’s gold fictions, albeit over a single human lifetime. At once understood and placed in sharp contrast with the present, “A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions” registers strongly as a stratigraphic signal of the human entrance into the Anthropocene, for both culture factories and natural industries seem nearly indistinguishable.

39 — A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions

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Above: “A Comprehensive Altas of Gold Fictions� by Aram Mooradian; video stills including book images.

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Clockwise from top left: All images from Shane Mecklenburger’s “Tendered Currency”— Gunpowder Diamond made entirely from gunpowder; Roadkill Diamond made entirely from armadillo roadkill, accompanying ID tag, ashes, glass bell jar; Superman Diamond made entirely from script of Superman III (1983), accompanying script pages, glass bell jar; Superman Diamond.

43 — A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions

Notes:

Credits

Anthropocene Artifact Analysis was published by Eli Block and Nicole Merola with support from the RISD Research Bridge Grant.

This volume constitutes a rough draft piece of work in an ongoing research project. The immediate goal of this research project is to further refine and test the methodology of reading cultural objects stratigraphically. Š All content is copyright of the authors and designers, unless otherwise stated or indicated by a citation. All rights reserved, including any reproduction.

Produced in the summer of 2015. No ISBN. Edition: 1

risd.edu/academics/las/faculty/nicole-merola eli-block.com

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Daisy Ginsberg — Sixth Extinction

The Crisis of Infinite Worlds

Unknown

Altered_hills_farming.jpg

Worldbuilding_Minecraft.jpg

Planets.jpg

Iceland_2015_2.jpg

Planet_craft.jpg

Earth_BeforeAfter.jpg

Basalt Unknown

Unknown

Encounters.jpg — C. Agapakis

Pluto_2015.jpg

Gyrecraft.jpg

BadLuck_HotRocks.jpg

Bastard Child Landscape Image

Planet_Craft_1.jpg

Image Name, Information

The Lecture of Stones

Sandra Bullock_Gravity

10.12.15_Anthropocene_Artifact_Analyses_Res, v.1

Notes

10.12.15_Anthropocene_Artifact_Analyses_N