Future Retrospective: Rituals, Relics, and Perceived Worth

ELI BLO CK Nicole Merola Theorizing the Anthropocene October 18, 2014

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F U T U R E R E T RO S P EC T I V E : R i t u a l s , Re l i c s , a n d Pe rc e i ve d Va l u e

Fig. 1: Anthropocene material assemblage crafted from some of Earth’s resources (i.e., plastics, aluminium, steel, concrete, glass, textiles, bones, etc.) made readily available by contemporary human material culture. Yesenia Thibault-Picazo, “The Anthropogenic Specimens Cabinet” 2013.

Fig. 2: Plastic sediment.

Yesenia Thibault-Picazo, “The Anthropogenic Specimens Cabinet” 2013.

Since the Great Acceleration in the latter half of the 20th century, humankind has become a geological force with transformative powers rivaling those of the Earth system. To this point in history, human society, its constructs, its highly ritualistic culture, and its dominance of the personal and collective over the global have resulted in powerful, large-scale influences—from reckless development to plastic pollution to large-scale industrial waste—that are making preternatural new materials abundant in the Earth’s surface environment. Still, while human manipulation of the physical lithostratigraphic landscape is alarming, it is only a small chip on the massive global tablet recording Homo sapiens, our evolving memebased culture (Dawkins 1989), and our substantial resurfacing of the Earth.

Born into false understanding that the world was and has always existed how it is today, many embrace uniformitarianism even while purporting to recognize the shifting, sliding, cycling, heating, melting, and reforming processes that have always acted on our planet, and that continue to make the Earth unique as the only planet in our solar system to sustain the continual metamorphosis Page 1/7

Fig. 3

From Left: Aluminum surface debris, Pacific Plastic Crust mortar, & bone marble pestle.

of its surface matter, biology, and climate. Of the materials that cycle—evolve, persist, and give way—through existence on the surface of the Earth, rocks and minerals are the most persistent. In our new geological age, humans have begun to generate novel “lithostrata.”

Thibault-Picazo’s speculative film The New Geology: Craft in the Anthropocene examines how humankind’s activities “will be recorded in [these novel] strata,” bringing them to life by providing physical samples of material that might result if contemporary human practices such as plastic generation, factory farming, and personal technology production continue unchecked by regulation. In constructing histories for humanity’s new materials, ThibaultPicazo both supports defining a new geological present and argues against uniformitarianism by providing scenarios in which the materials we now consider waste littering the surface of the Earth have begun their life cycles, transforming alongside natural materials in the perpetual flux of matter.

Thibault-Picazo brings dynamism to the traditionally static concept of pollution as permanent, generating a glimpse into a future world where past human practice has resulted in the accumulation of bountiful new materials. Thibault-Picazo’s short video piece asserts that human production of these new, geologically unprecedented substances will alter human craft, in effect initializing a cascade of changes that will continue to alter the Earth and its living inhabitants in the Anthropocene. At the same time that The New Geology asks viewers to look forward, it simultaneously implores them to look back at current society and question what cultural stasis will bring in the future. While not especially negative, Thibault-Picazo’s work highlights humankind’s current transition into a new geological age by extrapolating current cultural trends, thereby highlighting by comparison with the present how different materials in the Age of Man will be from those that have existed before in the long history of the changing Earth. Ultimately, the emphasis on uncanny newness in Thibault-Picazo’s work simultaneously affirms the Anthropocene and disrupts the idea of an unchanging earth by dividing Earth’s history into a past and future/present whose shift can be witnessed in modern society and thus made real for the contemporary observer.

Thibault-Picazo’s physical recreation of future Anthropocene objects juxtaposes deep time with the whirling present, resulting in matter that is at once familiar and strange. She writes that in “observing this shift [from past to future materials], [she] catalyzed this slow geological phenomenon to manufacture human-made minerals out of the most distinctive materials of our epoch (plastics, aluminium, steel, concrete, glass, textiles, bones…)”

(Thibault-Picazo, “Anthropogenic Specimens”). Unlike theoretical works that discuss but do not create Anthropocene objects, The New Geology aligns present practice with future fossils, placing the two in glaring contrast; in one hand balances the weight of the present, of immediate experience, memory, and the personal scale, while in the other weights the result of continued action, of the future, and of imagination—in essence relics of the future bizarrely lost in time (Porter 2013). The creation of future artifacts can thus be seen as a sort of Brechtian distancing effect, whereby the future objects are removed from their context, leaving the observer to consciously decide whether to be in awe of their reality or to accept the haziness and questionable morality of the combined human and earth processes that created them. Oscillations between acceptance and appreciation and revulsion and disgust

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Fig. 4 Our memories of past lived experiences are prompted in the present by triggers that remind us of those experiences. We fill in the gaps in our memories with imagination. This process applies to the future, with an additional step. We can imagine new experiences in order to remember them, and then design triggers (memento futuri) to help us recall memories from those imagined futures. From the series of nows in which we live in the present, we can look backwards, or forwards, at “then.”

Figure caption text from “Remembering the Future” by Lana Z. Porter, 2013 (p.43).

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Fig. 5

Future fossils, memento futuri: Manufactured geology that speculates about a potential future where human craft is transformed by the human redistribution of Earth’s surface materials.

Yesenia Thibault-Picazo, “Manufactured Geology” 2012.

become paralyzing to the observer, who is forced to accept the inevitability of the objects ultimate creation, for The New Geology generates a vision of the future that alters the observers present by producing a memory-like glimpse into the time to come [Fig. 4] (Addis et al. 2007; Green and Donahue 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn 2009).

In The New Geology, Thibault-Picazo prompts thought about geological changes initiated by current human practices that will be made visible in the lithostratigraphic record on a greater than human timescale. In the theoretical future that Thibault-Picazo builds, plastic debris washed into the world’s oceans has been transformed; it has accumulated in the Pacific, settled to a depth of 10,050 meters, and undergone compressive geo-processing that has resulted in a new synthetic mineral—a solid, mineable Pacific Plastic Crust [Fig. 3] (Thibault-Picazo, “Craft in the Anthropocene”). Dubbed PPC, Pacific Plastic Crust is a speculative new strata that Thibault-Picazo asserts may result from modern material culture, specifically humankind’s continued use of petroleum-based plastics. The idea that PPC could accumulate is feasible because synthetic, highly-polymerized plastics don’t readily degrade at the Earth’s surface and thus persist unchanged for millennia (Singh and Nisha 2008).

By generating a complete and highly realistic life-cycle for petroleum plastics trapped in a novel stratum, Thibault-Picazo builds a future world that is both convincing and disturbing.

Still, the mortar-shaped PPC sample in the film is quite beautiful, and is thus alluring and strangely desirable.

Thibault-Picazo manipulates traditional conceptions of value in The New Geology to emphasize humankind’s departure from a naturally produced world. In a short description of The New Geology, Thibault-Picazo writes that “in an imagined future, novel rocks will be mined in […] very specific sites and exploited for their special properties. The unique value of these new resources originates from their scarcity but also from the fact that they are the product of extremely long geological processes” (“Craft in the Anthropocene”). The concept of geological processes as a metric for value is not new. Many currently valued raw materials are lent worth due to their relative scarcity, their unique composition, the immense amount of time required to geoprocess them, or all three. In Thibault-Picazo’s imagined future, materials once considered trash are valued. She describes how “these new man-made minerals will affect the practice of future miners and craftsmen” and will be “mined by our descendants in a post-oil era” (Thibault-Picazo. “Craft in the Anthropocene”). The idea that these materials are prized enough to be mined and incorporated into luxury craft goods

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Fig. 6 This image from “Disquiet Luxurians” references purity, geology, and Earth processes to examine what it means for a material to have value in a postluxurian era. Emilie F. Grenier, “Disquiet Luxurians” Unknown.

upturns present ideas about the value of perceived waste. Plastic debris has relatively little use in the geological present, and yet time and the myriad forces of geology will ultimately transmute this material into something else. Whether the transformed soul of current plastics will become valuable in the future is unclear, although, as Thibault-Picazo keenly points out, the potential for current materials to transcend their designed function is present. What is certain, however, is that current practice will impact the future material composition of the world and be recorded in the diverse strata of the Earth. Thibault-Picazo readily conveys this idea through her manipulation of found materials to produce future fossils.

Thibault-Picazo uses the concept of relative rarity to generate value in her materials; this perceived value in future materials makes the Anthropocene appealing, and serves to validate the idea of a new geological era. In The New Geology, the narrator asserts that, in the future, “the Cumbrian bone marble will be the most valuable marble in the whole of Europe” [Fig. 3] (Thibault-Picazo, “Craft in the Anthropocene”). This marble, formed from the bones of individuals who died in the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom, is mined for its aesthetic qualities (Thibault-Picazo, “Craft in the Anthropocene”). This implies that currently large human

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Fig. 8

Collection of “rare” stone heirlooms turned coveted objects by their materiality and presentation. Emelie F. Grenier, “PostLuxurian Artifacts” Unknown.

Left: a post-luxurian woman mines for feldspar in a quarry analogous to those of Yesenia Thibault-Picazo’s bone marble. Emelie F. Grenier, “Disquiet Luxurians” Unknown.

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populations, while apparently destructive, can generate value when their mineralized organs are combined with geological processes that act over hundreds of thousands of years. At the same time, Thibault-Picazo’s linking of this valuable future material to a contemporary epidemic grounds its worth in the present, making the context of the Age of Man understandable while at the same time validating its definition and mollifying fears about the potentially devastating impact of humans.

In The New Geology, Thibault-Picazo plays the role of a future geologist and ethnographer, constructing fictional future minerals to comment on our world (Porter 2013). Her speculative fiction aligns with traditional Anthropocene theory, which serves to call attention to the impact that humans are having on the many facets of the physical Earth and Earth system. Yet, The New Geology subtly twists traditional thought about the primarily deleterious consequences of human manipulation of the complex and only superficially understood network of Earth forces by implying the up-cycling of waste and the transformation of contemporary synthetic materials into valuable resources of the future. In crafting Anthropocene resource samples and building the world in which they live, ThibaultPicazo provides the observer of The New Geology with a physical, tractable experience with a parallel world in which modern human life has resulted in captivating, creepy, and compelling new materials. These materials, in turn, alter the observer’s perception of the present by validating current human practices as perfective. While purporting to scorn contemporary society for its wastefulness with facts about human consumption, The New Geology instead endorses the continuation of future-blind human action by reveling in the beauty and possibilities that lie in a future filled with novel luxurian artifacts.

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