Make-Shift Anthropocene Symbiosis Station and Interface for Vibrant Exchange

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READING L.I.S.T.

Literature for Immersion in Symbiotic Transformation

From gritty, cyberpunk fiction to cultural criticism, I’ve selected these texts to accompany the City of Kelowna artist residency.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. New York, New York, Berkley, 2018.
Haraway, Donna J..“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991. p. 149-181.
Wilk, Elvia. “Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?” E-Flux, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/191258/is-ornamenting-solar-panels-a-crime/.
Wakkary, Ron L.. Things we could design: For more than human-centered worlds. MIT Press. 2021.
Shelley, Mary W.. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford University Press, New York. 1998.
Butler, Octavia. A Few Rules for Predicting the Future. 2000. Chronicle Books, 2024, https://app.kortext.com/borrow/2525065.
Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220kts.

I.N.T.E.R.F.A.C.E.S.

Interconnections, Natures, Technologies, Extinctions, and Relevant Fictions for Adaptation, Cooperation, and Ecological Solidarity

He jacked in.

"Dixie?"

"Yeah."

"You ever try to crack an Al?"

"Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin', jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass."

"What did it look like, the visual?"

"White cube."

– William Gibson’s Neuromancer, 1984

Gibson’s Neuromancer, first published in 1984 is often credited as the catalyst of the genre of cyberpunk, defined by “high-tech, low-life” stories, with dystopian visuals crystalized in the public imagination by films like Bladerunner, The Matrix, and Minority Report. Neuromancer is a surreal, dark, and gritty story of love, deceipt, hedonism, self-destruction, and ungraspably complex cyberspace.

As I work on M.A.S.S.I.V.E., a contraption of off-grid sculptures made for interfacing with what we call nature, I’m interested in Gibson’s world as it describes not just interfaces, but access-points and in-betweens involving a more-than-human cyberspace. Naturespace and cyberspace offering up some interesting parallels, concerns, and interactions.

^{I recently made this illustration of a boxy, modular interactive sculpture for M.A.S.S.I.V.E., based on prototypes I’ve made progress on so far. Pictured is an educational game on a modded gameboy, a two-output radio (one for plant-friendly frequencies and one for the usual ones), an irrigation system, and seed dispenser.}

Interfaces/Inbetweens

In Gibson’s cyberspace planes and plains, an AI system can run a near-infinite number of processes, operate in incalculable places as once, and appear to a human visitor as a white cube¹. For characters in this world, it might be convenient to believe an otherworldly consciousness like an AI exists separate from humans. However its conditions, connections, and consequences are troublingly real.

Interconnectedness is inherent to the cyberpunk genre’s analysis of class, exploitation, corporate power, and resilient transformation. Fibre-optics transmitting uncanny amounts of data are made with minerals mined off-world by machines or slaves, behavioural data is used to extrapolate complex predictive models to manipulate human activity, contracts are written between AIs and underground syndicates to carry out revenge plots, and sophisticated code is used to liberate through body modifications, control through memory implants. Data’s materiality is a little clearer when it affects what we consider human systems—like compromising oppressive secturity protocols or consolidating the power of corporate empires. I hope that sounds as familiar to you as it does to me..

What unifies the ‘unlikely heroes’ in Neuromancer is that they defy, embrace, and bear witness to consequential, banal, and awesome interconnections of the technological and material. Two holographic figures appear to Case, the protagonist, in a crowded restaurant. The holograms are designed, with perverse intent, to resemble an enemy performing horrifying, violent, and lurid acts with Case’s lover Molly, all for the crowd’s entertainment. Distressed and enraged, Casae escapes the scene to sever his senses from what he’s seen. Later, while Molly is infiltrating a corporate linchpin’s headquarters, she is informed that someone can see through her eyes and feel what she feels— through a technology called SimStim— she recognizes the ‘rider’ as Case, who has connected from his terminal. Instead of disconnecting like she’d done before, she shares with him a vulnerable story about someone special from her past, and how Case reminds her of him. Moments like these pull these characters into worlds between worlds; into the horrible and the sublime; as the digital and material encode one another.

D3c0d1ng_th3_F4lse_B1n4ry

The Modern world loves building binaries; digital and real; nature and culture; human and nonhuman; organic and synthetic; digital and real; past and future. But as Case discovers, a dissolving binary can reveal the real. These moments can be painful as we see in the restaurant, but the overall consequences of a dissolving binary bring him from numbness to passion. These moments motivate him to pursue sublime and difficult things like life, love, and knowledge.

I believe this reveal of the real is a consequence of challenging any dominant binary. Including the historically convenient severing of the human from the nonhuman.

It is painful and humbling work to challenge the binary between human/nature. If humans and nature are not separate like we’re told, exploiting land and nonhumans means exploiting our families, communities, selves, and a rich network of vibrant matter. To collapse the boundary between human and nature is to discover the interconnected horrors of our sixth-mass extinction.

On the other hand, it is empowering and collaborative work to challenge the binary between human/nature. If humans and nature are not separate like we’re told, taking care of the land and the nonhumans means taking care of our families, communities, selves, and a rich network of vibrant matter. To collapse the boundary between human and nature is to discover an an interconnected and empowering solidarity with all beings and non-beings.

I believe that from this empowerment and trouble is the best place to try and build resilient, symbiotic relationships. Especially at local levels, where one size does not fit all. However, cultural revitalisation programs, environmental restoration projects, and rights and labour movements are tried and tested formulas for better ways of living and dying with other beings.

M.A.S.S.I.V.E. is none of these formulas, but it’s my intention that it empowers and troubles; through gesture, play, dis/re-orientation, discovery, and small successes and failures. Later this year I’m inviting by members of the public (yes, I mean you!) to interact in outdoor spaces with the interfaces I’m building— screens, buttons, sounds, water, and seeds. I hope to articulate symbiotic possibilities for simple activities like playing a game or listening to the radio. By repurposing found materials to make a human-nonhuman exchange-space for sounds, stuff, and sentiments, I aim to share just one approach to kinship and resilience in the context of climate collapse.

Systems of (Renewable) power

He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrilic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display[.]

– Gibson, again

I think of the Marcus Garvey, the embodiment of the ‘slapped together space ship’ sci-fi trope, while working on the project’s solar-charged battery system. I’m bending all kinds of rules, accessing all new inefficiencies, intricacies, and protocols to connect the wrong things in the right ways; my growing Makita power tool battery collection with various adaptors and bucksteps, 12 tiny solar panels leftover from an engineer’s project, a second-hand battery from an Aussie van-lifer in a freezing cold Alberta tourist town, a tote lid, and a lightly used polycarbonate phone.

_{Pictured are some schematic-ish drawings of the power system I envisioned at the project’s outset. Getting closer every day! Image 1 depicts the system for charging batteries, while Image 2 is depicts the system for mounting them. I envision monitoring their power levels on install days will be an interesting dance, but I’m endlessly obsessed with how smoothly power tool batteries clip in to place.}

_{Pictured above are some of the components listed, along with a very early audio device prototype made with a Sony walkman smaller than a business card. There may be nothing more fitting for the language of outdoor nature-experience than an 18V battery for a 1.5V music player.}

I’m lucky to be joining you from a five-week stay at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s Early Career Artist in Residency program². A residency in a residency. Metadency? Inceptadency?— I’ll workshop it and get back to you. While I’m thoroughly enjoying experimentation, collaboration, and learning here, I’m also looking forward to taking what feels like an endless spring of inspiration back with me to Kelowna in February.

¹ _{I’d be remiss if I didn’t connect Neuromancer’s white cube with the white cube in the history of art spaces and the salon. In the story, Dixie’s white cube appears as a neutral non-entity. But when he engages with it, it functions at a level so intense it nearly kills him. There is a funny/unfunny parallel with Western cultural institutions here. These white-walled spaces appear to us as unbiased display, meanwhile they obscure whose artifacts were taken, which energy barons hold board member titles, and which neighbourhoods are gentrified by satellite galleries. Even with my current project taking place in alternative spaces like parks and trailheads, these are important considerations.}

²_{I’m deeply grateful to be spending time at the Centre, at the foot of the Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain, traditionally known as “Minhrpa” (translated in Stoney Nakoda as “the waterfalls”) and the Treaty 7 territory and oral practices of the Îyârhe Nakoda (Stoney Nakoda) – comprised of the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney Nations – as well as the Tsuut’ina First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy comprised of the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai. This territory is home to the Shuswap Nations, Ktunaxa Nations, and Metis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.}

———

This project takes place on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Syilx Nation.

^{Supported by the City of Kelowna Artist in Residence program.}