Science + Tech

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 essays for the analyst, diagrams for scientist, grids What to call the person before the screen—a spectator, the intertwined human-nonhuman relationships for the logician, city sketches for the architect, knotty a gamer, or a navigator—is a question left open. As the that constitute the matter of what we now call the layers of javascript for the coder. editors make clear, it’s one of many indeterminacies “Anthropocene,” or the contested term for the geolog- Building a virtual space both microscopic and that mirror the future of the Anthropocene as an unfinical era marked by human impact on the environment. panoramic, and fashioning a historical timeline both ished story. For the purposes of this article, and in a By infrastructure, the editors consider technological iterative and expansive, Feral Atlas is a contestation of suggestion that shifting ecological forms demand new apparatuses that function materially, publicly, and by form. In one sense, the project extends out of a lineage literary ones, I’ll call this person a reader. human design. The project’s ambitious temporal scope of traditional atlases—it contains collections of maps, attempts to assemble the last 500 years of the history illustrations, informative tables, and text. But atlases +++ of capitalism through a methodology of “patchiness,” are typically book-bound; in reimagining the atlas, this Feral Atlas’ own narrative tactic which, according to the project is suggestive of a new kind of book. Mimicking Describing the notion of nonhuman forms wending website, situates environmental events not as “closed the effects of the Anthropocene, this project destabi- their way through human-built worlds designed to territories” but as “cascading chains of effects.” The lizes the very tools—art, language, and history—we have repress them, the term “feral” is situated somewhere patchwork produced is more akin to a puzzle, or a always used to understand the landscapes we inhabit. between the accidental and the intentional. Though choose-your-own-adventure novel, than a historical It is at once a publication, an installation, a video game, continually emergent from human projects, feral timeline. There’s an entry point for all kinds of visitors: and a set of maps, both a series of expanding worlds and entities operate on their own terms. Like invasive visuals for the artist, syllabi for the teacher, framing a two-dimensional representation of one on a website. plants coextensive with processes of colonization

On Anna Tsing’s latest “book,” Feral Atlas

fundamentally “shift ecologies past tipping points, changing the relationship between parts and wholes.” In this case of the hyacinth, it’s the category “smooth/ speed,” the former signaling “surfaces of land and water [that] have enabled colonial governance and industrial development” and the latter “drilling, shipping, global pathogen introduction, and landscape transformation [that] block the healing of local ecologies by denying them time.” The verbs “smooth” and “speed” are co-constitutive—a relationship rendered by a 90-second silent film capturing highways, airport runways, dam reservoir waters, and the engine-powered speed machines that traffic their smooth surfaces.

Completing the trifold of axes is “Feral Qualities,” an analytic attending to the more subtle dynamics of collaboration, the “modes of attunement,” between nonhuman entities and human infrastructure. Formatted as a set of color-coded annotations along the left margin of the feral entity’s field report, these categories guide the reading experience as a professor would, offering the reader tools of analysis and threads of comparison. Hone in on a Quality— say, “Uncontainable,” “Partners,” or “Industrial Stowaways”—as you would sift a novel for a particular theme. Applying the filter reconfigures the atlas in terms of entities’ particular capacities to act upon the infrastructural forms they inhabit. As margin annotations, Feral Qualities formally signal the presence of editorial mediators—but ones who are careful to note the significance of reading these qualities as “openings to think through connections, juxtapositions, and overlaps rather than airtight categories for neat classification.” Feral Qualities not only subverts the conventional directionality by which humans and nonhumans exert influence, but also disrupts the very act of reading itself—interrupting, layering, upending the text. In performing these parallel contestations, Feral Qualities offers a reader ecological figurative tools, an ecological reading practice.

Tsing and her team make clear that the website is more than just a catalogue of the Anthropocene’s discrete effects; there is no shortage of scholarly articles to give us this inventory. Instead, this project demands a commitment to “in situ observation”—an attention to the Anthropocene’s endless invocations of varied subjectivities—as a way of generating new and necessary kinds of response. Programmed to continually arrange and rearrange field notes into new forms of archive, analysis, and art, the project materializes a complicated and vibrant universe of relationships planted just beneath the surface of the industrial-ecological conditions in our midst. In a review of Feral Atlas, composer Nicolàs Jaar, whose work increasingly explores the sonic landscapes of shifting ecological forms and whom the Indy interviewed last volume, calls this relational orientation “an intricately granular reimagining of the Anthropocene which allows users to move horizontally across its multiple manifestations.” The site, he says, “leads us through the dark, serpentine trails of our contemporary condition, urging us to look around rather than ahead.” Jaar pulls some of his language from what the editors loosely state to be the project’s mission: to “[show] the Anthropocene as granular, that is, as the combined but not fully synchronized effect of several processes.” The closest Feral Atlas comes to resembling conventional Anthropocene scholarship to date is on the “superindex” page, where the axes of Detonators, Tippers, and Qualities organize feral entities into a seemingly logical, grid-like diagram. But floating in the background of this index are semi-translucent words and phrases fading in and out of legibility: and toxin-resistant pathogens produced by industrial farming practices, feral phenomena are inextricable from human life. Capitalist infrastructure, Tsing’s team argues, is both built upon and undermined by the feral processes which cycle through it. Interfacing with the Atlas, the reader’s first encounter with a feral entity is a contextless one; discrete entities (such as the Comb Jelly) float through a home screen in a kind of nebulous swarm. As (web) pages are turned, each feral entity is revealed to be located at an intersection of three “axes”: Anthropocene Detonators, Tippers, and Feral Qualities. From the home The map-world is peppered by feral entities symbolized by tiny black dots, each representing instances of an ecological encounter with a piece of human infrastructure. Taken out of its aimless drift and reabsorbed into a landscape, the ecological icon is literally mapped onto the modes of production (the Anthropocene Detonators) from which it is inextricable. Click on a tiny dot—say, “water hyacinth on engineered water”—to find a written field report detailing its characteristics, as well as a “drawer” of pertinent essays by scientists, scholars, and artists, each elaborating upon the entity through their respective form “lead,” “DRAIN,” “Avian Flu”—instances of ferality that the Atlas, in its current form, failed to incorporate. The persistence of these half-legible words, concepts inadequately absorbed by the project, call attention to the Atlas’ indeterminacies, its open ends. It’s one example of formal leakiness indicative of the kind of ‘book’ Feral Atlas might model for the future. Collapsing maps—conceptual, material, and digital—inevitably leads to glitches, imperfect transposals. But if a book can mirror the form of the ecologically disoriented world its readers are learning to navigate, perhaps it can also serve as a guide. screen, the reader selects a floating orb—say, “dutch of empiricism. This page also provides information elm disease” or “toxic fog,” each represented by a painted icon—and is directed to a map visualizing one of four symbolic world-building Anthropocene about the “Tipper” within which the entity is categorized. Undergirding the Detonator maps is the activity of Tipper-verbs like “TAKE,” “BURN,” and TARA SHARMA B’20.5 wishes she hadn’t dropped her introductory computer science class. Detonators: Invasion, Empire, Capital, or Acceleration. “CROWD,” that, in accretion, have the capacity to