Not sure why, but Ive been thinking of the sea-edge all week -- likely as an escape from all the obligations that seem to have converged at once. Here is my prospectus for my contribution to the BABEL UCSB panel Walk on the Beach (a material ecology) + Things from the Sea (a manifestation) [sponsored by the Material Collective]. Let me know what you think. I’m most interested in the beach as a space of inscription: where the littoral becomes literal, human and inhuman histories get archived in things the sea touches, matter and writing intertwine. My objects for inspiration are hard things: shoreline stones, beach glass, and other inorganic fragments, detritus, and playthings of waves. I want to accompany (in good company) the activity of such objects in the hope of thinking through some modes of grasping non-anthropocentric temporal scales, especially elemental stories that unfold too slowly for humans to witness. At the same time, I realize that in our very apprehension of such magnitude we as observers are likely rebuffed: our own lives dwindle to insignificance, and brief human history is overshadowed by geological and pelagic movements. Our agency suddenly seems beside the point – and yet in these times of ecological crisis to turn our regard away from the effects of our own industry is clear folly. What practices of encounter, art and making can we put into place that might render inhuman expanses of time, space, and matter more knowable, without reducing them to human resources or familiar domestic stories? What ethics of enmeshment might beach walking, shore writing, and littoral care instigate or enact? How do we form a community of combers and curators that includes inland dwellers as well as walkers of the maritime edge? How can we investigate shorelines without forgetting trash gyres, overfishing, and other modes of depleting or destroying a deep that remains distant from sand, estuaries, waves that crash, and explorable lagoons? How might walking the beach assist in developing new modes of inhabiting the world that are (like rocks, glass and wave-smoothed flotsam) not fragments of a totalized whole but enmeshed stories of time, space, catastrophe and thriving? babel-meeting.org/2014-meeting/cfp-2014-meeting/
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 17:25:17 +0000