Visions of Deep Future
These are a series of works that respond to assumptions of technological progress made by those who wish for humans to travel to Mars. Building off of previous ethnographic research on the effects of Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, these works explore the concept of rehabilitating a Martian subjectivity, a term I use to describe the alienation from land and place which arises in people who live under systems of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and private property. Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s works of speculative science fiction, these pieces involve an alchemical process that recombines foraged materials, digital media, and disparate technologies to question the assumptions of human progress along with envisioning technological practices that may redefine social-environmental relations in the far future, on Mars, and/or our current moment.
Towards a Foraging Methodology
Here foraging and craft alongside video installation are a methodology to reorient myself to Santa Cruz, California, the ancestral homelands of the Uypi people and stewarded now by the Amah Mutsun tribal band, while attending to the politics and sites of conflict that arise in such a contested and diverse landscape. These installation pieces include structures that respond to this contested environment, coming into tension with the embedded systems of property and wilderness that lay implicit to California. A developed installation piece Untitled (Burning) involves using the invasive pampas grass to create projected paper installations that mimic fire, exploring the role that fire has in the California landscape both current and historical. This piece lies in conversation with other pieces of projected text onto seafoam, and performance works that involve pressing hot molten glass into soil, releasing a medicinal smokey scent that was often prohibited in California’s fire-cautious forest management.
