RESPONDING TO CHANGE
excerpt from “even in arcadia: a situationist game about representations of nature / phoebe shalloway “even in arcadia” is an experiential narrative game set in a sci-fi botanical garden by phoebe shalloway. download the game or learn more about it at: https://girldebord.itch.io/arcadia
Towards the beginning of my work on my senior project, two images compelled me to focus my attention on issues of the Anthropocene. The first image was that of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a colossal accumulation of plastic bags and plastic bottles and little broken-down bits of plastic too small to see, all trapped and swirling in the North Pacific Gyre. Because the smallest pieces of plastic are invisible in satellite images, the precise extent of the Garbage Patch is unknown, though according to a recent study it is over 600,000 miles, or three times the size of France. The landfill, that most distasteful of all human-made geological formations, has colonized our ocean’s ecosystems. Microplastics are swallowed by fish and travel up the food chain, settling in our air, water, and bodies. It is beyond our ability to clean up and it will never decompose. The Garbage Patch will circle the Pacific forever, unless… The second image was that of plastic-eating bacteria evolving amidst the chaotic geologies of our endless waste. A friend sent me an article that claimed such a miracle was discovered in a landfill in Japan. I imagined the tiny mutants swarming over the plastic, chowing down on chemicals that scientists have always claimed to be indestructible by natural forces. The Romantics pointed out the sublime in the myth of untouched wilderness, but it appears even more powerfully in those landscapes that we have touched and changed. We trash the world and it spits out something with the potential to save us. I saw these bacteria as the twenty-first-century sublime. 15
