FERAL READING BY Tara Sharma ILLUSTRATION Audrey Buhain DESIGN Clara Epstein
On October 29, I found myself mildly lost in the digital infrastructure of Anna Tsing’s latest project, a virtual world called Feral Atlas. From what I assumed to be her living room, Tsing—anthropologist and popular science studies scholar best known for her epic ethnography of matsutake fungal relations titled The Mushroom at the End of the World—attempted to shepherd a Zoom room of around 3,000 attendees as each navigated the endlessly layered website on their respective screens. With Tsing’s voice in the background, I opened the page and clicked on one of many drifting icons, a bluish watercolor blob labeled “Comb Jellies,” which seemed to split the screen open and send me to a surreal map-like illustration of an industrial port city made of intricately sketched container ships, factory rows, a suckling pig caught in highway scaffolding, and a sky full of tangled ropes. The aerial map was spattered with several black dots and a single red one, which, when I scanned my mouse over it, revealed itself to be the Comb Jelly icon. I was sent to another page, this one featuring a series of video poems under the heading “TAKE.” The video poems showed me trains, cargo ships, wholesale vendors, power lines. A tab labeled “field report” sent me to a short essay, the familiar watercolor Comb Jelly icon framing its title: “Alien species can cause severe disturbance.” As I clicked deeper, I gave up on a sense of direction. I spiraled into, out of, around, and through the vaguely familiar fantasy scape. But within about 15 minutes, the Feral Atlas webpage began to crash; the moderator politely interrupted Tsing and asked that everyone quit the website on their own devices and instead follow along via Tsing’s screen-share. After an hour more of shadowing Tsing’s mazing through an ever-expanding virtual collage of imaginative aerial maps, multimedia poems, data visualizations, and ethereal illustrations of organisms in their industrial contexts, an attendee asked the question that was glaring through the glitch: What do you plan to do when your digital world—which, in theory, is designed to reach an audience wider than the academic readership Tsing’s work typically attracts—collapses beneath the strain of the overused ‘real’ one? Launched on October 20 by Stanford University Press, Feral Atlas is the cumulation of five years of collaboration between Tsing and her editorial and curatorial team—Jennifer Deger, Alder Saxena, and Feifei Zhou—as well as over a hundred scientists, artists, activists, and scholars navigating the relatively new interdisciplinary field loosely labeled the “environmental humanities.” The contours of each discipline are not necessarily meant to be legible; taking up a methodology provisionally named “intimate empiricism” in the website’s description, the project recognizes its own fluid relationship to language, defending its capacity to “draw us close to the worlds we seek to describe and understand, exactly by fostering forms of careful, situated, and sustained attention.” It’s an open-ended approach to language, suggestive of an editorial skew toward the humanities as well as skepticism toward the authority ascribed to traditional scientific description. The project blends text, art, film, poetry, and digital simulations into 79 “field reports” on the sites at which human infrastructure has interrupted the course of ecological entities, producing the intertwined human-nonhuman relationships that constitute the matter of what we now call the “Anthropocene,” or the contested term for the geological era marked by human impact on the environment. By infrastructure, the editors consider technological apparatuses that function materially, publicly, and by human design. The project’s ambitious temporal scope attempts to assemble the last 500 years of the history of capitalism through a methodology of “patchiness,” Feral Atlas’ own narrative tactic which, according to the website, situates environmental events not as “closed territories” but as “cascading chains of effects.” The patchwork produced is more akin to a puzzle, or a choose-your-own-adventure novel, than a historical timeline. There’s an entry point for all kinds of visitors: visuals for the artist, syllabi for the teacher, framing
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essays for the analyst, diagrams for scientist, grids for the logician, city sketches for the architect, knotty layers of javascript for the coder. Building a virtual space both microscopic and panoramic, and fashioning a historical timeline both iterative and expansive, Feral Atlas is a contestation of form. In one sense, the project extends out of a lineage of traditional atlases—it contains collections of maps, illustrations, informative tables, and text. But atlases are typically book-bound; in reimagining the atlas, this project is suggestive of a new kind of book. Mimicking the effects of the Anthropocene, this project destabilizes the very tools—art, language, and history—we have always used to understand the landscapes we inhabit. It is at once a publication, an installation, a video game, and a set of maps, both a series of expanding worlds and a two-dimensional representation of one on a website.
What to call the person before the screen—a spectator, a gamer, or a navigator—is a question left open. As the editors make clear, it’s one of many indeterminacies that mirror the future of the Anthropocene as an unfinished story. For the purposes of this article, and in a suggestion that shifting ecological forms demand new literary ones, I’ll call this person a reader. +++ Describing the notion of nonhuman forms wending their way through human-built worlds designed to repress them, the term “feral” is situated somewhere between the accidental and the intentional. Though continually emergent from human projects, feral entities operate on their own terms. Like invasive plants coextensive with processes of colonization
06 NOV 2020
