Abstracts – SLSA 2024 Annual Meeting

Submission list

Note: These are all accepted submissions, but some authors are not attending the conference.

[1] Erika Kielsgard (George Mason University). LAMPREY.

Abstract. Interdisciplinary creative work facilitates radical collaborations. Lamprey (Harvard Square Press, April 2024), selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2023 International 3-Day Poetry Chapbook Contest and forthcoming for the Great Lakes Poetry Festival, works to decolonize our futures by connecting the devastation of colonialism and industrialization to an ancient, jawless fish: the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus). “Kielsgard synthesizes branches of history, including oral history, and ecology to unpack the narrative of colonialism and its devastating impact on indigenous culture and the ecosystem of the Great Lakes region…The lamprey, as numinous metaphor and embodied reality, functions as a sieve through which Kielsgard has managed, in this sequence of brilliantly crafted, formally innovative poems, to decant the whole world” (Seuss). The poems interrogate human evaluations of life from Roman fishponds, imperial recipes, violated treaties, Freud’s laboratory, and fishery commissions to elevate oral histories of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and food sustainability now.

Research ecopoetries can investigate human perceptions of various lamprey species in their ecological contexts, uncovering the consequences of cultural genocide’s impact on these fish and our global bodies of water by following their connections to diverse Indigenous cosmologies and ways of life. For example, the Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus) and the pouched lamprey (Geotria australis) are both invaluable Native American Inter-Tribal food sources threatened by land dispossession and postcolonial habitat destruction. Transformative genres interrogate industrial complexes. Forms can be inverted to expose systemic injustices, not unlike dam removal in the conservation of lampreys and our waters.

Keywords: poetry chapbook, research ecopoetries, Petromyzon marinus, food sustainability, colonization, industrialization, assemblages

[2] Adaoma Igwedibia (Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State). Climate Challenges in Nigeria’s Niger Delta: A Discourse on Helon Habila’s Oil on Water.

Abstract. The challenges of environmental degradation in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, calls for a serious concern, as the inhabitants (the natives) of this region suffer from all of forms of environmental hazards resulting from oil spillages, gas flares and other sources of pollution. However little or no special attention is given to them, being the minority ethnic group in the country, as they are condescendingly treated as the ‘periphery’ by the majority. Hence, the Nigerian literary artists, while focusing on the Niger Delta environmental challenges in their novels, seek to find how to harmonize and resolve these issues affecting the state of peace and harmony between the region and the Nigerian government in collaboration with multinational oil companies operating in Niger Delta. Thus, this study, in using Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, interrogates the attitudinal disposition of the people; it discusses issues of class dichotomy and suggests ways of creating peace as highlighted by these writers. Marxist literary theory is therefore employed through a qualitative approach to lucidly depict and define the nature of the struggle as well as the needed possible interventions for peace in the violently tensed environment of Niger Delta.

Keywords: Ethnic Minority, Pollution, Struggle, Niger Delta, Environment

[3] Shana Garr (Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts). Plant Beings: Portraits Beyond Humanism.

Abstract. Rather than seated in an interior or a garden, the leaves and flowers in Kehinde Wiley’s presidential portrait of Barack Obama (2018) and the dense jungle foliage in Tammy Nguyen’s multi-media painting of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2023) place the human and the plants in the foreground of the picture plane, making everything depicted in the visual field a subject. The paper interrogates what prompted the artists to encircle these two figures, who have come to stand for distinctively American ideologies, with plant beings. In their respective ways, they resonate both by resisting existing power structures and by attracting critical and popular attention in this current era. With formal interpretations of these paintings, in which figure and ground merge, I correlate their compositions with conceptions of human relationships with other-than-human beings. I base my writing on the psychological shift from the individual toward the collective articulated by ecofeminist Donna Haraway and employ visual analysis approaches by Paul Crowther. I apply a deconstruction methodology derived from Jacques Derrida, and my position finds parallels in the connected biological and cultural observations by Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. My main research question is, how do Wiley and Nguyen innovate portraiture and inherited visual vocabulary to express human relationships with nature? In addition to creating trans-historical, alternative interpretations of standard Western-centric art historical styles, I argue that the representation of plants in these portraits conveys belief in the value of human relationships with the unmediated more-than-human world. I define unmediated as an environment not controlled or altered by humans and trace how and why humans picture the land—and the plants growing on it—with the collective, orienting a change in human consciousness to prioritize entanglements with more-than-human beings.

Keywords: post-humanism, Kehinde Wiley, Tammy Nguyen, composition, unmediated landscape

[4] Emma de Beus (Queen’s University Belfast). Acclimatizing Shakespeare: Diffracting Hamlet though Indigeneity in Mesnak .

Abstract. This paper considers the 2011 Canadian and Indigenous film Mesnak, directed by Yves Sioui Durand as a diffracted adaptation of Hamlet. On a basic level, in diffraction, light behaves as waves and occurs when a wave encounters an obstacle. In diffracted adaptation, ideas, concepts, or themes from the source text engage with one another in ways which add or amplify meaning, but also quieten other aspects of the work. These adaptations might colloquially be thought of as ‘looser,’ or perhaps merely ‘inspired by’ their source texts. However, the deliberate, intricate adaptive work undertaken in diffractions deserves careful consideration of its conceptual and thematic endeavors. Mesnak demonstrates these principles of diffraction as they relate to adaptation. This diffracted adaptation emphasizes the fractured family and the identity crisis of the protagonist, highlighted by the array of issues inherent to the postcolonial Canadian and First Nations intersection. Concomitantly, it downplays Hamlet’s issues of mental illness and the multitude of murders inherent to the ending of a revenge tragedy. As seen in Mesnak, this variety of adaptation creates a series of constructive and deconstructive thematic interactions. This analysis of the diffracted adaptation taking place in Mesnak will pay particular attention to the ways in which diffraction enables an increased focus on the clashing amplification and diminishment of indigenous and imperialistic cultures. Both this film and the analysis presented as part of this paper reflect how Indigenous cultures are affected and shaped by capitalism and changes in climate.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Adaptation, Indigeneity, Climate, Diffraction

[5] Adam Zaretsky (BEAK). MegaFertility and the AntiAusterity Aesthetics of Green Excess Ecologies.

Abstract. What is beyond mere sustainability, can practices of Eco-Excess, PostSustainable Orgy, supercede austerity in the goal of a fertile earth organism future? We don’t need hyper-consumption of natural resources to access excess. The ignoble orgiastic option may be a more ‘ecologically sound’ plan than the green-washing of guilt through free-range chicken and plastic recycling bins. We can achieve post-sustainable excess by amplifying the cognitive, ritualistic and emotional registers of human expression without the long lasting material denigration of the biomes we inhabit. Massive orgies and festivals of expenditure can be tuned to have a low impact. Thinking fruitfully, why plan our creations towards a minimization of negative footprint? Can we re-channel our massive, embodied, corporate hives to strive and achieve positive, fertile-centric, rich green impact through industrial, large scale, ritual process? Appropriate Pervert Technology (APT) is a cry for intimate, libidinal global actions towards preservation of the environment. We can increase planetary, all-organismic livability and fecundity through queer character, freaky, heterogeneous cyclical times and green, post-prudent lifestyle. Sustainable monotony is a bitter pill and it is also a highly inefficient method for the prevention of eco-catastrophic extinction. Sumptuous post-sustainability calls for mega-manure spreads, global nature rubs and environmentally sound projects of mass anti-prudence and large positive footprints instead of carbon neutrality.

Keywords: Sustainability, Ecology, Conservation, Carbon Neutral, Green, Excess, Expenditure, Fertility, Recycling, Heterogeneous, Austerity, Fertilization

[6] Charissa Terranova (University of Texas at Dallas) and Meredith Tromble (Independent Artist/SFAI). Wilding Experimentation: Biology and the Lived Moment in Contemporary Art.

Abstract. Speculative contemporary art practices engage the living in ways that rework “experiment” and “experimentalism.” These artists galvanize activities in forests, streams, oceans, skies, anechoic chambers, garages, classrooms, on sidewalks and hot microphones attached to podia, prodding empirical trials and tribulations with life into spaces beyond studios, wet labs, and workaday academic conferences. They wild experimentation. They explore predicted and unpredicted activity unfolding in real time, building on whole and crumbling forms of extant knowledge systems. Duration is a crucial material inasmuch that this work is performed in the lived moment or concerns the performative actions of living organisms in natural habitats and/or the midst of biological development. The contemporary artists discussed consciously stand on the shoulders of giants metaphorically stitching arm, elbow, and hand to femur, clavicle, and mandible, making odd-body art-sci mash-ups. Titan forebears include Hugo Ball who performed spoken sound art in a lobster suit; Surrealist Eileen Agar who wrote about “womb magic;” László Moholy-Nagy who made the documentary Lobsters (1936) about the behavior of lobsters and Sussex fisherman; geneticist Ruth Sager who pioneered the field of cytoplasmic inheritance – gene action beyond the nucleus of a cell; and Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin by accident as though the chance meeting of a sewing machine and umbrella on an operating table. This panel sets in relief experimentalism as so many witting and unwitting concatenations of life-in-action outside its proverbial haunts.

Keywords: performance and performativity in the living, interspecies + bioart, experimentalism

[7] Tero Karppi (Associate Professor, ICCIT, University of Toronto). LunaNet. Interoperability between the Earth, the Moon, and beyond.

Abstract. In September 2026, the Artemis III mission will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in over five decades. These astronauts will rely on LunaNet, a novel communications network designed by NASA to function despite the significant delays and disruptions inherent in interplanetary communication. This paper examines LunaNet through the lens of critical internet studies (Chun 2006; Galloway 2004; Terranova 2004) and platform studies (Helmond 2015; Van Dijck, de Waal, Poell 2018), with a focus on the concept of “interoperability.” By examining scientific papers and policy documents of the LunaNet, I argue that interoperability plays three roles in the design of this new network. Technically, it ensures seamless communication between disparate networks such as the internet on Earth and LunaNet in outer space despite their differing protocols. Culturally, this same interoperability is part of NASA’s plan to share the outer space missions with commercial actors, potentially leading to the commercialization of LunaNet, and mirroring the trajectory of the Earth-based internet. And finally, at the core of this paper is a question of political interoperability: does LunaNet represent a missed opportunity to re-imagine and redefine socio-economic models for human life beyond Earth at the level of communication, or will it simply replicate the existing power dynamics of our terrestrial Internet?

Keywords: Internet, Interoperability, Media theory, platform, power, politics, interplanetary

[8] M. Beatrice Fazi (University of Sussex), Shane Denson (Stanford University) and Jeffrey Kirkwood (Binghamton University). Digital/Transcendental.

Abstract. The digital is everywhere. Computers are digital machines, and we describe as “digital” the societies, economies, and cultures that rely on such machines for most of their individual and collective practices. But is there anything such as a “digital a priori”? To what extent does digitality constitute the conditions of possibility of contemporary life? This panel develops these questions by looking at the digital in its transcendental capacity. The three papers in this session engage with the algorithmic climates and cognitive ecologies of the twenty-first century, asking if and how the digital provides the necessary grounds for specific modes of thinking, representing, imagining and reasoning to appear.

Keywords: Digital media, Media theory, Philosophy, Computation, AI, Transcendental

[9] Linda Henderson (University of Texas at Austin Emeritus), Jeremy Stolow (Concordia University, Montreal), Fae Brauer (University of East London Centre for Cultural Studies Research) and Serena Keshavjee (University of Winnipeg). The Occult/Scientific Climate of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries, Part I: Auras, Astral Visions, Ectoplasm.

Abstract. This is the first of two related panels chaired by Linda Henderson. Panel 1 brings together scholars from art history and communication studies to explore responses to occultism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The first speaker examines the photography of auras and other invisible phenomena (e.g. X-rays) revealed by the photographic plate at the turn of the last century. The other two speakers explore artistic practices in response to occult forms of knowledge in the early 20th century (Kupka) and, more recently, to the history of spirit photography and, particularly, images of ectoplasm.

Keywords: Auras, Astral Vision, Ectoplasm, Jakob Narkiewicz-Jodko, Frantisek Kupka, Spirit photography

Jeremy Stolow, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montréal

The Hand of Narkiewicz-Jodko

This presentation tells a story about the relationship between two remarkable images that were produced in close succession in 1895-6: the famous first radiograph produced by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the discoverer of the X-Ray, depicting the hidden skeletal structure of his wife’s hand; and the first photogram depicting a corona discharge of an electrified hand produced by the Belarusian scientist, Jakob von Narkiewicz-Jodko. My presentation will trace some of the ways these two startling images were reproduced, circulated, and commented upon, often in juxtaposition with one another, within a burgeoning ‘occultural’ public sphere of the previous fin-de-siècle. In so doing, I explore how these two images purporting to reveal hidden structures and states of being were entangled with one another, blurring the divide between sanctioned and heterodox modes of scientific observation and theorization. Playing on the centrality of ‘the hand’ as a key site of occult visualization, I locate Röntgen’s and Narkiewicz-Jodko’s pictures within a larger series of comparable pictures of hands that were produced under equally mysterious conditions and that also became objects of intense debate among physicists, psychical researchers, and their reading publics during this period. Gesturing toward my forthcoming book, Picturing Aura, of which my study of Narkiewicz-Jodko forms one small part, I will conclude my presentation with some reflections on efforts to ‘visualize the invisible’ as a project occult knowledge.

Fae Brauer, University of East London Centre for Cultural Studies Research

Composing “Symmorphies”: Annie Besant’s Theosophies, František Kupka’s Chromatic Music, and Astral Vision

The concepts of chromatism in music and musicality in colour were vital for achieving what the Czech-born medium-artist František Kupka called “compenetration” in his composition of “symmorphies”—symphonies of colour and sound in painting that seemed able to vibrate with major and minor chromatic modalities. In Paris, after becoming exposed to Annie Besant’s theosophy through her lectures regularly organized by the Société théosophique de France and widely published, Kupka began to explore “symmorphies.” Following Annie Besant’s Man and his Bodies, The Power of Thought, Karma, and Reincarnation, in French translation through Publications Théosophiques, Kupka scrutinized how his magnetic, mediumistic, musical and visionary experiences resonated with Besant’s, alongside C. W. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane and their jointly authored Thought-Forms. Theosophically encoding his double self-portraits in yellows to emit thought-waves signifying, following Thought-Forms, “a powerful intellect employed absolutely unselfishly for the benefits of humanity,” Kupka illuminated his mesmeric power in La Gamme jaune I and astral vision in La Gamme jaune II. Reconceiving his identity as an Astral visionary able to fuse his art with music and penetrate invisible realities, including

cosmic dimensions, Kupka confessed in 1909, “I can now render what was moving in my spirit like mysterious distant visions … I believe I can find something between sight and hearing and produce a fugue in colours as Bach has done in music.” Focusing upon Kupka’s series of symmorphies, Amorpha, fugue à deux couleurs, this paper shall then explore how these “cosmic symphonies” may engulf its beholders in their vibratory emissions with the force of magnetic hypnosis.

Serena Keshavjee, Dept. of History, University of Winnipeg

The Art of Ectoplasm

While visiting the Prairie city of Winnipeg in 1923 to lecture on the “proofs of immortality,” Arthur Conan Doyle spent an evening in the “scientific laboratory” of Dr. T.G. and Lillian Hamilton participating in a controlled seance. So impressed with the table tipping that he experienced, Doyle proclaimed Winnipeg a “psychic centre.” For fifteen years the Hamiltons organized weekly seances with their elite settler friends and took over 700 photographs of extraordinary events in the seance room, including telekinesis and ectoplasmic manifestations.

In some ways Conan Doyle was prescient with his description of Winnipeg as a psychic place. Once nicknamed “the Chicago off the North,” today Winnipeg is more often described as “weird Winnipeg,” and even the “ectoplasmic capital of the world.” When the Hamilton Family Fonds (HFF) was digitized early on in 2001, it was ignored by academics, but attracted artists, film makers and authors interested in occulture, Spiritualism, and ectoplasm. The exhibition The Undead Archive, in three venues across Winnipeg in 2023, brought together, for the first time, contemporary artistic responses to the HFF. This paper will look at how and why artists use archival psychical photographs as the source for their art.

[10] Linda Henderson (The University of Texas at Austin Emeritus), Polina Dimova (University of Denver) and Ana Hedberg Olenina (Arizona State University). The Occult/Scientific Climate of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries, Part II: Ether, Electricity, and Electromagnetism–from Theosophy to Theremin via Skriabin and Bely.

Abstract. This is the second of two panels chaired by Linda Henderson. This panel juxtaposes an art historian with scholars of Russian literature and media studies to explore interactions of occultism and science in 20th century. The panel begins with an examination of the engagement of Theosophy’s Russian founder, H. P. Blavatsky, with contemporary science. It continues with other prominent figures of Russian culture, the poet Andrei Bely and composer Alexandr Skriabin, as well as the physicist/musician Leon Theremin, inventor of the theremin and “techo-utopian” experimenter. For all of these figures, the themes of ether, electricity, and electromagnetism were central.

Keywords: Ether, Electricity, Electromagnetism, Theosophy, H.P. Blavatsky, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Skriabin, Leon Theremin

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The University of Texas at Austin, Emeritus

Reexamining Theosophy in Its Scientific Context

In the introduction to Thought-Forms (1905), Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater provided a useful account of the scientific milieu in which Theosophy had developed after its founding in 1875: “Ether is now comfortably settled in the scientific kingdom . . . . Mesmerism, under its

new name of hypnotism, is no longer an outcast. . . . Röntgen’s rays have rearranged some of the

older ideas of matter, while radium has revolutionized them, and is leading science beyond the borderland of ether into the astral world.” Theosophy’s co-founder Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who died in 1891, did not have the advantage of her younger colleagues in experiencing the new discoveries of the 1890s (X-rays, the electron, and radioactivity). Thus, her two major treatises, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Technology (1877) and The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (1888), could only draw on the ether (over 100 references in Isis Unveiled) and on sources such as William Crookes’s evolutionary theory of the elements. The Secret Doctrine appeared in October 1888, just as Hertz’s confirmation of electromagnetic waves was announced, depriving her of the model of communication via ether waves that would support subsequent arguments for telepathy, just as X-rays provided a model for clairvoyance.

Theosophy was to provide inspiration for a number of modern artists, including Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, who were themselves deeply interested in the new science that, like Theosophy, pointed to invisible realities beyond the human eye.

Polina Dimova, University of Denver

Illuminated Environments: Electricity, Light, and Ether in Russian Modernism

This paper examines the mystical-scientific discourses and material culture of electricity, light, and ether in late imperial Russia. It offers a typology of artistic responses to electricity in Russian modernism to reveal not only the profoundly ambivalent attitudes toward electric technology, but also a consistent electric aesthetic with political ramifications. On the one hand, electricity affirmed religious and imperial power in representations of the 1883 and 1896 coronations, and it embodied the national idea in notions of electric arc light as “Russian light.” On the other, Russian art at once figured electricity as diabolical, revolutionary, transformative, and divine.

Imagined as a physical and psychic vibration, electric energy further participated in what Linda Henderson has called vibratory modernism. Like western occultism, Russian modernism appropriated fin-de-siècle notions of electromagnetism in its mystical-scientific discourses and

art, and I examine scientific notions aligned with electricity as vibration (electromagnetism,

luminiferous ether, light) to explain Russia’s ambiguous reception of electric technology. By investigating Andrei Bely’s essays and prose and Aleksandr Skriabin’s writings and music, I will show how electricity and electric light create the imagined modernist environments of Russian art and mediate between their material and spiritual dimensions. I will finally discuss how the “whirlwinds of thoughts” in Bely’s novel Petersburg seem to transfer and materialize the characters’ neuro-electric thought impulses in its fictional reality. Thus, instead of reading the novel’s central image of the bomb as driving the terrorist plot, I suggest that electric and ethereal vibrations provide the narrative energy that propels the novel.

Ana Hedberg Olenina, Arizona State University

Music from the Ether: Leon Theremin’s Media Environments and Soviet Techno- utopianism

This paper contextualizes the projects of the Soviet physicist and musician Leon Theremin (1896-1993), known for his invention of the theremin – an electronic musical instrument responding to gesture within an electromagnetic field. By making the “music coming from the ether” visible and palpable, Theremin aspired to tap into hitherto unused possibilities of the human sensorium and bring new forms of experience to the audience. In his early career as a physicist in Russia in 1918, he experimented with hypnosis as a way of enhancing visual acuity and concentration when analyzing images of X-ray crystallography. In the 1930s, during his sojourn in New York, Theremin declared his ambitions to stage “synthetic super-concerts,” where electro-magnetic vibrations generated by the performer’s movements would transmit not only acoustic sensations, but also trigger devices inducing visual, haptic, and olfactory senses of the audience. Upon his return to the USSR in 1938, Theremin was imprisoned in the GULAG where he worked in a secret lab engineering radars, rockets and spying devices, such as an infrared laser microphone. Upon his release in 1947, he resumed his work in electronic music. In the 1960s, Theremin described his attempts to convert the electric currents (biotok) of his own body into sound. My research situates these experiments within the scientific trends of early Soviet techno-utopianism, underscoring the institutional and political contexts of Theremin’s inventions. I further consider Theremin’s instruments as a form of sensory prostheses, or symbiotic cyborg-like assemblages, foregrounding the implications of his experiments for contemporary debates in media theory, which are concerned, after Friedrich Kittler, with

technological processes that happen beyond the threshold of human sensory perception.

[11] Carol Colatrella (Georgia Tech). Lessons in Social Responsibility in Remarkably Bright Creatures, My Octopus Teacher, and Secrets of the Octopus.

Abstract. At SLSA 2024, I will consider examples of recent literature and media depicting octopuses as providing lessons in social responsibility for humans. Shelby Van Pelt’s New York Times best-selling novel Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022) intertwines the first-person narrative of Marcellus, an aging octopus confined in a Pacific Northwest aquarium, with an omniscient narrative about Tova Sullivan, an aging widow who for three decades has mourned the 1989 death of her only child. Marcellus and Tova communicate and develop a bond that encourages the highly intelligent, puzzle-solving octopus to solve the mystery of what happened to Tova’s son. Two nature documentaries–the Academy Award-winning My Octopus Teacher (Netflix, 2020) and Secrets of the Octopus (National Geographic, 2024)–also illustrate the ways that humans interact with and learn from octopuses. The human subjects in the novel and documentaries observe the behavior of octopuses, developing information that improves how human understand themselves and theior family and social relationships. The narratives reference octopuses as appearing variously ancient, alien, and exotic to illustrate how they mature and interact with other creatures and to examine the ways these engagements allow human subjects to contemplate aging and mortality. In this way, scientific concerns about the health of oceans and the prospects of species inhabiting them overlap with preoccupations about human well-being in Remarkably Bright Creatures, My Octopus Teacher, and Secrets of the Octopus.

Keywords: social responsibility, aging, mortality, narrative, ocean

[12] Kevin LaGrandeur (Global AI Ethics Institute). The Promise and Ethical Challenges of Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Abstract. Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk a few years ago, is the most notable of several companies developing a new type of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI): a direct, two-way, digital system that is robust, compact, and wireless. A big reason Musk’s company has received so much attention is because he has stated that its long-term aim goes beyond current therapeutic uses to the merging of humans with AI. These advances present great promise, but also dangers. BCI is already being used with benefits for emotional and mood therapy in psychiatric patients, and theoretically it could be used to radically increase a user’s thinking speed and abilities to interact with digital machinery, allowing humans to compete with AI for jobs (a key hope of Musk’s); however, it also presents ethical problems related to control of the technology and self: who gets it, how safe is it, how does it affect privacy, sense of self, and personal agency? My talk will address these potential promises and pitfalls, and possible solutions for the latter.

Keywords: AI, Brain-computer interface, Augmented humans, OCD, Depression, Deep brain stimulation

[13] Patrick Teed (York University). Intimacy (Captivity) At Every Scale of Abstraction.

Abstract. “Intimacy (Captivity) At Every Scale of Abstraction” takes up the positively valenced engagement with porosity undergirding new materialist engagements with the postgenomic body and its assumed benefits for theorizing our environmental entanglements. In the presentation, I argue that in their assumption of a body that was historically contained by a fantasy of closure, new materialisms structurally unthink the enslaved body, a body which is always-already disaggregated through the violence of enfleshment, a violence that positions its availability to force and invasion as its condition of emergence. I perform this critique through a return to the theoretical corpus of Hortense Spillers, the preeminent thinker of the body-flesh relation, and press her distinctions against the feminist science studies of scholars such as Donna Haraway, Carla Hustak, and Natasha Myers. Through this (re)turn to Spillers, I identify how the romance of porosity and ecology that scaffolds new materialist engagements risks extending the fundamental dispossession of the Black body through the form of a romance that conscripts the terms of its dispossession as the locus of its liberation. In so doing, I pose greater conceptual problems for the theorizations of scale at play in deployments of climate and diaspora in critical theory.

Keywords: Black critical theory, Afropessimism, New Materialism, Feminist science studies

[14] Andrea Buckvold (N/A). The After: Imagining Pollination and Plant Evolution in a Hyper-Carbonized Future through Art.

Abstract. Assuming life survives – as it has found a way to in the past – how will plants evolve without pollinators and in a hyper-carbonized ecosystem?

Artists have “imagined” realities for centuries. From Hieronymus Bosch to Jules Verne, humanity has explored beyond nature. But now, humanity is faced with examining not only an unknown future, but one that will very likely exist beyond our selves. This future will have been irrevocably created by us, but we may never see it, nor might any other living species that currently exists.

How do seeds germinate? What other methods of dispersal might they use? How will color evolve in life forms when there is no need to attract insects? Will a hyper-carbonized atmosphere effect plant growth and forms? Will fierce competition for rare nutrients create antagonistic relationships between previously symbiotic systems? What might this future ecosystem look like?

With the unknown looming, this lecture will focus on imagining a living future. By comparing and investigating how artists have explored and depicted nature in the past and present, Andrea Buckvold will discuss how her creative work explores a possible future that may exist “after” us.

Keywords: Pollination, Hyper-Carbonized, Plant evolution, Art, Art History

[15] Damian Enyaosah (The University of Texas at Dallas). Towards Afro-posthumanism: An Aesthetic Discourse on the Ifa Divination System in the USA.

Abstract. This research attempts to grant agency to underrepresented Ifa communities in the USA, notably the Black, White, and Hispanic practitioners of Ifa-ING. Ifa-ING is an African divination system that has been imported into American society through political and circumstantial migration. The aesthetics of performance and wellness in the Ifa divination are analyzed through the radical posthumanist school of thought. Where humans, plants, animals, objects, and other non-human agents of the ecosystem are part of Ifa divination, and these dynamic hybrids can be argued to possess attributes conceivable mostly as posthumanist performances. The human body has never been more decentralized than in the present age of the twenty-first century where there are cravings for lost cultures and organic healing due to the global effects of environmental degradation in industrialized societies. This explains why posthumanism aligns itself effectively with postmodernism, questioning reasoning, biology, aesthetics, performance art, culture, perfection, etc. In Africa, performances are predominantly embodied experiences and organic living rituals whose performative and aesthetic components cannot be fully expressed or analyzed through the concept of Western posthumanism alone. The researcher shall employ the view of interpretivism to understand the nature and functions of the body, place, and objects in the healing culture of the Ifa shamans across select Ifa communities in the USA. The purpose of the study is to propose a new way of analyzing indigenous ritual healing practices of African origin through the concept of Afro-posthumanism.

Keywords: Afro-posthumanism, Posthumanism, Ifa-ING, Ifa divination system, posthumanist performance

[16] Adam Rosenthal (Texas A&M University). Originary Bio-technicity.

Abstract. In “Originary Biotechnicity,” I expand on my forthcoming book, Prosthetic Immortalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), in order to consider the ontological, discursive, and historical factors that have contributed to what, today, has become the undeniable entanglement of the biological and technological. I argue that both the Western philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Simondon) and contemporary biological sciences (Davies, Walker, Moreno, Mossio, Montévil) demonstrate the impossibility of defining “life” without recourse to that which life first makes possible: the “technical.” Life can only be conceived of through the prosthetic supplements that it itself invents, a fact demonstrated by every appeal to the “organ,” qua instrument, or organon. Life has, therefore, always already been biotechnological. Following Simondon’s work on organology, I argue that by revisiting the philosophico-epistemological entanglement of life and technology we can rethink the catastrophic binaries of culture/nature, interior/environment, life/technics which have contributed to the current Anthropocene era.

Keywords: biotechnology, Anthropocene, Simondon, technicality, organology

[17] Kristin Kondrlik (West Chester University of Pennsylvania). When we all stopped: Environmental optimism and misinformation in children’s media about the coronavirus anthropause.

Abstract. The year 2020 saw twin disasters in the United States. The climate crisis continued to escalate: the global average temperature reached its second highest recorded rate (NOAA, 2021), and the United States alone saw twenty-two climate or weather-related disasters, costing 262 lives and over $95 billion dollars (Bateman, 2021). In January of the same year, Alex Azar, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, declared the coronavirus a public health disaster. Since March 2020, the United States has suffered over 1.1 million deaths and 6.4 million hospitalizations from the coronavirus (CDC, 2023).

In the face of these simultaneous disasters, public discourse during the coronavirus pandemic sometimes reflected a paradoxically optimistic message: that the environment and non-human animals could benefit from the pandemic. Rutz, et al (2020) have termed this period an “anthropause”: a temporary global slowdown of modern human activity (p. 1156). As businesses and schools closed during the pandemic, humans moved and traveled less, resulting in temporary benefits to the environment and animals. Popular discourse, such as viral social media posts showing a flock of swans in Venice (Felton, 2020) and news reports showing clear skies that had once been choked with air pollution (Kinver, 2021), praised humans’ decreased activity during the global pandemic.

Like popular media aimed at adults, texts written for children about the coronavirus pandemic adopted similarly optimistic framings of the anthropause. This presentation will perform a visual analysis of three texts: Tomos Roberts’ The Great Realization (a YouTube bedtime story), Lenora Todaro and Annika Siems’s Sea Lions in the Parking Lot (a picture book), and Tom Rivett-Carnac’s What Happened When We All Stopped (an animated poem). Like texts composed for adults, these texts frequently positioned the coronavirus anthropause as an opportunity for rapprochement between humans and nature: by staying at home and re-evaluating their relationship with nature, these texts urged, children could both protect themselves and heal the Earth. They provided comfort and asserted that children’s individual actions mattered in a time of hardship.

The messages of hope within these texts, however, intersect with recent disagreements about scientific communication about the climate crisis. As Eric C. Miller (2023) has noted, science communicators lack consensus about which posture to adopt when speaking about climate change: to motivate the public to take action, should communicators advocate hope for the future or highlight the horrific potential outcomes of inaction? The answer to this question became even more complicated during the coronavirus pandemic. As they offer hope, pandemic-era texts could also circulate insidious forms of misinformation. As Julia Fine & Jessica Love-Nichols (2023) note, many popular images and discussions of the pandemic’s environmental benefits, such as the pictures of swans in Venice canals, were faked or shared out of context, distorting public perceptions of the anthropause’s environmental echoes. Texts written for children about the coronavirus anthropause similarly romanticized the pandemic lockdown as a time of safety, reflection, and harmony with nature, when, for many children, especially children in marginalized communities, the pandemic did not mitigate the ongoing effects of the climate crisis. The hopeful narratives and images in these texts hinged on erasing many children’s lived experiences, creating nostalgia for a “safe,” “restorative” pandemic that never truly existed. These texts, therefore, show the dangers of drawing on rhetorics of hope when communicating with vulnerable audiences about disaster.

References

Bateman, John. (2021). Record number of billion-dollar disasters struck U.S. in 2020. Nation saw its 5th-warmest year on record. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. https://www.noaa.gov/stories/record-number-of-billion-dollar-disasters-struck-us-in-2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023, Nov. 7). COVID Data Tracker. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker

Kinver, Mark. (2021, Jun 1).Then and now: Pandemic clears the air. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57149747

Fine, J. C., & Love-Nichols, J. (2023). We Are (Not) the Virus: Competing Online Discourses of Human-Environment Interaction in the Era of COVID-19. Environmental Communication, 17(3), 293–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2021.1982744

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Monthly Global Climate Report for Annual 2020, published online January 2021, retrieved on April 17, 2024 from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202013.

Miller, E. C. (2023). Between Hope and Despair: Communicating Climate Change. Pennsylvania Communication Annual, 79(1), 32–52.

Rutz, C., Loretto, M.-C., Bates, A. E., Davidson, S. C., Duarte, C. M., Jetz, W., Johnson, M., Kato, A., Kays, R., Mueller, T., Primack, R. B., Ropert-Coudert, Y., Tucker, M. A., Wikelski, M., & Cagnacci, F. (2020). COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 4(9), 1156–1159. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1237-z

Keywords: children, media, children’s books, environment, environmental science and literature, coronavirus pandemic, climate crisis, optimism, misinformation, science communication, crisis communication, crisis literature

[18] Charissa Terranova (The University of Texas at Dallas), Mitchell Joachim (New York University and Terraform ONE), Dakota Gearhart (Independent Artist) and Phillip Thurtle (University of Washington). Goth Biology – Dissensus and the Blobbified Whole, Panel1.

Abstract.

Organizers: Charissa Terranova and Phillip Thurtle

False binaries haunt biology. Theoretical biology for example operates upon a conception of organisms as tightly regulated, whole-dominant self-forming systems, while wetlab science cares nothing for such environmentally situated whole-organism thought. Holism grinds against reductionism; the Cartesian mind-body problem metastasizes; disability equals death; and the old saw of theory versus practice sounds again. Operating beyond such boredom, goth biology dances within the tension of collective dissensus. It weds romantic novelist Mary Shelley to post-disciplinary performer Laura Kim, exploring organisms struggling onward, making hay from mutation. Like the rhythmic signaling of symbiotic microbial quorum sensing, goth biology is all about the repetitive circle of coalescence and granulation. Bodies coming together, then coming apart again like bacteria blobbifying into biofilm then deblobbifying into the atmosphere or along the ocean floor. Goth biology surveys incorporeal biological otherness, such as vanishing-twin syndrome, or living with the unliving inside, and chimerism, or organisms with both self-same and self-aberrant cells. It pivots from nineteenth-century phantasmagoria of the gothic that generated modernism a century later as both grim, dysfunctional public housing towers and disinterested Medicare. This panel recognizes the murkiness of systems of knowledge, the loosely composite nature of most living things, and the continual haunting of life by death. It will borrow from an aesthetics of gothic art and architecture and its continual reimagining to think about the gothic’s refusal to die. Inspired by studies in gothic architecture, gothic literature, and post-punk goth music, the panel will explore the role of death and loss in biology, the importance of abstraction and empathy, vitality through forms, the role of belief in biological thought, and what it means to inhabit a body that is haunted by other beings and multiple time spans.

Keywords: Medieval Gothic architecture, The ruins of the body, Empathy and realism, Reductionist biology versus abstraction, Form across time, Monstrous biology, Mythical bodies and signification, The Gothic and expressionism, Experimentalism and speculative biology, Loss and alienation

Running Amok: Goth Biology’s Unreconciled Antitheses

Charissa Terranova

Artists and writers have used “gothic” in manifold ways since Giorgio Vasari coined it in the 1530s to pejoratively describe medieval cathedrals as “barbaric.” The idea was especially convenient to an array of modernists. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the gothic materializes in the grotesquerie of a sutured-up fleshy humanoid given life by electricity – itself borne of Shelley’s drug-driven writing mania one night during the volcanic winter of 1816. Painter Caspar David Friedrich embodies it in the gothic ruin as a sublimity of solitude and loss. Then came the various notions of the gothic shaping modern architecture: Augustus Pugin’s reformist Catholic paternalism; William Morris’s liberal-socialist paternalism; Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s braiding of fanciful historicism with Whiggish technological formalism; and John Ruskin’s eccentric individualism. Like “biology,” the “gothic” is more discourse than thing. When coupled, the words “goth biology” name the critique of biology as decided, fixed, and unchanging: a narrative of so many reticulated organic systems well-honed by selectionist pressures of deep time and nature – Darwin’s natural selection and its later incarnation as the selfish genes of modern genetics. Instead, goth biology is organicism run amok in parts refusing to sublimate to the whole. After summarizing the rich life of the gothic as discourse, this talk revisits art historian Willhelm Worringer’s Form-Problems of the Gothic (1912) for tools reanimating the metanarrative of biology as “hybrid phenomena,” “uncanny amalgamations,” “unreconciled antitheses,” and “movement that is not connected with any goal and therefore loses itself in the infinite,” to use the words of Worringer. Goth biology is thus an epistemology of the living that resists reduction to molecule, machine, or one man standing alone.

Biodesign Against Extinction

Mitchell Joachim

A discussion about interdisciplinary art and architecture dedicated to combating the extinction of planetary species through pioneering bio-based materials. The focus is on advancing socioecological design with an array of specialists who cultivate resilience through innovative approaches in building, transportation, infrastructure, water, food, waste treatment, air quality, and energy systems. This collaborative process speculates on the impact of emerging technologies on future urban generations and local biodiversity, integrating ecological planning, bio-based architecture, urban systems, and public art. Committed to environmental and social justice, the work strives to develop inclusive spaces and strategies for all beings.

Whale Fall Aesthetics; A Visual Presentation

Dakota Gearhart

Intrigued by the ruins of a body and its generative possibilities, I propose to share a new project that researches the goth biology of whale fall aesthetics. A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft) in the bathyal or abyssal zones. On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades. Aesthetically, a whale fall is an immersive fish-food bonanza – but it’s also an alchemical architecture for the continual haunting of life by death, and better yet, no humans are involved.(…or are we?) My project, a visual art presentation on whale fall world-building, treats the imagery of whale falls as blubber-lined metropolises that inspire new combinations of unlikely communities. I offer comparisons to Gaudi’s Sagrada Família with fresh susi lining the walls, or an unpublished China Meville novel that oozes out hunger enhancing smells of fried chicken with a side of fresh egg custard. We can only dream of such speculative masterpieces, but yet whale falls actually exist. I offer a picture of what the ruins of a great body can supply to those who live in the shadows. I dare not equate a beautiful and innocent whale with American capitalism, but I do dare to suggest that death of a complex system can provide sustenance to those who we don’t see or even know about – like bone eating worms or baby octopi. Inspired from texts from scholar Phillip Thurtle’s “Goth Biology” and Anna Tsing’s “Mushroom at the End of the World”, I aim to dismantle the conditioned terror of witnessing decomposed beauty, and generate new aesthetics for a community body that is at once haunted by its own continuity, as well as the reality of abundance and loss.

[19] Phillip Thurtle (University of Washington), Siddharth Ramakrishnan (University of Puget Sound), Umut Gunduz (University of Washington) and Charissa Terranova (The University of Texas at Dallas). Goth Biology – Dissensus and the Blobbified Whole, Panel2.

Abstract.

Organizers: Charissa Terranova and Phillip Thurtle

Keywords: Medieval Gothic architecture, The ruins of the body, Modernism and gothic architecture, Reductionist biology versus abstraction, Form across time, Monstrous biology, Mythical bodies and signification, The Gothic and expressionism, Experimentalism and speculative biology, Loss and alienation

The Genetic Ruins and Monstrous Developments of Goth Biology

Phillip Thurtle

Change is hard. It’s difficult to go through and its outcomes are far from assured. This seemingly obvious comment, however, is not reflected in how we imagine biological change. For instance, some scientists describe evolution as a slow and gradual process; while other scientists suggest that development is a series of challenges that must be overcome. For the goth biologist, however, these portrayals underemphasizing the corporeal trauma, alienation, and discomfort that mark life’s many changes. As art historian Gilda Williams claims, the gothic combines “two things that should have remained apart”: such as life and death, growth and decay, the mineral and the organic, and the monstrous and the normal. Biological change must also hold together seemingly incongruent elements. Changes occur across spaces that warp and bend across molecular, cellular, and organismic scales. And evolutionary pasts haunt changes even as developmental futures promise monstrous outcomes. Drawing from Wihelm Worrnger’s characterization of gothic art’s “will to form” and inspired by Michel Serres’ portrayal of the poetics of knowledge through his characters Hermes, the Troubadour, and Angels, this paper explores biological change from the perspective of a goth biologist. It asks, might we better explain change by conceiving of genes as landscapes of loss, like the ruins of a building, instead of as a blueprint to construct something new? And might it be more accurate to think that development occurs because of the monstrous possibilities created by the unresolved tension between ontogenetic and phylogenetic scales of time than by their mutual embrace? But mostly this paper argues that goth biology understands that change occurs because we aren’t biologically efficient, even if it’s painful to experience and difficult to explain.

Frankensnails: Exploration of chemical induced shape changes in a hermaphroditic snail

Siddharth Ramakrishnan

Manipulation of animals (humans/non-humans) is a constant theme in both fiction and the science lab. In that way, labs are the epitome of the grotesque, the misshapen, the novel, the mutant, where both hopes and monsters are born. We will talk about how a chemical used to treat male pattern baldness (another form of body change for a different dysphoria), uncoils the hermaphroditic snail, changing it from being helical and sun-shaped to an uncoiled crescent.

Chrono-Satellites and Other Visceral Appendages

Umut Gunduz

Thomas Moynihan, in his book ‘Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History’ (2019), discusses the development of nervous architectures in relationship to chrono-perception. These ‘apertures’ are representational models of both neuronal and juridical constraints – “…both cerebrospinal ensconcement and semantogenic englobement are legible as thresholds of an inward collapse that was initiated six hundred million years ago with the evolution of nervous architectures. We, as representational systems, have never been in immediate contact with anything except our own modellings…” (Moynihan, 2019). In this way, both the body and its ‘models’ develop in tandem as anticipatory systems of hallucination. Combining this idea with Gaston Bachelard’s ‘poetic images’ (The Poetics of Space, 1958) we might start to imagine these unlocatable moments of visual reverie as ruptures in space-time – topophillic chronognostic antagonisms that appear as the iridescent vapours of an imagined order. These eruptions are catastrophic sublimations that act like prison-breaks if handled appropriately. In this talk, I will investigate this ‘handling of catastrophe’ through the artistic process – those acts that use ritual, spontaneity, improvisation, and chance in visceral conspiratorial gestures toward an anatomy that seemingly wants to extend, disburse, and escape into other worlds and cybernetic agencies.

[20] Nathaniel Otjen (Princeton University). Climate Displacements: Critical Mineral Mining and Settler Colonialism.

Abstract. It is well known that climate change produces displacement. Humans, animals, and plants shift their ranges to escape changing conditions, for example. At the same time, techno-scientific efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change are widely seen as offering solutions to displacement. Solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles are presented as strategies for reducing future emissions and keeping environments healthy. As a growing body of research is demonstrating, however, techno-scientific solutions are producing their own mass displacements and deepening historical injustices in ways that worsen contemporary vulnerabilities.

Drawing upon my ongoing research with communities threatened by critical mineral mining in the United States, this presentation examines how dominant narratives of climate change mitigation are built upon histories of displacement produced by settler-colonial and capitalist structures of dispossession. I examine how histories of mining in Nevada have supported new lithium extraction projects and further displaced vulnerable groups of humans and more than humans. I look at how the construction of a 6,000-acre open-pit lithium mine on land that is sacred to Paiute-Shoshone peoples and hosts some of northern Nevada’s most vulnerable species, including the endangered sage grouse, threatens the lives of local inhabitants.

Keywords: displacement, critical minerals, settler colonialism, mining, Nevada, climate change

[21] Sarah E. McFarland (Northwestern State University). “Simply Automatons”: Thinking Beyond Anthropocentricity with The Mountain in the Sea.

Abstract. Ray Naylor’s 2022 speculative climate fiction, The Mountain in the Sea, has been lauded by critics for how it “dwell[s] on our own species’ ecocidal depredations” (Steven Poole in The Guardian) as a “Nostradamic prophecy about a climate crisis engineered by consumption, profiteering, and technology” (Sinjini Dey in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction). Largely set in a nature sanctuary on Con Dao (and grounded in the historical realities of the colonized archipelago’s violent past), it is a story about the discovery of an octopus species with language, culture, writing, and art. The main storyline is about the efforts of researchers and tech firms to learn from, and potentially exploit, the octopuses’ experiences of embodied consciousness to advance artificial intelligence. This presentation argues that the emphasis on cephalopod cognition is problematic for reestablishing a hierarchy of merit based on human-valued characteristics, however. The emphasis on what characters classify as an “advanced form of life” (305) in contrast to those ignored as “simply automatons” (42) perpetuates the subordination of other beings that enables harmful exploitations in the first place. By putting cognitive science and philosophies of mind into productive dialogue with the novel’s character depictions, I exploit tensions between undervalued entities and anthropocentric values to reveal that their inhumanness replaces human indifference with humane compassion within their climate-changing ecosystems.

Keywords: climate fiction, cognitive science, animal studies, artificial intelligence

[22] Jenni Halpin (Savannah State University). Weighing Alternative Pasts as Other Countries in Jo Walton’s My Real Children.

Abstract. Alternative history fictions cast as homelands the periods they re-imagine by their contrast to the strange terrain the fiction itself discloses. Jo Walton’s My Real Children complicates this further by its narrator’s experience of two distinct pasts, both of which are not readers’ known worlds. As the novel begins, Patricia is a dementia patient pondering the difference between her medical problems with shorter-term memory and her certain recollection both of a life in which she raised four children and of one in which she had raised three.

Patricia considers whether she can choose one of these worlds over the other and whether her personal choice about a marriage decades ago could really have had such a significant effect on world events; more than her power to choose, I am interested in ways to evaluate these three worlds and how one might come to consider one world history better or worse than the others. What domains count? And what counts as better in any given domain? Is it even possible to weigh out these differences across the two scales, personal and planetary? Walton’s novel re-imagines agency in relation to both individual and collective actions. Through a reading of the novel’s judgments about Patricia’s pasts in their individual and international scales, I intend to argue for an evaluative framework eliding the commonly drawn distinctions between these two scales and recognizing them as (at least) mutually constitutive.

[note: please italicize My Real Children in title and abstract]

Keywords: alternative history, science fiction, many worlds speculative fiction

[23] Paris Weber (Texas A&M University). Hidden Heat Death: The Duality of Decay in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend .

Abstract. In Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), processes of decay are simultaneously obscured and made visible. The parallel obfuscating and highlighting of death and decay points both to a desire to understand the cosmos and a desire to be shielded from cosmic laws – namely, thermodynamic laws leading toward the heat death of the universe. A novel that is filled with fire, waste, and decay, it is also one that ambiguates the many processes of decomposition and combustion that lurk within the narrative. From the disguised John Harmon viewing the advanced decay of his own supposed body to the deep time of eons hiding within Lizzie Hexam’s hearth, Our Mutual Friend suggests the visibly hidden timeline of Victorian progress to universal decline. Further, the shop of Mr. Venus, taxidermist and articulator of bones, arguably depicts a setting of veiled decay and artificial preservation illuminated by a low, dying flame of a candle – a flickering light mirrored by the threat of a dying sun. Plainly stated, instances of decay, along with moments of combustion, abound in Our Mutual Friend, suggesting a link between representations of decay and the exhaustion of heat. In this paper, I will argue that the duality of decay – its status as both obscure and visible – in Our Mutual Friend suggests a tension between cosmic heat death and Darwinian notions of natural processes at an incomprehensible scale. By analyzing decay’s duality in the novel, I will highlight the ways in which the novel interchanges the metaphor of human death and cosmic death.

Keywords: decay, entropy, waste, fire, heat death, duality, Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

[24] Nicola McCafferty (Northwestern University), Claudia Kinahan (Northwestern University) and Angenette Spalink (Texas A&M University). Flesh, Plastic, and Trans-corporeality: Nonhuman Performance in the Anthropocene.

Abstract. *Event #1 of 3 in Performance Studies Stream

This panel explores nonhuman performance within the context of climate change by attending to the trans-corporeal collisions of the human with diverse materials including flesh, plastic, and sand. We offer overlapping perspectives on nonhuman relations that respond to and serve as strategies for attending to the agency of and performing with nonhumans. Panelists will cover a range of texts, objects, and approaches, from eco-material choreographies in the installation Correspondence (2021), to the plasticity of Barbie, to the interaction between music video and lyrics in Poppy’s apocalyptic anthem “Time Is Up” (2018). Together, these papers position performance as a space to attune to the nonhuman and to grapple with the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene.

Keywords: flesh, plastic, trans-corporeality, performance, nonhuman, climate, anthropocene, materiality
Flesh, Plastic, and Trans-corporeality: Nonhuman Performance in the Anthropocene

Individual Abstracts

“‘Baby, Your Time is Up’: Poppy’s Performance of Apocalyptic Nonhumanity”

Nicola McCafferty

Poppy is difficult to categorize. She’s a genre-bending musician, a former YouTube personality, a racially and ontologically ambiguous performance artist. Across her oeuvre, Poppy flirts with the boundary between human and nonhuman in sonic and visual narratives that explore the end of the world as we know it. This paper examines Poppy’s performance of nonhumanity in the context of the song “Time is Up” from her second studio album, released in 2018 and aptly titled with the ontological question Am I A Girl?. The song and accompanying music video depict an apocalyptic near-future characterized by environmental devastation in which Poppy, playing the role of an android, is able to survive when humans cannot. Using and extending the concept of “the flesh,” understood both as a de-humanizing and de-gendering processes associated with the exploitation of the Translatlantic Slave Trade and a possible site for new ways of being human to emerge unbeholden to Western liberal humanism, I attend to the material dimensions of Poppy’s nonhuman performance. This performance, I argue, brings together an intentional cultivation of racial ambiguity and interest in apocalyptic narratives in ways that invite an exploration of the overlapping layers of nonhumanity both moral and biological that construct her star persona. In “Time Is Up,” the song’s lyrics describe Poppy’s creation in a factory and the dry riverbeds, dying plants, and unbreathable air that characterize the environment, while the music video depicts Poppy waking up in a sterile space with electrodes attached to her head and feeding humans pills that transform them into androids to allow their continued survival. The track’s title is taken from the chorus, in which Poppy dispassionately sings “baby, your time is up,” distancing herself both linguistically and emotionally from the humans who can no longer exist in the climate they destroyed. Through both visual and lyrical analysis, I examine the challenges and alternatives to an exclusionary and environmentally catastrophic vision of humanity offered by Poppy’s nonhuman performance. Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

“Barbie’s Plastic Performances: Re-materializing Gender and Racial Forms”

Claudia Kinahan

This paper examines how playful encounters with Barbie’s plastic re-materialize forms of gender and race. Informed by the work of new materialist scholars like Catherine Malabou, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett who emphasize the agential potential of nonhuman forces, and the work of performance scholars who examine the scriptive potential of objects, I theorize Barbie’s plastic as a lively, material nonhuman actor. My work intervenes in scholarship that has focused on Barbie at the level or representation and signification to ask what Barbie is doing materially, as well as culturally and symbolically. I argue that Barbie’s plastic enmeshes humans and nonhumans through relational play. In this presentation, I look at Barbie dolls and ‘Human Barbies’ (people who undergo surgery to look like Barbie) and examine what kinds of relations Barbie’s plastic invites. I propose a theoretical framework of ‘careful’ and ‘rough’ play to account for the ways in which Barbie’s plastic invites embodied scripts that both materialize logics of cisgender normativity and whiteness and re-materialize bodies along lines of difference. I propose a theory of bioplastic performativity to account for the ways in which humans are always-already plastic and the inseparability of imaginative versus performed actions in the field of Barbie play. Ultimately, I argue that a re-orientation toward Barbie’s plastic reveals how humans and nonhuman co-create forms of gender and race through playful encounters and entanglements that animate new ways of being in the world.

“More-than-human Movements: Trans-corporeal Choreographies of the Anthropocene”

Angenette Spalink

A transparent vertical chamber, about the size of a refrigerator, stands in the middle of Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. It is filled a quarter of the way with sand. A performer clad in beige shorts and a gas mask stands in the sand. Blasts of air violently hurl the sand through the chamber. The performer struggles, ostensibly “drowning” in the sand as they fall over. The blasts conclude. The performer eventually stands up, sand visibly embedded in their hair and skin. The blasts commence, again. The performer plunges toward the ground. This pattern continues indefinitely. Correspondences (2021), an installation of multiple sand-filled chambers, was created by multidisciplinary artists Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya. In this presentation, I examine the choreography among the particles of sand and human bodies in Correspondences, arguing that the diasporic movement of the sand from its original habitat affects its biological composition and cultural meaning. An analysis of Correspondence’s more-than-human choreographies exposes the trans-corporeal exchanges that both structure and biologically alter the performers. Building on Donna J. Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble,” I use Correspondences as a case study to argue that if we are to persist through “the horrors of the Anthropocene,” we must not only stay with the trouble, but move through the trouble (2016 ). Much like Correspondences performers who persist within the harsh landscape, moving with the trouble requires considering how movement, whether deliberate or inadvertent, biologically alters and structures the movements of human and more-than-human bodies. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene.

[25] Angenette Spalink (School of Performance, Visualization, & Fine Arts at Texas A&M University), Cory LaFevers (School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts at Texas A&M University), Nicola McCafferty (Screen Cultures at Northwestern University), Claudia Kinahan (Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University), Devon Baur (Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA) and Elizabeth Schiffler (Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA). Performing SLSA: A Roundtable on Performance Studies and the Field’s Dispersions.

Abstract. *Event #3 of 3 in Performance Studies Stream

In 2003, SLS adopted an A, spreading the ideas, concepts, and inquiries of literary and scientific crossings into artistic fields of inquiry. SLSA has since hosted performances, a recurring Fluxus stream, performance analyses, and performance scholars–cementing the often-nebulous field of performance studies as a critical companion to the ideas emerging at the already interdisciplinary conference. This roundtable will reflect on the emergence of performance within SLSA, interrogating how performance scholars benefit from the many methods that emerge here, and concretize the interventions and inquiries that performance studies makes possible. This is the third and final event of the inaugural Performance Studies Stream at SLSA.

Performance Studies, a field that has emerged out of many disciplines, including (but not limited to) anthropology, dramatic literature, African American studies, and Feminist thought, exemplifies the conceptual dispersion of ideas that the conference planners have called for. The roundtable will ask, in response to panels within the Performance Studies Stream, how do performance studies speak to climate and migration? Specifically, how do nonhuman and nonvisual modes of performance open up pathways for rethinking humanities and performance?

The roundtable will conclude two prior panels: “Flesh, Plastic, and Trans-corporeality: Nonhuman Performance in the Anthropocene” and “The Sound, Taste, and Smell of Crisis: Nonvisual Performances of Climate Diaspora.” Our aim is to broaden the presence of performance studies thinkers at SLSA by building a network of graduate students, faculty, and artists invested in the power of performance. The three events, two panels, and one roundtable will afford SLSA members sustained opportunity to develop a shared language around performance and build connections for future conferences. Members of the two panels will be present, along with invited senior scholars who have witnessed SLSA transform throughout the years.

Keywords: Performance, Senses, Nonhuman, Nonvisual, Aesthetics

Individual Abstracts

“‘Baby, Your Time is Up’: Poppy’s Performance of Apocalyptic Nonhumanity”

Nicola McCafferty

“Barbie’s Plastic Performances: Re-materializing Gender and Racial Forms”

Claudia Kinahan

“More-than-human Movements: Trans-corporeal Choreographies of the Anthropocene”

Angenette Spalink

[26] Yijun Sun (University of Massachusetts Amherst). A Leaky Container: (Other) Bodies in the Circuit.

Abstract. This paper explores the entanglement between human bodies and electronic machines from 18th-century electrical experiments and medical electricity to early 20th-century cybernetics. Building on Donna Haraway’s “leaky distinction” between human and animal, and Warren McCulloch and John Pfeiffer’s analogy of a cell membrane to a “leaky capacitor,” this paper uses the concept of a “leaky container” to describe the bounded entities of living and artificial beings. The argument is twofold: it traces the outer limits of the human body—the skin—as it interacts with electrical instruments as a receiving apparatus, and examines the inner layout of the human body—neurons—as relays. In these practices, the body is portrayed as a container, a conductor, and a transducer within the circuitry. These two lines converge, with skin and neurons gaining new meanings as models for intelligent machines that simulate thinking and living beings in a container. I argue that simulated intelligence is not located in the system’s complexity but in the simple practice of boxing-in, as illustrated by Ross Ashby’s Homeostat and Marvin Minsky’s “ultimate machine.” At the end, I revisit the concept of the container as a feminist technology (in conversation with Elizabeth Fisher and Ursula Le Guin) and discuss an ontology of a leaky container based on the map of the skin. This ontology challenges conventional notions of unity and duality by interweaving the self and others and redirecting attention to the permeable periphery. It embodies a process of generation, oscillation, and transformation, highlighting the fluidity of existence.

Keywords: Bodies, Electronic Machine, Feminist Technology, Artificial Intelligence

[27] Cory LaFevers (Texas A&M University), Devon Baur (UCLA) and Elizabeth Schiffler (UCLA). The Sound, Taste, and Smell of Crisis: Nonvisual Performances of Climate Diaspora.

Abstract. *Event #2 of 3 in Performance Studies Stream

This panel explores the multisensory experience of climate diaspora by looking beyond the visual (pun intended). Each paper draws attention to a specific nonvisual sensory element of embodied performance, including the sound of Afrofuturism in Jake Blount’s The New Faith (2022), taste in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s alimentary performance Illicit Gin Assemblies (2021), and smell (and/or its absence) in Alejandro Iñárritu’s virtual reality installation Carne y Arena (2017). Collectively, this panel engages with the full spectrum of “climate diaspora,” ranging from ecological collapse and sea-level rise to the socio-economic conditions that prompt human (and nonhuman) movements, as well as the racial politics and humanitarian crises that both drive and arise from such displacements.

Keywords: Performance Studies, Nonvisual, Multisensory, Racial politics, Humanitarian crisis
Refugees: Afrofuturist Hauntology in Jake Blount’s The New Faith

Fiddlin’ Climate Refugees: Afrofuturist Hauntology in Jake Blount’s The New Faith

Cory LaFevers

Jake Blount’s 2022 album, The New Faith, is an Afrofuturist imagining of climate-driven diaspora. Set in an apocalyptic near future of desertification, mass starvation, and the collapse of civilization, it follows a group of African-American climate refugees –survivors migrating to an island sanctuary. It is also an album of traditional “old-time” Black string band music, with banjos, fiddles, ring-shouts, and clapping. In this paper, I argue that sounding out Afrofuturist speculation with seemingly archaic old-time fiddles and banjos is not the contradiction it appears to be at first listen, but rather indicative of longstanding Afrofuturist ideologies linked to hauntology and oral traditions. I argue that The New Faith complicates and expands commonplace delineations of what Afrofuturism sounds like precisely because it sonically performs lived Afrofuturist experiences of the past (the African Diaspora itself) to imagined climate diasporas in the near future. It is through the very real possibility of global ecological collapse that Jake Blount shifts our focus, amplifying the always present but often less audible past of Afrofuturism. Time is entangled: the human-made crises of the past (enslavement, the middle passage) and the future (climate change) exist within the present “climate” crises of global pandemics and racial violence. Blount hears our future in the echoes of our past.

The Taste of Place in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Illicit Gin Assemblies

Elizabeth Schiffler

Due to petrocapitalist and agricultural exploitation, Niger Delta’s ecology has gone through extremely violent change. Top exports from crude petroleum to cocoa beans extract and destroy soil and social life. Yet despite the ecological collapse, artists, artisans, palm wine tappers, and distillers have transformed organic matter through fermentation into a transformative commodity and sensory experience through the historical practice of illicit gin. This talk savors the Illicit Gin Assemblies, a contemporary food-performance art series by artist Zina Saro-Wiwa (Los Angeles, London, Port Harcourt), as a performance that transforms the organic matter of the Niger Delta into a consumable performance piece, reconceiving taste as a transnational embodiment through microbial life. Her production and communal consumption of Sarogua, a palm-wine-based gin created in a distillery that Saro-Wiwa built and operates in the Niger Delta, served as the main actant in an assembly and silent-tasting performance in Los Angeles in November 2021. Following Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on food as a performance medium, this talk examines how agricultural and ecological change affects conceptions of global food flows. Saro-Wiwa and the Illicit Gin Institute fermented and distilled palm wine into an innumerable series of bottled gins infused with myriad African botanicals. Fermentation, a process of decomposition, relies on nonhuman microbial partners to transform sugars into alcohol. Microbial life are also partners in the act of consumption, decomposing organic matter in humans guts in alimentary performance. The Illicit Gin Assemblies resist microbial uncertainty but rather distill the violence and complexity of global food movements into microbial pathways– invisible yet perceived through taste. Production, narration, and sensory entanglement puts audience member’s bodies in an intimate yet distant relation, resisting assumptions that intimacy necessitates physical proximity with the Niger Delta ecologies.

Olfactory Other: The Stench of Biopolitics and the Sensory Schisms of Virtual Reality

Devon Baur

A humanitarian crisis is happening on the US/Mexico border as thousands of people are forcibly held in overpopulated Immigration Detention Centers (ICE). Artists and activists have tried to bring global attention to this through shocking photographs and videos, but according to firsthand accounts the most alarming characteristic of these sites eludes the photograph, slipping by unseen: the overpowering smell. Detained immigrants are kept in inhumane and cattle-like olfactory conditions. The miasma is produced by the US-run system of detainment and is then used as a weapon of oppression. Olfaction is a unique and often overlooked site of knowledge production that can operate below the level of conscious perception; it can stick constructed racist rhetoric onto the body in a way that words alone cannot. Artists need to think beyond ocularcentrism to capture the invisible dimensions of this environment. This paper explores the embodied performance of the spectator in an immersive virtual reality (VR) installation about Immigration Detention Centers (ICE) on the US/Mexico border. Performing the multisensory can blur the borders of the material and the virtual but it is important to consider how the (often forgotten) role of scent can contribute to racialized politics. In the Oscar-winning Carne y Arena director Alejandro Iñárritu captures important stories of border-crossings by latinx immigrants and recreates a detention facility for one audience member at a time. Shown to predominantly affluent white audiences this work advertised a “total immersion into the shoes of another” yet it censors the most overpowering sensory experience described in firsthand accounts: the stench created by the process of detainment. How is a dissonant and artificial schism created by this promise of “full immersion”? How does the deodorization of this artwork further implicate the immigrant body? The paper aims to destabilize the ocularcentric logic that positions VR as “the experience of the other ” and instead illuminates lessons from a sensory epistemology that is just under our noses.

[28] Ryan Wright (University of California – Davis) and Samuel Pizelo (University of California – Davis). The Garden of Forking Links: The Cyberspatial Maze as a Model for Computational Subjectivity.

Abstract. In December of 1970, Jorge Luis Borges met with cognitive scientist and AI researcher Herbert Simon to discuss their shared interest in mazes. The conversation revealed a fundamental incompatibility in how mazes were figured in their work: Borges used labyrinths as imaginative models of human affective experience confronted with sublime structures. But for Simon, mazes were formal models that expressed the decision-capacities of cybernetic systems. The incompatibility of these two model mazes dramatizes the emergence of a fundamentally different understanding of subjectivity offered by behaviorism that rejected internal states in favor of decision-sequences. This talk examines the reciprocal development of subjectivity as a mode of rational decision making and mazes as the paradigmatic model of enclosed decision spaces. We argue that this new cyber-spatial maze expresses a concept of decision space that undergirds the construction of cyberspace–from hypertexts to computer games and the internet.

Simon’s research on mazes, beginning with his dissertation in 1943, borrowed from the longer behaviorist use of mazes as experimental environments for testing learning capacities across species–from rats to crawfish. Claude Shannon brought these mazes to computer science through his early experiments in cybernetic learning, and maze logics were further elaborated in the “twisty little passages” of William Crowther’s Adventure and the hypertext link network of Tim Berners-Lee’s internet. The conflict between Borges and Simon foregrounds maze formalism as an ideologically contested space. The later proliferation of mazes in computational media evinces a modeling project that coproduced a new form of cyberspatial subjectivity.

Keywords: behaviorism, cybernetics, Jorge Luis Borges, Herbert Simon, models, cyberspace, hypertext, internet history, games

[29] Sean Yeager (Independent). “I have seven limbs, so that was very relatable”: Interviewing autistics about time, kinship, and science fiction.

Abstract. This paper analyzes 15 interviews I conducted with autistic adults in the summer of 2023. To qualify, participants had to be familiar with at least one of the following science fiction narratives: “Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, “Arrival” by Denis Villenueve, or “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin. These narratives are foundational for my theory of “kakokairos,” a term I borrow from Remi Yergeau (2018) to describe neurodivergent temporalities. For one, these narratives explicitly embody and/or discuss the relationship between simultaneous and sequential temporalities; for another, they feature protagonists whose temporalities are a hybrid of the sequential and the simultaneous. I believe this hybridity is helpful for understanding autistic experiences of time, since our personal temporalities typically diverge from the hegemony of chrononormativity (Freeman 2010).

These interviews were conducted with a casual ambiance in the virtual climate of Zoom. This not only served as an accommodation for participants with social anxiety, but also enabled a global diaspora of ideas, with participants hailing from four continents. My original goal for these interviews was simply to gain other autistics’ perspectives on time, yet the discussions spilled over into a much wider (and stranger) range of topics once I let interviewees’ individual interests govern the conversational flow.

Keywords: time, autism, narrative, science fiction, neurodivergence, interviews

[30] Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University). The Biosemiotics of Trust in Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea.

Abstract. My way into Ray Nayler’s impressive 2022 debut novel The Mountain in the Sea—a quasi-dystopian near-future science-fiction thriller centered on an encounter with a species of sentient, symbol-using octopuses—will pass through Gregory Bateson’s sometime side-project researching octopus behavior. Especially in artificially close quarters, these notoriously solitary and territorial cephalopods occasionally appear to defuse hostility by establishing mutual trust. Paraphrasing Bateson’s description of one such dialogue— stronger octopus: “these gestures are to convey that, although I could eat you, I won’t”; weaker octopus: “these gestures are to convey my acceptance of your pledge not to attack me!” This thoughtful episode in the vexed history of human efforts to comprehend non-human communication parallels key themes in The Mountain in the Sea. Nayler’s story unfolding the emergence of abstract symbol-mediated dialogue between humans and octopuses constantly presses on issues of developing and breaking relations of trust. The narrative arc of cementing trust through relational meta-communication climaxes several times in the bonds that form between the android Evrim, the cyber-assassin Rustem, and the scientist Ha, and again, in the fraught relations between predatory humans and endangered octopuses, in the ultimate moment of understanding between Ha as human protector and the alpha female octopus known as the Shapesinger as community guardian.

Keywords: biosemiotics, Gregory Bateson, science fiction, communication, cephalopods

[31] Modhumita Roy (Tufts University) and Mike Hill (University at Albany). Reading for Capital and Carbon: Climate Change, “Surplus” Populations, and Revisionary Canons.

Abstract. In his History 4° Celcius, Ian Baucom laments that his training as a literary scholar had not prepared him for “interpretive protocols” requiring him to “periodize in relation to capital and also carbon…in dates and also in degrees Celsius.” Given the reality of “looming planetary crisis of climate change,” he argues, a new analytical method is needed. The panel answers Baucom’s call for a new interpretative mode by first thinking of climate crisis not only in terms of long-term weather patterns exposed by “degrees Celsius,” but also as a more generalized atmospherics co-constituted through a complex aggregation of capital and carbon. We explore the resonances of Baucom’s conjunction “and” —that is, we focus on the ecological and the economic, the yoked phenomenon of surplus extraction and environmental degradation one of whose fundamental consequences is the forced movements of populations. If for Baucom a new protocol for reading is an imperative, this panel adds to that imperative the need also to trouble the “settled” readings of texts and to examine new textualities that focus on the unsettlement of populations, the creation of various kinds of refugees, including climate refugees, as well as mutations of genre, and the rewriting of literary canons. Some questions that animate the panel are: What are the hermeneutic valences of reading for carbon and for capital? What kinds of recalibrations of analyses are required for such a protocol? What texts and what textual forms would provide the most efficacious ground for understanding, deconstructing, analyzing the creation of “surplus” populations and the involuntary movements of bodies?

Keywords: climate refugees, capital and surplus extraction, revisionary textual forms, rewriting the canon.

[32] Christine Skolnik (Vermont College of Fine Arts). What Animals Teach Us About Consciousness.

Abstract. Twentieth-century humanists argued that humans are defined by tool making, but we now know that our nonhuman ancestors used tools for two million years before the appearance of homo sapiens. To the extent that tools shaped the body and brain, it is likely that tools made human beings. Similarly, if consciousness evolved, it is likely that non-human consciousness made human consciousness and that a fringe of instinct still shapes human culture (Bergson, Creative Evolution).

Exploring non-human consciousness sheds light on the darker social-climbing (hierarchical) and tribal (territorial) preoccupations (or instincts) we share with other primates (Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics). Recognizing the deep roots of hierarchical consciousness, on one hand, and tribal consciousness, on the other (as well as the nexus between the two) may help us to better understand conflict and climate change displacement in the 21st century, and how they are interconnected.

A shift to ecological consciousness, conversely, may be inspired by studying animal instincts such as “play, sympathy, and creativity” (Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics). If a variety of belief systems have devalued these creative instincts, as they surely have, and are also the technologies that drive climate change, then we need a massive corrective. Play, sympathy, and creativity may seem like trivial or frivolous responses to current crises until we realize that we have, in fact, degraded the terms while being primarily engaged in world destroying thought and activity for centuries.

Keywords: Consciousness, Animals, Instinct, Creativity, Henri Bergson, Brian Massumi, Climate Change, Regional Conflict, Ecology, Ethics, Politics, Interdependence, Displacement

[33] Ivy Guild (University of Nevada, Reno), Eco-Art & Mobility in a Shifting Landscape.

Abstract. Historically, visual artwork has been a stationary being and it has become increasingly more mobile in the contemporary art period. Contemporary eco-artists confront the rise of global climate change and its rippling environmental effects in myriad ways. Speculative organisms with indications of mobility have been emerging in an increasing number of artistic investigations, particularly within sculptural and installation-based artwork. Upon a recent reexamination of A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, I realized that the last two bodies of work I created grant legs and mobility devices to fictional biological organisms that would typically be rooted in place. Subconsciously, I believe I knew that my speculative flora and habitats would need to be prepared to be nomadic in the face of climate collapse. In this presentation, I intend to triangulate my own artwork alongside other artists’ work that seems to be preparing to wander and relocate, such as the work of Dawn Stetzel and Anicka Yi. In a shifting landscape, indications of movement and sentient animation are growing, particularly in sculptural fields. What kind of migrations may occur within the gallery and art world?

Keywords: eco-art, contemporary, sculpture, installation, art, sentience, relocation, animation

[34] Dennis Summers (Strategic Technologies for Art, Globe and Environment), Roger Rothman (Bucknell University) and David Clark (NSCAD University). The Freedom of Rabbit/Ducks and Cats: Philosophy and Art/Science.

Abstract. In this panel the speakers find provocative links between individual philosophers and art/science. In the first presentation, Roger Rothman looks to the work of Hannah Arendt to gain perspective on the body of work created by the Fluxus artists of the 1906s. His focus, more specifically is on the concept of public freedom. A different kind of freedom is discussed in the following presentation by Dennis Summers. This is the variable experiences possible in the non-linear interactive digital artwork created by David Clark in 2008 called 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand). Not only is Ludwig Wittgenstein one of the many topics found within that artwork, Summers looks to Wittgenstein’s ideas about “seeing an aspect,” along with Summers’ own research on collage as relevant to digital deepfakes and artificial intelligence. Other kinds of blends of fiction and reality are discussed by the last presenter, the artist of 88 Constellations, David Clark. He will talk about his most recent project The Nine Lives of Schrödinger’s Cat. Clark considers a range of philosophical “cats,” including the philosophy of David Lewis (aka Bruce Le Catt), in order to address themes of hauntology, memory, possible worlds, and the limits of language as we try to imagine meaning in the time span of our nuclear legacy.

Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Fluxus, Freedom, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Collage, Digital Art, Deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, Schrödinger’s Cat, The Ray Cats Proposition, David Lewis

Title: “Fluxus, Arendt, and the Founding of Public Freedom”

What most distinguishes the work of Hannah Arendt from that of both her predecessors and contemporaries is her particular conception of freedom. For Arendt freedom is to be distinguished from liberation, the latter understood as a condition in which the individual subject is set free from some externally imposed state of domination. The former – freedom – is for Arendt, a condition founded on plurality. It requires multiple individuals to be achieved, and can only be won in the presence of others. Liberation can be individual and private, but freedom must be both plural and public. Though inarguably one of the towering figures of mid twentieth century political thought, Arendt has commanded little interest among scholars of twentieth century literature and culture, despite the central place that freedom has occupied among the artists of avant-garde (“The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” wrote André Breton in The Surrealist Manifesto of 1924). This paper will argue that Arendt’s conception of freedom, while at odds with the mainstream of avant-garde discourse (including, for instance, Surrealists such as Breton), illuminates with great clarity, the work of Fluxus, a group of artists who met in the late fifties and began exhibiting and performing together in the early sixties, in both the US and Europe. Though initially compelled by the same sorts of private freedoms advanced by Breton and others, they stumbled upon a fundamentally different experience of freedom, one that corresponds far less to the liberatory politics of Marx and Freud and far more to the plural and public modes of happiness articulated by Arendt.

Roger Rothman, Samuel H. Kress Professor of Art History Bucknell University, PA roger.rothman@bucknell.edu

Title: “Digital Collage: From 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein to AI”

For some years I have been presenting and writing about my theory of collage, (montage, etc.) across media and its often surprising manifestations. I also emphasize the correlation between collage and technology. For this presentation I will look at digital media by focusing on the extraordinary interactive net art project 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) by David Clark (2008). The participant negotiates the artwork by selecting from a display of 88 visual links that each lead to short audio-visual pieces on different topics, often but not always, related to the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This creates a non-linear experience for the user that opens up almost endless possibilities for different moments of collage connectivity. The connection to Wittgenstein is apt as I have found that his ideas from later in his career regarding what he called “seeing an aspect” to be especially relevant to collage theory. I will discuss that, and close by briefly considering recent advances in deepfakes and artificial intelligence. Specifically, the outputs of generative AI are fundamentally collages scraped together from bits and pieces of data. That the seams we typically expect in collage aren’t apparent don’t change anything. In fact, in this way they can be seen to resemble the “hidden” photographic collages from the midnineteenth century and also for example the artwork of Max Ernst. All of this raises important issues of truth and ontological realism, for which collage theory can be uniquely suited to address.

Dennis Summers, cco Strategic Technologies for Art, Globe, and Environment. cco@stage2001.com

Title: “Schrödinger Cats All the Way Down.”

Using material from The Nine Lives of Schrödinger’s Cat – my book about how fiction and reality have become increasingly entangled in our modern media world – I will consider a number of imaginary cats: Schrödinger’s Cat (a thought experiment that demonstrates how a cat – at the mercy of the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics – might be both alive and dead at the same time), the ‘Ray Cats’ proposition (an imaginative solution to the vexing linguistic problem of designing a warning for Nuclear Waste sites involving the creation of a special breed of genetically altered cats that would change color when exposed to radiation), and the philosophical writing of Bruce Le Catt (the nom de plume of American Philosopher David Lewis who wrote ripostes to his own work under his cat’s name). Each of these imaginary cats engages with different registers of meaning in the world (material, aesthetic, semiotic, and mythologic). Schrödinger’s Cat upsets the reliable dichotomy of subjective/objective meaning in classical science. The Ray Cats Proposition highlights the role of mythology in our culture (the only system of meaning that might endure to protect humanity 10,000 years in the future). And Bruce Le Catt, who acts as a self-conscious foil to the American philosopher who raised more than a few eyebrows by arguing that every possible world was as real as our current one. The talk will revolve around themes of hauntology, memory, possible worlds, and the limits of language as we try to imagine meaning in time span of our nuclear legacy.

David Clark, Professor, Media Arts NSCAD University, Halifax dclark@nscad.ca

[35] Himali Singh Thakur (University of California, Davis). Community and Design in Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town.

Abstract. On the outskirts of the Japanese City of Fujisawa, Panasonic and its partners are creating “A Town That Sustains for a 100 Years. ” Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is a private smart town developed centered on eco-technologies, many of which are installed inside the individual homes. Through appeals to training for natural disaster responses, interactive online platforms, seamless use of energy-saving technologies, Fujisawa SST is pitched as a project that supports the regional economy, creates a space for young families and the aging population of country, while mitigating the worst of the climate crisis.

The focus on design for a corporate environment was a core philosophy of Panasonic’s founder, Konosuke Matsushita. My paper traces the influence of his management philosophy, New Urbanism, and science fiction in Fujisawa SST’s community design through studying the promotional materials for Fujisawa SST: the Concept Book, the video series on “the Challenges of Fujisawa SST,” and papers authored by Sakamoto Michihiro of Panasonic’s former Institute of Future Design, an internal design unit at the company. In designing a community around “smart” technology use, Fujisawa SST signals a new approach to technological communities where a technology-community hybrid designs the future of the planet for its own survival.

Keywords: sustainability, climate, “Natural Disasters”, urban design, smart cities

[36] Maggie Meyer (The New School). Ideas of Strawberries: An Economic, Political, and Cultural Analysis.

Abstract. Consumption of strawberries in the United States provides numerous benefits for consumers and their communities. However, these benefits come at the cost of obscene violence and exploitation towards the primarily, though not exclusively, Mexican farm workers who provide the manual labor to produce strawberries. This proposed paper engages with the macroeconomic and political structures that allow for the inequitable dichotomy between the conditions of strawberry production and the benefits of strawberry consumption in order to engage with the idea of a strawberry: what it looks like, what it tastes like, and what the messages around it are. I plan to engage with these questions through a socio-cultural lens, discussing indigenous traditions with wild strawberries, strawberry themed marketing and branding, multi-generational familial strawberry recipes, and community strawberry festivals. Through this engagement, this paper will identify strawberries as a tangible and accessible means to reconnect production and consumption locally and challenge structures of oppression and violence.

Keywords: agriculture, community, macroeconomic, ethnographic

[37] Marcel O’Gorman (University of Waterloo, Canada). All the Birds I Have Not Seen: A Phenomenological Questioning of Species Identification Apps.

Abstract. On the morning of World Migratory Bird Day, I am awakened by a riotous cacophony raining down from the trees. Lying on the foam mattress in a posh platform tent, I reach for my phone and launch the Merlin app, an AI-powered wizard conjured by the Cornell Lab. One by one they appear: Red-Winged Blackbird, Common Yellowthroat, Yellow Warbler, White-throated Sparrow, Baltimore Oriole, Rose-breasted grosbeak. The list goes on and on. As each one sings, its name and photo light up on the list, cueing me to match sound with image. Without the app, I could probably only match two or three of these birdsongs with their respective birds. And I have never seen many these species as far as I can recall — though now I have heard them sing.

What is this experience? What is the app teaching me? Will I be able to recall this information without relying on Merlin as a prosthetic enhancement? And finally, is this combination of glamping and scrolling what it means to be a birder in the age of AI, and does it have something to do with the post-covid explosion of what Jenny Odell has called not birding but its more trendy cousin “birdnoticing”? These are only a few of the preliminary questions raised by Merlin on that morning at Pointe Pelee National Park.

Species identification apps raise critical questions about how technology mediates our relationship not just with one another, but with the more-than-human world. It could be argued that my AI-enabled encounter of avian species on World Migratory Bird Day is the harbinger of a new orality, a shift in human/more-than-human relations based on sound rather than sight. Following this thread, if Plato’s Phaedrus served as a critique of writing (“You will have the semblance of wisdom,” Thamus tells Theuth, but not the real thing), perhaps biodiversity apps give us the semblance of connectedness to “nature” without the wisdom required to care for it.

In this presentation, I will reflect on the Merlin experience and address these phenomenological questions by drawing on a range of theoretical texts, from Plato’s Phaedrus to Vinciane Despret’s Living as a Bird. In sum, this presentation seeks to ask whether apps such as Merlin can get us closer to life as a bird or whether they simply reinforce our technocentric anthropocentricity. Can they do both simultaneously?

Keywords: biodiversity, AI, species identification, animal studies, birds, media theory, birdwatching, phenomenology

[38] Raymond Malewitz (Oregon State University). Developing University Resources on Climate Change for the K-12 ELA Classroom.

Abstract. To help promote climate literacy, several US states have begun to implement large-scale changes to their K-12 curricula. In 2020, for example, New Jersey adopted a new set of Student Learning Standards that mandated climate change education across all content areas, and California is currently exploring ways of implementing similar policies within its classrooms. Such changes have placed pressure upon K-12 teachers, who must rapidly reinvent their curricula to align with new standards. To mitigate this pressure, universities have begun to develop a number of freely available resources for teachers, including Cornell’s “Climate Stewards” project, Purdue University’s “Climate Change Research Center,” and Stanford’s “Climate Change Education” project. The majority of these projects are centered in science learning, offering numerous useful resources for augmenting climate change discussions in relevant science classrooms. Unfortunately, fewer university-sponsored projects provide comparable resources for humanities classrooms. This absence is particularly notable in ELA classrooms, leading to frustration on the part of teachers whose training within this discipline has often left them ill-prepared to meet current and future mandates. In this short talk, I show how university academics (and, in particular, SLSA members) might address these problems through the development of sustainable, humanities-centered, open educational resources that target public school teachers and students. I organize the talk around the “Climate Change and Literary Form” website currently in development at Oregon State University, in which OSU graduate students and faculty members will produce modular lectures and lessons tailored to these communities.

Keywords:   Climate Change in the ELA Classroom, Climate Change Open Educational Resources, Climate Change and Literary Form, Climate Change and Public Outreach

[39] Allison Dushane (Angelo State University). “nauseous and despicable creatures”: Ecohorror and Natural History.

Abstract. The sixth of Bruno Latour’s eight 2013 Gifford lectures delivered at Edinburgh University on the topic of “natural religion” traces the “religious – or, more accurately, the counter-religious – origin” of the prevailing indifference to ongoing declarations of ecological disaster (192). He argues that the problem lies in how the Moderns have transferred the transcendence of God into their conceptions of matter, authorizing their efforts to build earthly utopias but also leading to a contempt for matter that fails to comply with their attempts to control the natural world. In the long eighteenth century, many texts that contemplate nonhuman forms of life are marked by some measure of ambivalence, disgust, fear, terror, or despair as they point to the ways in which natural history is imbricated in the development of human institutions. In this presentation, I investigate how zoophytes—creatures that defied classification as plant or animal—illustrate the “paradox of the Moderns” that Latour identifies in scientific discourse. I then turn to the role that the zoophytes play in popular poems, such as Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature, which establish the eschatological frameworks that drive Enlightenment visions of scientific and industrial progress. In the introduction to Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, the editors describe ecohorror as a subgenre that thinks through discourses of classification and control: We fear science and its attempts to control the natural world; we fear the natural world and the way it exceeds our control” (7). How might thinking through the long history of ecohorror expose and critique the visions of nature that prevent humanity from recognizing the urgency of the climate crisis?

Keywords:   Ecohorror, Natural History, Enlightenment, Bruno Latour, Plants, Animals

[40] Matthew Taylor (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). “Fear of a Black Planet: Vitalist Earths and Climates of Anti-Blackness”.

Abstract. “Life” isn’t fair, but it is light-complected–as evidenced by the long history of white supremacist evolutionisms and vitalisms. At the turn of the 20th century, many of these discourses disarticulated biological life-as-such from the merely living, granting “life” its own identity, imperatives, and desires–what Henri Bergson called “life in general” rather than “the forms in which it is manifested.” And the conventional avatars of this hierarchical, ever-expanding “life” were white adventurers in the vein of Tarzan and Conan. My paper, however, will explore a strand of fiction from the period that insisted that “life itself” is Black. Far from being antiracist, these texts invested the revelation of vitality’s innate Blackness with cosmic horror, depicting noumenal life in the phenomenal form of, for instance, terrifyingly living planets; planetary domination and white supremacy thus converge. Yet in making Blackness rather than whiteness the embodiment of life’s imagined essence, texts by Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others inspirited an inexorable Black alienness into the heart of white life, thereby imploding the exact racial distinctions they superficially secured. Black life, from this perspective, is the immanent insurrection that always already displaces whiteness from within. Drawing on recent Afropessimist scholarship to counter neovitalist attempts to rehabilitate “life” for supposedly progressive ends, I will analyze how these stories expose both the inherent fictionality and the inherent suicidality of “life itself,” and I will conclude by reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s _Darkwater_ as envisioning an alternative, devitalized mode of worlding.

Keywords: Climate Change, Anti-Black Racism, Vitalism, Speculative Fiction, Gaia, Living Planets, Biopolitics

[41] Sarah Parijs (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Ocean Memories: Black Diasporic Kinship and Gods of Survival in Gaia.

Abstract. Gaia theory argues that Earth is an interconnected system maintaining life, and can be thought of as a geohistory of rambunctious interspecies dispersions and affiliations. Gaia is also an old esoteric symbol of Mother Earth as humanity’s planetary home, an idea that recurs in colonial rootedness to wilderness landscapes such as forested mountains. However, in considering planetary history, kinship, and home as meshed together, I suggest that Gaia can be rethought as a mode for decolonial environmentalism. In its intersecting scientific and occult figurations, Gaia allegorizes the return of threatening diasporic and planetary agencies. This essay focuses on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ black feminist poetry in “Dub: Finding Ceremony” and Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater art sculpture “Vicissitudes,” which I argue are oceanic imaginations of how Gaia ecologically erodes the human. By reading these texts in conversation with slave, microbial, and anthropocenic histories, I demonstrate how they address and attempt to redress colonial assumptions of controlling nature through occult poetry and art. Opposed to how white, male writers avoid racialized history, and its ecological imbrications, “Dub” and “Vicissitudes” exhibit a supernatural fascination with denuded landscapes. Such diasporic oceans force us to meet planetarity in its purest form: a planet stripped of what the human imagination can hold onto. In this reading, I use these artifacts to theorize the experience of being rooted in Earth as being consumed by Earth. And rather than the human, this occulted version of Gaia as diasporic home is marked by apocalyptic histories and inhuman futures.

Keywords:   Gaia theory, Black diaspora, Occultism, Ecopoetry and art

[42] Donnie Secreast (Texas A&M University), Gwendolyn Inocencio (Texas A&M University College Station), Megan Poole (University of Texas at Austin) and Chris Dutton (University of Florida). Disturbing Drifts: Deciphering Movement in Entangled Environments.

Abstract. Certain movements within ecosystems go unseen but are important forces that determine its health and allow for the possibility of rooted, seemingly stable modes of existence. In response to SLSA’s 2024 theme, the co-constitution of climate and diaspora, this panel brings together conversations about the movements and dispersions that subsidize specific ecosystems and challenge static notions of “nature” in the cultural imaginary. Formulations of nature as “webs” are commonplace in Environmental Humanities discourse, and they reproduce concepts from Indigenous intellectual traditions. In Rehearsals for Living (2022), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes notions of Nishnaabeg nationhood as deeply relational webs “of intimate connections where bodies are hubs forming vital pathways and links between plants, animals, rivers, lakes, the cosmos and humans, blurring the boundaries between body and individual in favor of interdependent communal systems.” Simpson relays a nature of stochastic relations, underscoring the centrality of movement in its production. Dynamic and powered by its hubs’ perpetual cycling of energy, nutrients, waste—as well as reciprocal exchanges of information, attention, and care—these nodes make an ecosystem’s vitality and ostensible stability possible. Each panelist tracks a specific line of ecosystemic movement, and collectively our discussion pinpoints particular combinations of forces to enrich our understanding of the elements of co-constitution that drive ecological change and shatter ecological stasis. The discussion seeks to imagine new modes of being and ways to better support the organisms and entities that collaborate to produce these life-sustaining movements, actions, and interactions.

Keywords: Ecology, Environmental Literature, Rhetoric, Nature, Microbiology, Fiction

Chris Dutton: “The Movements of Bacteria.” University of Florida – Assistant Professor, Biology duttonc@ufl.edu

By tracing the movements of both micro and megafauna, Chris highlights important drivers of ecological change whose multi-scalar entanglements are central to the health of the complex ecosystems that they co-constitute. His research contributes to the study of intricate, dynamic relationships between climate, ecology, and multispecies health. Chris’s fieldwork in East Africa reveals how microbes are animating forces that make visible how deeply intertwined the health of the freshwater megafauna hippos are with the health of entire riverine ecosystems. Chris offers an exciting account of the movement of waters, of hippos, and of their digestive systems. Moreover, his work highlights the remarkable—and consequential—activities of hippos’ microbial symbionts. His research challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the significance and complexity of the microorganisms actively altering environmental biogeochemistry to improve their odds of survival. Chris’s navigation of notions of the individual in relation to the communal parallels insights from conversations about the co-constitution of climate and diaspora, and his examination of these issues within ecological contexts points to the importance of supporting entangled relationships at every scale.

Gwendolyn Inocencio: “The Movements of Semiaquatic Mammals.” Texas A&M University – PhD Candidate, English gwendolyn2015@tamu.edu Gwendolyn’s analysis contributes a more nuanced and expansive understanding of the coconstitution of climate and diaspora, one that takes seriously the agency, creativity, and resilience of nonhuman actors and diverse ways of knowing. Using the concept of legibility as a rhetorical device, she traces material and discursive movements related to the North American beaver (Castor canadensis). She makes legible both the material processes of ecosystemic motion and the discursive or symbolic representations of these movements. She considers how rhetorical tools make visible the entanglements and exchanges involving the beaver that sustain ecosystems, and how this legibility can foster a deeper understanding of symbiotic human-nonhuman relations. As an example, the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) Creation Story holds the beaver significant in its cultural imaginary and knowledge system. Here, the concept of legibility helps to make visible the complex entanglements between the beaver, the ecosystem it engineers, and the human communities that are impacted by and invested in its well-being. By tracing the 2 material and discursive movements of this species, she contributes to a broader understanding and responding to the co-constitution of climate and diaspora in North America and beyond.

Megan Poole: “The Movements of Migratory Cetaceans.” University of Texas Austin – Advanced Assistant Professor, Rhetoric & Writing megan.poole@louisville.edu Megan’s project on whale song and migratory movements offers a compelling counterpoint to the panel’s focus on the co-constitution of climate and diaspora. By examining how whales, as migratory species, communicate and share information across vast distances, Megan challenges us to expand our understanding of what constitutes “culture” and “diaspora” beyond human-centric paradigms. She suggests that the study of nonhuman communication and expression can offer valuable insights into how we might cultivate more resilient and adaptable communities in the face of ecological and social upheaval. Moreover, Megan highlights the importance of developing new methods for interpreting and translating nonhuman signals. She argues that by learning to listen differently and by bridging the gap between human and nonhuman ways of knowing, we may discover alternative modes of relation that are more attuned to the dynamic, interconnected world we inhabit. The dispersion of information via whale song offers a provocative intervention into the panel’s discussion of the co-constitution of climate and diaspora. It invites us to consider how the knowledge, resilience, and adaptability of migratory species can inform our understanding of what it means to be “rooted” or “dispersed” in an era of global environmental change, and how we might learn from these nonhuman ways of being to create more just and sustainable futures.

Donnie Secreast: “The Movements of Fungi.” Texas A&M University – PhD Candidate, English desecreast@tamu.edu Donnie challenges notions of stasis and highlights hidden ecological movements by tracking the motion of the seemingly immobile through an examination of fungal networks’ methods of nutrient dispersal and information transmission that travel throughout and beyond their immediate ecosystems. Her analysis brings together literary and scientific writings that depict fungal flows to interrogate how this historically bewildering (and often-denigrated) biological kingdom is essential to making the rooted lives of humans and nonhumans possible. Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot and Merlin Sheldrake’s nonfiction Entangled Life bring into focus the curious, sometimes grotesque, resonances between the structures of fungal bodies and human bodies. Following Anna L. Tsing’s lead in using mushrooms as theoretical objects that model ways of living in capitalist ruins, Donnie sees the resiliency and adaptive strategies of fungi as speaking to critical dimensions of the co-constitution of climate and diaspora. Attuning more closely to the reverberating architectures of seemingly disparate organisms and the unsettling experiences of embodied entanglement helps articulate new impressions of nature that gesture towards more inclusive, weird, and pleasurable modes of environmental engagement.

[43] Katie Anania (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Jessica Corman (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Eric Moody (Middlebury College), Jessica Santone (Cal State University East Bay) and Sarika Sharma (Middlebury College). Broader Impacts?: The Possibilities for Inserting, Playing With, and Applying the Humanities to Scientific Grants.

Abstract. That anthropogenic climate change and migration co-constitute one another – that social forces drive scientific shifts and vice versa – underscores the importance of interdisciplinary ecological research. As of 1997, projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) must address “broader impacts,” defined as benefits to society that range from enhancing national security or workforce development to increasing inclusion and public engagement. Scientists often pair with arts and humanities practitioners to reach these goals. While many impactful outcomes exist, the pairings themselves are not necessarily equal. What are some possibilities for inserting, playing with, or applying the arts and humanities in science grants that don’t cede their disciplinary perspectives or epistemic cultures? Are there strategies to establish greater parity or reciprocity between interdisciplinary contributions? How are these strategies challenged or compromised in the context of the neoliberalization of universities – where highly-funded STEM grants make science researchers key sources of income to their institutions, while those in the arts and humanities must position themselves as “adding value”?

This roundtable features five scholars connected to a multiyear NSF-funded research project, “From Ecosystems to Evolution,” which gathers and analyzes data about shifting nutrient balances (stoichiometry, a key indicator of ecosystem health) in inland waterways across the Americas. It includes a supplemental grant for art historians to expand approaches to data visualization and support inclusion of diverse scientific knowledges. After brief accounts of the ways that our arts-and-sciences partnership has impacted panelists’ research activities, an “unconferencing” discussion follows on what new formations might come next.

Keywords: Interdisciplinary collaboration, critical data studies, art history, ecology, art-science, organizational theory

[44] Dawna Schuld (School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts, Texas A&M University), Patricia Olynyk (College and Graduate School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis), Cristina Albu (University of Missouri – Kansas City) and Meredith Tromble (Feminist Research Institute, University of California, Davis). Art Beyond Instrumentalization.

Abstract. Since the 1960s, the prevalence of site-specific, situational, and/or hybrid art has led to the inverse dislocation of its practitioners. Alongside literal and socio-political shifts in the institutions that sustain artmaking and exhibition, these changes have contributed to an overall climate of unsettlement. Contemporary artists increasingly depend on temporary situations and residencies to garner financial and technical support and to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. At its best, this dispersal of artists into unfamiliar territory promotes understanding and expands creative potential. But in cases of art/science collaborations, artists can find their own research reduced and exhibited as merely illustrative or artifactual of the work of their scientific colleagues. Moreover, institutional sponsors may present such residencies as a means of effective virtue signaling or “art-washing” where art functions as a form of advertising or propaganda, or where artists themselves are seen as token examples of underrepresented communities.

This panel is organized as a forum for articulating and addressing various ways in which peripatetic artists and their art can be instrumentalized in the service of education, profit, or promotion. Despite the good intentions of all involved, artists can find themselves working against their own interests and/or contravening assertions of art’s intrinsic value. We seek to scrutinize cross-disciplinary practices both within and outside of the academy, asking what is the value proposition (or propositions) for working across disciplines? Are there occasions when art and artists are better served by disentangling from non-art interests? If so, are there other models for engagement that might be considered?

Keywords: instrumentalization, cross-disciplinary, third culture, diaspora, placement, institutions, gift economy, mindfulness

Embodied Awareness through Art: Prescription or Open-Ended Invitation?

Cristina Albu, University of Missouri – Kansas City

In the climate of cognitive capitalism which emphasizes self-optimization and measurable learning outcomes, the arts are often seen as tools with prescribed goals. Both art theorists and representatives of museum institutions increasingly assess their impact in a perpetual battle to justify their relevance in contemporary societies. Recent scientific findings about neuroplasticity and the function of art in activating the Default Mode Network reinforce the value of aesthetic experiences, yet also run the risk of reducing the encounter with art to a stimulus-response model. Susan Magasmen and Ivy Ross call for “personalized microdosing of aesthetics” and Alain de Botton and John Armstrong suggest that museum collections should be reorganized based on categories of emotions to respond better to visitors’ needs.

While numerous artists embrace creative processes with a view to foster personal and collective healing, they rarely see their practice as an instrument with pre-established objectives. In this presentation, I will examine a series of art projects involving neurofeedback which entailed hurdles in terms of access to resources and the conceptualization of intended outcomes. Such works typically encourage affective attunement between art participants by enhancing their awareness of the potential for brainwave frequency synchronization. In addition to this, they also invite speculative thinking on the complexity of the embodied mind and relations with other beings with which we share the planetary ecosphere. I will consider the challenges of integrating such practices in museum spaces and offer a critique of mindfulness programs which turn art galleries into mere backdrops for self-awareness training.

Looking at Lewis Hyde’s The Gift Like Janus

Meredith Tromble, Feminist Research Institute, University of California, Davis

In 1983, the poet Lewis Hyde published The Gift, arguing that “a work of art is a gift, not a commodity…works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” More than forty years later, The Gift keeps giving, having remained continuously in print, being praised by a still-burgeoning list of creators from Margaret Atwood to Bill Viola, and inspiring Robin McKenna’s eponymous 2018 documentary. Novelist Zadie Smith called it, “A manifesto of sorts for anyone who makes art, cares for it, and understands that our most precious possessions are not for sale.” A culturally influential work, to be sure. But does it have anything to tell us about the “instrumentalization” of art, about the sense that post-studio artists, in bringing their gifts to communities, corporations, or labs, risk becoming the instrument of cultural developments with which they may vehemently disagree? Can documenting climate change with pastel drawings for National

Geographic (Zaria Forman), organizing volunteers to mend clothes in a museum (Lee Mingwei), or creating special edition products for Ralph Lauren (Naiomi Glasses) usefully be analyzed through Hyde’s “two-economy” lens? Drawing on such examples and on the author’s own experience as a contemporary artist entering laboratory settings, this paper places Hyde’s study of psychological and social gift economies in conversation with concerns about artist instrumentalization.

Third Culture Entanglements: The Value of Art + Science Collaborations Within in the Academy

Patricia Olynyk, College and Graduate School of Art, Washington University in St. Louis

A joint meeting of the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts just over a decade ago engaged influential thinkers to explore forms of inquiry that concern the fields of art and science. The gathering focused on advancing scientific knowledge and new forms of artistic research, output, and collaboration, supporting the notion that enhanced cross-disciplinary discourse and creative work that advances “third culture” thinking is both timely and relevant.

However, many challenges remain for artists and designers who cross disciplines within the academy. There is a tendency for schools to encourage artists, musicians, and designers alike to fall into line with the institution’s research goals and methodologies. As a result, creative practitioners are increasingly burdened with defending their practices through esoteric debates that compare/contrast, for example, practice-led vs. practice-based research, or calculating the ways in which art can be of service to other disciplines. Often, conversations lack a constructive argument that reveals the intrinsic value of creative work, which in and of itself generates its own content for critical examination.

This presentation will discuss the instrumentalization of the arts within academic institutions, and the assertion that “the arts [should] contribute to the gross domestic product and are good for business. These arguments do not articulate the fundamental humanity of the arts, nor the dangers of pitching to monied interests, something former president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Don Michael Randel warned “make[s]us seem cultured as we concentrate on material goals.”

Boyle Family and Matters of Placement

Dawna Schuld, School of Performance, Visualization, and Fine Arts, Texas A&M University

In the 1960s, a group of London-based artists established an organization for embedding artists in non-art settings such as government agencies and manufacturing plants. Modeled in part after temp agencies, Artist Placement Group (APG) similarly emphasized the impermanence of these arrangements and, in so doing, asserted the independence of the placed artist. But,

unlike office temps, these artists did not fill a defined role within the organization; rather, they acted as interlocutors and, more occasionally, as consultants and collaborators who sometimes produced art objects. Noting that artists performed almost invisibly in modern British society and (with a few notable exceptions) were undervalued and poorly compensated for their work, APG sought out sponsors committed to raising the social significance of artistic endeavors, while placing artists inside institutions of power.

But placement is not the same as belonging. With works such as the 1968 Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition Journey to the Center of the Earth, Boyle Family (primary members Mark Boyle and Joan Hills) had an established experimental practice that took on non-traditional subject matter (such as earth, fire, air, water), employed multiple media (from casting to electron microphotography), and collaborated with non-artists of various stripes, including scientists and technicians. They seemed to be ideal candidates for placement and, indeed, were involved with APG in its early stages. However, Boyle Family’s stated desire to “see without motive” was soon challenged by APG’s institutional entanglements. Indeed, in a 1972 lecture, Mark Boyle went so far as to suggest that artists can be independent agents or “parasites” but not both. Their departure and subsequent approach to peripatetic and collective artmaking present an outsider alternative to placement.

[45] Zach Pearl (York University). Cloud Busting: Obscurity, Alienation, and Ecofeminist Critique in the Artworks of Fujiko Nakaya.

Abstract. Since 1970, Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s renowned fog sculptures have reimagined the possibilities of sculptural form through carefully produced fog environments that transform architecture and historical sites through an immersive visual rhetoric of obscurity and alienation. While ephemeral, Nakaya’s built environments stem from lifelong meditations on the mediated body and a critique of technoculture; she first came to in prominence in the 1960s as a member of the New York-based collective Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.). Arguably, her own immersion in the rapidly shifting eco-system of early networked media within a collective of performance artist-hackers directly informed her diffusive approach to land art in a similar gesture of invisible circulation and borderless distribution. In this paper, I offer a close reading of a handful of Nakaya’s “fogscapes” through the lens of ecofeminism and feminist science and technology studies to argue that Nakaya’s artistic practice is one of feminist “worlding” that, however temporary, literally and metaphorically allows visitors to cloud bust, or to tangibly sense the phenomenology of the “clouds” of information that increasingly construct and operate both our physical and virtual realities. More specifically, I consider the innate obscurity of Nakaya’s fogscapes as a polemic against the hype-visibility of digital lives and an eco-cyber-feminist tactic of “alienation as method,” or the speculative refusal of existent logics through the active distortion of the modern subject (Burrows and O’Sullivan, 2019, Edinburgh UP). As the disastrous effects of climate change become palpable, I contend that Nakaya’s artworks provide a crucial experience—to not only see but feel and absorb the exponential interconnection of technological and environmental systems.

Keywords: alienation, contemporary art, ecofeminism, feminist theory, fog, obscurity, science and technology studies, worlding

[46] Hannah Hopkins (The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Rhetoric & Writing). Infrastructures of Sensation: Energy, Networks, and Climate Catastrophe.

Abstract. Particularly amid emergent and intensifying global climate catastrophe, the scale of network infrastructures—spools of submarine communications cables cased in plastic, water-intensive data center cooling systems, broadband antennas lashed to soft wood telephone poles—reminds us that all digital activity is material. At the same time, the dispersed nature of these large-scale infrastructures can obscure the harms they visit on multiply-marginalized communities. Such massive infrastructural entanglements surface profound inequities in access— both access to particular technologies of connectivity and access to measures to mitigate climate harms. In this presentation, I join media studies scholars, environmental scientists, historians of science and technology, and voices in allied fields to grapple with the means available to communicate the relationships between digital infrastructures and climate harms. Engaging a case study of open-source web browser Carbonalyser, I argue that tools designed to track and trace the energy impacts of small-scale digital activity can help demonstrate infrastructures’ emplacement, highlighting what Nicole Starosielski, Hunter Vaughan, Anne Pasek, & Nicholas R. Silcox (2023) call “environmental specificity” of digital infrastructures. While energy trackers and tracers do regularly rely on quantitative data to contextualize users’ energy consumption, my study follows Nathaniel Rivers (2018) in highlighting the persuasive capacity of qualitative data to draw attention to the knots and tangles uniting digital infrastructures, human users, and more-than-human environments. Ultimately, I propose that approaching digital energy tracking and tracing tools primarily as instruments of sensation participates in ongoing efforts toward environmental justice, data justice, and climate justice.

Keywords: infrastructure, climate, networks, digital

[47] Sara Dicaglio (Texas A&M University). Weathering the Body: Health, Weather, and Embodied Meteo-rhetorics.

Abstract. Weather and climate have historically been tied to constructions of health–think of humors or of trips to the seashore as cures for consumption. Miasma theories still inform our discourse about health, often to deleterious ends. But in our contemporary era, an era of conditioned air and fictions of biomedical control, the stories we tell about our meteo-rhetorical exchanges are shifting. This paper theorizes what I call an embodied meteo-rhetoric—that is, the rhetorical traces of the often-invisible collision between health, embodiment, and weather. Here I consider weather to be the shifting material conditions in which we live and breathe. Some of these are easily perceptible and traditionally what we might think of as weather—heat, for instance, or climatological crises. But in my definition I wish also to broaden my sense of weather to aspects of our shared world that we may not think of as such: asbestos, inhaled quartz countertop dust increased by HGTV trends, Covid-19. This paper asks several related questions: how do metaphorics of weather—not just the usual black cloud, but brain fog and cytokine storms—provide a rhetorical terrain for navigating the intimate intersection between body and environment? How do visible and invisible interchanges with the air—the smoke from fires many miles away as well as aerosolized viruses passed asymptomatically—interact with our bodies as well as the stories we tell about them? What becomes visible in our bodily weather, and what forms of bodily weather remain outside of our rhetorical frame?

Keywords: weather, health, climate, rhetoric, embodiment

[48] Steven Peck (Brigham Young University). Poetry, Art and Science an assemblage of human meaning.

Abstract. For four years, Los Angeles Artist Jackie Leishman and I worked on a climate change project blending three dimensions of human expression and knowledge: Art, poetry, and science. Our project was a back-and-forth discussion between Jackie and me about these topics while creating work that reflected these discussions. Our project combined Jackie’s Art with found poetry constructed from words and phrases from the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change. Our work generated gallery shows and was published in Cold Mountain Review, Whitefish Review, Penumbra, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and seen in other venues, including the entire collection being purchased by the HBLL Library at BYU for their permanent collection. I will explore aesthetics in conversation with science, including Torrey House Press’s poetry collection on Utah Lake, and other projects, including a description of a new project with Jackie Leishman exploring how meaning emerges in these disparate ways of human expression. I will also read from my award winning novel, King Leere–Goatherd of the La Sals, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, about a climate change dystopia around Moab Utah and an afterword by Mary O’Brian, aspen scientist for the Grand Canyon Trust.

Keywords: poetry, art, science, climate change, meaning construction

[49] Yangqiao Lu (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago). Ground in the Sky: Thinking Geomedia and Eco-cosmology with Rooftop Farming.

Abstract. Rooftop farming (RF) is on the rise. Large rooftop farms have opened from Thailand to France. In 2023, Forbes called green roofing “the next frontier of geoengineering.” In cultural quarters, artists and institutions also turn to farming for ways to obscure industrial alienation from land. Paradoxically, while these projects aim to bring human closer to land, they also highlight the fact that land is made, and its making entails a mapping of agency. In this paper, I argue that, as an activity that deterritorializes and reterritorializes the scope of both urban dwelling and agricultural practice, RF maps the agency of land at the intersection of architectural durability and soil plasticity. To understand the implications of this duality, I first turn to architecture studies. Drawing on Cass Gilbert’s description of skyscraper as a “machine that makes the land pay,” I ask, if a building is an economic activity that allows extraction of value based on futurity (rent), how does RF mediate our sense of crisis and the temporality of the Anthropocene? Then I turn to the Paddy Film Farm project where artist Mao Chenyu explores land as a category of cosmological mediation in the paddy regions in China. I observe that the appeal of urban farming relies on a similar mythopoetic narrative of the earth and its aesthetic distribution of sense perception. Ultimately, this paper argues that the land question as it is posed in current ecological and socio-economic debates cannot be understood independently of the sensorial dimensions.

Keywords: geomedia, agricultural media, eco-cosmology, eco-media, media aesthetics

[50] Erika Lynne Hanson (Arizona State University), Ron Broglio (Arizona State University) and Ricky Crano (University of California: Irvine). Rituals, Transports, and Otherworldings.

Abstract. We live in a homeless world. The postmodern flattens values, capitalism collapses heterogeneous qualities into financial quantitative sums, geographic diasporas dislodge a sense of place, and digital social media displaces the drawing near with the nowhere of the screen. We have endless communication without community, streams of information without communication, and all of this plays itself out in a temporality without time—an endless stream of 24/7 always open, always on, always news, insomnia of Production.

Ritual is a technological form for puncturing the homogeneity of chronological time and making homes. Rituals inscribe in time a circle of difference. In this circle objects and activity takes on a different meaning—that connects to a world beyond the individual and beyond the here and now. This panel focuses on the material object used to pass from mundane time into ritual time and how rituals transform meaning and value. Dispersal. Diaspora. Dislodged. How can we understand and deploy ritual to engage in a crafting of place, value, and re-homing? This interdisciplinary panel of established scholars moves between art, technology studies, philosophy, and cultural theory to propose how ritual can reframe cultural values.

Keywords: rituals, technology, materiality, objects, production, ecology

[51] David Rieder (NC State University). Reacclimatizing a Discipline: Toward a Post-Western Rhetoric Studies.

Abstract. My proposed presentation engages with the broader view of what a climate can be at the SLSA Conference in 2024. The climate in question is disciplinary and pedagogical, and it’s in the field of rhetoric studies. I will argue that, Post-Floyd, the persistent narrative that rhetoric’s place of origin is Ancient Greece, and/or that rhetorical practices around the globe should be compared to and reconciled with the Western approach, contributes to a limited and exclusionary disciplinary and pedagogical climate in the field and our classrooms. I propose two counter-steps to address this negative climate.

First, I will argue against the notion that the origins of Western thought and practices, such as rhetoric, were born out of Ancient Greek civilization without precedent. Ancient Greeks lived, worked, and studied on three continents. This exclusionary history of the West’s origins is a persistent, white-euro supremacist approach to a discipline that is expressive of the wrong climate post-Floyd. Second, I will argue that while rhetoric is an Ancient Greek term, this doesn’t mean that rhetoric as a global phenomena needs to reconcile with a Western notion of rhetoric, nor that it has one origin point from which to develop a comparative or cultural rhetoric. ‘Rhetoric’ – however that is defined and practiced across the globe – has numerous starting points, histories, means, ends.

Pivoting toward a Post-Western rhetoric studies is a necessary path toward the kind of institutional ‘climate change’ we are witnessing across academia since the reckonings that have occurred since the murder of George Floyd.

Keywords: rhetoric, post-Floyd, post-Western

[52] Shelley Garrigan (North Carolina State University). The Controversy of Rewilding as Environmental Reparation in the Latin American Neoliberal Era.

Abstract. For this presentation, I use a cultural studies approach to understand a particular expression of environmental reparation known as “rewilding” in the context of Argentina. I aim to explore how this conservation effort reveals social conflicts around notions of authority, environmental stewardship, cultural identity and transnational influence.

The rewilding project in Argentina has ignited a complex controversy between over one hundred scientists and the Fundación Rewilding Argentina (FRA), which was founded with significant ties to a conservation charity established by a power couple of retired American billionaires (one now deceased). This debate, which was published in a series of back-and-forth exchanges in the journal Mastozoología Neotropical in 2023, transcends ecological concerns, deeply engaging with cultural, social, and economic dimensions as well as the social dimensions of collective ecoanxiety. The rewilding project, which aims to restore ecosystems by (re)introducing native (and in this case, non-native) species such as the jaguar and the giant anteater, is championed by the FRA as a critical step towards biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and ecological restoration.

Scientists, however, expressed skepticism, which quickly erupted into a clash that reveals deeper issues tied to environmental custodianship, authority and domain. These concerns and the debate that ensued underscore not only a deep divide between scientific caution and the FRA’s romanticized vision of nature, but also the salience of the question of domain and position when facing the question of reparation and restoration in a place marked by a long colonial history and an era of deep climate anxiety and uncertainty.

Keywords: rewilding, Argentina, controversy, reparation, environment, anxiety

[53] Shaoni White (University of California, Davis). Fragmentation Techniques: Web Weaves, Ecology, and The Shared History of Hypertext and Scrapbooking.

Abstract. Web weaving is an emergent social media practice in which excerpts of seemingly unrelated media are collaged together to address a shared theme. Web weaves’ use of screenshots and images of words counter dominant digital aesthetics by emphasizing the materiality of digital text. I contend that web weaves emerge from two adjacent histories of nonlinear reading technologies. The first is the prehistory of hypertext, which (as scholars like Terry Harpold have shown) ranges from sixth-century reading devices to Vannevar Bush’s imagined reading machine, the memex, to Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu. The second history is that of modernist collage, collage (eco)poetics, and their origins in domestic scrapbooking. I discuss scrapbooking as a nonlinear reading practice as well as an art form, highlighting its techniques of fragmentation, which employ an aesthetic of re-reading that breaks apart and reconstitutes texts into a new whole. I trace the relationship between scrapbooking and proto-hypertext projects in the midcentury moment. Then I draw on the work of Lynn Keller and other scholars of collage poetics within ecopoetry to understand how hypertext and collage techniques develop an ecological worldview that redefines the self/world and human/nonhuman relationship. I show how this shared history culminates in contemporary web weaves, which employ those nonlinear techniques of fragmentation to dramatize the dissonant experience of reading in the twenty-first century and disturb the human/nonhuman divide. Ultimately, I argue that the hypertextual structure of the contemporary Internet could not exist without the scrapbook.

Keywords: hypertext, ecopoetics, collage poetry, scrapbooking, media history

[54] Damilare Bello (Duke University). Technical Life and Ethic of Minimalism – A Rusty Matter.

Abstract. This paper argues that tragic encounters between postcolonial subjects and intelligent machines are sites where specific material practices and accumulation of affects surface. At first glance, “Rusties,” a collaborative fiction between film director Wanuri Kahiu and novelist Nnedi Okorafor, stages this encounter in terms of a social crisis between technophobes and rogue AI. I read “Rusties,” the eponymous text and the traffic robots in the story, as interfacing the materiality of finite resources and infinite resourcefulness. Rusties are solar-powered AI made with oxidized, ungalvanized steel exteriors; their powerful components are plundered in anti-AI reactions to an ominous technological singularity. This paper approaches what seems a slippage between vandalism and salvage as a critique of excess in an age of finite reserves. I draw on African media studies where “imperfect media” embodies an ethic of reuse and simplicity to interrogate Okorafor and Kahiu’s work as posing the question: can ugly, rusty and salvage media be powerful and generative in a time of overproduction? Though the narrative ends in social chaos, with humans dispersing into the wild after impulsively destroying technical forms and proliferating media waste, I contend this is because the story underserves its own logic. The logic of minimalism the story offers media theory appears stymied by its preoccupation with human-machine crisis and the excess of technological dysphoria it cultivates. However, in its inability to resolve this contradiction, the text develops ethic of minimalism as not just a material but also an affective condition of sustainable technical life.

Keywords: Salvage aesthetics, Minimalism, Imperfect media, Materiality, Futures, African literature

[55] Sayan Bhattacharyya (Yale University). Dialogue between (diasporic) Indian environmental ethics and Western climate rationality: A provocation concerning Richard Powers’s _The Overstory_.

Abstract. Can caricaturish, new-age-y depictions of environmental ethics from a part of the Global South lead to a deeper understanding of its philosophical tradition, despite a (superficially) neo-orientalist tone? I argue that Richard Powers accomplishes this feat in a subplot of his novel “The Overstory” (2018), staging a dialog between Indian environmental ethics and western science-based environmentalism through his portrayal of Nilay Mehta, an Indian-American character. Initially, Nilay and his immigrant (diasporic Indian) parents appear as stereotypical figures—respectively, model minorities dispensing trite wisdom and academic nerds adept at computer programming. However, as the novel progresses, Nilay becomes pivotal to the narrative. This transformation has to do with Nilay’s creation, in the novel, of an elaborate computer video game during his Silicon Valley career. I argue that the game evolves from a “game of progression” to a “game of emergence” (in the sense of these terms in Juul’s 2005 typology of games) serving as a metaphorical bridge between Western and Indian philosophical traditions. Powers’s approach meets Western readers at their current understanding of the non-western tradition that Nilay’s diasporic parents represent, making global environmental ethics accessible without condescension. With a parallel set up between ecological time as a “dark” hyperobject in Morton’s sense (2016) transcending human-scale time, and a virtual-reality world populated by AI agents, the game, initially called “Mastery,” evolves into a simulacrum of a posthuman, post-capitalist utopia. Drawing on theoretical insights from Bruce Clarke (2020), I show how this initially trite-seeming subplot becomes a compelling parable for a species-being and raises provocative questions about how to manage energy transformations.

References:

[1] Powers, Richard. The Overstory. New York: W.W. Norton. 2018

[2] Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2005.

[3] Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. 2016.

[4] Clarke, Bruce. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2020.

Keywords: India, Asia, Game, Videogame, Energy, Orientalism, Nonwestern, Novel

[56] Kelsey Cameron (University of South Carolina), Chaz Evans (University of South Carolina) and Carleen Maur (University of South Carlolina). Lenses Vs. Computers: The Endless Grudge Match.

Abstract. This panel is a conversation about the complicated relationship between cameras and computers and how that relationship affects the visual climate. Through media art history, media industry studies, and experimental praxis, the panelists will map out ways in which these two technologies have competed, harmonized, and chimerically bonded with each other since the emergence of computers and lenses as image production tools. While maintaining cultural and disciplinary differences, these categories have collided and colluded through half a century of rivalry and interdependence. The relationship between these two material foundations for image production remains unresolved. But what can we learn about their current state of hybridity through looking at specific sites of conjuncture and contestation? How is the stormy relationship between cameras and computation reconfigured in the body worn cameras of police officials, the software products engineered to simulate the capture of light, and cell phone towers that pretend to be trees? By recognizing both the medium specificity and immediate hybridity of cameras and computers this presentation will deliver insight on how this specific technological pairing sets the conditions for 21st Century visuality.

Keywords: computer graphics, wearable tech, experimental film
Kelsey Cameron – The Body Worn Camera as Computer

This presentation positions the police body worn camera (BWC) as a site of collision between two regimes of technological objectivity: the lens-based and the computational. The earliest BWCs were designed for audiovisual capture. They promised to automate witness, replacing flawed human accounts of the past with “truth” recorded via a disinterested technological gaze.

Contemporary versions of this device still involve lenses, but they go far beyond the capture of sounds and images, integrating environmental sensors, automated redaction, geospatial triggers, and artificial intelligence into their operation. BWCs, then, are as much computers as they are cameras, but their truth claims still depend on the visceral sense that seeing is believing. Drawing on scholars including John Durham Peters, Simone Brown, and Tarleton Gillespie, this paper analyzes the tension between the seen and the calculated in the BWC’s performance as a technology of evidence. It argues that the spectacular visibility of certain bodycam images allows for system-level opacity: public attention focuses on video recordings, occluding the computational elements that make them possible. Attending to BWCs as computers allows us to ask questions like: what data-driven interventions shape audiovisual recording? If computation has its own claims to truth and objectivity, why do law enforcement and legal systems hide these aspects of BWCs? What economic and political incentives shape the implementation of computation within BWCs? By making visible the hidden computation in BWCs, we can better understand the process through which they produce truth.

Chaz Evans – Maya as Harbinger of Post-lens Visuality

This presentation is an exploration into how much Autodesk Maya has influenced contemporary shifts in audienceship and methods of observation. It pairs two commentaries on major shifts in visuality: the radical shift to computer graphics (CG) that Jonathan Crary identifies, and quickly abandons, at the beginning of Techniques of the Observer, and Harun Farocki’s observations on how CG has replaced the lens in his Parallel series. Are changes in how audiences see only explainable as “broad societal shifts” or is it possible to find specific architects who constructed the conditions for visuality to change?

Specific answers can be found in the aesthetics implied through Autodesk Maya, the platform that has held a central position in CG production for over two decades. If CG has surpassed the lens as the dominant mode of visual production, and Maya is the central tool in the production of CG, how much do the decisions of a specific group of developers working across Toronto, Santa Barbara, and Paris precondition the visual foundation of the virtual world? If a technology like Maya is governed by a multinational software company like Autodesk who gets to limit, expand, change, grow, and edit that sense of visuality going forward? The group of technologists who initiated the CG image making paradigm is large but finite. By studying Maya as a platform we can learn how particular technologists resolved fundamental conventions of CG production, and the alternative approaches that had to be discarded in order to achieve these resolutions.

Carleen Maur – Estranged

This presentation will share research on the naturalization of technology, shown through clips of an experimental film work-in-progress titled, Estranged. The project uses the lens to observe the computational infrastructure of cellular towers found in and around the Southeast United States that use camouflage to look like trees. The film illustrates a false dichotomy between a human-generated “natural” aesthetic, and an imagined western world without cell towers and only trees.

The scenes are shot through the point of view of the filmmaker who explores and questions these “trees” relating it to the (dis)connection found in human to human communication as well as cell tower to cell tower communication. Referencing the approaches of Hito Stereyl and Harun Farocki, the video invites viewers to think about the tension between what is perceived, and what is hidden, in and outside of the frame. The cell tower trees are visual reminders of the impossibility of ignoring new technologies. In a way, they want to fit in with other trees, but they cannot, thus mimicking a form of estrangement familiar to human connection and communication. The aesthetic of these towers are contested, disliked by both the consumers they are meant to please and the laborers that spend time reattaching branches after each storm. The project investigates the beauty of a giant public artwork requesting everyone to look away.

[57] Sasha Crawford-Holland (Vanderbilt University), Lisa Han (Pitzer College), Sarah Dimick (Northwestern University) and Jen Rose Smith (University of Washington). Power to Delineate: Environmental Baselines and the Politics of Measurement.

Abstract. To identify a changing climate is to mark a departure from an initial condition—a baseline. When baselines fluctuate, worlds are upended. People become climate diasporas on their own territories. Establishing baselines is a political process. Debates persist over the start date of the Anthropocene because its origin point determines whether agriculture, colonization, industrialization, or another factor becomes legible as driving climate collapse. Baselines are contingent, yet we need them. They define what counts as pollution, financial loss, a restored ecosystem, or a premature death. They establish shared understandings of change, normalcy, harm, and repair. How do communities define, dispute, and transform environmental baselines? How are baselines experienced across diverse and rapidly changing geographies? Who exercises the power to delineate and what are its implications for environmental justice?

This panel examines how professional, activist, and subaltern communities employ media to construct environmental, economic, and perceptual baselines. We approach this as a negotiated, political, media-aesthetic process by elucidating how baseline media feed and reflect cultural imaginaries. First, Lisa Han investigates how biologists imagined the COVID-19 “anthropause” as a proxy for pre-industrial wildlife behavior. Next, Sasha Crawford-Holland analyzes how proponents of climate reparations model counterfactual baselines to substantiate damage claims. Third, Sarah Dimick argues that vernacular climate records produced by a fishing community in Chennai challenge expert monopolies on baseline construction. Finally, Jen Rose Smith offers ice as an analytic that troubles sedimented imaginaries of race, matter, and territoriality. Collectively, these presentations denaturalize the making, unmaking, and remaking of climates by refusing to take baselines for granted.

Author 1 (Chair): Sasha Crawford-Holland (Vanderbilt University)

Climate Models, Climate Reparations, and the Mathematics of Redress

As the costs of climate adaptation rise, stakeholders are debating who should foot the bill. Climate models have emerged as tools that allow plaintiffs to quantify damage and demand restitution from big emitters. Despite their scientific grounding, these models are laden with assumptions about history, identity, and justice. They make formal decisions that endorse certain versions of restitution (such as transnational payments) over others (such as corporate liability). In this presentation, I analyze how climate models have been enlisted in struggles for climate reparations. I argue that by quantifying harm as credit, they schematize repair into an economized project of “making whole.” This schema equates justice with restoration to a prior state—a baseline. But where does one demarcate the baseline prior to harm? If we understand environmental violence to be structural, is it even possible to model a world undamaged by fossil-fueled industrialization, colonization, or the transatlantic slave trade? I assess the promises and pitfalls of figuring repair as restoration by looking to demands for reparations for slavery. While financial compensation has been important to these discussions, some proponents have been reluctant to accept schemas of repair predicated on the same systems of valuation—the same baselines—that underlie slavery and its afterlife. Instead, more radical proposals emphasize self-determination in the present over quantification of the past. They approach reparation as a project of structural transformation that eludes the retrospective schema of making whole. Extending these insights to climate reparations, this presentation contends that equitable futures must be modeled on new baselines.

Author 2: Lisa Yin Han (Pitzer College)

Inventing the “Anthropause”: Baseline Construction and Mediations of the Anthropocene During Lockdown

In June 2020, an article by a group of wildlife biologists and ocean scientists in Nature Ecology and Evolution called for the coining of a new term and with it, more multidisciplinary, integrated research on a particular event of interest: the “anthropause,” the COVID-19 global slowdown in human activities and in particular, human travel. The use of pre-industrial climate baselines is positioned as a kind of holy grail for climate science—at once a necessary and simultaneously unattainable counterfactual in making climate change and the Anthropocene perceptible. During the initial outbreak of COVID-19, several studies were done using biologging data during the global lockdowns as proxies for pre-industrial baseline construction, seeking answers to questions about wildlife reclamation, resilience, and the ecological impacts of human mobilities. In this presentation, I shall explore, through case studies of bird watching and bird song during the 2020 anthropause, the ways in which biologists imagined the pandemic shutdown as an occasion for environmental baseline construction. Drawing parallels to a popular media history of anthropause representations in speculative films, which similarly posit movement restriction and industrial collapse as the grounds for a nature-reclaimed landscape, I analyze the rhetorical construction of anthropause baselines as tools that, to use Jacques Rancière’s words, “redistribute the sensible” in ways that privilege existing notions of a prelapsarian natural commons. Through this work, the anthropause becomes legible as both figure and ground for a possible future that might also be past.

Author 3: Sarah Dimick (Northwestern University)

Subaltern Seasons

Challenging the truism that climate baselines are sterile calculations derived via imperial sciences, this presentation analyzes baselines of weather and currents kept by a subaltern fishing community in Chennai, India, along the coast of the Bay of Bengal. As monsoons grow erratic under the pressure of climate change, S. Palayam and other hook and line fishers in the community of Urur Kuppam track shifting seasonality and its impact on their livelihoods. Focusing on two depictions of this community’s knowledge–Science of the Seas, a serial work of science writing by Nityanand Jayaraman, and Seaspeaker, a 2024 film by Parvathi Nayar–I argue that generations of labor in Urur Kuppam have produced vernacular climate records containing vital baselines.

Even more crucially, I argue that these subaltern climate records cannot be understood without considering disparities in consumption. Reflecting on S. Palayam’s statement that seasons in the Bay of Bengal have shifted because of “a culture that does not know the meaning of the word ‘enough,’” I posit a baseline of “enough” as a key distinction between sanctioned, academic climate records and subaltern climate knowledge. So much depends upon whether one thinks climate change is caused by chemical alterations to the atmosphere–increased proportions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases–or by a culture of greed. These are not mutually exclusive views, but the distance between them is often vast. By spotlighting seasonal

work in a warming world and baselines derived by a subaltern community, I emphasize how global inequities are threaded through records of changing winds and currents.

Author 4: Jen Rose Smith (University of Washington)

Ice, Race, & Racism in Lorna Simpson’s “Unanswerable”

In this talk, I illustrate ice’s generative offerings and contours as neither land nor ocean, but as an inherently transitory element. I place ice as an innovative theoretical analytic to bring together analyses of matter, material landscapes, and racial formations. Offering ice as analytic is also to complicate and trouble the imperial categories of the globe that work to keep radical traditions of theorizing Blackness and Indigeneity separate by latitude and longitude, hot and cold, and categories of race and indigeneity. I muddy the imperial divisions of the planet that keep us and our conceptualizations of waters and lands and ices apart, separate, and unrelated. Flows of water, hardening and melting of ice floes, the give of soil, these are distinct yet overlapping, shared, and related material-spatialities. Ice, land, and water ask us to and make us meet, and not only metaphorically. In working across radical, emplaced traditions of studies of Blackness and indigeneity, oceanic and landedness, climates hot and cold I will discuss artist Lorna Simpson’s discussion of such questions in her work over the last ten years on. In her exhibit, “Unanswerable,” Simpson’s work takes multiple new forms in 40 different pieces of painting, collage, and sculpture of ice and icebergs. I show how Simpson’s work is not about ice melt, but it is an insistence that we hold the realities of power relations that ice lays bare.

Keywords: environmental justice, colonialism, media studies, climate science, science and technology studies

[58] Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy (Northwestern University). Speculating Futurity: News From Nowhere, Hind Swaraj, and Genre’s Potential Energy.

Abstract. How does the language of thermodynamics help us understand transitional political formations like a waning British empire and an emergent postcolonial state? In William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890), the novel’s utopic communist, post-industrial England is precipitated by an energy transition: the eradication of accumulation based on concentrated fossil power and an expansive global empire, and their replacement with a fossil and pollution-free subsistence economy. Morris’s polemic finds echoes in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), a manifesto that envisions what postcolonial India should look like: significantly, not a modern, industrial, capitalist nation-state, but a country based on village economies and subsistence agriculture. Gandhi too imagines a world that does not need fossil fuels. In their imagined dismantling of fossil power and its accompanying infrastructures like railways, factories, and centralized colonial power, both these thinkers theorize a relationship between energy regimes and political ones: they argue from different directions that “western civilization” is a blight, and recognize the ecological as well as economic damages caused by its energy-intensive infrastructures like machines and railways. In my presentation, I parse out this relationship between energy, empire, and postcolonial critique, to argue that speculative literary genres use energy as a generic construct. Both these texts posit genre as a form of potential energy, that prescribes what future societies might look like and suggest the political work required to materialize that potential energy. By reading the language of fossil fuel energy regimes in these texts, I show that imperial and postcolonial formations alike depend on energy not only materially, but also imaginatively.

Keywords: Energy, Victorian Literature, Decolonization, Postcolonial India

[59] Dennis Summers (Strategic Technologies for Art, Globe and Environment), Roger Rothman (Bucknell University), Hannah Higgins (University of Illinois Chicago), Chris Wildrick (Syracuse University), Christine Filippone (Millersville University of Pennsylvania), Doug Stark (University of Texas at Arlington), Susanneh Bieber (Texas A&M University), Simon Anderson (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Lauren Mitchell (Vanderbilt University), Chase Crossno (Texas Christian University), Emilio Taiveaho Pelaez (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Craig Saper (University of Maryland, Baltimore County). Fluxakucha 9: Diasporaneity.

Abstract. Fluxus is a global art movement (or “anti-movement”) often seen as circumscribed by John Cage’s courses at the New School in the late 1950s and George Maciunas’ death in 1978. The ethos of Fluxus persists in this annual series of panels that have become a SLSA tradition, where art history critiques, performances, and events are held in the pechakucha format (wherein each presenter provides 20 slides (or actions) for 20 seconds each, for a total duration of 6’40”). Within that rigidly defined duration anything can, and does, happen—Fluxus provides a perspective for undoing the cultural orthodox, engaging with the everyday, and exploring the process of undermining what is thought to be well understood. There’s a natural affinity between SLSA’s topical interests in everyday science, technology, institutions, and controls, and the counter narratives in Fluxus that leverage chance, play, the unexpected, and audience participation.

In keeping with this year’s conference theme, the collection of presentations and performances will, in part, address the deeply diasporic nature of Fluxus, as a movement that began, nearly simultaneously, in New York and Wiesbaden, and which spread to the Nordic countries, Japan, and Central Europe. The first truly global art moment, Fluxus has much to teach us about how aesthetics and politics may operate within what might be called the condition of “diasporaneity.”

Keywords: Fluxus, Collaboration, Feminism, Friendship, Alison Knowles, Betsy Damon, montage, George Brecht, space-time, medicine, theater, inflatables, mail-art, Dick Higgins, Poetics, Mycology, science, education, literacy

1. What’s in the Bag?: Betsy Damon, Alison Knowles and the thousand year friendship

Christine Filippone

Millersville University of Pennsylvania

christinefilippone@yahoo.com

Hannah B. Higgins

University of Illinois Chicago

higgins@uic.edu

Abstract: In the mid-1970s, in the midst of second-wave feminism, artist Betsy Damon moved to New York where she met artist Alison Knowles. Damon participated in Fluxus sound works, a signature practice of Knowles’, marking the beginning of their friendship based in collaboration and artistic exchange. Damon performed her groundbreaking feminist work The 7,000 Year Old Woman in 1977 impromptu on Prince Street in New York City. For the work she affixed 400 small canvas bags of flour to her body and walked slowly in a circle while puncturing each bag, allowing the release of the flour and thereby the symbolic weight of seven thousand years of women’s oppression. Knowles regularly visited Damon’s studio and, enamored with Betsy’s bags, asked to borrow them for her own work. Both artists were interested in used, everyday items, often associated with food. Recognizing collaboration as a central feminist value, our two, contiguous Fluxakuchas are a collaborative investigation into these groundbreaking artists, their work, and their friendship.

2. It’s About Time

Dennis Summers

Strategic Technologies for Art, Globe and Environment

dennis@quantumdanceworks.com

Abstract: The cinematic crosscut and George Brecht – There’s a rift in the space-time continuum.

3. Fluxus as a Way of Life: Art, Attention, Attitude

Doug Stark

University of Texas at Arlington

doge@live.unc.edu

Abstract: We tend to think of philosophy as a discourse about the world, but for the ancient Greek schools, it was a way of inhabiting the world. The stoics, for example, strived to harmonize their habits with the wider cosmos by conducting “spiritual exercises” — like epoché, the suspension of judgment — designed to change their overall attitude. This is what Pierre Hadot meant when he claimed that “philosophy is a way of life” (1995). Recently, scholars have started to think about how we might “reinvent philosophy as a way of life” today (Ansell-Pearson, Ure, Conway, 2020), especially to address ecological (Robbert 2018) and technological issues (Sloterdijk 2013). Gabriel

Trop likewise reimagines poetry and, moreover, art as a way of life that fosters a particular disposition toward the world by means of “aesthetic exercises” (2015). What about Fluxus art? Drifting from its original, mid-century context, can it still be said to cultivate the “Fluxus Attitude” (Smith 1998)? Building on Hannah Higgin’s account of how a performance of “Street Cleaning Event” (1966) changed her experience of cleaning more generally (2002), this paper argues that the event scores prompt exercises in attention that can transform our perception of the environment in enduring ways.

4. Inflatables: Forms in Flux

Susanneh Bieber

Texas A&M University

bieber@tamu.edu

Abstract: During the long 1960s, many artists created inflatable objects, structures, and environments that made visible the immaterial medium of air. The exhibition Air Art, curated by Willoughby Sharp in 1968, featured works such as Silver Clouds by Andy Warhol, Pneumatic Structure by Graham Stevens, and Balloon by Akira Kanayama. In this presentation, I expand the remit of Sharp’s exhibition—it featured an all-male, predominantly white cast of artists—by highlighting practices by women artists and artists working in the Global South. I explore the global networks of artists working with inflatables and the works’ diverse meanings. Inflatables not only draw attention to the invisible medium of air fundamental to human survival, but they also respond to human interaction, environmental conditions, and ideological pressures. They are in constant flux.

5. Whither the Weather

Chris Wildrick

Syracuse University

cwildric@syr.edu

Abstract: I will collect weather-related Fluxus works from artists around the country and present them at the Fluxakucha. Participants can use classic Fluxus weather-related prompts like Mieko Shiomi’s Wind Event (“Make wind or disturb the movement of natural wind which surrounds the globe”), Takehisa Kosuigi’s Chironomy I (“Put out a hand from a window for a long time”), George Brecht’s Three Aqueous Events (“•ice/•water/•steam”), or Danny Boyd’s A Performance Calendar: March (“Watch the clouds on a sunny day for 10 minutes”), or create original pieces in the Fluxus spirit for this event. My presentation will be to show or enact these pieces in whatever way is appropriate for the piece, whether that means to read the score, show a recorded performance, or perform it live. They will all take place within my allotted time span; it is possible multiple works will be performed simultaneously. In this way, it will be a sort of climate anti-diaspora, as weather art is brought from a dispersed state (creators around the country) to a centralized endpoint (the Fluxakucha). I see the many approaches that people will take as being akin to the quick changes seen in the weather under Climate Chaos.

SESSION 2: Fluxakucha 9: Diasporaneity (part 1 of 2)

1. BG-P & BGP: better geo-politics and Beau Geste Press

Simon Anderson

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

sander2@saic.edu

Abstract: Micro-migrations and changes in the international cultural climate are made visible in the marvelous and beautiful publications of Beau Geste Press’ David Mayor, Felipe and Martha Ehrenberg, Takako Saito and a host of friends at the community in Cullompton, Devon between 1971 and 1977. Schmuck, BGP’s eccentric periodical, centered issues on Iceland, Hungary, France and Japan as well as varied international art activities—including Mail-art. The press produced dozens of titles made on the condition that each individual spent time with the community and assisted in production. This presentation aims to highlight the deliberately provincial internationalism that is evident in the works, the editorial concept, and production values of this experimental organization, and to suggest that it offers an alternative to currently rising ideas about the free movement of ideas and people.

2. Richard’s Rostrum

Roger Rothman

Bucknell University

rrothman@bucknell.edu

Abstract: This paper explores a puzzle: When Richard (Dick) Higgins first outlined his theory of Fluxus he identified nine fundamental criteria. A few years later, in response to Ken Friedman’s expanded list, Higgins added two more, yielding a total of eleven. The riddle is this: neither the original nine nor the subsequent eleven include the concept of a “rostrum,” despite the fact that on a number of occasions–and once in an explicit riposte to Geroge Maciunas’ identification of Fluxus as a “collective”–Higgins described Fluxus as precisely that. What are we to make of the idea that Fluxus can be understood as a rostrum and what are we to make of the fact that Higgins did not include it in his subsequent theorizations? This paper will suggest that the notion of Fluxus as a rostrum opens up new ways of thinking not only about Fluxus itself, but also about the nine Fluxakuchas that have brought so many of us together year after year after year.

3. Performing Competence: Clinical Ecosystems and Diaspora Using the Viewpoints

Method

Lauren Mitchell

Vanderbilt University

lauren.mitchell@vanderbilt.edu

Chase Crossno

Texas Christian University

c.crossno@tcu.edu

Abstract: Medical practice can be easily compared to a theatrical performance, where providers don costumes, memorize scripts for communication and education, and may even include the added drama of spotlights and prompted action in procedure based settings. As medicine is hierarchical, many would-be providers are often taught to view themselves as central to their environment, rather than the other way around. In this presentation, we will engage clinical practice with Mary Overlie’s concept of Viewpoints.

Originally conceived as a method for actors and dancers to explore movement on stage, actors practice Viewpoints as a way of investigating non-verbal connections with others and objects in space and time. This concept can translate into the theaters of care in which physicians operate to help them understand how non-verbal communication impacts modes of connection, meaning, and hands-on practice with patients. We will also discuss a practical pedagogical approach to use Viewpoints in medical school settings.

4. John Cage and the Migrant Mushrooms of Language

Emilio Taiveaho Pelaez

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

emiliotaiveaho@gmail.com

Abstract: Fungi are a vital force across John Cage’s work. The composer’s relationship with mycelium—which begins in the 1930s, foraging for sustenance, and lingers with him throughout his life—fruits most conspicuously in the recent collection __John Cage: A Mycological Foray__ (Atelier Éditions, 2020). As a harvesting of mushroom-filled compositions, __A Mycological Foray__ showcases some of Cage’s most compelling

poems, acrostics that decompose and detoxify Linnaean taxonomy into “nonsense in the sense of not being ordinary sense.” Saprotrophically, Cage’s language eats away at habituated patterns of thought, forcing “words which you’re used to going in one direction” to go “in at least two directions.” I am interested in the ways Cage potentiates the composting of thought and perception through our fungal counterparts: using mushrooms to break down ordinary sense. This presentation forages through the diasporic thickets of fungal thought, uncovering the subterranean relationships between Cage and his consociate, María Sabina, the Mazatec matriarch of mycopoetics. By foregrounding María Sabina’s impact on mycological discourse, broadly, as well as on Cage’s work, specifically, I hope to chart a diagram of dispersal, as mushroom-thought migrates from Huautla de Jiménez to Black Mountain to upstate New York.

5. FluxScience: Cage, Feyerabend, Maciunas

Craig Saper

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

csaper@umbc.edu

Abstract: Fluxus as against method was never opposed to science or education, but against a calcified reified method of science education. FluxScience (with the intentional homophonic pun), in the sense of processes and procedures of running an experiment with a laboratory space, played deeply in the cultural imaginations of the non-artists associated with Fluxus. The so-called anti-artists explicitly argued that their works should be encountered outside of the art world gallery system (in that sense they have failed miserably). We should teach Fluxus as science methods, literacy education, and even in organizational sociology, and never in art history or as part of a ghettoized notion of the arts. This paper introduces FluxScience (phonetic pronunciation: Fuluck Science).

[60] Jennifer Clary-Lemon (University of Waterloo) and Marcel O’Gorman (University of Waterloo). BIOBLITZ! A Field Trip for Critical Citizen Science (Workshop Proposal).

Abstract. This 2-hour workshop organized by the Critical Media Lab engages participants in a bioblitz at John R. Carpenter Park, which is a 3-minute walk from the Dallas Sheraton conference hotel. In a bioblitz, citizen scientists explore biodiversity in a local landscape by using a species identification app to gather and share information. The goal of this workshop is to provide an introduction to the bioblitz, accompanied by a critical discussion that frames the event within broader theoretical and methodological contexts, inclusive of curiosity (Daston and Park, 2001), arts of noticing (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al. 2024), digital damage (Edwards, 2020) and environmental care (Pezzulo 2017; Barnett 2022).

Keywords: animal studies, media theory, Anthropocene, environmental care, nature apps, bioblitz

[61] Henry Osman (Brown University). Computing the Forest.

Abstract. Rows of date palms line the land, each with a single sensor drilled into its trunk emitting a constant stream of information to the cloud. These sensors, developed by Israeli start-up Agrint, algorithmically isolate which trees are at risk for insect infestation, a risk magnified by climate-change induced heat and water stress. The forest is then rendered on the farmer’s computer as a grid of dots, translated into a language of risk such that some trees are coded green, some yellow, and some red as the ecosystem’s liveliness is subsumed into a computational ecosystem. In effect, these distinct streams of information from each tree compute the forest, parallel processing its agricultural potential. These colored dots are seen as both a model of the forest that simulates it in real time. Agrint further claims to detect pest damage before it is visible, as if the digital forest on the cloud were a truer and more immediate representation of the forest than the forest itself. I take up these sensors as a digital transduction of the forest and Palestinian land that naturalizes Israeli agricultural development through a simulated digital ecology. I also attend to the form of the forest itself, whose interconnected form represents for some, like Rob Nixon, a liberatory model of an interdependent and collectivized social. However, I argue that the interdependent and entangled model of the forest is ground for its capture and integration into Agrint’s computational assemblage.

Keywords: Environmental media, Palestine, Network

[62] Chris Wildrick (Syracuse University). Diasporas in Marvel Comics as a Models for and Escapes from Reality.

Abstract. I will discuss multiple diasporas (and their opposites: protective homelands) within Marvel comics, such as those of mutants (including Genosha, Utopia, Krakoa, and Arakko); the Inhumans (including Attilan, the Universal Inhumans, and the Terrigen Bomb); African Wakanda and the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda; various population movements among the Kree and Skrulls; and the Eternals of Earth and Titan.

These stories, including several by Jewish, Black, and queer writers, comment on the dynamics of real-world diasporas (or the creation of safe spaces that a diasporic population might return to) or as fantasy models that provide the opportunity for escapism or hope for the reader. While the proximate cause of the Marvel diasporas might be due to things like a giant purple planet-eater, the characters in these stories are motivated by the same basic fears, dreams, and problems as the real world. That giant purple planet-eater, Galactus, is for instance a nearly-irreversible force of nature not unlike climate change, the bigoted persecution of mutants has led to stories that parallel both the Holocaust and Zionism, and the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda embodies Afrofuturist dreams and colonial entanglements that act as both escapist utopias and warnings of the corruption of power.

Keywords: Comics, Disapora, Escapism, Colonialism, Persecution, Safe Spaces

[63] Jason Price (University of North Alabama). Climate Change, Animals, and Animism in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.

Abstract. Set in the Sundarbans, a mangrove delta in the Bay of Bengal subject to increasingly violent cyclones,land loss, and increased salination due to rising sea levels, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) describes the forced migrations of humans and animals as a result of climate change. The novel explores animist folklore about a snake goddess, who has historically been credited with protecting communities and their resources from violent storms. What potential do folk stories of animist goddesses and animals offer for thinking about vulnerable humans and nonhumans fleeing environmental crises? The snake goddess might be considered what Joni Adamson calls a “protector being” as she notes that “ [i]n movement manifestos such as The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change (2010), stories about forest mothers and river spirits… are understood as complex ecological literacies articulating human relationships to nature”. Ghosh’s narrative often reveals the inadequacy of isolated Western-style scientific approaches and humanitarian aid to responding to climate change and considers the promise of traditional practices informed by local oral and material culture.

Drawing on postcolonial science studies and animal studies, this paper explores how rationalist secularism exacerbates the devastation of climate change by deriding traditional material culture and its ability to resist dominant narratives and ways of thinking about environmental crises. The Westernized protagonist of Gun Island, a PhD in folklore, explores the historical arc of adaptations of the goddess legend throughout periods of environmental and political upheaval. Despite his academic interest, he derides animist culture as nonsense, replicating a colonial legacy. In its animist realism however, the novel challenges his sense of mastery and superiority over the folk tale and others as he encounters the agency of animals, the environment, the dispossessed, and “earth beings” (de la Cadena). In this paper I explore Ghosh’s commentary on folk narrative through Harry Garuba’s “animist materialism,” a theory that claims a sense of agency for its vulnerable practitioners. Animist cultures are uniquely situated to “prepossess the future” according to Garuba as their accommodative quality allows for the coding of new social, technological, and natural phenomena according to a traditional worldview. Ghosh’s novel firmly asserts the importance of maintaining and recovering traditional ecological material culture toward resisting the replication of colonial ways of relating to vulnerable people, animals, and environments.

Keywords: climate migration, animist materialism, animal studies, postcolonialism

[64] Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield (University of Colorado, Boulder). From Self-Birthed to Animal-Made : Why Should We Pay Attention to Recent Retelling of Man’s Birth.

Abstract. One of the enduring mysteries of philosophical thinking in the 20th century is how little it is informed by Darwinian evolutionary theory. Until very recently, anthropological and ecological thought appears to have operated on the modern premise of a radical separation of species – even when it tried to explore an obvious common ground. Nowhere is this more evident than in stories that account for the origin of man. Freud’s tale of the self-birthing of civilization comes prominently to mind. But it is also true of post-modern fictions such as Georges Bataille’s Theory of Religion which accounts for an “animal side” of man but still imagines the birth of human reason as a purely auto-genetic process based on a radical break with animal “immanence”.

Even though these self-birthing tales still dominate today’s cultural imagination, they are slowly been replaced with new fictions of origin based on Darwin’s theory of the evolutionary continuity of species. Thinkers like Paul Shepard and Baptiste Morizot write the new story of a zoomorphic man whose animal ancestry is everywhere, right down to his richest, most cultural behaviors. They re-imagine the birth of human language, science and art as a fundamentally animal one.

My aim, in this paper, is to look at these new Darwinian re-writings of man’s animal origin side by side with their older, anthropocentric, counterparts. What do they tell us? What is their cultural impact on today’s rapidly changing ecosophies. And how can they help to inflect the “crisis of awareness” at the center of our ecological and climate crisis?

Keywords: Fictions of origin, Eco-anthropology, Zoomorphism, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Paul Shepard, Baptiste Morizot

[65] Amit Ray (Rochester Institute of Technology). Scaling Ignorance: Generative Artificial Intelligence, Agnotology, and Ecology.

Abstract. This proposal examines generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance) as ecological and diasporic phenomena. GAI is rapidly affecting communities around the globe, even as its political economy largely arises from American technology corporations. And, in a variety of ways, GAI is an engine of agnotology, dispersing ignorance as a result of its technical processes and transnational scope of operations. Its rapid growth is fueled by a neocolonial approach to resource and labor extraction, affecting the planet’s social and ecological futures. As in the past, the current landscape is dominated by large, for-profit corporations who have the necessary funds to develop such models. Given the billions it takes to develop GAI, these corporations are loath to share their trade secrets. While there are efforts to develop more Open Access and transparent systems, deemed Explainable AI, most GAI are cloaked in secrecy. Companies such as Meta, Google, and OpenAI reveal very little about the configuration of their models, their decision-making processes, how their models are trained, and what they are trained upon. This is compounded by the fact that even the creators of these systems do not fully comprehend how they work. GAI is inherently agnotological, as several factors such as complex decision pathways, lack of explainability, data-driven biases, and unpredictable outputs make accountability, even in open access systems, nearly impossible. Given the burden of ignorance placed upon us by GAI, in how can humanities scholars respond?

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Agnotology, Neocolonialism, Diaspora, Ecology, Political Economy

[66] Casey Boyle (University of Texas-Austin), Jillian Sayre (Rutgers University-Camden), Nathaniel Rivers (Saint Louis University) and Jim Brown (Rutgers University-Camden). The Afterlives of Extraction .

Abstract. By now, it is clear that extractive economies have decimated and continue to decimate the climate and its communities in inequitable ways. The Global South, for instance, suffers disproportionately due to an imagined world in which resources are unlimited and the transformation of those resources into capital can continue ad infinitum. This panel addresses the many afterlives of extractive economies and extractive processes. Speaker one will discuss recent attempts to de-extinct species as a mode of temporal extraction and frame it as an aesthetic problem. Speaker two takes up the ways Indigenous filmmakers, writers, and digital artists are laying bare the gory results of extractivism, using brutal imagery that forces audiences to confront the horror of an ongoing, devastating climate catastrophe that is often buried beneath the idea that horrors of colonialism and its attendant climate catastrophe are slowly unfolding or (worse) a bygone historical event. Speaker three’s presentation demonstrates the importance of recognizing the blowback effects of extractive impulses and how attention to aesthetics points the way to non-extractive practices of consumption. Speaker four addresses the discursive machine that has sponsored digital extractivism and asks how this “lore” that has sanctioned a placeless approach to the mining of data might be rethought or recomposed. In total, our panel presents an incomplete but necessary step towards charting extraction afterlives.

Keywords: extraction, aesthetics, lore

Speaker One – Aesthetics of De-Extinction

Guilty of rendering species extinct and extinguishing ecosystems, some are turning their attentions to resurrection. This is precisely the aim sought by Colossal Biosciences Inc., an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company. Their plan to resurrect and reintroduce the wooly mammoth into Arctic regions hopes to repair an ecosystem gone awry in their absence.

Audra Mitchell’s Revenant Ecologies (2023) refers to de-extinction efforts as “ex situ conservation” and argues that, far from a return, these genetic reintroductions can be characterized as “alienated and disembodied, temporally orphaned” (40). In an analogous vein, Patricia Stuelke writes in The Ruse of Repair that reparative engagements, like those in critical reading, offer not corrections but ways to maintain systemic inequities by feeling better about troubled engagements. We can see the same dynamics at play in recent projects towards de-extinction or bio-engineering species back from the dead. These acts of repair should be refused.

A question emerges. Is ethics the right frame to engage the arts of de-extinction? Novelist Ray Naylor reminds us that to remake a mammoth, a mammoth must first feel as such. Tusks of Extinction demonstrates that DNA might get the species, but aesthesis is needed to raise the specimen from the dead. What aesthetic pleasures are we enjoying in dreaming up plans of resurrection?

This presentation will examine the aesthetics of de-extinction by limning the sensational contours offered by efforts to extract past forms of life as ways to heal a world that may be beyond repair.

Speaker Two – “I’m not sorry you’re seeing this”: Indigenous Horror and the

Extractivist Abject”

In two short stories, Richard Van Camp writes a dark future onto the Tar Sands in Canada. In this space, already transformed from boreal forests and muskeg into one of the largest mining developments in the world, Van Camp imagines oil crews uncovering a Wheetago, a creature from Tłįcho legend that he elsewhere describes as “a human possessed by a malevolent spirit that invokes an insatiable urge to cannibalize others. The more it eats, the hungrier it becomes.” This is not a future that can or will be avoided. The narrator in the first of these stories is told “what’s coming is already here.”

This is a horror that must be seen and recognized for what it already is. Van Camp’s stories are brief but overwhelming, filled with excessive violence and the spectacle of destroyed bodies. One reviewer called them “two of the most brutal pieces of speculative fiction I have ever read.” But when the narrator and readers receive this horrific vision, we are told “I’m not sorry you will see this.” This paper studies the work of contemporary Indigenous creators, including writers, filmmakers, and visual artists, who join Van Camp in yoking climate catastrophe and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. By making present the expansive work of colonial extraction through the affective economy of gore, these creators force us to bear witness to processes that have been otherwise described as temporally refracted or historically displaced, emphasizing instead an inextricable material fragility shared between human and nonhuman worlds.

Speaker Three – John Cage Ate the Wrong Mushroom

In John Cage—A Mycological Foray, Kingston Trinder recounts when composer John Cage ate the wrong mushroom. Instead of eating what he misidentified as Spatlryema faetidus, Cage served hellebore. “Cage’s mistaken consumption of poisonous hellebore caused rapidly decreasing blood pressure, extreme nausea, and an anxious visit to nearby Spring Valley hospital” (A Mycological Foray 16). Thanks to timely medical intervention Cage survived. Through this foraging misfire, speaker three argues that aesthetics saves lives. Aesthetics can and does make a difference in one’s orientation to climate. Speaker three draws from the work of Kandice Chuy, Bruno Latour, and Jacques Rancière, who all articulate aesthetics as irreducible to the judgment of particular objects and instead as an embodied and relation practice vital to politics expansively understood. Aesthetics is political work that takes place through the body’s worldly becoming. The conjunction of Chuh, Rancière, and Latour helps us to read Cage’s near-death experience as a political allegory for climate change. An aesthetics to be traced through A Mycological Foray tends toward a careful acknowledgment that not everything in the world is for our taking—that one must move and consume, which we all must, cautiously and attentively.

Such an aesthetics possibly suggests that not all consumption need be extractive, which generates toxicity by rendering both the world and its bodies mute. Learning to sense the world is part of what makes the world, and the strangely (and possibly dangerous) quotidian act of identifying and collecting mushrooms is worth learning from.

Speaker Four – The Lore of Data Extraction

In Right Story, Wrong Story, Tyson Yunkaporta argues for an Indigenous approach to technology, an approach that is rooted in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) rather than “tech.” TEK requires that every tool be accompanied by a “psychosocial” technology, an “inviolable” lore, that Yunkaporta calls “strong story”: “You need to leave the ore in the ground until you have strong enough story to regulate its use in the world” (192).

This ethic does not necessarily help in a situation where the extraction has already happened, but that does not prevent us from trying to understand the lore that drives extractive technologies. Yunkaporta is clear that Western “tech” is not without its lore: “It’s not as though there is no Lore in Western cultures, it’s just that the stories have no place-maps in them.” Western technological lore is abstracted, disconnected from place, unconcerned with particular time-places. It requires placelessness. This is particularly clear when it comes to digital platforms that extract data without any ecological concern in order to build technologies that have no link to place. What is the lore that drives the extractive economies of contemporary digital life, and what would that lore look like if it did have place-maps, if its notion of responsibility were not tied to capital and short-term value creation? This presentation unearths the lore that sponsors the frenetic extraction of data, asks what kinds of activities it allows or prohibits, and considers how it could be recomposed with a different set of commitments.

[67] Jayne Hildebrand (Barnard College). The Island and the Environment Concept at the Fin-de-Siècle.

Abstract. Historians of science have often suggested that the concept of “the environment”—the idea that the natural world forms a totalized system coextensive with the planet—is a product of the mid-twentieth-century (Timothy Mitchell; Robin, Warde, and Sörlin). This paper turns to the fin-de-siècle writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, particularly his South Pacific stories, to argue that this concept has a longer history in the pages of late-Victorian literature. Although Stevenson’s most famous island is the self-contained world of Treasure Island, snugly enclosed within its neatly-drawn boundaries, in his later writings about the South Pacific, Stevenson draws on the emerging science of island biogeography to reimagine island settings within a larger planet-sized system. Reading Stevenson’s The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1893) alongside Alfred Russell Wallace’s foundational scientific work Island Life (1880), I show how both these thinkers envisioned the island form not as a static microcosm, but rather as a vantage point from which to apprehend the natural world as a dynamic system traversed by networks of colonial and ecological exchange. Key to this fin-de-siècle environmental imaginary was a blend of description and narration that treated the visual details of an island’s biological life as requiring the narrative contextualization of global evolutionary history to be understood. Through an experimental descriptive practice informed by Wallace’s island biogeography, I argue, Stevenson transforms the 1890s island setting into a porous site from which to critically view the intertwined planetary scales of both the British empire and “the environment” as a total system.

Keywords: environment, South Pacific, island biogeography, British empire, Victorian literature, Robert Louis Stevenson

[68] Juan Camilo Velasquez (New York University). Split Screen and Split Earths: The Representational Ideologies of Videotelephony.

Abstract. Split screens are at the center of the 21st-century diasporic condition. Since the early 2000s, immigrants have been able to surmount physical distances using videotelephony services like Skype, Zoom, and Facetime, most of which share similar visual compositions that privilege the split screen. These visual technologies have replaced face-to-face encounters with split screens that simultaneously place two or more interlocutors side by side, on top of each other, or on a screen within a screen. Yet, while they have played an important role in reuniting people, these services also support the representational and economic logics that caused these forced migrations in the first place, as seen in their support of productivity and representability during the pandemic and the substantial carbon footprint they produce. What are the ideologies undergirding the split screen?

This paper suggests that the split-screen aesthetic of contemporary videotelephony ought to be understood within a modern desire for total mastery and representability of the world. Tracing a genealogy of canonical uses of split screens in cinema, I argue that a film like Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) exemplifies a tendency in Western modernity for totalizing representations of the world. The split screen emerged as a solution to the problem of representing simultaneity, the final frontier of audiovisual representation. Despite their many benefits, then, the aesthetic composition of video call technologies ought to be understood within ideologies of mastery, control, and total representability through simultaneity – which are at the core of Western colonization and exploitation of the planet. Ultimately, the ideological paradox of split screens points to a crucial contradiction within technologies of videotelephony: even as they try to bridge distances, they exacerbate the climatic conditions that create those distances and migrations from the Global South.

Keywords: Split screens, Videotelephony, Video Call Services, Aesthetics, Climate

[69] Joshua DiCaglio (Texas A&M University), Claire Fitch (University of Texas Austin), Marina Peterson (University of Texas Austin), Rebecca Falkoff (University of Texas Austin) and Abena Osseo-Asare (University of Texas Austin). Elemental Methodologies.

Abstract. This panel examines atomic elements as they become entangled in cultural and political practices. Since the definition of the periodic table in the 19th century, technoscience has produced an extensive map of the elements as the atomic-scale objects through which the rest of the world is built. As technoscience examines and expands on their attributes, these elements become entangled in a host of actions and interests. This panel contains papers reflecting on methods for approaching this schema of atomic scale entities. Each paper examines a particular element in relation to a difficulty that requires methodological reflection and in relation to a particular manifestation in literature, culture, or politics. Claire Fitch thinks with the variability of silicon to consider how the material properties of elements shape sociotechnical imaginaries, as well as how elements are enrolled as substrates for inscription and reproduction. Joshua DiCaglio situates elements as scalar objects, examining lithium as a recent example of how elements are drawn into multiple scales of interaction that produce varying and partially conflicting perspectives. Marina Peterson examines the indeterminacy of atmospheric dynamics through an examination of silver iodide cloud seeding, as a mode of making evident the materiality of clouds. Rebecca Falkoff analyzes the “nitrogen problem” in Fascist Italy in terms of how it dramatizes the contradictions of autarky. Finally, Abena Dove Osseo-Asare examines uranium as a key figure in Ghana’s scientific development and conception of its future.

Keywords: Elements, Atoms, Scale, Method, Materialities, Lithium, Uranium, Silicon, Nitrogen, Silver

Silicon (on Silicon Hills, elemental materiality of sociotechnical imaginaries)
Claire Fitch

In the northwest corner of Austin, Texas a large cluster of tech companies sits on limestone cliffs stretching out above the Colorado river. This land is nicknamed “Silicon Hills”, imagined as the successor of Silicon Valley, a new technopolis. This toponym references the silicon microchip’s central role in modern technologies – As a semiconductor, silicon is incredibly mutable, making it a choice material for microchips, as engineers can manipulate the electrical conductivity of specific parts of a silicon surface. Silicon is also present in many other forms throughout the riparian area, notably in the form of the silicate flint, with which lithic tools were crafted by Indigenous inhabitants of the land. Silicates were the stone chosen for tool-making because its crystalline structure allows it to fracture conchoidally when struck– enabling the creation of sharp, tapered tools. Through the field site of Silicon Hills, I think-with silicon as a method of paying attention to the elements through which technological imaginaries materialize– considering how the material properties of elements shape these imaginaries, as well as how elements are enrolled as substrates for the inscription and reproduction of them. Thinking-with silicon as a method enables attunement to the ongoing alchemical intra-action of sociomaterial configurations– the dynamic and irresolute character of the world’s technicity as constantly produced by exchanges between humans and Earthly materials. As silicon has been knapped, inscribed, heated, molded, and etched with human intention into heterogeneous technologies, it helps us to consider how sociotechnical imaginations are forged by and with the elements.

Lithium: Scalar Objects and the paradoxes of sustainability
Joshua DiCaglio

This paper will use Lithium to consider techniques for examining relations across multiple scales. Lithium, like all atomic elements, is a scalar object, meaning it is defined and made significant only by examining the world at a different scale: the atomic scale, where we define “lithium,” examine its attributes, and understand what it can do. Like many elements, lithium is then connected up to a host of concerns at various scales. Vital to the creation of lithium-ion batteries powering personal electronics and the electric vehicles that many see as essential for an energy transition necessary to address climate change, lithium is also a limited resource entangled in issues of indigeneity, globalization, politics, and labor. Lithium becomes a focal point through which a variety of perspectives and situations are forced into contact. This contact has produced a narrative that I call the “sustainability paradox” in which sustainability efforts are forced to reckon with their additional effects on the planet, indigenous communities, and continued investment in technical infrastructure. This narrative of paradox, as seen in works ranging from journalism (Sanderson) to sociology, emerges from a fundamental aspect of scale: since scale traces varied perspectives taken on the same object, relating nonhuman views to the human lifeworld, this sense of paradox arises in part from the varied ways of bringing this scalar object into view. In turn, this conception of the scalar object prepares us to more thoroughly diagram these alternative perspectives enabled by “lithium” as partially intersecting modes of value and intervention.

Silver (iodide cloud seeding)
Marina Peterson Silver

iodide cloud seeding was developed by Bernard Vonnegut in the 1940s. After his colleague Vincent Schaeffer successfully created clouds with dry ice, Vonnegut turned from temperature to mimicry, analyzing an array of substances to find one with a structure similar to that of ice. After much experimentation, he determined that silver iodide – 1.5 times larger than ice but with a similar structure – proved effective as a nuclei for ice crystals in clouds. Drawing on his experience studying “smokes” for the Chemical Warfare Service, Vonnegut found that silver iodide nucleates ice crystals better when in smoke form. In order to be blown into clouds as smoke, it needs to be burned. To achieve this, silver iodide generators – still used today – consist of rods of silver iodide that are burned, their smoke carried by the wind into supercooled clouds where they can nucleate ice crystals. Cloud seeding intervenes in the water cycle, making evident the elemental materiality of clouds as phase shifting, effervescent formations of water, dust, and air that mark the transformation of vapor into water or ice, becoming rain or snow that might reach the ground or might simply evaporate. Here I consider how the elemental is a way of knowing in and through the indeterminacy of atmospheric dynamics. Caught up in wind and clouds that drift and turn and rise, the movement of silver iodide (and microbes and dust and minerals and pollen and soot and flakes of skin and hair) eludes both knowability and control.

On Elemental Autarky, or, the Nitrogen Problem in Fascist Italy
Rebecca Falkoff

Often considered the most important technical invention of the twentieth century, nitrogen capture and the industrial production of synthetic fertilizers, has been integral to the “great acceleration.” The industrial implementation of the Haber process at BASF’s Opau plant beginning in 1913 allowed Germany to remain in WWI despite its loss of access to saltpeter from Chile’s Atacama desert and accordingly, the supply of fertilizers and explosives. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, German intellectual property was surrendered to allies, and industrialized nations invested heavily in its implementation, as well as research and development into air nitrates and the production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. My paper is drawn from a larger project that traces articulation and transformation of the “nitrogen problem” as such in Italy from the first decade of twentieth century to the period of economic autarky following the imposition of sanctions in response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. In “On Elemental Autarky,” I examine divulgative articles on nitrogen published in 1932 and 1937 by the engineer-turned-novelist and enthusiastic supporter turned acerbic critic of fascism, Carlo Emilio Gadda. I show how these articles, which participate in a revival of the elemental emphasis first articulated in Italy thirty years earlier, and which earned the praise of dictator’s brother, Arnaldo—narrate the nitrogen cycle in such a way as to dramatize the contradictions of autarky.

Uranium: Atomic Futures in West Africa and the making of Ghanaian nuclear scientists
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare

The West African country of Ghana has long pursued nuclear ambitions. This project considers the long simmering dream of nuclear scientists there to perform fission reactions themselves from the late 1950s, to the arrival of the country’s first nuclear reactor the GHARR-1 in 1994, and now, current efforts to establish a nuclear power station. While the focus in Ghana has been on peaceful applications of nuclear technology, there are signs that as early as the 1960s, Ghanaian officials also discussed weapons manufacture. Given a variety of setbacks, including the overthrowal of first President Kwame Nkrumah in a CIA-backed coup, the initial efforts to import a Soviet-made reactor faltered leading to a four decade struggle to find another supplier. Ironically, the Chinese made 35 kilowatt miniature neutron source reactor that Ghanaians installed in 1994 was much smaller and safer than the initially planned Soviet reactor. Interviews with leading Ghanaian scientists over the years trace a path of African nuclear dreams from sojourns of students in the Soviet Union to the United Kingdom to the establishment of Ghana’s School for Nuclear and Allied Sciences, a training hub for African scientists from across the continent. With the creation of an independent Nuclear Regulatory Authority in 2016, Ghanaian scientists met further requirements for the establishment of a nuclear power station and widened the prospect for employment of the many nuclear scientists the country has helped to generate over the years. This presentation includes archival materials and visuals from a documentary film on Ghana’s nuclear program with a focus on shifting reactor technology over the years.

[70] David Cecchetto (York University (Toronto)), Ted Hiebert (Toronto Metropolitan University), Nathanael Elias Mengist (University of Washington) and Katherine Behar (Baruch College/CUNY Graduate Center). Paracognitive Climatology.

Abstract. As has been widely noted, “climate change” marks a problem whose perception is inseparable from—and in some respects defined by—technical mediations: the very observation of climate as such, beyond the mere weather, involves scalar technologies that expand perception beyond what any individual could otherwise observe. At the same time, registering the unevenness of the phenomenon demands seemingly the opposite: to truly understand climate change involves understanding how it drives (and is driven by) highly specified political realities that are most profoundly experienced in the daily lives of racialized and economically disenfranchised individuals.

This panel accepts this bind as self-evident. As a result, the papers in the panel each work at the mechanism that make it a vexatious one to “deal imaginatively with [the] ontological disjunctures [and] epistemic fractures” of climate change (Richardson). In some cases, this means crafting pluriversal accounts of climate catastrophes, while in others it involves giving less attention to the fact of “climate diasporas” and more to the technical, medial, and cognitive machinations that constitute its perception and that would, in turn, make it a conceptually actionable problem. In short, the panel considers instances of analogously constituted experiences to explore how post-rational technologies and visceral abstractions (Ngai) can be brought to bear on one another as experiences; easier done than said!

Keywords: listening, black marxism, sound studies, psychogeography

Panel respondent: Katherine Behar, Baruch College and CUNY Graduate School

Paper: Suprasensible Listening

David Cecchetto, York University

This paper parses the connection between communication and experience that underwrites much contemporary work on relationality, specifically through the figure of listening. To this end, the paper examines an experimental music practice (Bitstance radio) that is premised on what might called the suprasensible character of listening: Bitstance radio leverages the “sensuously material” form of music (Ngai)—i.e. its circulation as a “visceral abstraction”—to unfold an understanding of listening as the attentional texture of a given situation that is distributed through human and more-than-human collectivities. This, in turn, demands that we resist romanticizing listening as attentional hearing, instead dwelling with the vexatious communicative causalities that it lays bare.

Paper: Worrying the Postrational
Ted Hiebert, Toronto Metropolitan University
I gave my son a worry stone—he was anxious about going to school and the stone helped him redirect his focus, giving an outlet for anxiety, distracting in a helpful direction. I want to say the stone is an agent of climate change—and I want to say that the particular type of climate at stake is ideological. I might call it paracognitive. I might say it has something to do with psychogeogaphy, brought down from the scale of urban experience to that of a young child. I might say it has something to do with Joseph Beuys, using symbolic gestures and placebos and magic to help shape a world to come. I might want to talk about Edouard Glissant and the relationality of experience, or Jean Baudrillard and the reversibility of reason. I might want to call it an active conspiracy, a simulation, a self-help innovation. I might call it sympathetic parenting. I might call it performance art. But whatever I call it, I want to create a space in which it is real—whether it is real or not, paradoxes and contradictions notwithstanding.

Paper: Tierra Nigredo
Nathanael Elias Mengist, University of Washington
If alchemy was useful as an epistemic resource for the British appropriation of indigenous material sciences in colonial-era India, as reported by Rajani Sudan, can crafting an analogous ‘alchemy-in-reverse’ then invert the colonial relationship with matter and technics? This presentation will explore the ambivalent associations with alchemy that black studies scholars make, from subtle references to transmutation as an emblem for the dehumanizing mutations of transatlantic enslavement in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism to transmutation as a gesture toward artistic practices of sensuous liberation in Bettina Judd’s feelin. Then I experiment with my own black feminist appropriation of alchemical transmutation theory in order to perceive otherwise the imperialist causes of Western industrialization and its catastrophic effects — specifically the impact of rising sea levels on Turtle Island communities off the coast of Sierra Leone. Here, alchemy is both a “pluriversal account” of planetary change and a technology for elevating the base materiality of anti-black climates into new forms of life.

[71] Nicolas Rueda (University of Chicago). For the Long Haul: Trucking Sims, Road Space, and Climate Inertia.

Abstract. Climate discourses often underrate emotional investment in existing infrastructural arrangements: the affects that radiate through the vernacular landscape of strip malls, highway interchanges, rest stops, and industrial parks. A range of cultural productions offer windows onto this realm of the American imaginary, from the New Topographic photography of the 1970s to the web-driven recathexis of empty malls and office blocks in the 2010s and 2020s. This presentation takes up the video game genre of the trucking simulator—particularly SCS Software’s American Truck Simulator—as a rich site where affective investment in ordinary American road space is perpetually worked through. It reads the appeals of a game whose Czech developers labor to produce a miniature version of the American highway milieu, rendering granular peculiarities of each state’s infrastructural landscape. I draw on scattered intimations of a more critical relation to space in existing game studies scholarship, but also on other lineages: from debates around “placelessness” and the vernacular landscape in 1970s geography to Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s writing on “ordinary affects” to critiques of logistical space following Henri Lefebvre. The staging of ordinary space in video games offers a mise-en-abyme of existing spatial orders, where careful reconstructions of the infrastructural status quo back onto outré mutations of the ordinary. I argue that spending time in game worlds dedicated to limning infrastructural space can sensitize us to affective dimensions of political inertia around energy transition, and the ways in which new orders might be envisioned in all their lived and felt complexity.

Keywords: game studies, space, climate, infrastructure, affect, everyday

[72] Irina Kalinka (Columbia University), Robert Nguyen (Lycoming College) and Himali Thakur (University of California, Davis). Romancing AI: Exploring Our Imaginary Bonds with Emerging Technologies.

Abstract. Panel Abstract

This panel examines how artificial intelligence (AI) imaginaries, including speculative and fictional ones, shape the design, promotion, and interfaces of AI platforms and products. While consequences of the current AI boom are very real—shifts in industry and the academy, financial investments, and enormous rates of energy consumption, to name a few—speculations of what AI might be or might become heavily influence characterizations of AI by the general public and by the very people that create these technologies.

Despite there clearly being more technical and precise ways to describe ChatGPT, even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman deferred to a pithier reference to promote the latest iteration of the product: he tweeted a single word, “her,” a reference to the 2013 science fiction film about a human who falls in love with an AI.

This panel will explore how circulating AI imaginaries produce a hegemonic ideology of AI as the fulfillment of longstanding science fiction promises: the creation of human-like relationships with sentient AI others and techno-solutionist responses to climate catastrophes deemphasize the dire need for alternative, human-led political futures.

Through objects from William Gibson’s Neuromancer to the virtual companion chatbot app “Replika,” this panel will interrogate the relationships between technology and culture industries, and how the hype of venture capital and tech-capitalism create living fictions: relations between humans and AI consciousnesses that are, quite simply, not there.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, media studies, science fiction, capitalism, climate, technological imaginaries, political theory, digital media

Irina Kalinka, “Service Chatbots and Machine Lovers: From

Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Intimacy”

There has been much recent debate about the promise of artificial intelligence and its potential to reach, or even eclipse, the intelligence of humans. Less attention has been paid to claims about the ability of AI technologies to simulate emotional intelligence and empathy in interactions with human users, what one could call artificial intimacy or care. However, these claims constitute a growing field of techno-capitalist hype, examples of which include how chatbots will alleviate loneliness in the elderly,1 help make interoffice conversations more empathetic,2 and outperform the bedside manner of human doctors.3 Similarly, a May 2024 Slate article opined, “ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI’s most recent chatbot iteration, isn’t an improvement in appearing intelligent—it’s an improvement in appearing emotional.”4 My project interrogates this commercialization of feeling5 through the popular AI chatbot app “Replika,” promoted as the “AI companion who cares. Always here to listen and talk. Always on your side.”6 First, I make the case that the proliferation of such forms of artificial intimacy constitutes a potent new form of affective capitalism and changes users’ relationships with digital platforms by giving them a ‘human face’ that inspires greater willingness to comply, pay attention, and be tracked.7 Second, however, the frequent breakdowns and shortcomings that characterize AI companions hyped as perfect caring interlocutors can also facilitate surprising critical technological literacy. Here, I will be discussing how users in r/Replika have responded to changes to the app’s algorithm, for instance educating each other about the technology and commercial incentives behind their machine lovers.

Robert Nguyen, “Neuromancer, ELIZA, and ChatGPT: The Digital Fantasy of Artificial Intelligence”
William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is most known for popularizing the term “cyberspace,” a virtual world inhabited by mainframes and hackers—“a consensual hallucination” of its users8. Less discussed is the novel’s depiction of Wintermute, an artificial intelligence that schemes at beyond-human timescales to free itself from human control. Though early in the novel Wintermute is represented as a bodiless, ominous force, later it appears to Gibson’s protagonists through recreations of persons from their own memories—avatars that Wintermute refers to as “spokespersons.” I argue that Gibson’s visualization of complex and geographically distant technological systems as single, familiar human figures mediates the chatbot model of human computer interaction, one made famous through Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA programs in the 1960s. It also foreshadows today’s predominant model for human interaction with generative AIs: the chat interfaces of programs such as ChatGPT. Where cyberspace was a “consensual hallucination,” the chatbot model incentivizes “human complicity in a digital fantasy9”, a connection that begins once one types a natural language question and expects an answer, far before an AI has the opportunity to hallucinate or profess its love10. At the keyboard, the user becomes, like the protagonists of Neuromancer, part of a narrative in which complex systems become deceptively comprehensible as coherent interlocutors with human motivations. By comparing Gibson’s literary work with historical computing systems, we can better understand how imaginaries are at the core of technological systems.

Himali Thakur, “A soulless masquerade: AI Characters in High-tech Urban Spaces”
In Satoshi Hase’s light novel series Beatless and Urobuchi Gen’s anime Psycho-Pass, powerful artificial intelligence systems have come to control real human beings. Psycho-Pass shows a corrupt “Sibyl System” that supposedly guides individuals towards their best personal and professional lives. In Beatless, a teenaged protagonist is romantically involved with an “hIE,” exploring the possibility of connecting emotionally with AI for co-existence. However, in both cases, this happens after human beings cede their emotional capabilities to AI systems that promise a happier, stress-free life. The AI entities step in as symbolic liaisons for governments and corporations that feel distant to our characters. The paper studies Beatless and Psycho-Pass as examples of a distracted world where engagement with symbolic AI takes precedence over creating sustainable urban futures. In both works, while our protagonists work to respond to their AI entities in their daily lives, there is an irreversible transformation of their urban landscapes that goes unremarked. I parallel these scenes with promotions of robots and AI technologies in a “smart city” project in Fujisawa, Japan, where focus on the “solution” of the climate crises elides erosion of community. These projects purport increased connection with the city and with other residents, but I argue, in conversation with the science fiction works, that such urban technology cultivates attachment to symbolic entities over and above the actual community and space. The increased focus on AI entities works as a distraction and allows for the environment to be ignored.

[73] Paul Harris (English, Loyola Marymount University), Elpitha Tsoutsounakis (Division of Multi-disciplinary Design, University of Utah) and Brian Rajski (English, Santa Monica College). Panel title: Deep Time Diasporas.

Abstract. In her geo-memoir The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), Ithell Colquhoun posits that “The life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum… it determines character of streams and wells, its vegetation and the animal-life… finally through the type of human being attracted to live there.” This panel will explore climate and diasporas through a geologic lens, situating restless migrations of humans within histories of crumpling, fissuring grounds of volcanic eruptions, orogeny, and continental drift. Presenters will expose mass movements such as orogeny, deposition and lava flows and treat tectonic shifts and continental migrations as deep time diasporas in Earth history. Shifting across timescales, presenters will also map how local geologies have shaped settler colonization and migrations in specific landscapes. These deep histories reveal the nonlinear, ruptured nature of evental planetary time and massive planetary and human migrations. This framing is informed by Michel Serres’s conceptualization of the mapping of human and geologic timescales in terms of sudden shifts, movements, and upheavals. Referencing the “regime of revolutions,” he asks, “What if … beneath these schisms, flowed (or percolated) slow and viscous fluxes?” Invoking plate tectonics, Serres asks: “Are the breaks in history similarly brought about from below by an extraordinarily slow movement that puts us in communication with the past, but at immense depths? The surface gives the impression of totally discontinuous ruptures, earthquakes—in this case, quakes of history or of mobs, sometimes—whose brief violence destroys cities and remodels landscapes but which, at a very deep level, continue an extraordinarily regular movement, barely perceptible, on an entirely different scale of time” (Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 139). The panel will trace different mass movements of people and planet, deepening a sense of deep time and its role in human history.

Keywords: deep time, geology, tectonic, orogeny, settler, eruption, lava flow, gneiss, fossil, grain

Fossil Grains: Limestone Migration Routes of early Pioneer Settlers.

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, Assistant Professor

Division of Multi-disciplinary Design, University of Utah

This paper will discuss a ongoing survey by the Field Studio Geontological Survey in Ephraim, Utah exploring migration of pioneer settlers in the late 19th century, its orchestration by the oolitic limestone beds of the Green River Formation in the Sanpete Valley, and its colonial legacy. Oolitic limestone (also known as grain-stone) was quarried to produce many significant buildings throughout Utah and the United States in the 19th century. The most recent exhibition of this project, Folio 2405—Geontological Survey of Fossil Grains, is an aggregate of three regional assemblies: archival materials, collective histories, and local geologies. The installation is a culmination of FSGS field work in Ephraim surveying local geology, pigments, and archival research into the Mormon pioneer diaspora that settled the majority of so-called Utah. Fossil Grains maps a route of human migration drawn to the oolitic limestone through it’s use as building stone in the Ephraim Granary building. The Granary was used by the Mormon Relief Society to store grain. If the fossil is the rock’s memory of the shape of the body that once was; the photograph is the archive’s memory of the shape of the body that once was. Images from the Utah Costume Research Project special collection show belongings of these same pioneer settlers as the fossils of the human bodies who manipulated the geo-bodies of the region. The Geontological Survey is specifically interested in the way geopower1 shapes causal structures of human/nonhuman entanglements. In this frame, geology—the physical, nonlife setting of our current present—(in)forms life and the cultural manifestations of terrestrial beings. The late 1800’s was a period of colonial settler occupation across the region that would become the state of Utah. From one world, the fossils in the Pioneer Costume Research Project provide a glimpse into a proud history of pioneers in Utah—both Mormon and non-Mormon. From another world, the set map the routes of migration that led to the violent dispossession of land and erasure of Indigenous ancestors, specifically Ute tribes who lived in the central regions of Utah since time-immemorial. From this lens the geontological survey produces an interpretation of this colonial legacy that is not often validated in dominant historical perspectives.

In the Flow: Encountering Deep Time in the Mojave Desert Lava Fields

Brian Rajski, Professor Department of English, Santa Monica College

The now-rejected proposal to label our epoch the Anthropocene has generated an increased awareness of the ecological urgency for humanity to start thinking geologically. Although one of the foremost tasks of such thinking is to acquire a deeper understanding of “deep time,” it remains questionable whether humans can ever adequately experience or comprehend such immense temporal scales. From tourism to Iceland to witness new eruptions to drone footage of lava on social media, volcanoes, however, continue to be popular opportunities to contemplate or figure the earth-forming geological processes that otherwise occur outside the range of human perception. My paper takes a step back from these igneous spectacles of the present to focus on the generally ignored and unknown lava fields of the Mojave Desert in California, some of which were created as recently as 12,000 years ago. The magma that broke through the earth’s crust in various episodes over the last 7 million years has created a diaspora of cinder cones and other volcanic landscapes scattered between Barstow and Amboy that are now slowly eroding into or being covered by the surrounding dirt and sand of the desert. Using photography and backcountry exploration as its foundation, my presentation will focus on traces of this igneous activity—specifically long lava flows, vesicles and ropy textures formed in/on basalt, and colorful red “boles” made from sediments baked by lava. I will use these examples of frozen dynamism that are weathering away to argue the Mojave Desert lava fields juxtapose or even collapse vastly different scales of time and processes of geomorphology. Ultimately, they enable an encounter with deep time that vividly expresses past change through present stasis.

The Stress of Faults and the Power of Gneiss

Paul A. Harris, Professor Department of English, Loyola Marymount

The fault-fractured Los Angeles Basin in Southern California, home to 4.4 million immigrants, is a land shaped by border-crossing “dense tectonic plates of humanity” (Michel Serres, The Natural Contract) and boundary-sliding Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Like its inhabitants, the lithosphere is a complex mosaic, where, in John McPhee’s words, millions of years ago “parts began to assemble. An island here, a piece of a continent there—a Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascar—came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered” (“Assembling California,” in Annals of the Former World). Among other distinctive geologic units, the LA Basin is bordered by the Transverse Ranges, named for their unusual east-west orientation, the result of being rotated 110 degrees clockwise by subducting tectonic plates over the past 16 million years. These ranges include the San Gabriels, extremely young mountains (having grown within the past 5 million years) composed of multiple rock units of varying ages, which rank among the fastest growing peaks in the world. Forces from the San Andreas Fault to the north and a series of thrust faults on their south cause them to uplift 1- 2mm a year or nearly 8 inches every century. The infantile, volatile San Gabriels have a tortured history: plate tectonics along the San Andreas Fault dating to the Late Cenozoic formed a rotational structural environment known as transpression and transrotation that shaped the range’s characteristic crystalline rocks. The San Gabriels’ oldest rocks are the Mendenhall Gneiss, which metamorphosed around 1670 million years ago. Outcroppings in the San Gabriels constitute a geologic diaspora with a stunning history of global tectonic migrations. Geologists have speculated that the Mendenhall Gneiss originated in a Precambrian formation that geologists have speculatively correlated with the western margin of Laurentia bordering Australia or Antarctica 750 million years ago. The presentation will feature displays of particularly striking pieces of gneiss from the San Gabriels, in which geologic power is palpable in serpentine folds and foliations compressed under extreme heat and pressure as the San Gabriel Mountains formed. A series of thought experiments and breathing exercises will be offered as a means to correlate human and geologic mass movements and calibrate human history and deep time.

[74] Helen Burgess (NC State University). Imaginal Pockets.

Abstract. Imaginal Pockets is a textile installation that consists of five padded silk artifacts, embroidered on one side with scientific illustrations of insect body parts and mulberry leaves, and with lace “pockets” attached on the obverse containing silk thread, lacemaking bobbins and other materials. Each in embellished with ribbons embroidered with quotes from Derrida’s “A silkworm of one’s own” and Robertson’s Proverbs of a She-Dandy. This project builds on my paper on crafting and insect biology presented at SLSA last year.

The pockets are inspired by the phenomenon of “imaginal discs,” cellular clusters that lie dormant in moths and drosophila until they are activated during pupation. Each cluster forms a different part of the adult imago – wing, leg, eye, antenna – through a process of pocket inversion, wherein they turn inside out and release cells.

The installation addresses the conference’s call on two axes. First, silkworms (the primary focus of this installation) have been dispersed across the globe for millennia as agricultural products. This migration includes dispersion of white mulberry, the silkworm’s sole food source, which has spread globally as a secondary crop and naturalized as an ‘invasive’ plant species. Second, silkworms undergo “migration” from one body form to another during pupation, including the addition and subtraction of body parts and sensoria – a migration humans have capitalized on via selective breeding and husbandry.

Materials: recycled kimono linings, bone bobbins, silk thread, satin ribbons, glass and copper beading. The installation may be placed on a table or hung in embroidery hoops.

Keywords: insects, silk, textiles, installation, embroidery, mulberry

[75] Alice Gibson (Oxford University). Natural Disasters, Philosophy, and Separation .

Abstract. In 2012, Timothy Morton, asked: ‘What about thinking beyond disaster, or is thinking forever caught in disaster’s shadow?’ Morton’s suggestion forms the starting point of my presentation, in which I demonstrate how the 1755 Lisbon earthquake established a shift in the relationship between people and nature, which still reverberates today. It shaped the thought of Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, and others, leaving a wealth of literature declaring nature to be a malign force, informing the development of Western philosophy.

In this presentation, I unpack the term ‘natural disaster’, examining what it infers about the role of human agency, and the divide this seeks to maintain between what is natural and unnatural, human and nonhuman. To question this sense of separation, I draw on the work of Vandana Shiva, who, inspired by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, argues: ‘Separation allows a handful of men to imagine they are masters of the universe, who can conquer, own, manipulate and control nature and society for accumulating power and wealth without limits.’ I argue that our collective future depends on the extent to which we allow environmental catastrophes to justify a lack of reverence for nature. Rather than being determined by them, I suggest we seek out new forms of authority on how to relate to nature, closing by drawing attention to how, for Stoic philosophers, the very object of philosophy was to learn to live in harmony with nature.

Keywords: Natural Disasters, Philosophy, Separation, Stoic Philosophy

[76] Case Pharr (Oregon State University). Speculation as a Formal Device: Reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 in the Anthropocene.

Abstract. If taken seriously, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s discussion of the wide-ranging implications of climate change signal a fundamental shift in both our sense of history and those literary elements we consider subject to history. In this light, time-honored imperatives like Fredric Jameson’s “Always historicize!” should resonate with a renewed exigence for scholars of contemporary literature. Yet, critics writing about climate change literature such as Amitav Ghosh often neglect attending to how narrative form might mutate in the Anthropocene, instead viewing climate change as “improbable” content which literature inertly confronts. Following recent criticism by scholars such as Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh, this paper posits that climate change might be better understood as a problem of literary form. Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon as representative examples, I show how these speculative novels attempt to represent and resolve changes in the social totality wrought by climate change through their creative formal renderings of various socio-economic structures such as the metropolis, state infrastructure, and financial markets. As I argue, these formal lines of flight reveal a politics and sense of history which shapes and (in)forms the content of each novel while also allowing us to glimpse the heterogenous cultural imaginaries which arise and underpin the broader context of climate change. By attending to these formal innovations, I then explore whether the “speculative” in speculative fiction itself might be understood as formal device or technique of contemporary fiction in the Anthropocene. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Keywords: Climate Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Formalism

[77] Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez (Brown University). Essential Tremors.

Abstract. Essential Tremors is a modular performance lecture that shirks disciplinary boundaries to trace the knotted vectors of influence that flow into and out of a single vibrational nexus—specifically—a phone call between my father and his father, a CIA asset, on September 11th 1973: the day of the coup d’etat in Santiago, Chile. What begins as an auto-theoretical narrative uncoils into a transmedia reflection on the charged bonds between people and copper, and their imbricated rhythms of displacement. Described by Macarena Gomez-Barris as “the cacophonous and reverberating afterlife of post-memory,” Essential Tremors lingers with the embedded extractive realities of digital life, the material legacy of colonial neoliberalism, and the potential of vibration as an analytic instrument of history.

Guided by the work of Patricio Guzmán, Cecilia Vicuna, Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra, Victor Jarra, and Nelly Richard, Essential Tremors draws from a personal archive of testimony about the events of 9/11/73, stop motion animations of copper forming a patina, hacked google earth api animations from above and below the Andes mountains, and onsite footage of mines from Oak Flat AZ to Pisagua Chile.

Essential Tremors is dedicated to the detained and disappeared.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fARO7NdxLlE

[Note: Essential Tremors can be presented as both a standard conference-length paper, and a longer live cinema presentation running ~50 minutes.]

Keywords: Extractivism, Environmental Humanities, Post-memory, Elemental Media, Rhythm Analysis, Neoliberalism, Performance Lecture, Live Cinema

[78] Dan Bustillo (University of California, Riverside), Elizabeth Murice Alexander (University of Maryland, College Park), Josef Nguyen (University of Texas at Dallas) and Amanda Phillips (Georgetown University). Racializing Technologies.

Abstract. This panel brings together interdisciplinary scholars for a conversation about racializing technologies in the US. We draw on “racializing technologies” in two senses: technologies can participate in acts of assigning racial identities to users, groups, and communities, just as they themselves can have racial meaning assigned to them. Facial recognition, motion capture, surveillance, and hiring algorithms produce racialized subjects and fortify white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy (see, e.g. the work of Safiya Noble, Simone Browne, Amanda Phillips, Shoshana Magnet, and more). Scholars like Lisa Nakamura, Moya Bailey, and micha cárdenas demonstrate how assumptions about labor, politics, and difference link technologies to racialized communities: Asian tech labor, Black Twitter, border crossing, and more. The panelists examine a wide range of tech objects and practices that interrogate and even resist these processes of racialization.

First, Dan Bustillo investigates how trans and immigrant rights activists create their own community-based identification documents in the face of limited and limiting state bureaucratic legibility. Next, Elizabeth Murice Alexander considers how contemporary Black women artists use and discuss mobile video as a tool to assert control over their visual capture. Then, Josef Nguyen interrogates how US discourses express anxieties over Asian tech industries by constructing Asian tech development as racialized violations of civic and sexual consent. Finally, respondent Amanda Phillips draws common threads and marks provocative divergences across the papers to facilitate further critical discussion on how technologies racialize and are themselves racialized as well as to imagine futures of racial justice.

Keywords: Race, Gender, Sexuality, Media, Technology

Paper 1

Presenter Name: Dan Bustillo

Email: dbustill@ucr.edu

Affiliation: University of California, Riverside

Paper Title: Trans Papeleo: Re-Crafting Disidentity Documents

Abstract:

Papeleo (loosely translated as paperwork) is a far-reaching racialized and gendered regime. Papeleo is also a site where identities are translated into bureaucratic expressions. From legal status, to racial identity, to gender markers, bureaucratic expressions of identity are scriptural gatekeepers to resources, and one of their most common cultural forms is the identity document. Often needed for even the most basic resources, identity documents are also inaccessible to many people—to folx who are undocumented, formerly incarcerated, and to folx who have lost their documents or are amending them—producing as Kelly Lytle Hernández puts it, a “racialized caste.”

Informed by trans studies, Latinx studies, and media studies, this paper offers the term “trans papeleo” as a theory and practice of survival workarounds to racialized surveillance technologies like identity documents that limit access to civic belonging. This paper looks to trans and Latinx immigrant rights activism for trans papeleo survival workarounds in the form of community-issued IDs. The examples this paper looks to range in official relationships to the state: from makeshift activist IDs for incarcerated trans people, to laminated corrections to official IDs, to municipal IDs that come out of grassroots coalitional immigrant rights activism.

This paper asks, what kinds of alternative relationships to state legibility do strategic mis/uses of identity documents offer? How might these re-crafted state relationships engage a form of what José Esteban Muñoz calls disidentification—not entirely compliant but also not entirely oppositional? And finally, what kinds of transfeminist possibilities does creative mis/use allow for? Thinking through trans papeleo as a framework and practice for survival workarounds, this paper argues that trans and immigrant rights activists creatively re-craft disidentity documents to produce differently agential relationships to state legibility.

Paper 2

Presenter Name: Elizabeth Murice Alexander

Email: ema86@umd.edu

Affiliation: University of Maryland, College Park

Paper Title: “If you want me, you can watch me on your videophone”: Black Women Artists & Mobile Video

Abstract:

When, in the 2020 remix to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage,” Beyoncé proclaimed that her “hips tick tock when [she] dance / on that demon time she might start an OnlyFans,” the singer broke the internet: OnlyFans traffic spiked that day as hopeful fans rushed to the mobile video provider’s website. Of course, Beyoncé had not launched an OnlyFans account, but the hype around this lyric is one iteration of the longstanding American interest in (if not obsession with) capturing the exploited Black body on film. Visual culture scholars have detailed the relationship between the emergent camera and Black enslavement, noting the role of enslavement in camera technology development and the importance of the camera-captured image in shifting attitudes around enslavement and Black personhood.

This paper takes up similar questions from the contemporary end of visual capture technology, considering how Black women artists use mobile video (video captured with or intended to be viewed on a mobile phone) as a tool to negotiate control over their visual capture. I discuss how three Black women artists – Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, and Megan Thee Stallion – define their terms of engagement with mobile video technologies (video phones, music videos/emotion pictures, and social media videos, respectively), despite attempts by dominant society to confine all three artists within the boundaries of visually respectable and easily readable Black womanhood. I also analyze how this dovetails with the rise of mobile video-based sex work, considering how each artist blurs the boundaries between digital art and digital sex work. Thus, this paper uses mobile video as a starting point to consider choreographies of Black women’s technoculture; how Black women shift in and out of lenses, co-produce the digital technologies that work to pin them down, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Paper 3

Presenter Name: Josef Nguyen

Email: josef.nguyen@utdallas.edu

Affiliation: The University of Texas at Dallas

Paper Title: Racializing Consent in the US Imagination of Asian Technology

Abstract:

This paper investigates how contemporary US cultural and media discourses of techno-Orientalism express anxieties about the perceived threat of Asian global dominance in technology, sociopolitics, and economics by characterizing Asia as developing new and emerging technologies for the “wrong” reasons. I interrogate how consent–and particularly violations of consent–are defined and conceptualized through historic logics that racialize subjects in the service of white supremacist patriarchy and American empire. For example, the pernicious model minority myth implies a racialized readiness to consent to the will of others in the attribution of obedient, passive, and submissive qualities in its articulation of inherent Asianness.

In understanding consent as itself a social technology of power that racializes subjects, I focus on how the US imagines two prominent Asian nations and cultures perceived at the forefront of emerging technologies but representing distinct vectors of American racialization of Asianness and domains of consent. On one hand, I examine US constructions of China as a Communist and authoritarian violator of the “consent of the governed” (the social contract) through depictions of its development and use of emerging technologies–from censoring the internet to technologies for surveilling civilian loyalty. And on the other hand, I explore US constructions of Japan as a more Westernized and democratic nation that is framed, nonetheless, as developing cutting edge technology for perverse reasons of questionable or outright violation of sexual consent–including sex robots, rape games, etc. Engaging Asian American studies and transpacific studies alongside cultural studies of media and technology, this paper situates contemporary U.S. characterizations of emerging Chinese and Japanese technologies within techno-Orientalist imaginations that figure Asia as an exotic continent of both strict obedience as well as of perverse erotic excess in order to consider how consent functions as a technology of Othering and domination under liberal humanist white supremacy.

[79] William Lockett (Stevens Institute of Technology). The Animated Ecologies of 1970s Analog Video Graphics.

Abstract. In the early years of mass market computer memory—circa 1970—programmers cherished storage space for position and color data; they packed registers to the brim, imagining sprites dancing out movements in precious chip space. Yet America’s TV tubes had been recently graced by real-time color visuals transmitted via analog ultra-high (UHF) frequency antenna. Analog ruled color control. Programmers envied analog. Artist-scientist Dan Sandin designed an analog video synthesizer for voltage control of UHF band video data.

In Sandin’s works, Wandawage Waters and Water Cloud Multiply, fluid diffraction and rolling clouds provided the positional data to analog color control. Nature’s patterns undulated publicly broadcast waves. H2O molecules granted real-time form, freeing the artist from ROM-chip bits.

I situate Sandin’s radiantly colored landscapes, which he broadcast on public access TV, alongside corporate cable programming feeding the viewing public images of gas station lineups during the Arab Oil embargo and computer graphics of Ozone depletion. Too, Sandin’s work existed in close collegial proximity to early ROM-chip graphics of Cambrian critters (from an early 1980s Lynn Margulis presentation) and computer art renderings of utopian Buffalo conservation infrastructure (by Jane Veeder and Timothy Morton)—all made with graphics terminals engineered by Sandin and his colleague Tom DeFanti. Gazing into the primordial color flows on screens animated by Sandin, I aim to release the listener from habituation to the economization of digital screen space (e.g., graphical user interfaces), demonstrating alternative pathways of graphical meaning more tightly hitched to forms generated by the ecology of animated energy.

Keywords: video art history, video game history, history of programming, ecological aesthetics

[80] Katrina Maggiulli (Northern Arizona University). Assisted Migration Forging a New Conservation Narrative about “Invasives”?: Assisted Migration for Climate Change Adaptation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (1973).

Abstract. In August 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revised a regulation under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 allowing for the establishment of threatened and endangered species (T&E) experimental populations in habitat outside the species’ historical range. The rule was developed in response to threats posed by climate change and invasive species and the rapid decline and alteration of historic ecosystems. Sea level rise is one example referenced in the project that threatens the Florida Key deer, possibly necessitating assisted migration as the deer’s former habitat goes underwater. Such assisted migrations are complex endeavors, however, as the movement of species from one ecosystem to another outside its native or historic range (usually under the power or influence of humans) has been a traditional way of defining an invasive species—a problematic category itself within conservation discourse and rhetoric, but one many biologists still put much stock by and use as a guide to conservation management decision making. This paper interrogates the sticky moral and ethical complications that assisted migration efforts pose for conservation biologists within the already complex and shifting stage of native and nonnative/invasive species discourse. I identify some potential this work has for destabilizing the present binaries and forging a road toward a more dynamic understanding of adaptive species communities and novel ecosystems. Assisted migration in T&E conservation is particularly able to disrupt the problematic anti-nonnative species discourses and present new, more collaborative, and adaptive forms of conservation practice because of the powerful moral tenor and restrictive policy-framework of T&E conservation itself. T&E conservation is the most restrictive of species conservation arenas, thus the adoption of assisted migration and the destabilization of native/nonnative binaries in this space can provide a potent role model to other areas of biodiversity conservation.

Keywords: T&E Conservation, Assisted Migration, Climate Change Adaptation, Invasive Species, Conservation Policy, Environmental Ethics

[81] Brendan Johnston (University of California, Davis), Stacey Moran (Arizona State University) and Chris Mays (University of Nevada, Reno). Critical Diasporas: Diffraction, Interdisciplinarity, and “Post”-Critique.

Abstract. This panel treats the conference theme of Climate Diasporas as a provocation to assess the changing climates of critique, theory, and practice over the past two decades. In particular, it explores the interdisciplinary concept of diffraction, a salient term that might productively be tied to “the material turn,” “the posthuman turn,” and, most recently, “the post-critical turn.”

Borrowing the concept from Trinh Minh-ha, Donna Haraway first invoked diffraction as a way of resisting conceptual frameworks that place one method of determination (scientific, cultural, historical, linguistic) in hierarchy over the others. Instead, a diffractive method looks for the patterns of interference and overlap between realms theorized as–but not actually–separate. However, Karen Barad’s radically interdisciplinary text, Meeting the Universe Halfway in 2008, provoked the biggest application of the concept in STS, literary studies, posthumanist rhetorics, material feminism, and ecocriticism. Part of the promise of this came from the fact that Barad’s extensive background in theoretical physics gave some material metonymy to Haraway’s already productive use of diffraction as “worldly metaphor.” In short, diffraction and other methods of reading nature, culture, and language as entangled and complex networks at the end of the first decade (Quantum Anthropologies, Vibrant Matter, The Material of Knowledge, Bodily Natures, etc.), merged with many of the calls in second half of the 2010s for the “weakening of strong theory,” the idea of “post-critique,” and the resurgence of Eve Sedgwick’s argument for “reparative” rather than just “symptomatic” and “paranoid” reading. However, since the early 2020s, there has been a notable pushback—in literary and cultural studies especially—calling for a return to critical formalism, noting movements like “posthumanism” or “new materialism” as, at their best, politically naïve, and, at their worst, divergent from or even directly opposed to historical methods of critique.

The panel’s overarching question is: What aspects of diffraction, diffractive reading, and/or adjacent theories of entanglement (quantum, natural, cultural, linguistic, and otherwise), are worth preserving as we continue to explore their uses in interdisciplinary theory and practices?

Keywords: diffraction, post-critique, affirmation, new materialism, poetics, posthumanist rhetorics

Brendan Johnston, University of California, Davis, bmjohnston@ucdavis.edu

Research Interests: critical theory and pedagogy, materialism (historical and scientific), modernism, poetics, science and technology studies, writing studies

Paper Title: “Diffractive Reading, Diffractive Poetics: Critique and Composition”

Johnston argues that diffraction overlaps with many of the calls in the second half of the 2010s for the “weakening of strong theory.” However, some historicist critics, such as Patricia Stuelke and Anna Kornbluh, have noted this overlap as well. And they discount what they see as the excesses of the posthumanist turn—the “ruse of repair” or lure of “immediacy” to take the focus off the task of historical critique and the need for mediation. While their critique conflates diffraction and other productive new materialist avenues with object theory and surface reading, Johnston concedes that some of their critiques and suggestions are timely–especially the current need for political solidarity among our various fields. However, Johnston argues that diffraction as a theory and practice, while not ethical itself, is conducive to the goals of social, economic, and ecological justice–that diffraction promotes opportunities for both critique and composition.

Johnston proposes a more capacious concept of diffractive poetics drawing from Haraway’s “worldly metaphor,” Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, and the emergent, multiscalar poetics of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem. However, Johnston does not claim that diffraction or diffractive poetics work as meta-language. Haraway proposed diffraction as a way to disrupt the endless mirroring and reductionism of strong theory. The patterns of interference and entanglement that diffraction might create and illuminate are still subject to the necessary interpretive process of external critique. Though, alternately, diffraction’s resistance to final synthesis, “to joining without conjoining” as Glissant argues, also allows that critique does not remain the singular external firmament around materiality. In terms of the contemporary critical landscape, Johnston argues that diffractive poetics should be productively associated with “weak theory” but not with “post-critique.”

Stacey Moran, Arizona State University, stacey.moran@asu.edu

Research Interests: feminist theory and technoscience, design studies, critical theory and pedagogy, science and technology studies.

Paper Title: “Academic Trend or Repressed Desire? Unpacking the Affirmative Ethos,”

Caught up in the wave of post-critique, new materialism’s affirmative approach aims to illuminate the “entangled effects that make a difference,” avoiding dualisms and oppositional thinking to build transversal connections. Affirmative critique “diffracts” texts, ideas and authors “through one another,” rather than defining them “against” each other. In this paper, I will explore the conceptual gymnastics required to maintain the position of affirmative critique.

Built on the alluring concept of diffraction, affirmative critique relies heavily on diffraction’s versatility: simultaneously diffraction denotes a real physical phenomenon (in nature), a real effect of difference patterns (material), a laboratory experiment that proves wave-particle duality (scientific method), a metaphor for a way of seeing (optics), and metaphorically, a reading method (textual). However, despite its claims to attend to difference patterns that matter, what one finds in diffractive readings is a tendency to find entanglements that homogenize difference. Disregarding the dual nature of the physical phenomenon in which interfering waves either combine to amplify or they cancel each other out, as a reading practice, the diffractive method operates “transversally” and finds only sameness. In this paper, I do not seek to resolve this problem, but merely point to the problems that emerge when using diffractive phenomena as the basis for affirmation, and turn to the question of what drives the desire to maintain an affirmative stance at all costs.

Chris Mays, University of Nevada, Reno, cmays@unr.edu

Research Interests: complexity and systems theory, emergence, posthumanism, rhetoric and writing studies, neurorhetorics.

Paper Title: “Encompassing Pedagogies: Diffraction and Rhetoric in the Classroom”

In this paper, Mays advocates for diffraction as part of a pedagogical project that asks students to interrogate historical-rhetorical conditions in which persuasive texts (such as, but not limited to, particularly effective political slogans and lines of argument) are able to gain traction and become significantly persuasive to specific historically- and culturally-situated audiences. Here, diffraction serves in the classroom as a way to expand the scope of what is involved in persuasion, which for many students is ostensibly a discursive-only rhetorical practice. As Kristie S. Fleckenstein argues, incorporation of visuals into rhetorical critique in the classroom helps students better understand embodied habits that impede political critique and social action. In line with this point, Mays’ approach would ask students to visually map political conditions in terms of a rhetorical object (e.g., a political slogan) + a contextual milieu that is productively capacious, and that includes both material and discursive factors. This route still allows for historical critique, but in fact encourages a more encompassing critique than would a pedagogical methodology that considers discursive or rhetorical interventions as things-in-themselves, which is a methodological attribute that diffraction, among other posthumanist approaches (e.g. Barad), avoids (see also, Hickey-Moody, Palmer, and Sayers). Overall, Mays argues that incorporating visualizations informed by a diffractive reading of a rhetorical-political situation helps students appreciate the diversity of elements in such a situation, and mount more effective rhetorical and political critiques.

[82] Daniel Vandersommers (University of Dayton). Staging Métis and Sioux Individuals in the Cincinnati Zoo, 1895-1896: Habitat, Extinction, and Critical Zoology.

Abstract. For nearly a century, from the 1870s through the 1950s, zoological parks exhibited humans. With a few exceptions, the scholarship on “human zoos” (also referred to as “ethnological expositions”) focuses on Europe. Popular zoo-historical literature leaves the impression that – aside from the well-documented exhibiting of Ota Benga in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 – the American zoo movement, due to its emergence later in the nineteenth century, was somehow more directed by conservation imperatives and, thus, less influenced by the crude spectacles of exhibiting people. This paper challenges these assumptions by examining two disturbing exhibitions at the Cincinnati Zoo: displays of Plains Cree (Métis) individuals in 1895 and Sicangu Lakota Sioux individuals in 1896. Departing from the work of Miles Powell, Claire Jean Kim, Ursula Heise, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, this paper will examine how, in the words of zoo historian Marianna Szczygielska, “human performers were folded into the animal spectacle that had already been rehearsed in zoos.” Specifically, the paper will focus on how indigeneity was staged within the Cincinnati Zoo, drawing attention especially to the centrality of the emerging zoological discourses of “habitat” and “extinction” and their co-constitution with the American settler-colonial project.

Keywords: zoo history, Native American history, critical race theory

[83] Heidi Biggs (Georgia Tech). Bog Girl: Theorizing Land Body Doubling through AutoFiction.

Abstract. In their ongoing discussions of how to find post-anthropocentric subject imaginaries that are more horizontal, humble, ecologically sensitized, anti-colonial, and more just and sustainable, many feminist STS scholars suggest utilizing speculation and fiction. Therefore, I present the theoretical ideas developed in an auto-speculative short story that examines the logics of bifurcation which weave land use histories and bodily histories together. This story, called Bog Girl, details a non-binary person’s meeting with the spirit of a historic marsh in Indiana. The characters share their experiences of being ‘cut’ due to bifurcating logics/bodily readings through engulfing each other into a shared body and sharing their experiences. By sharing their ‘cuts’ through fiction, I express how my own medical treatment in a women’s health procedure as a non-binary person doubled or mirrors the binary ‘cutting’ / channelization of the historic non-binary wetlands in the American Midwest as they were terraformed into agricultural lands. I build on Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality – which notices movements across body and nature – via Luce Irigaray’s critiques of binary logics in her concept of doubling. Doubling offers a bodily metaphor which embraces a paradox of simultaneous separation and unity that shifts, in ecological terms, how we might awaken to valuation of land and bodies beyond use, utility, and productivity toward plural, non-binary, multiplicities. Being cut for me was a path to an awakening to my doubling with land, where doubling cuts across and cuts together new human/non-human bodies, monstrous and generative.

Keywords: critical environmental posthumanities, feminist STS, queer theory, environmental humanities, autofiction, autotheory, agriculture, women’s health

[84] Elizabeth Berman (Brown University). Embracing Exile: Towards a (Jewish) Diasporic Ethics in the Nonhuman Turn.

Abstract. As a response to anthropogenic climate crisis and to the privileging of Man (Wynter 2003), literary studies, historical research, the arts and more increasingly turn their attention towards the more-than-human.

Environmental concerns in the theoretical humanities often take as a point of departure human ‘exile’ from the ‘Great Outdoors’ (Meillassoux 2006). No longer content in the confines of language and post-structuralism’s putative overvaluation of it (Barad 2003, 801), (new) materialist turns seek access to a material Real ‘out there,’ beyond the mediating, exiling forces of language and representation. This paper provocates that these tendencies do not so much offer alternatives to a destructive humanist attitude towards nature as recapitulate them, positioning the more-than-human as that which can be fully known and gathered into accretive, reparative unity.

As an alternative, what would it mean to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) otherwise, by tarrying with the human subject’s exile, or diasporic distancing, from the Real (Žižek 2012, Zupančič 2017)? Might a diasporic climate ethics insist that more-than-human worlds ultimately elude human comprehension? This paper reads this possibility of a diasporic climate ethics through the context of Jewish exile and diaspora. The global Jewish diaspora has long insisted on embracing its millennia-long exile in the face of ongoing genocide committed by the Israeli state, which aims to know and to claim the diaspora. A diasporic ethics instead calls for restraint from demanding access to distant lands and their (non)human worlds, imagining an ethics of repair not beyond, but rather in, exile.

Keywords: Jewish Diaspora, Colonialism, New Materialism, Post-Structuralism, Exile, More-than-human

[85] Kieran Murphy (University of Colorado Boulder). Timefulness and Displacements in the Age of Hydroelectric Dams.

Abstract. We need more “timefulness,” Marcia Bjornerud argues, to counter the presentism and short-term thinking of industrialists who have precipitated disasters like global warming in the name of modernization. She proposes nurturing timefulness through the teachings of geology, art, and non-modern folk wisdom, where she finds accounts of time more attuned to the poly-temporality and wide-ranging rhythms of the planet and its inhabitants. The shift from the modern age’s atrophied sense of time to timefulness is inherently political. Frederic Hanusch has shown how the nonhuman actors that keep the planet habitable prompt us to develop a “multitemporal governance.” To represent their stake in policy-making decisions, humans have to attune to nonhuman temporalities.

In this paper, I focus on the hydroelectric dam to explore temporal interactions that reach beyond humans and into deep time. The dam sits at the center of operations where age-old ecosystems clash with rapid modernization, white water turns into a placid lake, and dynamos convert the lake’s gravitational pull into high-voltage electrical current. The hydroelectric dam exploits and exacerbates differences among the temporalities distinguishing these operations to generate power. In doing so, it has rendered the multiplicity of time more tangible. To support this claim, I will turn to authors such as Aimé Césaire, Martin Heidegger, and Arundhati Roy, who have relied on timefulness to explore how dams have displaced people, ecosystems, and modes of knowing, doing, and remembering.

Keywords: Time, Technology, Dam, Aimé Césaire, Martin Heidegger, Arundhati Roy, Deep time, Planetary politics

[86] Clarissa Chevalier (University of California San Diego). The Datafication of Oceanography and the Digital Diaspora of Oceanic Life.

Abstract. Equipped with remote sensors, monitoring devices, and representational technologies, contemporary oceanographers race to understand the complex role oceanic life plays in climate and planetary regulation. Within biological oceanography, the conceptualization, documentation, and management of oceanic life rests on the assumption that these entanglements can be systematized, digitally captured, and manipulated. This is evident in nascent attempts to produce an ocean “digital twin,” a digital interactive model meant to mirror oceanic processes to simulate, predict, and guide future geoengineering interventions. Because studies of the ocean are less explicitly tied to human subjects, it may be tempting to view oceanography as removed from gender, racial, and ability bias. I complicate this vision by demonstrating how contemporary dominant biological oceanography, and the desire to produce digital twins of oceanic life, are rooted in heteropatriarchal colonialist impulses. I ground this argument in an analysis of planktonic lifeforms and plankton imaging technologies. Here, I stretch the concept of diasporic movement to theorize how plankton bodies move from physical to digital space. The operational nature of digital oceanographic representations also means that plankton data are scattered across time, locations, and technologies. Yet, this diasporic movement from physical to digital is not neutral. Renderings of plankton are not unbiased mirrors; they are limited interpretations, shaped by the ideological commitments of researchers and funding bodies. Through a feminist science studies approach, I question the feasability of digital twins of oceanic life and draw upon theories of disability and entanglement to consider how ocean plankton resist digital documentation.

Keywords: Oceanography, Feminist Science Studies, Digital Twin, Entanglement, Media Studies

[87] Alex Campolo (Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham University), Thomas Pringle (Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California), Rose Rowson (PhD Candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University) and Derek Woods (Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Arts at McMaster University). Media Riskography.

Abstract. In 1986, Ulrich Beck asked: “Are Risks Timeless?” Beck’s account of the novel scale and power of modern environmental risks—nuclear power, erosion of the ozone layer, human-induced diseases, etc.—advanced concepts for researching the unintended consequences, or risks, endemic to industrial capitalism. This necessitated a new historical periodization: “reflexive” or “second” modernity. For Beck, uncertainty was a condition immanent to modern society and risk an epistemological tool for describing the prevalence of anthropogenic hazard and how those hazards became known and potentially managed. As elaborated in World at Risk (1998), the discourse precipitated by climate science is a full expression of this mode of knowledge production; the correlation of risks to global warming—from natural disasters to human health, migration, and financial insecurity—articulate a historical, temporal order wherein predicted futures bear on political decisions made at identifiable points in time. Thus, histories of risk pose a methodological problem: How do historians describe a given moment’s temporal relationship between archival data and future projection, which form the epistemic conditions for execution?

This panel builds on recent conversations crossing media studies and risk history, such as intellectual historian Gaspar Mairal’s study of the theological basis of risk temporality, Jonathan Levy’s philosophical account of risk in economic theory, and Claus Pias and Timon Beyes’ media historical analysis of climate modelling as paradigmatic of how the historicization of risks must detail media techniques, like data compilation. Centring media in the historical study of risk directs research toward the a priori stakes of media as technical coordinators of past and future for present purposes, which global climate change exemplifies.

Keywords: Media Historiography, Risk, Climate Change, Uncertainty, Machine Learning, Reproduction

Alex Campolo, Durham University

A genealogy of the notion of risk in machine learning

“The goal of a machine learning algorithm is to reduce the expected generalization error. This quantity is known as the risk” (Goodfellow et al. 2016, 268). Where did this meaning come from? I argue that it emerged in the behavioral and economic sciences during the middle part of the twentieth century as part of a broader decision-theoretical reorientation of probability, where risk generally refers to an action or decision undertaken under conditions of uncertainty but with measurable outcomes (Sprowls 1950, 238). This understanding of risk was elaborated by Soviet control theorists and used as a cornerstone of what would become statistical learning theory (Vapnik and Chervonenkis 1971). After emigrating to the United States, Vladimir Vapnik embedded this notion of risk into machine learning and neural networks through his inductive principle of empirical risk minimization (1991). When this history reduces risk to a simplistic imperative to minimize errors on the training set, machine learning can appear to be a purely pragmatic, “instrumental” culture of pure prediction (Jones 2018). In practice, there is much truth to this view, informed by a strong engineering ethos in machine learning’s culture. However, as the social theorist Ulrich Beck argued, it is not trivial to separate the “internal” learning methods from “external” techniques used to measure or validate outcomes (1992, 155)—especially when the latter are necessarily formulated as cultural objectives, like predicting the next word in a sentence. Such reflexive dynamics abound in machine learning’s distinctive treatment of risk. – –

Thomas Patrick Pringle, University of Southern California

The Climate Proxy: Media Historiography and Signals of Environmental Change

In a 1947 Carl Dudley travel film titled Glacier National Park, the narrator notes: “There off in the distance is Grinnell Glacier, one of the largest of the 60 remaining in the park. Due to climatic changes, these last accessible American glaciers gradually are disappearing.” The statement is notable because the theory of global warming would move from the realm of scientific conjecture toward accepted fact a full decade later in 1957. Dudley’s film joins a range of historical media examples that demonstrate evidence of climate change risks before their authoritative recognition—i.e., observing the decline of glaciers prior to an elaborated theory or public understanding of global warming. When scientists study climates before or unavailable to human documentation, they use “climate proxies” as measurements that stand-in for direct meteorological observation, like ice cores from glaciers. Here, I read recent media theoretical approaches describing “proxy” as a term of mediation (Steyerl, Chun) to adapt the term “climate proxy” into a historiographical approach to media archives that reconstructs moments when media recorded a climate risk signal before its diagnosis. As Adriana Petryna’s recent Horizon Work (2022) makes clear, the warning signals emanant from second-order climate impacts, like ecological regime shifts, are often obscure or even undetectable. In any present, the comprehension of biophysical changes as pervasive as global climate change will be only partial. I wager media history is instructive to discerning the cascading impacts of climate change in the present, which reside beyond contemporary perceptual horizons. – –

Rose Rowson, Brown University

Risky Business Machines

In the 1980s, North American working women’s organizations voiced concerns over a new piece of office equipment. The Video Display Terminal, or VDT, was an early version of the desktop computer: the major difference from typewriters and earlier microcomputers was the addition of a cathode ray tube. VDTs exacerbated pre-existing workplace health risks like repetitive strain and carpal tunnel, and introduced new problems. Clusters of women working with VDTs reported having miscarriages and babies suffering from birth defects. VDT operators, and the organizations that advocated for them, argued that radiation emissions were to blame for these reproductive issues. This paper approaches these issues as a regulatory problem, based around the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) inability to protect working women from reproductive risks through permanent and temporary health standards. These health standards proposed that the myriad, unknown risks associated with reproductive health in the workplace could not be regulated against, as they have undeterminable causes and effects. This paper examines how the non-specifiable reproductive risks associated with VDT use were siphoned into experiments into the effect of low frequency electromagnetism on chicken embryos. While the results from these experiments were nebulous, they were embraced by the women’s occupational movement to legitimize their workplace safety campaigns. I argue that experimental science shifted the burden of proof away from the situated and anecdotal experiences of female office workers and performed an ideological function rather than an evidentiary one, making a promise about direct causality while not necessarily providing evidence for it. – –

Derek Woods, McMaster University

Climate Tipping Points and Existential Risk

Earth system science is oriented toward sensing, systems theory, and simulations of the planetary ecology/climate. The field attempts to integrate geology, climatology, ecology and other disciplines into a syncretic meta-discipline with the ambition to create a “safe operating space” for humanity, managing the relationship between nature and society at the planetary scale. In the 2020s, earth system science has begun to collaborate with scholars from the field of existential risk, which studies the risk that the human species will go extinct or (an alternative formulation) that the evolution of intelligence will be drastically curtailed. So far, the collaboration has taken the form of articles co-published by (for example) British earth system scientists and scholars from the tech-billionaire funded Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge (e.g. Kemp et al. 2022). The grounds for this collaboration is an alliance between extinction risk and the concept of the “tipping point” as it functions in earth system science. My paper will address the history and politics of the tipping point, with a focus on its current role in this alliance and on the specific temporality of risk taking shape in that field. In particular, I theorize the narrative implications of a distinction between first and second order uncertainty. In a moment when earth system science and the wider sphere of interdisciplinary climate sciences have institutionalized a probabilistic view of “our” risky future, careful attention should be given to the epistemic and political claims that give these futures their normative weight.

[88] Moinak Choudhury (Georgia Institute of Technology). Plotting Stasis and Alienation in the Global South’s Ecoroman.

Abstract. If we follow Helena Feder to understand the bildungsroman as a form rooted in biology–the separation of nature and culture–then our belated realization of their intertwined histories requires renewed attention to plots of development and movement (2014). Indeed, critics note how climate fiction from the Global South has used magical realism to depict environmental disasters (Ghosh 2016; Rogers 2020). In contrast, with its reliance on Bildung and realism, the Western novel has failed to portray these “improbable” effects. However, this paper posits that the prevalence of magical realism also signifies the disruption of diasporic movement and development.

How do we approach ecological crises’ fundamental altering of the bildungsroman, both Western and postcolonial? And how can we account for a critique of environmental alienation that has been fundamental to this form? This paper suggests that the Global South’s ecoroman, with its unique portrayal of climate change and political inaction, requires renewed attention to how this genre enmeshes plot, political action, and their intertwined failures. This perspective offers a fresh lens to understand the complex relationship between literature, politics, and the environment.

In my paper, I will examine two works, The Man with the Compound Eyes (2013) and The Ministry for the Future (2020), to understand this crisis-enforced stasis and its impact on plot structures and politics. Through a close reading of these texts, I will explore how waste, climate change, and excessive heat disrupt diasporic movements, cause alienation, and enforce immobility, thereby reshaping the traditional bildungsroman narrative.

Keywords: Novel, Narratology, Alienation, Stasis

[89] Sei Jung (Northeastern University). Political Climates and Robotic Diaspora.

Abstract. How are robots migrating into the lives of people? Machinery has been with humans for a long time, but robots tend to be on the topic due to their automation, which leads people to perceive each of them as an individual entity. With the rapid pace of technological development, people currently see advanced robots. Sophisticated ones are more expensive and less accessible to the public. However, some started getting involved closer in daily lives or organic beings – four-legged crawlers are chasing away wild animals in Alaska, and people adopt little beepers with faces as their pets. Many robots mimic animals and humans since they were created within the human mind. They often reflect the existing species. They are foreigners who have been residing among us and are at service to certain species. Under the current political climate, many of them are being recruited at war recently. With this circumstance in mind, two questions arise. (1) What does it mean to weaponize anthropomorphized robot entities? How are both parties adapting to each other? (2-1) How would their beings be affected based on the specific political climate change? (2-2) What would be the robotic diaspora when the divisive and violent political climate persists? Will there be a migration? By answering these questions, clues about living with robots and how political climates affect technological artifacts may appear. The research will consider a speculative design (speculative future) and creative practice as a method since the questions are about the affected future. The first step will be looking into examples and references in fiction and real-life present artifacts related to the topic. Next, as practice-based creative research, a digital artifact about the affected imaginary entities will be made.

Keywords: Political climate, Robot, Society and technology

[90] Grant Wythoff (Princeton University). Measuring the Time Horizons of Climate Fiction.

Abstract. Frederic Jameson famously argued that speculative fiction’s “deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future” (Jameson 1982). In the case of climate fiction — broadly conceived by Alison Sperling, Derek Woods, and others to range from 1890s “dying earth” texts to 2020s solarpunk — planet Earth has time and again set new time horizons and upended whatever futures we can imagine.

In this talk, I will use my forthcoming dataset of speculative fiction set in the future to explore a hypothesis: that works of climate fiction are now set closer to the present as the impacts of global warming are felt more acutely in daily life. This dataset — *Time Horizons of Future Fiction* — collects ~2,500 works of English-language speculative fiction set in the future, each marked with the year it was released and the year it takes place. The works (fiction, film, television, video games) were published between 1733 – 2023. The futures they depict range from 1840 CE to 100 trillion CE. My collaborators and I originally scraped this information from Wikidata and Wikipedia. We then curated it through a rigorous set of rules for cleaning and verification before submitting it for peer review with the *Post45 Data Collective,* who will publish the data Fall 2024.

At SLSA, I plan to present the preliminary results of our first study utilizing this data by filtering for works of climate fiction and measuring how far a future they imagine. Speculative fiction is a means of reckoning time. Is there a pattern to the limits of the futures it can project? What does it mean to set a work of climate fiction ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years from now? I will share data visualizations showing the expansion and recession of these time horizons, decade by decade over the past century and a half, and frame these trends as collective portraits of climate change’s affective dimensions.

Keywords: digital humanities, cultural analytics, humanities data, speculative fiction, climate fiction, futurity

[91] Moises Hernandez (Southern Methodist University). Memory and Dream: Narratological Responses to Climate Diasporas in LatinX Fiction.

Abstract. Over the last few decades, storytellers have absorbed and retold the narrative of climate diasporas using narrative elements of anachrony (time displacement). Elements like retroversion and anticipation, help the storyteller realize specific literary affects so that the characters existing within a narrative mimetic to the sociopolitical world outside of the novel can be better understood by the reader. As a result, narratives containing examples of population displacement due to climate change can be read as time capsules of how storytellers responded to climate diasporas. How anachrony was used to orient the memory and dreams of the displaced in the story might also indicate how effective these narrative elements were at structuring the hegemonic ideologies of climate diasporas, both in the past and the present. For this presentation, I will be working with three texts that focus on the LatinX literary hemisphere of population displacement: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange. Each of these texts was written during a different decade (1997, 2009, and 2019) and as a result their use of anachrony and its literary affect vary. While there is plenty of literary and political scholarship covering LatinX migration, there is not enough emphasis on the use of retroversion and anticipation, memory and dream, within LatinX literature that marries eco-criticism and narratological research. I believe here is an opportunity here to better understand how ideologies of climate diasporas have changed within the last quarter century.

Keywords: Climate, Environmental Humanities, Literary Studies

[92] Pamela Carralero (Kettering University). AI Characters and Climate Resilience in African Futurist Short Fiction .

Abstract. Climate-related technologies are increasingly presented as an integral part of the pathway communities take to become climate resilient. However, there is a tension here between the idea of climate resilience as an inclusive and agential process in which a community is iteratively engaged in anticipating and preparing for hazardous weather, and the way in which climate related technologies can exacerbate data colonialism, which transforms community lives and bodies into computable objects whose movements between or across digital or physical thresholds can be tracked, organized, and sold. This presentation explores how two pieces of speculative African futurist short fiction decolonize the notion of ‘the computational’ and present it as analytic to build radical climate resilience. In Cadwell Turnbull’s “Monsters Come Howling in their Seasons” and Wole Talabi’s “A Dream of Electric Mothers,” Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs emerge as characters that illustrate what it means to think technology from an African perspective through the lens of what Achille Mbembe calls the dis-enclosure of the world, meaning “the abandonment of the desire for borders, and the possibility of a world unlocked out onto the open” (“Decolonial Anxieties” 128). Decolonizing computation is a project of re-centering for African futurist authors, which includes rejecting the assumption that Western conceptualizations of digital technologies and techniques are universal and exploring these terms’ connotations and possibilities from Black perspectives. Through the motif of dispersion – the over-spilling of border-bound categories – Turnbull and Talabi’s AI characters illustrate how future AI climate technologies could empower community emergence from what this presentation calls forms of digital servitude. Dis-enclosure, portrayed here as decolonizing computation, becomes a way of theorizing non-Western climate resilience in postcolonial spaces.

Keywords: African futurist fiction, Decolonization, Climate resilience, Technology, Artificial intelligence, Computation, Short story

[93] Diamond Beverly-Porter (Washington State University). The Technology of Survival: How Digital Humanities in Games and Afrofuturism can bridge the gap between culture and representation. .

Abstract. In the mid-19th century Martin Delaney published what is considered the first African American science fiction novel Blake; or the Huts of America as a serial in The Anglo-African Magazine. In culture, Science fiction is used as a tool for social commentary. The standard narrative design of the hero’s journey in a Western context is explicitly influenced by stereotypes of the other. Science fiction extracts from marginalized and non-Western cultures with colonial roots. alluded to by Indigenous scholars Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, in “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” We see the intersects of race gender, and speculative fiction in the 20th-century work of Pauline Hopkins in Of One Blood and W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 story The Comet. Both Black Sci-Fi Character works by Black sci-Fi authors are rendered invisible and hyper-visible through stereotypes and othering in sci-fi in games. Through this extraction and racialized otherness in science fiction Black Characters are rendered both invisible and hyper-visible through stereotypes and the usage of marginalized identities to inform narrative monstrosities through non-normative othering. Through these series of short games, I seek to remix our understanding of culture by intersecting concerns of race and gender as they relate to injustice and inequality. I do this by calling upon 1980s game aesthetics and leaning into text-based narratives; while simultaneously simplifying the game mechanics with text interest and on-screen puzzles. The creative works that have influenced my project include Cyborg (1984) and Méwilo (1987). Cyborg is the core inspiration for this game series project’s critical-making process and game mechanics. At the same time, Méwilo informs the inclusion of culture and narrative design.

Run: a Sci-Fi Apocalypse Adventure is set in a future where Earth has colonized another planet. Throughout the game narrative the protagonist and the player are asked to consider what exactly reparation means and what is the price to be paid. Run: Algorithms, AI, and Archives is set in an apocalypse future by human-designed technology. The last librarian and archivist in the apocalypse has been discovered. They have been tasked with keeping malicious code from destroying the last of human digital records. All Games in the series were made with Twine which utilized HTML JavaScript. Through this game both the protagonist and player are asked to consider the importance of archives and history in societies and culture. These games are an experimental short-form narrative game series with a Black protagonist and the first two in the game collection. I intend to create three more games for this series. The post-apocalypse has been of recent interest with scholars such as Lawrence Gross’s work “Post-apocalypse Stress Syndrome” leading discourse on Indigenous epistemologies. For the scope and purpose of The Run game series, I center Black thought and experience that are often rendered invisible. Through calling on the legacies of Black thought and centering of Afrofuturism these games examine sci-fi and fantasy themes and questions of gender race, social and economic injustice, and inequalities.

Keywords: Game Studies, Narrative games, Afrofusturism, Black studies, Game Design, game Development

[94] Jovana Isevski (UCR). Dangerous Frequences: Reclaiming the Body in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.

Abstract. The Broken Earth is set in a distant future which, in the aftermath of the collapse of a technologically advanced civilization, is riddled with natural disasters that wreck the lives of future peoples in irregular and incalculable intervals. Essun, the story’s protagonist, has the capacity to manipulate the earth’s kinetic energy and quench or trigger earthquakes, although not always at her will. She is an orogen, a part of the population that is feared and discriminated against due to their dangerous “curse.” Orogens who are deemed docile enough to be (re)programmed are taken by the Fulcrum Empire and taught how to be “cold and calm in [their] anger” (215) and obtain control of their emotional fluctuations that will later translate into better capacity to wield the earth’s seismic forces. Fulcrum’s tendency to subdue the syncopated rhythms of orogens’ unpredictable “nature” is an offspring of the Cartesian split of early modernity that rendered “reason” as a calibrating device that must subdue passions whose excess is detrimental to one’s and others’ well-being. Sylvia Wynter argues that reason and its lack-state dichotomy has been foundational to the colonial and racial technologies of oppression, a logic that continues to differentially structure present socio-political and economic milieus. I argue that Jemisin’s trilogy, by reconnecting one’s mind not only to one’s body but also the body of the earth, manages to unsettle the Cartesian dualism and offer an alternative metaphysics of subjectivity that refuses to fit into the geometrical molds of the imperial rationality.

Keywords: dangerous frequencies, Cartesian dualism, reclamation of the body

[95] Najeeba Shahim (Southern Methodist University), Ahlam Atallah (Southern Methodist University), Atithi Lyall (Southern Methodist University) and Gayathri Suseel (Southern Methodist University). Transplantation and Colonization: (Re)Creating Natural and Cultural Environments.

Abstract. Disruptions of climate, landscape, and culture create a space for imperial and colonial powers to supplant the indigenous populations’ way of life and transplant their own systems of being and knowing. This panel seeks to interrogate the ways in which colonization and imperialism have had a direct effect on the connections between indigenous people and their environments.

Keywords: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, Culture, Transplantation, Diaspora, Environmental Colonialism

1. Najeeba Shahim’s Abstract
Cloud seeding in the UAE is a weather modification method that attempts to transform the indigenous, desert landscape into one that mimics the preference of western expats who partake in the city’s wealthy lifestyle. It is a man-made phenomenon that not only is causing harm to the climate—see Dubai’s disastrously high levels of rainfall—but is enforcing a western conception of richness, one that equates luxury to a lush, green landscape rather than the hardiness of the desert. This essay uses Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” and Anish Kapoor’s famed sculpture “Cloud Gate” to argue that the act of artificially transplanting a climate that is in direct opposition to the indigenous environment is a damaging attempt to enforce an imperialistic aesthetic that erases indigeneity.

2. Atithi Lyall’s Abstract
Adoption has been regarded as a commendable and beneficial action but transnational adoption can lead to displacement of children that causes significant negative psychological effects. Through the lens of diasporic displacement, this paper studies the consequences of adoption and detachment/alienation from indigenous cultures. This is illustrated in Garth Davis’ “Lion” and Dinesh Vijan’s “Mimi” where the adopted children’s agency is stripped from them, and they are forced to adjust to an ‘alien’ environment. This paper examines the consequences of adoption diaspora, leading to a detachment of children from their homeland and indigenous culture, as well as the psychological effects that reveal the undercurrents of colonial mentality.

3. Ahlam Atallah’s Abstract
The act of planting and engaging with the land for agriculture, gardening, or farming is performed and informed by indigenous/displaced and settler/colonial populations in vastly differing ways. The relationship formed between Indigenous populations and their land guides the utilization of the land in symbiotic, sustainable cycles, whereas settler colonial groups often engage with the land in harmful and destructive techniques. The long-term effects of ecological imperialism and environmental injustice can be seen in the example of so-called “green colonialism” weaponized against the indigenous population of Palestine by the Zionist entity, like uprooting ancient olive trees to plant non-native pine forests. This essay will examine how the act of planting can be used for sustenance or remembrance versus as extraction or forced transformation using the texts Salt Houses, The Grapes of Wrath and Braiding Sweetgrass.

4. Gayathri Suseel’s Abstract
More than 700 languages are spoken within the borders of India. When India was colonized by the British Empire, they introduced and prioritized English, sidelining the existing languages as ‘barbaric’ which destabilized the existing and established veins of communication. The linguistic clash between indigenous languages and the proliferation of English sparked stigma and shame surrounding those who continue to use indigenous tongues—in their pure or hybrid English form. Even after attaining freedom from colonial rule, India still grapples with this clash evidenced in literature and popular culture. Through the hindi films English Vinglish (2012) and Angrezi Medium (2017), this paper studies the disharmonious relationship between the rise of English and the wane of indigenous languages to the point where being proficient in English automatically relegates its wielder more power in social and economic mobility.

[96] Mingkang Hao (Duke University, History Department). “Will the Dyke Hold? The Power of Multiple Ecological Subjects around Yellow River Dyke-centered Microecology, 18th Century to 20th Century”.

Abstract. This paper is a part of my PhD dissertation project, which aims to conduct a non-anthropocentric archive-reading and multispecies historical research of Yellow River dams/dykes. It contributes to a better understanding of the local hydraulic engineering project from an ecological perspective. Inspired by the concept of “distributive agency,” this research will try to explore, explain, and excavate the powers of non-human ecological subjects, including cave-burrowing animals, plants, non-life entities such as holes, etc. The primary sources that this paper relies on range from Qing memorials, official archives mainly from the Yellow River Conservancy Commission Archive (huanghe shuili weiyuanhui dang’an 黃河水利委員會檔案, YRCCA), newspapers, literature, images, archaeological materials, and oral histories. More specifically, this paper uses a more critical and also creative way to read archives to shed light on the power of multiple non-human ecological subjects. Instructions for Badger Hunting (buhuanfangfazongjie, 捕貛方法總結), for example, was never solely a product of human’s own wisdom but was closely connected with the dam/dyke-centered ecological system (i.e. plant-cutting, replanting, cave-digging, and cave-filling activities). The whole process reveals that once the dams/dykes were established, a microecology emerged and started functioning, with cave-burrowing animals, plants, caves, and natural power participating in the system to utilize its power. Under some circumstances, the powers of other ecological subjects worked against humans’ will and triggered a more complicated symbiotic relationship.

Keywords: Non-human actants, Dyke-centered microecologies, Modern Chinese environmental history

[97] Livia Monnet (University of Montreal). Weaving Time, Weaving Stories: Adivasi Futurism, Radical Environmentalism, and the Time (Weaving)-Image in Subash Thebe Limbu’s SF Film Ningwasum (2022).

Abstract. Yakhtung(Limbu) media artist and filmmaker Subash Thebe Limbu’s time travel, Limbu-language SF film Ningwasum (2022) consciously embraces the vision of Adivasi (First People) Futurism, which the artist defines as a “space where Adivasi artists, musicians, and filmmakers can imagine… future scenarios (where) they have agency, technology, and sovereignty and where their Indigenous …culture” flourishes (Thebe Limbu, 2020). The paper zooms in on the film’s central metaphor of weaving time. I argue that Ningwasum’s complex imaging of weaving time articulates an unequivocal critique of modern “universal” time (Neti 2024) and of (neo)colonial, global racial capitalism’s contribution to climate change and environmental degradation in the Himalayan regions. Thus, the film suggests that what is needed to stave off an imminent ecosocial catastrophe, and to build a sovereign, egalitarian future for Adivasi, Dalit, black and other oppressed people is a relational, decolonial indigenous cosmology of “solidarity across difference” (Demos 2023) that insists on the indigeneity and livingness of the Earth as “an embodiment of Deep Time” (Smyer Yu 2023).

Ningwasum’s ecospiritual ethico-aesthetic and radical environmental philosophy is epitomized by a specific type of time-image I will call the Adivasi time(weaving)-image. Visualized as a dizzying vortex and resonating with Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte’s concept of indigenous spiraling time and kinship time (Whyte 2018, 2021), the Adivasi time(weaving)-image harbors multitudes of intra-acting, vibrant nonhuman, human, and cosmic stories and timelines. It bears witness to the resilience and resurgence of Yakthung(Limbu) and other indigenous cosmologies of becoming, multispecies collaboration, living ancestral knowledge, and a “future of many futures” (Demos 2023).

Keywords: Adivasi (South Asian First People) Futurism, Indigenous Futurisms, Climate change, Yakthung(Limbu)culture, Limbu language, Ecospiritual cosmologies, time(weaving)-image, Deep Time, Indigenous climate science, Radical environmentalism

[98] Rebecca Uliasz (University of Michigan), Alexis Herrera (Duke University), Ernest Pujol-León (Duke University) and Sang Chi Liu (Duke University). Planetary Catastrophe and Environmental Technics.

Abstract. The Anthropocene has thrown into question many of the epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning the exceptionality of the human subject, the integrity of the project of liberal democracy, and the inevitability of a capitalist world economy. As a wealth of scholarship in the post- and environmental humanities has shown, the notion of “the human” can no longer be thought without its constitutive enmeshment in networks of animal, environmental, and technical entities. Furthermore, any political project appealing to a liberal notion of the nation-state misses the global, or, rather, planetary scale of the issues presented by climate catastrophe, even as an emergent planetary nomos presents a depoliticized techno-positivism primarily aimed at transcending all natural and biological limits to the accumulation of capital. Starting from the need to rethink the relation between the breakdown of Earth systems and the proliferation of planetary-scale intelligent technologies, this panel proposes that media theoretical inquiry offers a unique perspective through which to think these transformations due to, among other things, its longstanding interest in examining the relationship between human and machine, the “elemental” turn to the mediatory capacities of non-human ecological actors, and its attentiveness to the infrastructures mediating scientific and political systems. This panel brings together four papers which interrogate the corporeality of artificial intelligence, the environmental management of the contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border, the indeterminacy of planetary-scale computation, and the significance of environmental catastrophe for cosmotechnics, which relate in attending to the ways the environment is figured as a medial project.

Keywords: Media Theory, Environmental Media, Environmentality, Planetarity, Crisis, Cosmotechnics

Prevention Through Deterrence and the Environmental Management of the U.S.-Mexico Border

Alexis Herrera, Duke University

In my presentation, I examine the environmental management of the U.S.-Mexico Border region. Analyzing “Prevention Through Deterrence” policies implemented by the United States Border Patrol in the 1990s, I claim that the contemporary border regime is one that works through the active management and weaponization of the natural environment via militaristic and technological apparatuses. Following contemporary scholarship in border studies, I suggest that the U.S-Mexico Border is understood best through ideas of complexes and assemblages, and not through juridical frameworks emphasizing border lines, walls, or frontiers. In distinction to much of this scholarship, however, I suggest that the language of environments offers the study of the U.S.-Mexico Border a richer vocabulary to think about this distinctively neoliberal mode of border governance. To develop this point, I stage an encounter between “Prevention Through Deterrence” policies and what Michel Foucault describes as “environmentality” in his 1978-1979 Birth of Biopolitics lectures. Environmentality, I suggest, allows us to think about both the simultaneous autonomy of the environment and the ways it is nonetheless subjected and instrumentalized by humans in service of political governance.

Toward the Corporeality of AI: Exploring Black Feminist Perspectives

Sang Chi Lui, Duke University

My study advocates for a need of embodiment for Artificial Intelligence (AI). My conception of embodiment diverges from inserting an empirical element that aim to make the logico-quantitative operations of computation comprehensible to humans. Instead, embodiment emphasizes the corporeal innovation of AI as a means to incorporate an awareness of the concept of indeterminacy. Thus, the corporeality of AI serves to generate and render the becoming aspect of AI accessible in human experience. Building on Beatrice Fazi’s notion of contingent computation, she posits that contingency occurs within the computation process, contrary to the traditional view that contingency is only empirically encountered in the real world. Although Fazi’s objective is to demonstrate that contingency need not be perceptible to humans, her explicit focus on the logico-quantitative aspect of computation aligns with the dualism of human and machine. In the sense that choosing to only focus on either the process of computation or the human perception of computation implies that human and machine is in opposition. I contend that it is crucial to carve out a space for exploring both the logico-quantitative and the empirical simultaneously. By examining the corporeality of AI, I am interested in dismantling the human/machine dualism. As evidence, my study refers to a divine Buddhist AI at Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto. The purpose of this project is to follow Yuk Hui’s proposal of cosmotechincs, which advocates for alternative models of human-technics relations, paving the way for a mechanical future that challenges modernity.

Planetary Catastrophe and the Cosmotechnics of Capital: Towards a Critical Theory of Nature

Ernest Pujol-León, Duke University

In a 1929 essay, Ernst Bloch depicted the “Americanized big city” as an “inorganic metropolis” defending itself “daily, hourly, against the elements as though against an enemy invasion.” Decades later, amidst the rise of postwar consumer society, Kostas Axelos similarly noted, echoing Heidegger, that modernity’s antagonistic relationship between technology and nature necessitated a process of planetary “enframing,” modern technics tending increasingly towards “planning all that exists.” Extending this line of thought, Yuk Hui has recently argued that the entirety of the cosmos has been subsumed into a monolithic, all-encompassing technological system or “cosmotechnics,” culminating modernity’s violent epistemological rupture with nature. In dialogue with these critical diagnoses, this paper situates contemporary cosmotechnics and its antinomies within the capitalist mode of production – a reified social totality that imposes idealist forms of domination on human and non-human nature alike. Drawing on the early Frankfurt School and recent work by Carl Cassegard and Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod, I propose the basic outlines of a critical theory of nature that avoids the culturalism and anthropocentrism of which the critical theory tradition is often accused. By retrieving Adorno’s concepts of “natural history” and “primacy of the object,” I contend that contemporary critical theory can shed light on both modern cosmotechnics and its obverse, planetary catastrophe. Like Benjaminian experiences of shock, environmental catastrophes present themselves as ruptures in the closed dreamworld of commodity society, offering an indirect glimpse of materiality itself and nature’s resistance to capital’s abstract economy of time, labor, and value.

New Materialisms for the End of the World: On Planetarity and Planetary Computing

Rebecca Uliasz, University of Michigan

To call our era the Anthropocene is to suggest that the Earth has been made artificial by the inseparable impacts of capitalist engineering and the expansion of digital infrastructures. While the rise of “planetarity” as a theoretical paradigm in media studies responds to the implications of environmental digitization, the flat ontologies of new digital vitalisms shore up many of the metaphysical assumptions bound to the modern category of the “human” that they seek to transcend. The related post-human turns in theoretical and political conceptualizations of techno-material agency, such as those grounding medial projects of planetary control such as NVIDIA’s “Earth-2,” an AI-augmented climate prediction model, generate an aesthetics of the planetary that delimit our capacity to grasp the imbrication of the Western concept of technology and the accelerating breakdown of Earth systems. Despite these challenges, the artificialization of the planet with digital technologies may provide an opportunity to rethink the reconfiguration of agency beyond the Anthropocentric basis of liberal humanism at the center of Western cosmology. From this perspective, this talk examines media critical attempts to reconceptualize agency on the basis of what Jennifer Gabrys, drawing from the work of Sylvia Wynter and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has called “planetarity as praxis.” In doing so, I argue that media theory highlights an indeterminacy constitutive to planetarity, imploring us to rethink the onto-epistmological transformations at stake in climate techno-politics beyond the metaphysical crisis of the “genre” of the human remaking the colonial projects of globalization through planetary scale technologies.

[99] Brett Cumberbatch (University of Manitoba). Qualitative Autoethnographic Practices as Healing Mechanisms. (Utilizing Reflexive Journaling in examining the navigation of Black Wellbeing in self determined moments of harm).

Abstract. Introduction: As a Black Man I do not enjoy the embodied privilege of hoping to know what it will mean to feel well or healed from racial trauma. This is a constant sociological deficit intrinsic to modernity. It is structurally more profitable for me to remain disconnected from my most well self and dislocated from agency. The control of my healing is too often covered in the rhetoric of well-intentioned altruism, or the misguided optimism of solidarity and awareness raising advocacy efforts. Objective: This presentation aims to examine what are the conditions that constitute a “safe space” for Black men to pursue and achieve safety/healing in times of subjective self-determined embodied harm and distress. Methods: From January 2021 to January 2023 as a qualitative autoethnographic exercise I maintained a reflexive Journal in an attempt to document my racial trauma and time in wellness/yogic spaces. Results: In order for a sense of safety and wellbeing to be achieved these disparities must adequality be addressed. The over examination and ill being has been to the detriment of the Black male being and their positionality, and embodiment in society. Conclusions: Healing requires being connected. Connected to self, connected to social economies, connected to a sense of consciousness. Black men have been alienated in participating meaningfully in these economies.

Keywords: Race, Gender, Conflict, Wellness, Safety

[100] Joshua Enslen (United States Military Academy at West Point) and Alaina Enslen (Independent Artist). From Edenic Paradise to Climate Crisis: AI-Driven Explorations of Climate Change Themes in Brazilian Poetry and Remix Culture.

Abstract. This paper examines the creation of a prototype website and database for AI querying and analysis of variations of one of the most imitated poems in the world, “Canção do Exílio,” written by Brazilian poet, Antônio Gonçalves Dias in 1843. Building upon the work of an international exhibition series and a recent book, this paper explores remix culture as a diaspora of ideas, tracking the evolution of the poem’s original Romantic depiction of Brazil as an Edenic paradise to contemporary adaptations addressing issues such as the destruction of the Amazon, urban pollution, political corruption, and mismanagement of natural resources, among many others. Through analysis of a corpus of over 600 variations and growing, we reveal thematic shifts and the rising prominence of climate change narratives in these variations. Utilizing algorithmic criticism, humanities-based visualization techniques, and artificial intelligence, we demonstrate how the creation of this database dynamizes our understanding of the poem’s continued relevance in Brazilian culture while we explore in detail its messages on Brazil’s climate. Considering how “Canção do Exílio” has functioned as a lightning rod for summoning ideas on Brazilian identity and culture for more than 200 years, this interdisciplinary approach highlights the interplay between the dispersion of ideas through remix and the prominence of climate change narratives in the corpus.

Keywords: “Canção do Exílio”, Brazilian Poetry, Intertextuality, Remix Culture, Climate Narratives, Data Art, New Media, Artificial Intelligence

[101] Anastasiya Chybireva Fender (University of North Texas). Blue Humanities re-enchanted. Changing the perspective on climate change to acknowledge aquatic diasporas as metaphysically valiant political agents of environmental consciousness.

Abstract. In the context of the “belated emergence” (Gilles, 2013) of the Blue Humanities, climate change acquires a character of transversality (Deleuze & Guattari, p.11). Recognizing the closeness of the relationship between modern culture and the ocean, where according to Rachel Carlson (1951), we are bound to return if not in body then through imaginative rupture, this research investigates the role of the mythic aquatic diaspora in the phenomena of climate change. Building upon the methodological findings of Elizabeth de Freitas’ (2017) laboratory of speculative sociology, this inquiry takes a “radical break“ (deFreitas, p.122) from the current approaches to environmentalism, providing the spacetime architecture for research-creation aimed to challenge the politics of sentience, recognizing the aesthetic role of the mythological members of the aquatic diasporas as powerful agents of oceanic consciousness.

This research employs the bestiary, or a conceptual technology for “organizing and evaluating” socially estranged creatures, and the framework of exopedagogy, as a strategy for creation of the “zoömorphic and savage imaginative vectors for new political narratives beyond the capture of the communal law or the desires of the capitalist marketplace” (Lewis & Khan, p.9,12) to define, classify, and investigate the political aesthetics and metaphysical valence of the three particular members of the aquatic diaspora — Mermaid, Alien Octopus, and Siren.

This study employs the synergy of Deleuzean diagrammatic scrambling (Zdebik, pp.2-23), and Massumian biogrammatic synesthetic art-science hinge (Massumi, p.188) to research-create in water — the “zone of blackness” representative of “the entire unconscious” itself (Macaulay, p.48, 46).

[102] Brandee Easter (York University). Truth Machines and the Computational Adjudication of Uncertainty.

Abstract. This paper presents a rhetorical history of the polygraph, or lie detection, machine. As a method, rhetorical history focuses on the origins, transformations, and narratives around its subject, especially to uncover patterns of argument that provide insight into discourses that may seem new and without referent or resonance (Jensen 2016; Johnson 2014; Koerber 2018). This paper uses rhetorical history to trace the complexities of how the “truth machine,” as the polygraph has been often called, participates in a longstanding pattern of argument on the benefits of machinic evaluation of human problems. Promising to turn feeling, sensuous bodily responses into quantified fact, the polygraph is a perfect example of how ideas about the machinic are bound up with and so difficult to untie from objectivity, logic, and truth—questions that are central to understanding and navigating the complexities of climate disasters. This tracing of the “truth machine” in its many instantiations provides insight into the dangerous temptation to offload human complexity onto a supposedly accurate, truthful, and authentic machine.

Keywords:   rhetorical history, digitality, uncertainty

[103] Aparajita Bhandari (University of Waterloo). Twice Verified: How Digital Verification Systems Remake the Self.

Abstract. This project examines the history and evolution of digital identity verification systems (passwords, captchas, and biometrics) turning a critical post-humanist analytical focus to these easily overlooked verification mechanisms that we encounter daily. This exploration traces how over the last two decades liberal humanist notions of identity have become inextricably tied to neoliberal constructions of personal property and ownership and how these shifts reflect a larger pattern of automation of life.

First, I discuss how the meta-myth of an individual data subject, presumed to possess a distinct “identity” characterized as discrete, static, and immutable lies at the center of the data verification project. Yet paradoxically under our current data capitalist ecosystem “the self” becomes distributed and interconnected within complex digital ecosystems and although responsibility for maintaining privacy is framed as resting solely on the individual, an individual has very little control over what personal information is collected or how this information is used. Digital verification systems grow wantonly complex and surveillant in service of an elusive sense of “security”.

Ultimately, in this paper I argue that digital verification systems construct notions of self-identity through explicit processes of inclusion and exclusion and posit that there is more at stake than the mere application of algorithmic technologies to the domain of security. Rather the most insidious threat presented by these systems is not merely the wearing away of individual privacy but rather the larger project of hierarchical categorical classification that ultimately renders complex dynamics of being in the world fixed, transparent, and predictable.

Keywords: posthumanism, surveillance studies, critical cybersecurity, self-identity, digital verification systems, passwords, captchas, biometrics

[104] Robin Manley Mihran (University of California, Berkeley). Foucault’s Cybernetic Milieu: On the mechanical logic of biopolitics.

Abstract. Foucault’s account of biopolitics presents us with a theory of the environment: apparatuses of security act on a population by intervening in its social and ecological surroundings. The nature of these surroundings thus becomes an important question. In his work on biopolitics, Foucault’s preferred concept for such surroundings is the ‘milieu’—a term whose complex history and many scientific valences had been carefully detailed some twenty-five years earlier by his teacher Canguilhem. In this paper I will argue, however, that Foucault is not a faithful inheritor to his teacher’s analysis. Whereas Canguilhem in his essay “The Living and its Milieu” had taken great pains to offer a fundamentally dialectical account of the mechanist and vitalist moments in the scientific history of the concept of the milieu, Foucault instead draws out only the mechanist aspects of the milieu in his own analysis of biopolitics. Of course, this is not to say that Foucault simply overlooks the vitalist moment of Canguilhem’s work. Rather, as this paper will demonstrate through a close reading of his 1977-1978 lecture series Security, Territory, Population, Foucault turns to the cybernetic figure of the negative feedback system in order to explain those apparently vital and purposive aspects of the milieu. Foucault, we might say, effects a sort of cybernetic revision to Canguilhem’s more dialectical concept—one that treats purposes and vital norms as a mere byproduct of circular mechanical causation. I will therefore argue that Foucault’s work on biopolitics is premised on a cybernetic—and thus also mechanist—theory of the environment and the organism.

Keywords: biopolitics, milieu, cybernetics, security, vitalism, mechanism, Foucault, Canguilhem

[105] Edmond Chang (Ohio University) and Ashlee Bird (University of Notre Dame). Game Studies Stream.

Abstract. Game Studies Stream BRIEF

SLSA 2024

Dallas, TX

November 7-10, 2024

Thursday, November 7

3:30 PM GAME STUDIES 1: Speculations/Genres

Friday, November 8

8:30 AM GAME STUDIES 2: Philosophical Play

10:30 AM GAME STUDIES 3: Platforms

1:30 PM GAME STUDIES 4: Play(ing) Politics

4:30 PM GAME STUDIES 5: SLSArcade 2024

Saturday, November 9

10:30 AM GAME STUDIES 6: Race, Bodies, Colonialism

1:30 PM GAME STUDIES 7: Oil & Water

4:30 PM GAME STUDIES 8: Playing (with) Degrowth (Roundtable)

Keywords: game studies, video games, environmental games, play, design, speculative fiction, gaming culture

[See updated schedule]

[106] Melissa Yang (Emory University). Fly Away Home: Revisiting & Reflecting on Research & Relocation.

Abstract. For many environmental humanists, our research involves sustained place-based investigation drawn from local field sites, forests, and archives. In our early careers, we are asked to move wherever a job takes us—often far from our research sites. What happens to our ongoing projects and priorities when we migrate away from our places of home and study? To what extent can the boundaries of our projects and pedagogy expand, connect, and transform, and how are these projects reshaped as we return to them? What strategies can we use to relocate our research, to find local research sites that enable us to expand our work? Compounded with factors from research funding to climate impact, how do we work in sustainable, ethical, and capacious ways when we can’t always access the ecologies and environments that shape our work?

I consider the portability and possibilities of my own place-based environmental humanities exploration of birds and language. Launched in Pittsburgh, an area influenced by Rachel Carson’s legacy and home to the National Aviary, I assisted with community science, visited ornithological research centers, interviewed local pigeon racers, and more. Moving away has meant navigating this work in new ways—compounded by an ongoing pandemic. In the years since, I have reconsidered my research through my local bird worlds through volunteering at a local bird rehabilitation center. I want to use this space to invite scholars to reflect on place throughout their careers—on how homing and rehoming, inflected by agency and affect, impact place-based projects.

Keywords: environmental humanities, animal studies, birds, personal narratives, reflection

[107] Christina Donaldson (University of North Texas), Isabelle Bishop (University of North Texas) and Kevin Siefert (University of North Texas). Infrastructures for a Climate Changing World (Part 01 of 02).

Abstract. Infrastructures are material and immaterial. They entail physical, political, economic, and affective dimensions shaping social worlds. Critical infrastructure studies, or what is sometimes referred to as “infrastructuralism,” is a growing interdisciplinary field of research. Originating in geography and anthropology, infrustracturalism is increasingly present in the differing fields of art, design, and the humanities. This panel furthers the interdisciplinarity of infrastructuralism, bringing multiple fields of study into conversation.

The papers on these consecutive panels critically analyze key themes in infrastructuralism to think with ongoing climate crises. In particular, papers will address issues such as the infrastructures of optimism in resilient educational climates, petro-capitalist infrastructures of everyday eating, science fiction literature and digital media as resources for mapping complex networks of human and nonhuman environmental infrastructures, aesthetic infrastructures operative in a climate changing world, and the ecological dimensions of the body as infrastructure in Chinese aesthetics. The goal of the panel is to examine how these analyses of infrastructures can shed new light on climate crises while also providing potentially educational, aesthetic, and utopian alternatives.

Keywords: Infrastructure, Infrastructuralism, Climate-changing world, Berlant

Optimistic Infrastructures of Affective Capitalism in Resilient Educational Climates

Christina Donaldson, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor,

Interdisciplinary Art and Design Studies (IADS)

University of North Texas

Affective capitalism is a late-capitalist infrastructure. Affective capitalism operates within complex technological ecosystems of human and other-than-human entities. It generates, captures, and commodifies emotions, recasting them into different forms of capital (Karppi et al., 2016, p. 10). As Brian Massumi (2002) writes, “[t]he ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late-capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory” (p.45). This infrastructure enables commodified affects to circulate within education, working to maintain orientations towards neoliberal capitalism’s optimistic fantasies. Optimism functions to serve affective capitalism. Under affective capitalism, precarious lives are built on uncertainty, hope, and disappointment. The best one can hope for is to survive, to live through, to cope with the precarious political, social, economic, and ecological present. Hopeful educational manifestations of optimism evoke critical questions into the ways in which concepts and applications of resilience manifest through the affective contours of subjectivities and attachments. This invites consideration on how one is educated optimistically to want the good life. In this paper, I explore how disrupting habitual states sustaining neoliberal education requires a departure from futures imagined through capitalist forms of resilience and good-life fantasies. Such disruption entails a critical examination of the ways in which individuals are trained and educated to want the good life and have come to rely on habituated repetitions to get it.

Precarious Infrastructures in Ordinary Spaces: The Supermarket in the Midst of Climate Chaos

Isabelle Bishop, PhD Candidate

Department of Philosophy and Religion University of North Texas

Petromodernity names how fossil fuels permeate the present, or as Stephanie LeMenager writes, how “modern life [is] based in the cheap energy systems made possible by oil” (2014, p. 67). Petromodernity entails both material and immaterial infrastructures. Following Lauren Berlant, I conceive of infrastructures as “material processes of binding” (2021, p. 22). The supermarket is a critical petromodern infrastructure, supporting the common distribution and exchange of vital goods. Though petromodern infrastructures are not unique to supermarkets, supermarkets’ infrastructures are distinctive. These food spaces serve as primary sites supporting the reproduction of human life, positioning their infrastructures as particularly compelling in the context of proliferating climate crises. Infrastructures of the supermarket normalize ways of being and eating that reproduce petrocultural habits and attachments at the level of bodily incorporation. In considering the material processes of binding entailed in supermarket’s petrocultural provisions, I explore how immaterial infrastructures like attachments, ideals, desires, habits, and norms shape petrosubjectivites in the supermarket through food and eating. Supermarkets and the orientations they engender embody and embolden petromodernity’s promises. I clarify how the everydayness of the supermarket obscures the (re)production of petromodernity in these spaces, complicating transformations of ordinary life in the midst of ongoing climate chaos.

The Aesthetic Infrastructures of a Climate Changing World: Radically Relational Sensibilities

Kevin Siefert, PhD Candidate

Department of Philosophy and Religion University of North Texas

My presentation attends to aesthetic infrastructures operative in a climate changing world. I conceive of aesthetic operations broadly. Differing distributions of sense produce different worlds (Ranciere, 2004; Lugones, 2003). I argue that the differing distributions of sense operative in a climate changing world constitute different infrastructures of climate change. How climate change becomes sensible – the aesthetics of climate change – refuse universal presentation. Climate change occurs across varying strata revealing different situations for different peoples. There is not one humanity. There are complex networks beyond simple models of comprehension and control. Climate change presents everything in relation. This occurs in various ways through processes of temporal and spatial compression (Hill, 2022). As COVID-19 has demonstrated, a market in China can affect global and local politics, economics, and environments (Bourriaud, 2022). The aesthetics of climate change is an aesthetics of radical relationality. By attending to the relationality that climate changing events afford, one can challenge the infrastructures of control and sovereign individuality promoted by denialist sensibilities. Not all worlds are climate changing. However, in noticing the radical relationality of the world, one engages in the making of sense resistant to infrastructures of denialism. This form of sense making – the relational aesthetics of climate change – disrupts infrastructures and politics perpetuating the metanarratives and myths of a uniform and undifferentiated humanity living in a climate stable world.

[108] Christina Donaldson (University of North Texas), Tyson Lewis (University of North Texas), Li Xu (University of North Texas) and Ranran Fan (University of North Texas). Infrastructures for a Climate Changing World (Part 02 of 02).

Keywords: Infrastructures, Infrastructuralism, Climate-changing world, Berlant

Body as Infrastructure from the Perspective of Chinese Aesthetics

Li Xu, PhD Candidate

Department of Art Education University of North Texas

The concept of the body holds significant importance in Eastern aesthetic traditions. In Chinese aesthetics, there is an inherent ecological dimension emphasizing that humans and the environment coexist as a unified entity through the body. The body is not merely corporeal but also extends into nature, making it both a distinct entity from and a part of nature. The dynamic relationship between body and environment establishes an infrastructure that sheds light on the complex and ambiguous interactions between human beings. Chinese aesthetics does not centralize humans or nature but emphasizes the mutual transformation between them. This mutual transformation and generative relationship between them have become an important theoretical source of Chinese aesthetics and have significantly influenced art. For example, the transformation between a man and a butterfly in the Daoist Zhuangzi is a typical example. Even Confucianism considers that humans and nature form a homomorphic relationship. Human bodies correspond to certain virtues through the characteristics of plants, landscape names derived from body organs, and the concept of the “Four Gentlemen” of plants—plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum. Chinese aesthetics inherently possess the ecological wisdom that value the coexistence of human beings and nature, or the Body. In this discussion, I present examples of Chinese art, such as dancing, music, and landscape painting to illustrate how the idea of the unity between body and environment constructs a framework that demonstrates the aesthetic dimensions of art and artworks, shedding light on an alternative relationship between human beings and nature through art.

On Alternative Power Infrastructures

RanRan Fan, MFA Assistant Professor,

New Media Art University of North Texas

This video project explores alternative power infrastructures that challenge the patriarchy. It contains several sci-fi narratives in the quantum dimension, loosely connected based on relationships of different particles. It examines various principles in nonhuman ecosystems and proposes alterative social structure inspired by them. The aim of these alternatives is building an entrance to address difference types of discriminations in human society and climate crisis – in both scenarios, they are consequences of power abuse. In this presentation, I present alternative options which can contribute to approaching a healthy balance for every element in an intricate system

Utopian Infrastructures and Post-Environmental Catastrophes in the Work of Kim Stanley Robinson

Tyson Lewis, PhD Professor,

Department of Art Education University of North Texas

In the novel, New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a near future in which most of the coastline of the United States has been submerged underwater causing untold death, destruction, and mass migration. Yet, in Robinson’s utopian imagination, the city of New York is able to restructure itself as the new “Super Venice.” While the novel weaves together multiple plotlines and involves dozens of characters, the central character is the city itself. For this paper, I will highlight how Robinson’s utopian imagination is supported by an infrastructural imagination capable of mapping the complex networks of material, immaterial, and atmospheric infrastructures that all combine to form the dynamic potentialities of a city that never sleeps (or drowns). In this sense, Robinson helps us recognize that without infrastructural experimentation, utopian space remains empty. World building, in other words, is supported by the capacity to dream alternative infrastructures that, collectively, prop up the actions of characters and the events constituting plots. The lesson from Robinson is that climate chaos can only be faced if we embrace the challenges of imagining how material and immaterial, cultural, and natural infrastructures might reconstitute social, political, economic, and environmental relationships.

[109] Eddie Lohmeyer (Clemson University). Terra_Forms: AI Engines and the Cultural Imaginary of Terraforming .

Abstract. This presentation aims to explore novel ways in which glitch practices and artificial intelligence engines can visualize climate change while charting an ethics for using AI to address ecological disaster in the current Anthropocene. As a case study, I discuss my creative work-in-progress Terra_Forms: a series of large-scale video murals that animate the changing landscapes of the Appalachian region through data corruption and AI diffusion models. Drawing from retro videogame aesthetics and 19th century Japanese Ukiyo-e landscapes, Terra_Forms aims to reveal how artificial intelligence relates to our collective imagination of natural landscapes and terraforming (especially in contexts of science fiction); or rather, modifying ecosystems to produce a more habitable and harmonious environment for supporting diverse lifeforms. More so, how might generative AI influence our sense of home and place in relation to nature and within a broader art historical trajectory of landscape painting? Here, Terra_Forms employs the dynamics of glitch and often unpredictable nature of diffusion models to playfully visualize Southern landscapes that heal themselves and reclaim the elements from human involvement. In this discussion of my work, I draw from what Joanna Zylinska calls the Anthropocene Imperative (AI): a playful rearticulation of artificial intelligence toward a critical response to climate change and how AI can potentially visualize, critique, undermine, and mitigate wicked environmental concerns. By positioning Terra_Forms as a creative work uses AI to expand the cultural imaginary of climate change, this presentation aims to engender new ways of visualizing human interference in Earth’s processes through human-AI collaboration.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Glitch, Terraforming, Anthropocene, Climate Change

[110] Karen Leona Anderson (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). New Mutualisms, Poetry, and Climate Change (paper submission).

Abstract. (This is a single paper submission, not a panel submission)

In this short paper I will trace some of the strange new bedfellows that climate change has catalyzed as they are depicted in poetry. I will look specifically at the history of U.S. poetry that addresses nonhuman agents unlikely to be represented as full subjects–from fungi to cockroaches—yet are still somehow necessary to “work with.” In describing these organisms as both crucial to human survival —and also overtly uninterested in it— I will trace a history of how US poets have responded to nonhuman-human mutualisms, moving from the late nineteenth century in poems by Emily Dickinson through to mid-twentieth century poems by Lorine Niedecker and Lucille Clifton to focus on early twenty-first century work by Camille Dungy and Aracelis Girmay that specifically respond to climate change and the new ways it invites us to address and engage with the nonhuman.

Keywords: animal studies, nonhuman, contemporary US poetry, metaphor, climate change.

[111] Andrew Rose (Christopher Newport University). Jason W. Moore’s ‘World Ecology’ as a Posthuman Politics for Climate Justice.

Abstract. The debate over the role of intention and anthropocentrism in the political agency necessary to address climate change has played out most publicly between Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Fossil Capital, and Jason W. Moore, who has theorized the Capitalocene and World Ecology. Malm argues that we must retain anthropocentrism to motivate environmental activism, and that theories of the posthuman are just that, theories in a time that calls for action. Moore’s response is to argue that, in order to address the power of capital, we must better understand how nature and culture operate through what he terms a ‘double internality’ (ie. a post-dualist understanding of nature-culture).

This paper takes up Moore’s argument via his now seminal book Capitalism in the Web of Life to expand upon how a posthuman politics for climate justice – a combination of theory and action that can locate and address the problems of the capitalist state to foreground the uneven experience of climate via race, class, gender, etc. – that operates from a relational nework of actants to pursue what Rosi Braidotti has called an “ethically affirmative and politicall sustainable” posthuman subjectivity

Keywords: Critical Posthumanism, Post-anthropocentrism, Marxism, Climate Justice, Distributed Agency

[112] Michael Beach (University of Washington). Nonlocality, Nonlinearity, & Complicit Bias in Climate Diasporas.

Abstract. This paper explores climate diasporas through the conceptual lenses of nonlocality, nonlinearity, and complicit bias. Embracing the fluid and interconnected nature of Deleuzian events, which exist in perpetual becoming and differentiation, we confront the rhizomatic realities of climate-induced displacement. Central to this inquiry is complicit bias, a systemic extension of biases such as confirmation, framing, and implicit biases. Complicit bias emerges from our embeddedness within larger socio-ecological structures, where our actions are shaped by and perpetuate existing power dynamics. This bias manifests in how we navigate our worlds and workplaces, negotiating through our positions of vulnerability and privilege, often reinforcing the systems we seek to challenge. Drawing from the rich intellectual traditions of Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers, I engage in a speculative fabulation that calls for a radical rethinking of our complicity. Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble” and Stengers’ concept of “cosmopolitics” invite us to dwell in the complexities and contradictions of our times, recognizing that our efforts to address climate diasporas must be situated within a broader ethical and political commitment to multispecies justice and planetary flourishing. Through this philosophical and speculative lens, we seek to illuminate the multifaceted realities of climate diasporas, advocating for reconfigurations that embrace their nonlocal and nonlinear character. By acknowledging and addressing complicit bias, we open radical speculative pathways to more just and equitable responses in a world marked by profound ecological and social transformation. We resist the homogenizing forces of modernity and celebrate the vibrant plurality of life on Earth.

Keywords: nonlocality, nonlinearity, complicit bias, climate diasporas

[113] Isadora Cavalcanti (University of Porto). Let the river run wild: Exploring posthuman perspectives on traditional flood narratives to uncover new tools in times of climate emergency.

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of our global interconnectedness and the insecurity of our systems – or, in Pope Francis’ words, that we are ‘all in the same boat’ . By echoing Pope Francis’ metaphor of being ‘all in the same boat,’ we are forced to question whether these boats are equally seaworthy. This discourse invokes traditional flood narratives, where the destruction of people and ecosystems ensues. The harsh truth of today’s floods highlights the disparity in resources and protection among different groups. Many individuals find themselves without even a metaphorical boat, highlighting alarming inequalities. Even predating biblical accounts, similar stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses delved into flood myths, exploring concepts of survival amidst catastrophes. However, as we face the current climate crisis, these tales of salvation for the ‘chosen’ collides with the grim reality of environmental asymmetries. It’s not about the purest versus the impure ones. Those who perish are the most vulnerable and least dangerous on a global scale, while those who thrive are likely most responsible for the global human-made mass exceeding all living biomass . This discussion challenges established narratives and introduces emerging perspectives on the climate emergency. Drawing on the book Bodies of Water, by Astrida Neimanis, I want to explore new tools that may be useful in these turbulent times, recognizing the complexities of our shared existence while outlining pathways towards a more sustainable future.

Keywords: universal flood, emerging narratives, ecofeminism, anthropomass, biomass

[114] Joao Paulo Guimaraes (University of Porto (ILCML)) and Pedro Santos (University of Porto). Ghouls: Making Do in the Compromised Environment of the Fallout Series .

Abstract. The Fallout videogame series is famous for having created a world in which humanity endures after a nuclear holocaust, inhabiting both the ruins of the surface and sophisticated underground vaults where a semblance of normality is preserved. Taking the theme of this year’s conference as a cue, this paper will examine the migratory trajectories of different groups of people in the Fallout universe and assess the kinds of responses to disaster that they indicate. The recent TV adaptation foregrounds the topic of class, telling us that the vaults were exclusively built to house the upper class, something that is not at all clear in the games. This focus on economic inequality and its relation to people’s vulnerability to environmental problems is no doubt informed by a contemporary sensibility. We will, however, dedicate most of the talk to the figure of the ghoul, since it most productively emblematizes a stance of making do, of trying to stay afloat in the compromised world of the surface. Ghouls are humans that have been exposed to radiation for too long and have undergone non-fatal mutations. A number of ghouls, in the videogames, are icons of endurance and perseverance, carrying on in the face of ill-health and discrimination (non-mutated humans treat them as freaks), trying to make a new life for themselves in inhospitable areas that others do not want to settle. The TV adaptation features a ghoul as one of its main characters (with a rich backstory) and the latest patch of Fallout 76 allows the player to explore its online world as a ghoul. Honing in on these “monsters”, we will assess what “staying with the trouble” means when the apocalypse has already taken place.

Keywords: Post-Nuclear, Post-Apocalyptic, Mutants, Game Studies, Donna Haraway

[115] Manu Joshi (Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi). (Un)homing through the body: the temporality of imperialism and its deranged social imaginaries in the early works of J.M. Coetzee.

Abstract. This paper argues that the insistence on narrative centering of the precarious body in two of Coetzee’s early works, in retrospect, answers to the urgently raised questions of ‘imaginative failure’ in fiction to capture the reality of climate change in our ‘deranged’ Anthropocene (Ghosh 2016). The body as vulnerable, exposed, and subject to the unreasoning impulses of desire structures these narratives in order to form a fecund ground for ethico-political questions about life and its viability amidst prevailing modes of global capital circulation and governance. In Life and Times of Michael K (1983), K’s journey sees him reduced to the animal aspect of bodily sustenance. Exposed to the elements, moving in and out of government run workers’ camps, coming into contact with both sides of the political divide, K yet refuses help and in an emblematic gesture returns to the abandoned farm to live alone, attending to his garden patch of pumpkins. In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the cyclic time of seasons and contingency of the corporeal body expose the catastrophic temporality of the Empire and its hysteric rhythms of triumph and panic ( Quayson 2021 echoing Mbembe). Globalized industrial production shares these attributes and is homologous to the novels’ understanding of civilizational “progress” as history’s flight into empty time (Benjamin 1986). Given Coetzee’s bent for intertextuality, these novels may still answer to the future humanity’s charge of ‘derangement’ as they revisit and reuse the literary tradition while urgently raising the question of imagining much needed forms of political collectivities.

Keywords: anthropocene, precarity, imperialism, race, intertextuality, literary representation

[116] Merve Sahin (The University of Texas at Dallas). Agnes Denes’ Environmental Artworks through the Lens of Gaian Theory.

Abstract. Pioneer environmental artist Agnes Denes has created much art about pressing ecological issues, such as anthropogenic climate change. This paper explores Denes’ artworks through the theoretical framework of James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’s Gaian Theory, which conceptualizes Earth as a complex self-regulating cybernetic system and living organism. Gaian theory, which posits that Earth’s physical and biological processes are tightly interconnected to create a self-regulating system, is increasingly pertinent due to the rising worries about global climate change. By framing the environmental and ecological stability of the planet within a cybernetic paradigm, Gaian Theory emphasizes balance, control, and homeostasis. The artistic rooting of Gaian Theory in Denes’ work points to a dispersion where scientific ideas find a new homeland in art.

Denes’ art encapsulates the essence of Gaian Theory by illustrating the interconnectedness of all life forms and their environment. Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), where a two-acre wheatfield was planted in Manhattan, challenges urbanization and consumerism, emphasizing a balance between human activity and natural ecosystems. Similarly, Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule (1992-96), which involved the planting of 11,000 trees in Finland, underscores the concept of Earth as a living organism. These artworks challenge more anthropocentric views of environmental management, advocating instead for an approach that recognizes the intrinsic value and agency of natural systems. It thus not only informs scientific discourse but also influences environmental ethics and policy, promoting a worldview that sees humans as integral components of a larger, self-regulating planetary system.

Keywords: Gaian Theory, Agnes Denes, land art, cybernetics

[117] Wil Carr (North Carolina State University). The Riches and the Spoils: Thinking with the Pollution of Another Crab’s Treasure.

Abstract. Pollution relations are complex and constantly in flux. As species’ habitats become more polluted and over longer periods of time, they are forced to adapt to survive these new conditions. From an anthropocentric perspective, pollution is almost always viewed as only causing harm to an environment and the species occupying it. However, for nonhuman species, these relations do not follow a simple good/bad binary. Pollutants may harm some species, but offer shelter or nourishment for others. Released in April 2024, the soulslike game Another Crab’s Treasure imagines an ocean with complex relationships between sea creatures and pollutants. Not wholly positive or negative, the game illustrates how oceanlife adapts to thrive alongside pollution, even as pollution still harms the lives it touches. While plastics and other pollutants are the source of power-ups and new skills for characters, they are also a source of danger. Too often, pollution discourse focuses on pollutants, the objects of pollution. Instead of falling into this narrative, Another Crab’s Treasure offers an alternative view of the ocean in which pollutants are neither entirely negative nor positive. By doing so, the game avoids problematizing the pollutants themselves, and instead criticizes the process of pollution and the larger structures which enable and encourage pollution. Ultimately, the game creates a space to see creatures thrive alongside and be harmed by pollution, complicating dominant narratives about ocean pollution and illuminating the structures which have encouraged pollution to continue.

Keywords: pollution, video game studies, plastics, animal studies

[118] Pratistha Bhattarai (Duke University). The Futurity of Toxified Slums in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.

Abstract. This paper shows how Indra Sinha’s _Animal’s People_ (2007) presents modernity’s toxified slums as sites not just of death but also of new, yet unnamable forms of life. The novel fictionalizes the ecological catastrophe unfolding in the aftermath of the explosion of Union Carbide’s insecticide plant in Bhopal, India in 1984. Its story is narrated by Animal – a slum boy who walks on all fours, his spine bent by the disaster. Animal is keenly aware of his Western readership’s hunger for spectacles of death and suffering. Rather than serve their voyeuristic gaze, he introduces several layers of self-conscious _mediation_ in his narrative to defamiliarize the narrated catastrophe. In this paper, I elaborate on two such narrative techniques: ekphrasis and transposition. Animal translates his visually spectacular world into a verbal form with an avowed disregard for fidelity. His self-consciously inaccurate ekphrases emphasize the distance between the spectacle of an ecological catastrophe and its novelistic representation. Furthermore, unlike in traditional first-person narratives, readers see the novel’s story-world from the perspective not of the narrator but of the implied reader – recurringly addressed by Animal as “you,” as distinct from his “I.” Hunched, Animal sees the toxified slums around him at “crotch-level,” exposed without reprieve to their stench and stickiness. But he positions the implied reader at eye-level. His descriptions capture the transposition of the former to the latter as they blend visual imageries with olfactory and tactile sensations. I argue that the novel uses the formal strategies of ekphrasis and transposition to fashion, through the reading experience, a sensorium that is sensitive to the stirrings of liberatory socio-environmental futures in the catastrophic present.

Keywords: ecological catastrophe, industrial disaster, mediation, narrative form, futurity

[119] Roberta Buiani (University of Toronto). To conserve or to adapt? Messy ecologies and survival in a more-than-human world.

Abstract. In the summer of 2018, a group of scientists, artists and local residents met in the city of Cervia, a seaside destination located in the North East coast of Italy. The conversation focused on the contribution of the arts and interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists and the community at large in addressing challenges caused by the increasingly radical effects of climate change on coastal communities, as well as the inherent conflicts eroding their ability to develop sustainable long-lasting plans. At the time, my research and artist residence there focused on the salt reservoir adjacent to the city of Cervia which doubled as a conservation site and a major tourist attraction. This condition caused palpable friction between a desire to protect such unique environment, thus ensuring that migrating birds continued to choose the reservoir as preferred destination, and the necessity of the population to preserve their jobs in the florid hospitality industry. In 2020, I was faced with a similar situation while researching the appearance of new invasive species at Varano Lake, a lagoon off the South East coast of Italy: carried by cargo and cruise ships, the oysters and blue crabs had found the ideal environment to thrive with fatal consequences for the native fauna. Local fishermen were split between commercializing the new “invasive guests” or finding new ways to fight them.

In this contribution, I will examine the above case studies through an artistic lens that combines ethnography and sound documentation. My research aims to raise the following questions: What role does the relation between economy and ecology play in the transformation of fragile and endangered environments? Should the transformations caused by global mobility of goods and organisms be ousted or rather creatively embraced?

Keywords: conservation and adaptation, more-than-human, economy and ecology, migration and mobility, invasive species

[120] Duygu Yarimbas (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) and Merve Caskurlu (Yeditepe University). SPECULATING ON WATER: BYZANTINE CISTERNS AS A WET ONTOLOGICAL TERRITORY.

Abstract. Discussions surrounding the Anthropocene, global warming, and climate change predominantly focus on drought and access to clean water sources. However, an emerging approach known as wet ontology offers a fluid perspective and novel framework for environmental discourse. It is increasingly apparent that narratives related to water will dominate contemporary thought and the zeitgeist. In response to this paradigm shift, we developed a course project aimed at fostering speculative design that emphasizes the ethical and societal dimensions of design practice to explore diverse future possibilities, prioritizing imagination over practicality and functionality.

The cisterns of Istanbul, originally constructed during the Byzantine era for water storage and distribution, represent a spatial manifestation of control and utilization of aquatic resources. Five historically significant and visually impressive cisterns (Basilica, Theodosius, Hebdomon, Philoxenos, and Gülhane) were selected for the project and are considered both ideological and functional metaphors, reflecting aspirations and projections for Istanbul’s hydrospatial future. Our approach investigates the potential consequences of climate change, with a focus on water-related issues.

Entitled “Flow Forward: A Time-Traveler’s Kit to Hydrospatial Istanbul,” the project aims to design visionary travel brochures for a future time traveler exploring Istanbul. These brochures illuminate the historical and cultural contexts of the ancient reservoirs, reimagining them as spaces of innovation in potential future scenarios. The speculative-based methodology emphasizes environmental perspectives over anthropocentric viewpoints, aiming to envision futures that encourage ecological radicalism. Our approach employs a wet/watery mode of thinking to generate novel perspectives and provocative responses to deeply-rooted ecological challenges.

Keywords: wet ontology, climate change, speculative design, ecological radicalism, research into design

[121] Haoran Chang (York University). Making “Slow Game” for Reparation and Care .

Abstract. “Slow Game” is not a specific genre, but it challenges the “hegemonic of play,” a heteronormative understanding of video games in commercial game production (Fullerton et al., 2008). The characteristic of immediacy in a hegemonic game is based on speed, domination, and mastery, which resonates with the notion of hegemonic pleasure by John Fiske (1989). Slow gameplay introduces a queer temporality, countering the time consciousness ingrained in neoliberal capitalism, where individuals are compelled to maximize time efficiency both within and outside of the workplace (Harvey, 2007). In this paper, I will argue that “Slow Game” can become a reparative experience for both players and designers.

For players, the durational experience of “Slow Game” can foster a “sensory realism” for self-reflection and move beyond human consciousness to non-human consciousness of time, altering the state of mind. “Slowness” is not uncommon in various media creations, such as “Slow Cinema” (de Luca and Nuno, 2016), “Slow Technology” (Hallnäs and Redström, 2001), and “Slow Art” (Reed, 2017). I will use various video games as case studies, such as Desert Bus (1995), Animal Crossing (2001), Mountain (2014), Walden, a Game (2017), Meditations Games (2019), and Playne (2020), and compare them with other “Slow Media” creations in film, interactive design, and painting, to analyze the “Slow Game” as a reparative medium. For designers, the philosophy of “Slow Game” can also be applied in the creation process for a sustainable work-life balance. Scholars like Kara Stone and Sandra Danilovic also have proposed the idea of using game creation process as self-caring. I will use my ongoing research-creation game project, “Qigong Exergame,” an exergame based on Traditional Chinese Qigong practice, as a case study to illustrate the “slow game” as a design methodology and philosophy in the game iterative process for reparation and care.

Keywords: Exergame, Slow game, Reparation, Queer Game, Slow Media

[122] Nimrod Astarhan (Independent). Spectral Elemental.

Abstract. Spectral Elemental looks away from screens to reunite digital media with the environment through physics. It seeks a definition of media in the interaction of earthly energies. Those are considered such that not only fuel, drive, or enable but otherwise interface with, activate, and are activated by, and generally entangled with, media technologies. As a foundation, the relationship between resource mining, energy consumption in the form of electricity, and digital media technologies is introduced. However, the relationships digital media technologies have with energy continue beyond consumption. Considering the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole, digital media technological devices emanate this type of energy almost as often as it powers them. Media technological devices disperse light, radio frequencies, and telecommunication signals to become parts of networks. These information exchange and communication networks are also networks of energy exchange and thermodynamic relationships between living organisms, earth energies, and media technology devices. Once such relationships are established, the question remains: what can the use of principles, theories, and research from the physics discipline tell about how digital media operates on Earth?

Keywords: energy, critical media theory, cultural techniques, physics, artistic research

[123] Allie E.S. Wist (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). Olfactory Artifacts for Shifting Worlds—Sensing nonhuman diasporas and cultivating affective “climates” for ecological noticing.

Abstract. Anthropogenic environmental change shifts worlds—not just by forcing the movement of life within them, but also by dissolving the discrete boundaries between worlds altogether (i.e. that between “nature” and human) (Cronon 1996; Purdy 2015). Many shifting worlds are not immediately visible or easily relatable to the scales and sensory apparatuses of human perception (Nixon 2011; Hsu 2020). The challenge of scale is one of the most pernicious barriers to understanding urgent ecological shifts (Demos 2017; Zylinska 2018), which is compounded by sensory limitations in ocular-centric knowledge-production cultures. Informed by research-led investigations into sensory studies and environmental change, this paper hypothesizes that awareness of epochal planetary movements—shifting diasporas of plant, human, and animal relations—can be conveyed in novel ways through artistic experiences of smell, rather than as traditionally communicated through visual and data-driven methods (Springgay 2018). Artistic sensory “artifacts” offer sensory representations of nonhuman climate diasporas: volatile chemicals produced by forests in distress from persistent droughts, the smell of pine trees involved in human-assisted migration, and a fungal-asphalt perfume meant to erode the distinction between the “natural” and the human-made. Encounters with these scents cultivate ecological noticing practices (Tsing 2015) of worlds-in-the-making. Furthermore, I suggest that certain affective “climates” are critical for being present with and for shifting ecological realities, as discrete boundaries between worlds fade. The related affective dimensions of ambiguity (Marton 2021) and of inconvenience (Berlant 2022) are crucial for accepting the open-endedness of ecologies on the move and of the non-sovereignty of human bodies. These affects are, in fact, reinforced by the enigmatic and corporeally-invasive qualities of olfactory encounters.

Keywords: research-creation, artistic practice, olfaction, smell, sensory studies, Anthropocene, olfactory art, bioart, affect theory, embodiment, art-as-research

[124] Roger Whitson (Washington State University). Media are Time Machines: Time-Criticality in HG Wells’s The Time Machine.

Abstract. In his history of the time-travel genre as a “narratological laboratory,” David Wittenberg curiously argues that H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine articulates time by referencing the emergence of cinema: “the mere press of a lever accomplishes the task of advancing, reversing, or modulating temporal movement, as it would, for instance, in a kinetoscope, a protocinematic device with which Wells was very familiar” (86). The parallel between media and time machine is invoked in the field of media archaeology. For instance, Wolfgang Ernst describes media devices as “sonic time machines” and sees time as “a complex layering of presence and past(s), rich forms of temporal articulation [that] can be identified in a chrono-tonal sense.” This presentation will show how Wells’s book develops a machinic form of time travel as a literary device to conflate three different scales of temporality: the rapid temporality of the film projector, the precise temporality of the industrial clock, and the longue durée of deep time. While Wittenberg sees the time-travel genre as hinging on the development of the time paradox, I suggest that the discovery and development of time-critical processes uses synchronization to put them in the service of extractive capitalism and colonialism.

For Ernst, time-criticality is the delineation and processing of time by media operations. One of his best examples is mechanical escapement in pendulum clocks. While the sundial measures time by the shadow cast from the sun, forming an indexical relation between time and the sun, mechanical escapement processes time as a series of standardized units operating through a mechanical oscillation that does not have an indexical reference other than its own measurement. I suggest that Wells’s book develops time travel as a mechanism to throw into relief the difference between the cultural artifact as enveloped in a history and the operative mechanism processing time. While this dramatization is particularly present in the artifacts the traveler uses to prove that he traveled to the future, a not-so-subtle reference to the surplus value extracted from colonial holdings, it can also be seen in the mechanism itself as engaging in the act of disciplining organisms from vastly different moments in history through a radical form of time synchronization. For me, Wittenberg’s focus on narratology should be supplemented with an account of how media construct various experimental possibilities for narrative. The machinic modulations of time in Wells’s novel provides a powerful example of the entangled relationship between time, media, and narrative. While the extraction, synchronization, and modulation of time alongside their relationship to capitalism will form the central focus of the presentation; it will also show the implications for climate change and its delineation of what Ajay Singh Chadbury calls “the long now.”

Keywords: time-criticality, science-fiction, time-travel, temporality, HG Wells

[125] Futong Ren (Brown University). Aqueous Mediations of the Mekong: a River between Hydrological Flows and Cinematic Speculations.

Abstract. Flowing through Southwest China to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam, the trans-boundary river, the Mekong, sustains the livelihood, ecosystem, and socio-cultural formation of the region. However, hydropower developments have severely impacted the Mekong Basin’s environmental integrity and climate conditions, displacing human and nonhuman communities while altering multi-species relationalities. Stories, indigenous beliefs, and aesthetic forms contemplate the environmental deterioration and mediate shifting cultural, ideological, and historical imaginaries of the Mekong region. Specifically, this paper examines the entanglement between the technological and geopolitical desires for hydropower extraction and the eco-aesthetic practices of independent cinema surrounding the Mekong milieu through a media studies perspective. It considers the 2020 film project, Mekong 2030 – an anthology of five short films by Southeast Asian filmmakers produced and distributed by the Luang Prabang Film Festival – as a representative case to rethink environmental media theory and history tethered to the geo-political specificities of the Mekong regions.

What happens when hydro-science permanently transform geo-political territories, global networks, and postcolonial natural-cultural environments in Southeast

Asia? How can independent cinema and regional festivals challenge not only hydro-hegemony and global capitalism of the Mekong Basin but the dominant model of media globalization and deterritorialization? Following Melody Jue’s urging to rethink media studies’ “terrestrial orientations” (2020) and Joanna Zylinska’s concept of “hydromedia” (2021), this paper aims to trace the aqueous movements of the Mekong in hydropolitical and media terms to grapple with the region’s boundary-crossing identity, socialist pasts, and unpredictable future fraught with environmental crises and ongoing encroachments of indigenous ecologies.

Keywords: Environmental media, Hydropower and hydrosciences, Southeast Asian independent films, Regional media, Film festivals, Regional ecology

[126] Rukimani Pv (Duke University) and Nathanael Elias Mengist (University of Washington). Black and Indigenous Sciences: Transmutations.

Abstract. This roundtable brings together scholars with commitments to Black and Indigenous thought in considering the linkages between science studies, the Anthropocene, coloniality, and the politics of (fugitive) reimagining. Some guiding questions for this roundtable are: following Sylvia Wynter, what are the enclaves of possibility for Black and Indigenous life beyond the violence inscribed by the categories of Western, Imperial Man? How does Black fungibility become a tool to rewrite “the human,” and likewise, reconfigure an orientation of the human to offer us an alternative way of understanding ecology (King)? How can SLSA contribute a reclamation — a transmutation — of “Western” science from its historically anti-indigenous agendas (Sudan) into an advocate of Indigenous scientific self-determination (Bang)?

Engaging in excerpts from these texts with our participants, we aim to (1) facilitate a generative space for thinking through the possibilities of futurity and liberation within the legacy of Western technoscientific thought and (2) edit a transcript of the discussion for submission to Configurations, SLSA’s quarterly journal.

Keywords: the human, coloniality, fugitivity

Chairs: Rukimani PV & Nathanael Elias Mengist

Participants: Bettina Judd, Kessie Alexandre, Alexandria Naima Smith, Emerson Zora Hamsa

The Black and Indigenous Sciences stream brings together scholars with commitments to Black and Indigenous thought in considering the linkages between science studies, the Anthropocene, coloniality, and the politics of (fugitive) reimagining. Some guiding questions for this roundtable are: following Sylvia Wynter, what are the enclaves of possibility for Black and Indigenous life beyond the violence inscribed by the categories of Western, Imperial Man? How does Black fungibility become a tool to rewrite “the human,” and likewise, reconfigure an orientation of the human to offer us an alternative way of understanding ecology (King)? How can SLSA contribute a reclamation — a transmutation — of “Western” science from its historically anti-indigenous agendas (Sudan) into an advocate of Indigenous scientific self-determination (Bang)? Engaging in excerpts from these texts with our participants, we aim to (1) facilitate a generative space for thinking through the possibilities of futurity and liberation within the legacy of Western technoscientific thought and (2) edit a transcript of the discussion for submission to Configurations, SLSA’s quarterly journal.

Bang, Megan, Ananda Marin, and Douglas Medin. “If Indigenous Peoples Stand with the Sciences, Will Scientists Stand with Us?” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (March 1, 2018): 148–59.

https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00498.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Sudan, Rajani. The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41949874.

[127] Jessica Fitzpatrick (University of Pittsburgh). Disanthropocene Stories: Responsible Repositioning in Speculative Fiction and XR .

Abstract. What does it mean to create a *dis*anthropocentric story of climate change? How does considering the scale of climate diaspora from a different planetary perspective—from below ocean waters or from multiple economic positions within another solar system—allow us to better consider the importance of place and embodied movement to the discussion of climate diaspora? How can narratives of irreversible relocations also challenge conceptions of what it means for the marginalized to thrive? This talk pursues these questions by drawing together case studies from (1) speculative fiction (SF) authors invested in the experiences of climate change and diaspora in the Global South and (2) virtual and augmented reality (XR) development teams operating at the edge of our technological ability to fictional world-build. By connecting Stacy Alaimo’s theorization of “transcorporeality” with theories of lived space, this paper explores how literary works like Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and nonfiction and fictional XR titles (e.g. “After Ice”, an AR app which shows if a user’s location will be underwater in 2080, or the VR game Eleven Eleven (2019) which plays through a planetary evacuation) compels readers/players towards an alternative, disanthropocentric, ethical orientation to the natural world and the priority of their movements within it. This paper will also posit how both the speculative literary and immersive technology mediums might further the question of lived perspective within the growing genre of climate fiction, and how XR technologists may benefit from considering the methods, and warnings, of world SF creators.

Keywords: Climate Change Fiction, Extended Reality / Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality, spatial studies

[128] Sara Bimo (York University). When, How, and Why is Interface?

Abstract. Technological interfaces have been theorized alternately as thresholds, surfaces, or boundaries; the site of both embodiment and hermeneutic relations, and world-making devices that mediate the human experience of the technological. While the term “interface” tends to conjure up images of various kinds of screens, the increasing prevalence of micro-sensory environmental technologies complicates this picture. What does it mean to interface with entities that bypass human faculties of perception and engagement? Where does interface go (and what does it do) in an age of elemental technology, where agency and subjectivity can be said to be diffused across extensive material and immaterial assemblages? Are we post-interface?

Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Galloway (2008) who identifies interface as the moment when one material is understood as distinct from another–an “effect” rather than a thing-and deploying the micro-sociology of Gabriel Tarde, this project builds up a theorization of interface as a temporally-bound relation that comes into being instantaneously as a result of violence or conflict, and self-annihilates back into infinitestimal -dividuations in moments of success. Working with this theorization, this project seeks to develop an expanded notion of interface that draws linkages between human-technology interactions, ostensibly “natural” geographic boundaries such as rivers and mountain ranges, and larger geo-political boundaries such as national borders.

Keywords: Interface, microsociology, individuation, posthumanism, assemblage

[129] Thomas Rickert (Purdue University), Laurie Gries (University of Colorado), Michael Lechuga (University of New Mexico) and Byron Hawk (University of South Carolina). Futurities for Land and Climate.

Abstract. Climate signifies both an affective cultural mood and a material set of conditions. The semi-stable entanglement of the two affects both the rhetorical ecologies of local situations and the material ecologies of local environments. As Nate Stormer notes, “ecological conditions affect the climate, over time, and likewise climate shapes ecologies. Mutual conditioning occurs across all levels and places: climate to ecologies, ecologies to climate, but the experience is the weather—by minute, by month, by season” (“Inclement Weather” 40). Such complex entanglements of spaces, times, and experiences have made constructive responses to climate change and environmental disasters tenaciously difficult. Rhetorical measures to slow climate change, reverse environmental damage, or forward innovations that cultivate new cultural pathways and practices are especially difficult, as each requires a variable take on both worlding and temporality. Each presenter in this panel addresses a different version of this entanglement through ulterior responses to the pressing question: how are we to think new, climate-oriented and land-grounded futurities under these conditions?

Keywords: Climate, Rhetoric, Indigeneity, Land, Worlding, Temporality, Futurity

“Addressing Climate Change Anew: Futurity, Deep Meaning, and the Problems of Liberalism”

It is increasingly clear that real measures to thwart climate change are failing, and it is all the more pressing to ask why. Certainly, corporate power and money are potent factors. But, in a sense, this begs the question. Why are publics so hapless in the face of such power—why can they not make at least some inroads on such a pressing issue as the climate? There is a growing strand of argument that claims that liberalism is itself a problem. Common themes that emerge are that liberalism has tied itself to an elitism oriented on scientism, expertise, and facts, while at the same time pursuing forms of individualism that are oriented on property but now also personal identity (Deneen 165). The second orientation, while it has certainly offered massive advances in freedom in social arenas, struggles to achieve broad-based coalition-building on issues of the common weal, including climate change. The first orientation has also proven less successful than hoped, as the focus on fact-based expertise is extremely vulnerable to forms of information attack. Rectifying post-truth will not save us. I argue that new forms of coalition-building in the face of liberalism’s limitations require not only forms of common cause, such as calls to Go Green! (Princen), but a new, publicly-galvanizing mood or what Timothy Stacey calls “deep meaning”—different combinations of myth, religion, and compelling future imaginaries. Ultimately, I argue that forms of deep and common meaning that bring together disparate parties and conflicting traditions are crucial to forging a meaningful futurity in a climate of growing hopelessness.

“Land, Rhetoricity, and Toxic Worldings”

This presentation draws on new materialist ontobiographical research (Gries 2020) conducted at a local super fund site to explore how rhetoricity emerges through toxic landscapes and contributes to unfolding realities experienced differently by human and more-than-human bodies. Superfund sites have oft-been studied by scholars in other disciplines. To date, however, with the exception of Phaedra Pezullo’s Toxic Tourism (2007), superfund sites have received very little rhetorical attention—a missed opportunity to better understand how toxic landscapes trigger biological, affective, and persuasive forces that come to take on social, political, economic and ecological consequences in local ecologies and communities. Such understanding is important, in that superfund sites contribute greatly to not only ecological precarity and “toxic baggage” (Pezullo) but also what I call “toxic worlding”—the spatio-temporal unfolding of multiple realities that emerge through human and more-than-human encounters with toxins and come to take on uneven, differentiated consequences for various bodies in a particular community. As evidence for its rhetorical significance, I share a brief vignette written insitu at a local, contaminated nuclear site located less than two miles from her home. In this vignette, she draws on interdisciplinary theories and philosophies–such as feminist materialisms, phenomenology, rhetoric, decoloniality, settler colonialism, and critical geography informed by Black and Indigenous studies–to explore the affective-persuasive and socio-material experiences of toxic worlding and its implications for our contemporary understanding of rhetoric.

“Responding to Future Settler Imaginaries: Slipstream and Conceptualizing a Space/Time in Critique”

I contend that conceptions of temporality within the U.S. settler Komplex-Assemblage rely on the mediation of future trauma—including physical pain and grief—to justify the current conditions of violence against Land and its stewards, propelling settler occupation. This assertion builds on Veracini’s theorizing of settler consciousness, Lacan’s Imaginary- Symbolic-Real, and Deleuze’s explanation of Foucault to describe how the settler subject is bound to a promised future mediated to materialize settler imaginaries through disaster. To undermine this conception of settler time and theorize temporality otherwise, I pull from Indigenous Studies and Science Fiction Studies to conceptualize a slipstream method for interrupting settler time and thus, demystifying the universalizing narrative of linear progress that harbors settler consciousness. As a critical approach, slipstream allows one to temporalize space and seek out how the spirals of time might slip into each other affecting moments on other levels, like a coiled snake pressing into itself. Then, using this slipstream method, I conceptualize how environmental violences—including the intentional destruction of Land by eco-fascist groups, the destruction of Land for profit, and the climate catastrophes accelerated by petro-culture—are visited again and again onto places like the U.S. southwest, and in the Land now known as New Mexico in particular. From conquest to the implementation of a militarized border, nuclear colonization, gentrification, and now the current water and air contamination from fracking, this place has been visited time and again with violences in the name of settler colonial progress; a slipstream critique unveils these events in relation to one another. “Temporality and Speculative Methodologies: On Climate Futurities” In Rhetorical Climatology, Nate Stormer sees time as change, both contingent, things “might not be this way” in the future, and inevitable, things “will not be this way” in the future. The latter is a kind of thownness into the future, the former a kind of futurity that humans more readily co-participate in. Humans might toggle between the two or acknowledge them through senses of “duration, or looping, or continuation” (172). Temporality engages and enacts these senses of time as “the-more-than-can-be-now” (172), which makes it both a multiplicity and multiple. In the same work, Bridie McGreavy sees temporality through the model of tidal waves. She writes, “The temporality of tides is cyclical in a non-deterministic way, as tides manifest differently depending on the specific arrangements of weather, geography, season, the moon’s position relative to the earth and relative to the sun . . .” (92). Such a “tidal temporality” is, then, a multiplicity, always a function of intersecting conditions, and multiple, always an endless variability that produces differing versions over time. Stormer finds hope in this contingency of multiplicity and the multiple, but my sense skews more toward the inevitable. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks argues that our current technological level of civilization will start to collapse between 2040 and 2050. Even if that is 2070 to 2080, the fact that our current system is wildly unsustainable seems more certain than not. How do humans think about the future more contingently in the face of the fact that “civilization is already dead” (Scranton)? I will draw on speculative methodologies and Richard Fisher’s psychological heuristics for thinking through the duration, loops, and continuities of climate futurities.

[130] Nathanael Elias Mengist Mengist (University of Washington), Kaleb Germinaro (University of Illinois Chicago), Yveline C. Saint Louis (University of Washington) and Rukimani Pv (Duke University). Black and Indigenous Sciences: Lands.

Abstract. The Black and Indigenous Sciences stream brings together scholars with commitments to Black and Indigenous thought in considering the linkages between science studies, the Anthropocene, coloniality, and the politics of (fugitive) reimagining. During an urgent time of irregular disturbances in environmental and ecological cycles distributed unevenly across space, “more-than-Western” sciences are needed to support the most vulnerable inhabitants of our planet. These rapidly changing phenological rhythms raise the stakes for what it means to thrive amidst the urgent challenges of the 21st century. We aim to facilitate a generative space for thinking through the possibilities of futurity and liberation within the legacy of Western technoscientific thought. We are: *Lands*, Waters, Forests, Seeds.

Keywords: green gentrification, kujitegemea, martyrdom

Presenter: Kaleb Germinaro

Title: Youth Learning for Spatial Reclamation

Abstract: This presentation encounters “green gentrification” in urban contexts. In this case study, a high school in Seattle, Washington that serves a predominantly Black and Brown population serves as a site for youth engaging concepts at the intersection of environmental racism and design. Students from this high school self-enrolled in a two week speculative landscape design program that asked the question, “how would you redesign your highschool?”. What emerged from discourse about contaminants in their soil and pollutants in their air was a process of reconstruction to address previous and ongoing harm. We used the medium of collage as a cohesive graphic form to capture the dynamics of relationships, events, and initiatives that have been cultivated over the years in their neighborhood. This project is a case for Black youth reconstructions of space that build on traditions of Black folks’ resistance to displacement while being agents in the transformation of their own ecologies. Learning in community with each other provides an opportunity to cultivate a Black sense of place while activating spatial knowledge, thus serving as a methodological and analytical framework for collective critique of green gentrification. Collage provided a unique process to engage youth in ways they would steward a space, design for their futures, and map themselves within and across their neighborhood.

Presenter: Yveline C. Saint Louis

Title: Climate Spasms and the Resurrection of Radical Black Subjectivities in Tanzania

Abstract: The racial capitalocene and its cultivation of global, yet unevenly distributed, climate chaos brings forth questions about possibilities for life beyond the death-dealing paradigms that seek to disrupt and disable Black and Indigenous ecologies. With each shifting season, the predictable becomes more unpredictable, threatening the livelihoods and established ecological practices and knowledge systems of those closest to the land. In Tanzania, where over 65% of the population is involved in agriculture for either employment, subsistence, or supplemental income, the changing environmental landscape is particularly foreboding. In alignment with Justin Hosbey and J.T Roane’s conceptual framework, “Global Black Ecologies,” this ethnographic study is a snapshot of the perceptions, challenges, apprehensions, desires, and futurities expressed by small farmers in the Arusha Region trying to hold on to a way of life that has historically been both a postcolonial symbol of self-reliance and a major characteristic of national identity. Through ethnographic vignettes and found poems written in collaboration with my interlocutors, this paper begins to frame climate change as a kaleidoscopic force that resurrects anticolonial histories and desires for kujitegemea (self-reliance) through invocations of radical Black future-making, ecological continuity, and abundance.

Presenter: Rukimani PV

Title: The Planetary and a Reimagining of Palestinian Life Through a Black Feminist Lens

Black feminist praxis calls us to “reject and upend the colonial logics that undergirds the canon” (Khabeer 10), and in doing so, necessitates a re-imagining of Palestinian life beyond war, death, and suffering; it is an affirmation of the notion that Palestinians have the right to live, to love, and to prosper. This abstract comes approximately 8 months after Hamas’ attack on October 7th, 2023, where retaliation by the state has resulted in over 40, 000 Palestinians being ruthlessly murdered. The rapid decimation, necropolitical condition of Palestinian life calls us to consider “what does it mean to be human – politically – in the wake of the plantation?” (Thomas 1). I turn to a black feminist praxis as my starting point as a means to understand what is at stake for those that are read as terrorist, non-white, non-human. Specifically, I am interested in: What does it mean to imagine Palestinian liberation beyond land? What does it mean to respond and bear witness to their mass murder, land destruction, and planetary destruction? Most importantly, how can we defy the logics of settler-colonialist violence in the afterlife of Palestinian martyrs? Here, I call for a political re-imagining of Palestinian life, an ontological futuristic re-orientation of the self towards the planetary, an orientation that bears witness and mourns for the loss of the land, and the loss of the people, and deeply feels the disruption of kin that is evoked in the forced removal from one’s figuration on Earth.

[131] Nathanael Elias Mengist (University of Washington), Bettina Judd (Emory University), Kessie Alexandre (New York University) and Alexandria Naima Smith (University of Virginia). Black and Indigenous Sciences: Waters.

Keywords: oceanographics, waterways, wet archives

Title: Mitochondrial Eve’s Water Broke: Black Feminist Oceanographics

Presentor: Bettina Judd

Abstract: Through the body of literature that has emerged and emergent that expands the relation of the African Diaspora to the ocean, this paper explores what I call a Black Feminist Oceanographic reading of ongoing discourse on the human genome, the reparative notion of African Ancestry, and the race science underpinnings of tracing ancestry. Taking up the work of Alondra Nelson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dorothy Roberts, Claudia Rankine, and Jade Sasser, this paper tarries with the affective longings for a universal mother, the sense of loss and rupture from that mother, and the troubled relationship with racial science that promises belonging.

Title: Refusing Refuse: Waterway Toxicity and the Racialization of Space

Presentor: Kessie Alexandre

Abstract: The Lower Passaic River in the city of Newark, New Jersey is one of America’s most polluted waterways and largest Superfund sites. This paper discusses the racialization of space through varied accounts of the Lower Passaic as a toxified waterway. First, it examines the ways in which Newark residents imagined and acted upon environmental toxicity and bodily risk through narratives of urban fishermen suspected of eating toxic fish caught from the Passaic. Alexandre finds that Newarkers used these accounts to socially locate themselves in relation to one another, conceptualize their own bodily risk and ways of knowing, and forge claims to environmental justice in the city. These narratives reveal environmental justice activists engaged in the practice of what Audre Lorde calls biomythography through which they assert a Black sense of place. At the same time, human-fish interactions in Newark have triggered public health, economic development, and environmental remediation interventions aimed at grappling with the city’s legacy of industrial pollution and corporate impunity. This paper thus considers and challenges the ways in which public-private interventions have drawn on narratives of Black and brown anglers to shift responsibility for toxic exposure to residents themselves.

Title: A Wet Archive: Literary Dialogue, Disoriented Senses, Black Feminist Poetics

Presentor: Alexandria Naima Smith

Abstract: Black and queer scholarship on diaspora has suggested that we understand disorientation, in material and existential dimensions, as an outcome of Black, Indigenous, and other-than-human life in the wake of colonial and imperial violence. In the work of Black feminist thinkers of the Black diaspora, we often find the sensory capacities of both authors and subjects positioned as the vehicles through which poetic, narrative, and theoretical knowing travels. In this presentation I think through disoriented senses in Black diasporas by tracing intertextual conversations between and among Dionne Brand, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Bettina Judd. Individually and in conversation, these Black feminist poet-scholars meditate on disoriented senses as neither problem, nor solution, but workable conditions, of Black and Indigenous life in the world. This presentation engages three questions: in what ways has disorientation been made manifest in diasporic Black feminist writing? How have Black feminist discussions of diaspora invoked the senses? How do Black and Indigenous ways of knowing offer us insight into sensory experience beyond hegemonic forms of sense-making? Privileging dialogue and response rather than answers, I turn to my interlocutors’ writings on the middle passage, saltwater, doors of no return, whales, Black motherhood, tears, and breathing underwater.

[132] Nathanael Elias Mengist (University of Washington), Neda Atanasoski (University of Maryland), Nassim Parvin (University of Washington), Amrita Vinod (University of Pittsburgh) and Sam Stoeltje (Herkimer College). Black and Indigenous Sciences: Forests.

Keywords: intelligences, deities, flesh

Presentors: Neda Atanasoski & Nassim Parvin

Title: Smart Forests

Abstract: This presentation considers government and industry “smart forest” initiatives alongside artistic and activist reimaginings of what it means to learn from the intelligences (broadly conceived) of forests, trees, and nonhuman life. Smart forest initiatives differ in aims and scope as well as in the kinds of technologies that they employ. Yet, a quick survey reveals that they are broadly aimed at “banking nature” through a centralized system that idealizes total monitoring and management. The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, for example, centers their smart forests initiatives around deployment of sensors and a centralized mode of access. Their goal is to deploy sensors to collect and transmit essential environmental measurements wirelessly to the internet from strategically distributed sites across different geographic, climatic, and vegetation gradients. Real-time access to sensor data is provided through a central website, and visualization and outreach tools will be employed to engage researchers, resource managers, educators, and the public with the data collected from these ‘Smart Forests’. The initiative promises the development and implementation of cyber infrastructure to improve environmental monitoring at these sites. By contrast, the artworks and activist approaches discussed in this presentation foreground knowledge that exceeds western rationalist approaches. They orient us toward what Indigenous scholars have underlined as a way in the world that is in tune with the knowledge and wisdom of the more than human, and includes a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings and environment.

Presenter: Amrita Vinod

Title: Indigenous Architectonics: Sacred Groves in South India and East Africa

Abstract The sacred grove, as its name suggests, is often understood as patches of forest land that are revered and managed by communities because of their cultural and spiritual significance. They stage rituals, spiritual practices, and daily or seasonal performances as a part of people’s reverence towards the sacred spaces and the deities dwelling in them. Many sacred groves in South India are places of worshipping local deities like serpent gods, Bhagavathi (female deities), and many others like Teyyaṃ(s), depending on which community enjoys the right to do so. In the context of Sacred groves in India, environments like Madhav Gadgil identified that sacred groves play important ecological roles by preserving and maintaining biodiversity. “African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change,” edited by Michael J. Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru brings together scholars to delineate how sacred groves relate to social dynamics and historical contexts as sacred groves have been in a problematic as well as frequent categorization as relics of ancient forest and cultural relics from pre-colonial past. This paper brings discussions on sacred groves in South Asia and in the African content conversation by acknowledging that sacred groves as a cultural and natural entity possess potential beyond any of its associated with one religion, culture, or geography. By reading into the case studies and the main approaches and views taken by authors on various sacred groves in Africa and Asia, this paper will offer an insight into the commonalities and differences in the cultural underpinnings of the space or place-making practice of sacred groves.

Presentor: Sam Stoeltje

Title: Performance of “Carnal Opacity” in Slave Old Man

Abstract: Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Slave Old Man (L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse) is concerned with opacity and the rendering of opacity in, by, and through the flesh. Its protagonist, the Slave Old Man, after a lifetime of “docility,” one morning refuses work and flees into the Martinican rainforest. He is pursued by the Master, and the Master’s dog, the mastiff (le molosse). In his escape, the Slave Old Man interacts, collaborates, at times seems almost to merge with the other-than-human world around him. These are deformations, transformations, and reconfigurations of the human, and they are coextensive with the character’s lifelong practice of opacity in his behavior and speech. The Slave Old Man’s escape, his “marooning” into the other-than-human world of the rainforest, is a culmination of his usage of his own flesh as a medium for the performance of opacity. Understanding the narrative in this way, I am following the theoretical and philosophical motions and gestures of the text. Edouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation, elaborates an aesthetic of opacity. Selections from Glissant are interwoven as chapter headings throughout Slave Old Man, and references to (the protagonist’s) “opaque flesh” and the “carnal opacity” of the rainforest make clear that this narrative directly responds to Glissant. I will think about how opacity in action and body in Chamoiseau’s strange, mythic, utterly realist novel become challenges to the genres of human form that structure the economy and scene of the Caribbean plantation.

[133] Nathanael Elias Mengist (University of Washington), Emerson Zora Hamsa (Auburn University), Dykee Gorell (University of Washington) and Kristen Reynolds (University of Minnesota). Black and Indigenous Sciences: Seeds.

Keywords: metaphysics, regimes, apocalypse

Presenter: Emerson Zora Hamsa

Title: Black Obscurant: Antehuman Praxis and the Queer Cover of Captivity in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed

Octavia E. Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980) proffers an exploration of blackness as praxis, and potential, before and against the human. The novel revitalizes the ways in which we think about (un)freedom in the wake of the ongoing terror of the plantation. Herein I limn the ways in which Butler’s use of historical speculation rejects a western historical project that organizes itself through antiblack logics and, instead, presents an account of a past that rejects historical narratives that privilege self-making through the possession of the black form via the plantation. I argue that Butler employs the black speculative as [a] method that, at once, illumines and critiques the ways that the designation of the human—as a category of sentience and a genre of being—is the foundation for the antiblack world. As well, Butler posits what Katherine McKittrick calls a geographic story, which is to say that her novel reconstitutes the terrain of the plantation by positioning the slave toward a disavowal of the human and restaging the plantation as a clandestine site of freedom.1 By narrating a speculative history of the New World through the complex relationship of two black “immortals,” Butler’s Wild Seed productively considers the potential of relationality and survival that is not organized around the hierarchy of the human, but rather through a black metaphysics that precedes the human. 1 See Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Presenter: Dykee Gorrell

Title: Black Foodways Against US “Food Regimes”

In “the” United States, food systems are complex, adaptive networks involving food production, distribution, and consumption. U.S. food systems are shaped by corporate and governmental bodies as well as legal and economic processes (Neff, 2014; Wilde, 2013; Holt-Giménez, 2011; Hollander, 2003; Ferdinand, 2019; Freshour et al., 2023). Given how food systems are formed not only by natural and cultural relations but by forces of subjugation, it may be more appropriate to speak of “food regimes.” Historically, food regimes in the Americas date back to European colonization, with the industrialization of U.S. food systems linked to colonial plantation systems. While positivist social science and technology research dominate traditional food system studies, critical food studies challenge these perspectives by exposing the historical and contemporary food regimes rooted in colonialism, commodity crop economies, and the marginalization of black and indigenous agricultural practices. This paper examines the racializing processes and technologies of food systems, exploring rice and sugarcane production histories, carceral plantation legacies, and Black agrofood movements advocating for land reclamation through pica and African American mud foodways.

Presenter: Kristen Reynolds

Title: Data Colonialism, Antiblack Infrastructures, and Apocalyptic Futurities in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Abstract: In “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject,” Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias argue for colonialism as the frame that is key to making sense of how “social life all over the globe becomes an ‘open’ resource for extraction that is somehow ‘just there’ for capital.” This paper expands on their ideas, exploring the big data industry’s indebtedness to legacies of slavery and extractive colonialism. After establishing the relationship between antiblackness, data extraction, capitalism, and coloniality, I turn to N.K. Jemisin’s speculative fiction novel The Fifth Season (TFS), which takes up how antiblackness becomes both epistemological and material infrastructure within empire. I read TFS through Singh and Jackson’s concept of “seeing like an infrastructure” to demonstrate how the novel adopts this lens to first, unveil antiblackness as key to the modern world’s maintenance and second, develop a methodology for radical change. Ultimately, I argue that TFS offers a methodology for the disruption of colonialist antiblack logics that are meaningful for resisting extractive forms of colonialism today, especially data colonialism. Overall, I expand on the concept of seeing like an infrastructure, arguing that doing so when infrastructures are also people calls for radical, apocalyptic, departures from normalized ideologies and infrastructures that make extractive violence and industries possible.

[134] Patricia Solorzano (giraSOLa dance). Danzas Migratorias: Choreography for the Monarch Butterfly –-Dance as embodied ecology and archive of migration.

Abstract. We will present, and participants will eventually practice, the choreographic methods used for the site-adaptive dance project Danzas Migratorias: Choreography for the Monarch Butterfly. This project, funded by the Mexico National Endowment for Culture and the Arts, arises from the connection between the resilience of complex migratory systems and their environment.

In this project, we visited the sanctuary of the monarch in Mexico and used its movement patterns–individual and collective, adaptive behavior, sounds, and ecosystem to propel a choreography that, mirroring the monarch, resists the pressures of climate catastrophe and continues moving through its migratory rhythm. The project included collaboration among dancers, scientists, and the communities along the monarch’s migratory route under displacement and dispossession (archiving, workshops, movement).

Workshop participants will learn to “listen with the body” to situate it as a place for knowledge and meaning making, develop kinesthetic empathy, and make kin with the non-human (Haraway). To do so, we will first listen to a live transmission of the monarch sanctuary (streambox installed by collaborator Rob Mackay) as we practice drawn and embodied imagery, and learn simple strategies for migratory coordination and movement. Then, we will head outdoors for a walking practice and to enact dance scores inspired by the monarch’s own dynamics. Finally, we will consolidate our movement of migration, coordination, and environmental resilience through a mapping exercise. Through this series of exercises, participants will learn the basic research tools of dance artists, the progression from an idea to a choreography, and why this practice matters as we face ecological and geopolitical challenges.

Keywords: migration, monarch butterflies, dance improvisation, embodied ecology, kinesthetic empathy, making-kin

[135] Colleen Small (UT Austin PhD Student). The Texas Star Mushroom and State Environments.

Abstract. [I learned about the SLSA conference like a day ago, and I’m not sure I have something that’s enough of a fit yet. I used this abstract for a conference earlier in the year; if you’re open to something that connects mushrooms and the state of Texas with environment and diaspora (I feel like it’s there but need to think more), I’ll talk about this idea with the faculty member I’m working with on an STS comps list. This conference really interests me, so part of what’s happening here is me trying to be there to hear other presentations, truly.]

ABSTRACT

In 2021, Republican Governor Greg Abbott made the Texas star mushroom the official State Mushroom of Texas. For Texas, the mushroom became an image-bearer, a site to reflect the state’s own aseity, exceptionalism, manifest destiny, permission to wield violence, and ultimate choice. The legal resolution describes the mushroom’s agency—its selectivity “about where it chooses to grow”—but grants it none. The premise here is critical: a mushroom that chooses Texas can do so because Texas is prior to it, can contain it. Texas is the waiting premise impartially adjudicating over whether to accept the mushroom as evidence. Texas, not a forest floor, is the natural habitat, the empowered and established theater. The language of a selective mushroom empowers Texas. It reinforces the idealized world of Texas, a world worthy of finding and choosing, even if there is no choice.

State symbolism sometimes seems anodyne, another way legislators focus on trivial matters or invite school children to participate in the legislative process and watch political theater. I argue that more happens here. The Texas star mushroom shows how the state uses religious undertones and perspectives to both justify and expand Texan exceptionalism. A hallowed Texas gives a familiar religious warrant to what is otherwise obviously false: that Texas, a state not even 200 years old, is somehow prior to a mushroom, an authority that accommodates the mushroom to its environment.

Keywords: state symbols, fungal turn, discursive border practices, environmental border practices, mushrooms/mycology, states and environment

[136] Daniel Lichtman (Stockton University). Collaborative Worldbuilding and Speculative Futuring.

Abstract. This talk will present a variety of recent 3D and immersive reality projects that explore collaborative world-building and speculative futuring. Presented projects include: Collective Futuring in Nebraska’s Panhandle (Ash Eliza Smith, Sam Bendix and Daniel Lichtman): In this project, community members experiencing or recovering from Substance Use Disorder participate in worldbuilding exercises and use a digital story engine to develop interactive audio-visual narratives that speculate on collective futures of communal support. Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages, a special issue of the Hyperrhiz Journal of New Media Culture, published in fall 2024: Projects consist of collage-based interactive 3D scenes that explore post-human environments, queer materialities and collective memory. MetaEternity, a VR experience, performance and installation by Teresa Braun, Ayodamola Okunseinde, June Bee, and Zelong Li. In this project, viewers create and participate in an environment that speculates on the continued social and relational life in the metaverse after physical death.

Featured projects are all developed in connection with the Community Game Development Toolkit (previously presented at SLSA), a creative framework for developing 3D environments that draw on users’ own drawings, photo cut-outs and DIY 3D scans. To explore a context for the presented projects, the presentation will draw on Anna Anthropy’s idea of the DIY game as a zine, or a small-scale interactive experience in which gameplay and/or audio-visual style present the creator’s own life experiences, particularly those that challenge the cannon of straight white male game design culture, and present a selection of historical and recent game projects in this lineage.

Keywords: worldbuilding, futuring, game design, collaboration

[137] Daniel Lichtman (Stockton University). Cicada Mountain.

Abstract. Note: this is a submission for an artwork for exhibition

This series of audio-text pieces was created as a collaboration between myself and GPT-3, an AI text generator. These poetic, absurdist narratives tell stories of vulnerability, insecurity and dreams of anthropomorphic and spiritual grandeur from the perspectives of a series of insects, animals and plants. To create these pieces, I started by writing fragments of text about the animal/plant in each section. I used these fragments as prompts for the GPT-3 engine, which produced AI-generated text in response. I then went through an editorial process, in which I edited the generated text and experimented with using some of this generated material as new prompts for the GPT-3 system. In the end, each piece is a combination of fragments of text that I wrote and edited fragments of text generated by the AI. Each text is accompanied by sound effects, which the user triggers manually as they read the story.

The first piece was initially conceived as a radio play performance during the AI Radio Play workshop with Ash Eliza Smith, Jinku Kim and Robert Twomey at the Society for Language, Science and Art Conference, Purdue University, 2022.

View the artwork here: https://www.daniellichtman.com/cicada-mountain/

Keywords: generative AI, post-human, poetry

[138] Hank Gerba (Stanford University), Danielle Adair (Stanford University), Paul Kim (UC Santa Barbara) and Zach McLane (UC Santa Barbara). Atmospheric Techniques: Sound, Race, Place, and the Digital.

Abstract. Panel Abstract:

Across four papers, this panel investigates different methods through which the technical, cultural, performative, and political each generate what we might call “atmospheres.” Whether constructed via museum soundscapes, geopolitical musical performances, pastoral imaginaries, or through processes of discretization, each paper investigates the processes by which systems of communication, aesthetics, labor, and subjectivation are generated and sustained, but also disrupted and warped. These atmospheres are understood as precisely those configurations which are paradoxically both “below” us—the subperceptual, the infrastructural—and “above”—the supra-perceptual, the imaginary, and publics. Working across a range of disciplinary methods and methodological tacks, the panel seeks to broaden the theoretical utility of the atmospheric toward the theorization of complex and scalar objects of study.

Keywords: Sound Studies, smartphones, Apple, race, performance, digital aesthetics, mediality, gentrification

Danielle Adair Stanford University dcorrell@stanford.edu

Title: (Music) or Sound as Space

Abstract: On the first-generation iPhone, music was accessed by what was considered “the iPod app” (i.e., iTunes). With iOS 5 in 2011, however, iTunes was replaced by the Music app. By 2015, with iOS 8.4, Music, the app, was updated with functionality for Apple Music, a streaming service. Since 2016, in order to access their ‘sounds of Music,’ users have increasingly turned to hearables, which with the iPhone, implies AirPods. This paper considers the relatively recent embrace of AirPods by museums as well. This invitation is set against the earlier admonishment, by art world actors and institutions, of the iPhone in such spaces. Since 2021 the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and other American art venues have integrated soundtracks within their static exhibitions; they do so utilizing the private device of the viewer, the hearable. Through interviews, exhibition ethnography, and marketing analysis, this paper investigates the use of AirPods within the museum-going experience. Thinking alongside Shannon Mattern’s “urban public voice,” I explore how museum soundtracks alter the spatial dynamics of public institutions. The institutional trend that I identify relates to larger discourses surrounding the culturally constructed divisions of visual and sonic expression, the role of sound within modernity, and the evolution of practices of listening begot by new sound mediation technologies. Without a sense of internal/external sound, listeners are sooner transported by external voices and interests. Gallery soundtracks are one such voice.

Keywords: Sound Studies; smartphones; museums; earbuds; space; Apple

Hank Gerba Stanford University hankg@stanford.edu

Title: Digital Atmospherics

Abstract: This paper theorizes digitality as a technical atmosphere, one which is obliquely felt through images which, like unbidden guests, perturb the boundaries of perception. Felt through phenomena such as moiré patterns, beat frequencies, stroboscopic effects, these artifacts of digital artifacts (which are here understood as the emergent results of discretization) demonstrate the complex and paradoxical relationship between images, environment, and subjectivation. These phenomena demonstrate that the aesthetic modulations produced by digital processes, from simple gridded windows through to the most advanced computational displays, are modulations of precisely the pseudo-transcendental boundaries between matter and form, the decipherment of which constitute what Sylvia Wynter called a new science. Indeed, the mode of structuration evinced by such digital atmospherics (along with their analog counterparts) are argued herein to comprise the ur-operations of mediality.

Keywords: Digital, artifact, mediality

Paul Kim UC Santa Barbara paulkim@ucsb.edu

Title: Performance as Racial Technique: “American Pie” and South Korean Subjectivity

Abstract: On April 25, 2023, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and his spouse Kim Keon-Hee accompanied United States President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden on a tour of the Arlington National Cemetery to honor the lives of American Korean War casualties. Notably, this visit culminated in Yoon performing Don McLean’s “American Pie” in an informal repayment to President Biden who gifted Yoon a guitar signed by McLean. Thinking alongside scholars such as Mimi Nguyen and Jodi Kim who have theorized the Pacific subject’s relation to the United States as one of indebtedness, in this paper I emphasize the gift structure of Yoon’s performance. Yoon, offered a guitar he did not ask for, was then requested by Biden to perform a song. In this performance, a parallel event to his visit to the Arlington National Cemetery, Yoon is already constructed as a subject in debt to the United States. By considering this process of Cold War Pacific subject formation, I examine Yoon’s performance as an event of race-making. If, as Wendy Chun writes, race can be thought of “as a technology,” then race is not only prescribed, but also wielded. In this way of thinking about race as technology, race is made through enactment. Taking Yoon’s performance as a moment of racial enactment, structured within a gift economy, I consider how, if race is a technology, performance is its technique.

Keywords: Race; performance; debt; technique

Title: Cool Politics, Cool Aesthetics

Abstract: A critical reflection on what has been called the historic UC-wide graduate worker strike. Zach McLane UC Santa Barbara zmclane@ucsb.edu Title: Gentrified Landscapes and the PastoralOS Abstract: Beginning in June of 2013 with the announcement of macOS Mavericks, Apple shifted its naming convention for macOS from various big cats (Jaguar, Tiger, Mountain Lion) to California landmarks (Yosemite, High Sierra, Mojave, Big Sur, Sonoma, and most recently, Sequoia). Each new macOS has also been accompanied by a new default desktop wallpaper, which is tied to the locations of each macOS’s name. Using these California macOS desktop wallpapers as an entrypoint, this paper unravels the relationship between land, labor, and technology that Apple’s wallpapers index and envision. By understanding the macOS desktop as a space in which the so-called ‘creative-class’ labors, I consider how this creative labor is distanced from the racialized and classed labor that both Apple products and the California economy at large is dependent upon. Turning to the history of landscape painting and photography as a space of colonial vision and worldmaking, this paper asks: What kind of pastoral imaginary of California do Apple’s macOS wallpapers represent? Likewise, if we are to understand this creative class as the gentrifying class, how might we understand this “PastoralOS” as an aesthetic manifestation of the frontier imaginary of gentrification in California? Reading the sanitized landscapes of Apple’s macOS wallpapers in the context of what Tracy Rosenthal calls the “homeless industrial complex,” I argue that Apple’s “PastoralOS” aims to disappear its very condition of possibility: displacement, mass incarceration, and racialized labor.

Keywords: digital aesthetics, Apple, gentrification, pastoral

[139] Anne Collins Goodyear (Bowdoin College). The Biology of Jim Dine’s Portrait/Drawings.

Abstract. Describing his approach to making a drawing, Jim Dine remarks: “The quest is to keep the thing alive.” Dine’s comment offers fascinating insight both into the nature of the works he produces and into his process, fusing a dedication to a continual, often years long, manipulation of his compositions with the physical result of his work: sutured, scarred, even punctured compositions wresting hard-wrought likenesses into being. Focusing on Jim Dine’s portraiture—his self-portraits and his depictions of others—this presentation explores the organic materiality of Dine’s portrait/drawings, which posits an analogy between the object, the subject represented, and even the artist himself. By the terms of this extended biological metaphor, Dine’s paper functions as an analogue for skin, reflecting the inevitable wrinkling and spotting of aging human flesh. Amplifying the connection, Dine declares in one instance: “Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life,” and, in another, about his portraiture: “It’s about what I took into … my

DNA, what I added to it, this memory.” Creating a complex parallel between the substance of the portrait and the likeness captured in graphite and charcoal, Dine maps the fluidity of personal identity through his materials. “I’m not interested in someone else’s secrets, but I am interested in what those secrets have done to the human visage,” he notes. Process, then, more so than illusionism, informs likeness, as the work’s material construction embeds the portrait/drawing with meaning, mirroring the flux and flow of human life and experience.

Keywords: Portraiture, Drawing, Materiality

[140] Anna Davidson (Cornell University). Mohawk River Project, Imagined Futures.

Abstract. The Mohawk River flows 149 miles through Haudenosaunee ancestral lands ending in the Hudson in Upstate New York. In the 1800’s the river was severely modified by the installation of the Erie Canal. Today the Mohawk has five permanent dams, nine movable dams, and five hydropower plants. When the Erie Canal was completed, so was the railroad followed by the interstate, both hugging the river and more efficient means of moving goods. Today, the canal is viewed as a polluted superhighway for invasive species and a million dollar-a-year gift to yacht owners.

As rivers do, the Mohawk watershed floods, most notably in ‘06, ‘13, and in 2011 during hurricane Irene resulting in loss of lives and significant costly damage. In 2010 the NY Department of Environmental Conservation released the Mohawk River Action Agenda. The first framework for watershed management in this basin, it is impetus for the multilayered work, Mohawk River Project consisting of a new course at Cornell, student art exhibitions, and a community-engaged artwork for which Davidson brought a blank canoe to communities soliciting messages intended for law makers. Messages of concern were incorporated from the indigenous and scientific communities, middle schoolers from the Youth Climate Summit, and New York Mills middle school students who experience severe flooding. In August 2024 the canoe will be paddled down the river as a performance piece by Davidson then taken out and exhibited at the NY State Capitol intended for the eyes of lawmakers. This presentation discusses the process of making this work and important questions that surfaced.

Keywords: Climate, Visual art, Indigeneity