In my work I speculate about the
impossible, and for my current research this allows me to engage in ideas about
our ‘deep future’ ((Karen Barad[1]), shimmering [2], and haunted landscapes [3], and to embrace unknowing through expanded notions of field work and data collection using a variety of new and alternative ways of measuring, including through imagination and other observational methods. In Dimetrodon, I am speculating about long-evolving organisms whose ghosts and traces inhabit our tangled ecologies and which are now facing a new mass extinction event.
[3] In his essay “Haunted Geologies”, anthropologist Nils
Bubandt contemplates “the fractures between human deeds and deep time,” where “indecidable
geologies erupt, and with them ghosts and spirits of the Anthropocene.” A.
Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, N. Bubandt eds. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. University of Minnesota Press:
G65.
[1] A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, N. Bubandt eds. (2017).
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. University of Minnesota Press: G171.
[2] Shimmer is
proposed by Deborah Bird Rose as a term learned from Aboriginal people in the
Victoria River region of Australia’s Northern Territory, which she calls “a
process of encounter and transformation, not absorption, in which different
ways of being and doing find interesting things to do together.” A. Tsing, H.
Swanson, E. Gan, N. Bubandt eds. (2017). Arts
of Living on a Damaged Planet. University of Minnesota Press: G51.
