To get out into native habitat a few times a month–to see the seasons shift across the plains with the interplay of highly-adapted species richness– has relayed in me a conviction that a positive impact is not unreachable; and, more than emulate, appropriate, or reify nature the idea, we can develop tandem intelligences to fortify our inextricable ecology.
It could never be passive: every action we pursue or not pursue embeds weight in this fabric.
Vagueness, noncommittal complacency serve a misdirecting purpose– a volleying of mutualistic responsibility.
At the same time, it is hardly adrenally sustainable to feel urgent all the time.
So, that’s what I’ve picked up from the prairies–how to be generous with my attention, to recede from an individualistic timescale blinkered-ly servile to capital,
Brad Troemel, LIVE/WORK, Tomorrow Gallery, 2014.
and maybe begin to attune my working to a biotic, geophysical timescale.
Santiago X, POKTO CINTO (Serpent Twin), Schiller Woods, 2019.
Manipulating the exoskeleton for photic current is my energy sink for ecological grieving.
In renunciation of the assimilating screen, it forthrightly harnesses the very same noxious, lucent mineral extracts & dopants in a format spared metaversal privatization of every interaction or aesthetic phenomena. Gas under vacuum is nearly data-free.
My practice is one of persistence strategy, how to live tactically and artfully against the imperial carceral state of devalued labor, in ecological crisis.
My research interest is in the
petro-porosity of the human and extrahuman condition. Are we more undying residue of ancient life, solvents in water, than what can be deemed discrete “human individual”?
We are the fuel-eaters– the pollutant-hooked planetary pilferers, we habituate capitalism and scarcity’s logic with every complacency. And yet, I love the rot and recycling of ecology somewhat borderline on the divine.
To slacken and tense the groove for a gaseous atomic cascade, we thwart the desire lines of current.
The physical chemistry of light is one of electron transfer, ever seeking more stable energy levels when displaced from full orbital shells under current.
Left to the palliative care of one’s seething senses, one might recognize ruthlessness in the prerogative of property over life and of atomized individualism.
No better than mothlike seduction by wavelength, can propagandic electromagnetism be extricated from the foul of extractive commerce? Or is light my hospice at this stage?
When I consider the political impotence of representation,
I concede energy is not impotent nor inert. Lumens pierce the porosity of my being, as does petropollution degrade life on a global scale in windfall to capital, and plastic is a moratorium on death process.
Is it adequate for institutions to mime a land acknowledgement in spite of zero divestment from land-extractive practices? Should one still use social platforms to moralize surveillance capitalism? These are questions these ultraviolet interventions might lull you from pondering, or amplify, roll the dice.