… dust trails / transit / Nov 02017 by FoAM.Earth

We spent two weeks at the ASU campus, inquiring about existing and potential relationships between people and the desert. We interrogated existing myths underlying contemporary lifestyles and re-imagined counter-myths that could be more attuned to the desert environment. From these myths we created a series of propositions to prototype as embodied experiences and publications in 2018.

This field trip was an immersion in the academic life in Phoenix. Our primary modes of exploring the field were structured and unstructured conversations, Causal Layered Analysis and an experimental open space workshop. Occasionally we would venture beyond campus, guided by our very own 'artists' sherpa'. We explored the the Paradise Hills, the Superstitions and the Shadow Mountain; Papago and Moeur Parks; the Museum of the lost Dutchman and the Pueblo Grande ruins. We experienced a silent Full Moon walk with the Museum of Walking and found a site for FoAM's audio-walk. Attuning to the academic environment inevitably involved paperwork, meetings with students and faculty. We gave a lecture and treated the visitors to a clandestine FoAM Apero. Amidst the various activities on campus, we were temporarily adopted into our collaborators' family life, which allowed us to experience (among many other things) our first Thanksgiving feast with the Moran-Nocek clans.

Guests: Nik Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanovic (FoAM)
Hosts: Ron Broglio, Adam Nocek, Stacey Moran, Sha Xin Wei (ASU)

Desertification

• Everything shrivels up and erodes into dust: desertification related to ecology and culture (intergenerational memory)
• Humans come and go
• (Engineering) mistakes cause large scale ecological transformations

Probabilistic Future Preparedness

• Phoenix holding onto permanence
• Civilisations with expiration dates (one moment or slow subsiding)
• Prehearsals of obsolescence
• Urban desert / urban wilderness

Attunement

• material wonder & wander
• layered time, massive scale
• beyond human relationships
• solitude and indifference
• (i)nertness
• naming
• conviviality with diverse entities, different lenses of interrelation

Vampiric and zombie utopias

• Shadows
• Ghost towns
• Haunted utopias
• Troubled past
• Living but already dead (eg. Paradise City); planning for unsustainability

• What are the critical uncertainties in the region? What/how to extrapolate local conditions to other deserts and environments on their way to become deserts?

• What does a thalient laboratory in the desert look like?
  • How to translate animist attitudes into worldviews compatible with contemporary techno-materialist societies?
  • How to (re)animate pre-modern sensibilities without dualisms of light/dark, good/evil, love/power?
  • What arts, sciences and technologies become possible if we widen the 'sentience spectrum' and emphasize experience and interaction with diverse beings?
  • Should we refrain from speech and use the visceral language of experience?
  • How do we speak of relations as well as things?

• Why attempt to build cities in the desert?
  • What would a banishing ritual for haunted utopias be like?
  • How to turn zombie utopias into 'log' utopias, that can feed new life as a dead log would?

• We can adapt or mitigate climate chaos (etc.) with a change of mindset/worldview and the underlying myths and archetypes.
  • Art can initiate, amplify or test this change.
  • We can draw inspiration from animism, panpsychism, shinto, shamanism, etc.
  • Any technological solutions will be perverted by existing dominant ideologies (and vice versa)
  • Myth-making and reactivating myths can animate inert geological and architectural markers
  • We need a new form of geomancy

• We can become human receptors and listening devices.
  • We practice the craft of silence and heterogeneous hearing to help us attune to our surroundings.
  • At all times there are other beings listening. We can hear each other if we pay attention.
  • We tread lightly seeing with new eyes. We witness and weave threads of connection with other people and places (FoAM)
  • Our language can liquefy
  • We communicate to connect, not dissect
  • With can uncover sacred refugia and wild sanctuaries through our work

* The desert invites unencumbered experimentation, yet the desert is also unforgiving

• It is possible to thrive in uncertainty
• Objectives obscure progress
• We should move from social contracts to natural contracts
• It is possible to transform zombie utopias into fertile compost for new eutopias
• Neo-reaction and new age are each other's flip-sides, collapsing complexity of uncertainty into platitudes

… vaporous thoughts condensed into propositions, commonplaces and fieldguides by:

• seeing, listening, tasting, smelling, experiencing (sensing & activating)
• walking
• fieldwork
• inquiry (critical, embodied…)
• experiential futures and speculative design (e.g. designing an open air museum with stories and artifacts suggesting alternative myths, lifestyles and ecosystems
• action research
• contemporary rituals and peak experiences
• contemplative practices and attunement
• writing

• Mythologies - Roland Barthes
• Six Memos - Italo Calvino
• Book of Sand - Italo Calvino
• Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson
• The Enchantment of Modern Life - Jane Bennett
• The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander
• Dust studies - Jay Owens
• Minutes to Midnight - Trent Parke
• The Dark Mountain Project
• In Praise of Shadows - Tanizaki
• Anthropology in the time of the Anthropocene - Bruno Latour
• The Last Angel of History
• City and the City - China Mieville
• Perdido Street Station - China Mieville
• Humankind - Tim Morton
• The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing
• Customs in common - EP Thompson
• Governing the commons - Elinor Ostrom
• Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands - The good-natured feminist: eco-feminism and the quest for democracy
• Trinh Minh-Ha: Writing post-colonialism and feminism
• Staying with the trouble - Donna Haraway
• Xenogenesis - Octavia Butler
• Hope in the dark - Rebecca Solnit
• Freehouse Rotterdam
• Too like the lightning - Ada Palmer
• The Laundry series - Charles Stross
• 2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson
• Anathem - Neal Stephenson
• The word for world is forest - Ursula Leguin
• How forests think - Eduardo Kohn
• Thalience - Karl Schroeder
• Ecology of Mind - Gregory Bateson
• Gins and Arakawa (architectural body)
• Kengo Kuma
• Olafur Eliasson
• AVL
• The Lightning field
• Microsound
• Crystal Radio
• 100 year roulette
• C14 Clocks
• Organic abstraction
• Romantic Machine - John Tresch
• Geology of media - Jussi Parikka
• Finite media - Sean Cubitt
• Panpsychism (& Noumenautics - Peter Sjöstedt-H)
• Reclaiming Animism - Isabelle Stengers
• Codex Seraphinianus
• Arrival
• Desert Solitaire - Edward Abby
• Solarpunk
• Body rituals among the Nacerima - Horace Miner
• The Wilderness Act
• The Imperative - Alphonso Lingis
• Ecology of Practices - Isabelle Stengers
• A Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning - Marcus Coates
• Point Omega - Don DeLillo
• Vilém Flusser - Into the Universe of Technical Images
• Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau - Blakey & Ranney
• Roadside Geology of Arizona - Halka Chronic
• Q Is for Quicken - Sha Xin Wei

(with Nik Gaffney behind the camera)