The Hypnotechnic Booklet GT23

The Hypnotechnic

Emily Dinnerman

Graduate Thesis 2023

"We wear clothes, speak, create civilizations, believe we are more than wolves.

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, And that is who we are."

— Anthony Mara, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

The Hypnotechnic looks at the urban landscape through a new lens, employing a blend of digital techniques and a para-fictional narrative of Earth’s future. This new era marks an age where landscapes, once heavily transformed by human-accelerated climate change, are no longer a nuisance to mankind. Instead, mankind achieves homeostasis with the environment through a device unearthed in ancient Antarctica. This era marks a transition from the Anthropocene, where humans operate within a new global environmental paradigm shaped by this device. The device takes no form, left to the viewer’s imagination through storytelling, images, diorama, and found objects.

The aesthetics of this new age evolve as a byproduct of what we achieved from climate change. The project encapsulates three ecologies within an atlas, spanning the years 2070, 2275, and up to the reversal of global warming in 3100. The Hypnotechnic introduces a new perspective on what the built environment means in Earth’s future. Through superimposition and stratification, these worlds illustrate the interdependence of geomorphology and environmental conditions. The Hypnotechnic inspects artifacts that hint at climate change effects, including tectonic shifts in soft desert rock, silt erosion in rivers, rising sea levels, and the fusion of raw materials with human-made raw materials.

The narrative unfolds through three city-ecology-timelines.

The far Future

The near future

Atopos

The Far Future // Year 3100

The Antarctic is the Earth’s best archive for environmental and geological changes from the past million years. Core samples exhumed from iceberg sheets at McMurdo Station are transported to the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility every year. As a publicly-funded institution, the facility sends core samples to hundreds of recipients around the world. Typically, to scholars in the fields of geology, hydrology, and zoology. Less frequently, to the public enthusiast. One such anomaly is a young fossil collector in Ireland who landed a core sample from Atopos. This sample contained the Earth’s atmosphere from five million years ago in the Miocene Era. Through a millennium of unconfined global warming, ice thinning brought us closer to extracting artifacts deeper

within the Earth’s crust. Something alien was frozen deep within this core sample. The collector and his friends were celebrating his birthday all night while the core sample melted. The next morning, they transformed. Their bodies remained intact, but their free will was under a new master, leaving evidence as Ground Zero for the end of the Anthropocene Era.

The rise of the Hypnotechnic machines meant a new world: One that fed off the waste and pollution of the human species. This era introduced an invisible force, indiscernible by human senses except by erratic markings on “pastlife” objects.

Atopos means "nonplace" or "without place."

Arrabesk

The Future // Year 2250-3100

Our confidence for mankind’s survival wavers to the rhythm of a thousand ecologies, as they conquer, kill, and die in an unctuous world of evolution.

It is the Year 2275. A type of rhizomatic operation cooks in the North American city of Arrabesk. Shaped by epochs of floods and overwhelming waste disposal, the iron-stained land now creates an oxygen-rich atmosphere that fuels the birth of hundreds of new

avian and Hexapoda (insect) species. Artificial tendrils of the land’s past mattify with the expansion of nature’s webs, leaving few regions exposed. With the influx of birds, bats, and beetles, guano-rich ground smells like a urine-soaked litter box. No one lives here, but everyone has a stake in the mining operations. If there were ever a get-rich-quick city for the middle class, Arrabesk would be second to none.

The new urban ecology.

Corelinius

The Near Future // Year 2075

In a desperate attempt to save livestock from rising sea levels, humanity confronts the impurities of their work. Oil-saturated water flood the fields. Dust clouds chase livestock as they flee to hilly lands untouched by fluvial erosion. Soot-covered forests are mankind’s requiem for rural ecologies. This new peneplain condition is a byproduct of hyper-industrialized farming and capitalistic bodies that prioritize mass production and profit over Earth’s bottom line.

The Paris Agreement lost half its supporters after the 2050 global financial crisis triggered by depleted oil reserves and a disconcerted effort toward mass conversion of renewable energies. Alien landscapes form out of the vesania of a new global warming crisis—One where our world surpassed the 2.0-degree Celsius cap. Who is responsible for this new condition? Where do the cows go? Are the vanishing animals a plan or a result of this new life?

When the unnatural becomes the natural.