“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, September 28, 2012

SLSA Liveblog 8: Derek Woods

“Molecular Poetics and the Scales of Oil: Marina Zurkow’s Necrocracy,” SLSA (”Nonhuman”), Milwaukee, September 27–29, 2012

the children in hazmat suits
industrial catastrophe
dynamic sublime
scaled down hazmat suits layered with cuteness; precious and horrible like the girl in The Exorcist
Necroracy is ironically not apocalyptic; cataplexis as cartoon hydrocarbons; ambient poetics that collapses figure and ground
molecular scale as absent presence that fills the atmosphere with hydrocarbon voices
chemical substrates of the military industrial
Barthes on plastic: the myth of processing everything
this creates lots of black boxes that make this infinite plasticity fantasy become weird and strange
limit case of processing: any input >> any output
Star Trek replicators
ideological function of plasticity
Mesocosm Wink, Texas
realism plus manipulated scale effects
looping in a separate room, the only piece that uses visual perspective
nothing is the “right” size
nonhuman scales haunt around the edges
Haldane on insects
Tim Clark on noncartographic scale: not a smooth moving in and out
scale variance
we need scales outside our scale mesocosm
Powers of 10 movie
Mesocosm movie: sinkhole as portal into geological time
Neo/Geo: black boxes with distorting mirrors: juncture of deep technics and deep time

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