{"id":6673,"date":"2012-11-28T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=6673"},"modified":"2012-11-28T12:07:19","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T17:07:19","slug":"making-the-geologic-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2012\/11\/making-the-geologic-now\/","title":{"rendered":"making the geologic now"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n<\/a>[Jinanqiao<\/em>\u00a0Dam under construction on the Jinsha River. New “mega-dams” such as Jinanqiao in high seismic\u00a0risk zones — territories prone to earthquakes, in other words — are at the center of a highly consequential scientific debate<\/a> about whether the dams are making disasters like catastrophic 2008 Wenchuan earthquake<\/a> more likely and frequent. Fascinatingly, the argument is not between scientists who believe that the dam reservoirs are affecting regional seismicity at a massive scale and those who dispute that claim, but between scientists who argue that the dams produce only small, frequent tension-releasing quakes and those who believe that “reservoir-induced seismicity”<\/a> includes the larger, catastrophic quakes. Roughly half of the 130 “mega-dams” recently built, currently under construction or proposed in China lie in within these high-risk zones.\u00a0Photo by International Rivers<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

We’re excited to note that Making the Geologic Now<\/em> — a fantastic collection of images and essays ruminating on the role of the geologic in shaping the present, edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (Smudge Studio<\/a>\/Friends of the Pleistocene<\/a>) — will be launched next Tuesday, December 4th, with the release of the free, downloadable e-book at Punctum Books’ website<\/a>, the launch of an interactive web version of the book, and a launch party<\/a> hosted by Studio-X NYC<\/a>. Pre-orders of the print version, which should ship in December, will also be available through Punctum’s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Making the Geologic Now<\/em>\u00a0announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. \u00a0It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to material conditions of the present moment. \u00a0In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are extending our active\u00a0awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth\u2019s iron core.\u00a0<\/strong>Their works are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable and possible if humans were to take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer\u2014as a partner in designing thoughts, things, systems, and experiences.\u00a0As a reading and viewing event,\u00a0Making the Geologic Now\u00a0<\/em>is designed to move with its audiences while delivering signals from unfolding edges of the \u201cgeologic now.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabeth and Jamie have assembled a great and extremely diverse list of contributors, which I’ll copy and paste to avoid the difficult work of choosing who to mention:<\/p>\n

Matt Baker,\u00a0Jarrod Beck<\/a>,\u00a0Stephen Becker<\/a>, Brooke Belisle,\u00a0Jane Bennett<\/a>,\u00a0David Benque<\/a>,\u00a0Canary Project<\/a>\u00a0(Susannah Sayler, Edward Morris),\u00a0Center for Land Use Interpretation<\/a>,\u00a0Brian Davis<\/a>,\u00a0Seth Denizen<\/a>, Anthony Easton,\u00a0Elizabeth Ellsworth<\/a>, Valeria Federighi,\u00a0William L. Fox<\/a>,\u00a0David Gersten<\/a>,\u00a0Bill Gilbert<\/a>,\u00a0Oliver Goodhall<\/a>, John Gordon,\u00a0Ilana Halperin<\/a>,\u00a0Lisa Hirmer<\/a>,\u00a0Rob Holmes<\/a>,\u00a0Katie Holten<\/a>,Jane Hutton<\/a>, Julia Kagan,\u00a0Wade Kavanaugh<\/a>,\u00a0Oliver Kellhammer<\/a>,\u00a0Elizabeth Kolbert<\/a>,\u00a0Janike Kampevold Larsen<\/a>,\u00a0Jamie Kruse<\/a>,\u00a0William Lamson<\/a>,\u00a0Tim Maly<\/a>,\u00a0Geoff Manaugh<\/a>,\u00a0Don McKay<\/a>, Rachel McRae,\u00a0Brett Milligan<\/a>,Christian MilNeil<\/a>,\u00a0Laura Moriarity<\/a>,\u00a0Stephen Nguyen<\/a>,\u00a0Erika Osborne<\/a>,\u00a0Trevor Paglen<\/a>,\u00a0Anne Reeve,<\/a>\u00a0Chris Rose<\/a>,\u00a0Victoria Sambunaris<\/a>,\u00a0Paul Lloyd Sargent<\/a>, Antonio Stoppani,\u00a0Rachel Sussman<\/a>,\u00a0Shimpei Takeda<\/a>,\u00a0Chris Taylor<\/a>,\u00a0Ryan Thompson<\/a>,\u00a0Etienne Turpin<\/a>,\u00a0Nicola Twilley<\/a>,\u00a0Bryan M. Wilson<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\n<\/a>[A TenCate Geotube being unrolled and pumped full of sediment at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport<\/a> on Wallops Island.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Stephen and I also have a short piece in the collection, written with Tim Maly and Brett Milligan in our guise as the Dredge Research Collaborative<\/a>. “Packaging Sludge and Silt” considers the geotube as a super-sized, Anthropocene-ready successor to the humble sandbag, and something of a small window into a new vernacular for engineered geology:<\/p>\n

The geotube literally encapsulates the sublime materiality of the Dredge Cycle, as sediment and water in slurried suspension are stuffed into geotextile casings. The Dredge Cycle is fundamentally composed of wet stuff: basic materials; ordinary sand, silt, clay, and water. While it can and should be understood as a highly abstracted set of networks and feedback loops operating on a global spatial scale, it should also be understood as a material operation. It is the cubic yards of excavated soil downwashing across your backyard from the new construction three houses down in a rainstorm as much as it is globally networked processes the expansion of the Panama Canal to accommodate the importation of goods from East Asia driving port expansions and dredging operations along the East Coast of North America. Similarly, geotubes are always dirty: placed in muck, filled with muck, and, like muck, slumping and slouching into soft shapes, rather than following the precise angles of architectural geometry.<\/p>\n

The geometry of the geotube, however, is no more natural than the clean modernist lines of the Hoover Dam. It is something else entirely, both post-natural and post-architectural. This seems entirely appropriate for an era in which we are freezing sediment-spraying rivers in specific configurations, like the Mississippi at Old River Control, or impounding the eroded sediments of entire continents behind vast concrete structures, like Three Gorges Dam. For an era where our largest monuments are not pyramids and skyscrapers, but geologic impacts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The launch party<\/a>, which is free and open to the public, will run from 7 to 9 pm on the 4th. Studio-X NYC is at 180 Varick Street in Manhattan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Jinanqiao\u00a0Dam under construction on the Jinsha River. New “mega-dams” such as Jinanqiao in high seismic\u00a0risk zones — territories prone to earthquakes, in other words — are at the center of a highly consequential scientific debate about whether the dams are making disasters like catastrophic 2008 Wenchuan earthquake more likely and frequent. Fascinatingly, the argument is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566,432,3,590],"tags":[709,680,517,245,757,760,759,758],"class_list":["post-6673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dredge","category-events","category-landscape","category-publications","tag-anthropocene","tag-dredge-research-collaborative","tag-friends-of-the-pleistocene","tag-geology","tag-geotubes","tag-making-the-geologic-now","tag-punctum-books","tag-smudge-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6673"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6677,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6673\/revisions\/6677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}