This post was originally published on the Landscape Surgery blog of the Social, Cultural and Historical Geography
Research Group in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of
London. Landscape Surgery is a fortnightly seminar series that the SCHG hosts
during term-time. Sessions are typically organised around a theme for which
speakers (including external invitees) talk about their research, followed
by questions/general discussion on the topic; though it can also include
workshops and research training sessions. I attend the sessions as part of my
PhD activities, and am one of four editors of the Landscape Surgery blog.
The session discussed in this post featured the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities Creative Commissions from 2018. I co-wrote and edited this piece with Alice Reynolds, another PhD student in the Department of Geography at RHUL.
The session discussed in this post featured the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities Creative Commissions from 2018. I co-wrote and edited this piece with Alice Reynolds, another PhD student in the Department of Geography at RHUL.
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For the penultimate Landscape Surgery of
the academic year, we were delighted to be joined by two guest speakers. Jol
Thomson (PhD student at the University of Westminster) and Dr. Julian
Brigstocke (Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography and Planning
at Cardiff University) joined us to discuss their work as part of Royal
Holloway’s Centre for the GeoHumanities Creative Commissions, funded by the
Leverhulme Trust and AHRC, and last year organised around the theme of
‘Creating Earth Futures’. Five works were selected for the 2018 programme,
three of which we were introduced to in the session. Full details about all of
the selected works are available on the Centre for
the GeoHumanities’ blog.
First up
to present was Jol Thomson discussing ‘In the Future Perfect’, the commissioned
work he developed alongside Julian Weaver, an artist at Finetuned Ltd. Jol and
Julian’s project seeks to interrogate the imaginaries and implications of
scientific work operating in the realm of pataphysics: that which examines imaginary
phenomena existing in a world beyond metaphysics; outside the basic principles
of existence. In this regard, their work explores the discourses and
materialities of nuclear fusion and its implications for energy provision and
climate change.
Jol
explained that the cultural imaginary around this branch of scientific
experimentation and technological development has so far only existed in the
future perfect, with fusion consistently projected over the past century to be
‘30 years away’ from being a viable power source. Decades of fusion experiments
have faced continued difficulties in containing the reaction in a manner
requiring less energy than the amount that can be extracted.
To
develop their creative research, Jol and Julian sought to gain access to The
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, the UK’s national nuclear fusion research
laboratory located in Oxfordshire, as well as visiting
the ITER Centre in Marseille, an internationally-recognised
experimental site for nuclear fusion. One of the most significant observations
the pair have made during their research at both sites is the scale of
infrastructure needed to make fusion reactions possible. Jol illustrated using
maps and photographs how the UK’s Culham Centre is situated close to both a
power station and solar field, and also draws on sources of energy from further
afield to function. Meanwhile, it was explained by Jol that for fusion to be
viable as a source of energy, research has shown that humans would need to mine
off-world to recover the minerals needed to create adequate conditions for
fusion to occur, which are rare to find on earth.
Even
aside from these very practical limitations to the fusion process, Jol
hypothesised what would happen if humans could harness the unlimited,
self-sustaining energy that nuclear fusion promises. It has been projected that
population levels could eventually become so high that our impacts as humans would
become devastating to the earth’s ecosystem and ultimately be unsustainable,
undermining the ‘green’ credentials of fusion as a method of energy production.
In considering what the legacy of fusion energy could look like millennia into
the future, Jol and Julian have been inspired by the film Into Eternity, which
explores ideas about how a nuclear waste site in Finland could be marked as
hazardous for future inhabitants of Earth, who are unlikely to communicate
using the same languages we do today.
Both
film and sound recording have been employed by the pair to interrogate the
atmospheres and energies that permeate today’s nuclear fusion testing sites. In
the session, Jol played sound files that audibly represented what takes place
inside a tokamak test reactor, where a magnetic field confines the heated
plasma used in nuclear fusion experiments, suggesting that him and Julian could
eventually score this sonic output for a choir as a performative piece. Through
the process of transforming these scientific operations into visual and sonic
outputs, their work demonstrates both the elusive and ethereal qualities of
current fusion experiments, and the level of imagination necessary to make
nuclear fusion as a power source a tangible reality.
Following
Jol, Dr. Julian Brigstocke gave a presentation titled ‘Thinking in Suspension:
The Geoaesthetics of Sand’. His presentation introduced his collaborative
project ‘Harena’, which he works on alongside Victoria Jones, an installation
artist exploring the ways humans use their senses to connect with and create a
sense of place. Their creative collaboration investigates the contemporary
politics of sand mining through a series of experiments with the material
properties and cultural experiences of sand.
For
Julian, sand is both a vital substance and display of power. It connects the
elemental to the global; marks time, decay and death; and as the primary
component of concrete, cement, glass, fibreglass, asphalt, microchips and more,
is the most important constituent material of our urban landscapes. Despite
being a finite natural resource which takes centuries to form, it is the
world’s most consumed resource after air and water, and humans are using it at
accelerating rates, particularly in construction (Morrow, 2018). In 2014, the
UN Environmental Program declared that sand mining was causing “unequivocal”
environmental problems (ibid).
In this
regard, Julian made particular reference to Hong Kong, where sand extracted
from seabeds has provided the material for land reclamation, at the cost of
catastrophic damage to marine ecosystems. While land reclamation projects
appear to promise a quick fix to endemic housing shortages in one of the
world’s most densely populated urban areas, political debates rage around how
far these projects go towards reducing Hong Kong’s vast inequalities in wealth;
where the sand itself comes from; why existing brownfield sites are not used
instead; and government collusion with private property owners and developers.
As well
as carrying out fieldwork in Hong Kong and visiting sand mines in the UK,
Julian and Victoria’s work has delved into the sensual and material properties
of sand through a series of ‘experiments’ that explore its qualities of suspension. Julian
recounted his unsettling experience of a sensory deprivation tank, where
participants lie face up on a pool of water warmed to body temperature and
containing a high proportion of salt in suspension, enabling them to lose all
sense of the body’s external boundaries. Elsewhere, him and Victoria visited an
anechoic chamber, which prevents users from hearing anything inside it, as an
exploration of the silence that suspension in air entails; while indoor
skydiving allowed them to perceive how tiny adjustments in bodily weight can
cause significant directional movements when bodies are suspended in air. In
thinking about these processes of attunement with various environmental and
atmospheric conditions – of drifting, disorientation and movement across earth,
water and air – Julian was reminded of a quotation from Michel Serres (1982:
83): “nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal”.
Julian
ended his presentation with a provocation central to the joint political and
cultural territory of his and Victoria’s project. He asked: how might the
granular thinking necessary to understand the properties of sand pollute the
contemporary noisy landscapes of consumerism, for example in the concrete,
glass and asphalt landscapes of Hong Kong?
To
conclude the session, we were presented with a film by Matterlurgy (Helena
Hunter and Mark Peter Wright) made in collaboration
with filmmaker Daniel Beck, entitled ‘Rehearsals for Uncertain Futures’.
Featuring Royal Holloway’s Department of Geology’s Sea Ice Simulator (SIS),
used in climate science to predict and model the impact of black carbon on ice
reflectivity, the film emphasises the create commission project’s broader
emphasis on noticing (Tsing, 2015). Focusing on the polyphonic dimensions of
environmental processes and methods of observing them, “[s]uch an inquiry finds
its roots through interleaved theories of listening […] and the practices of
performance and fictioning. It considers the vibratory, affective and
speculative forms of agency bound within the technologies and practices
produced by GEC [Global Environmental Change]” (Hall, 2018).
Heavily
featuring the work and daily practices of Professor Martin King (Professor in
Environmental Geoscience in the Department of Earth Sciences at RHUL), the film
never once features Professor King’s full body or face, but instead focuses on
the materiality of the shipping containers situated in the woodland where the
SIS is stored, the bird song in the background and the diverse sounds produced
by the SIS machinery.
“The
film focuses on the interconnections between the lab and field amplifying
physical and material production practices behind climate simulation and
predictive data modelling. How does data become data, where exactly is the
field, what practices of maintenance and care does simulation require?” (Helena
Hunter, no date).
The film
is just one part of a broader project which seeks to produce a series of
artworks which “challenge and re-imagine how GEC is both sensed and non sensed,
signalled and signed, heard and unheard” (Hall, 2018).
We would
like to extend our thanks to Jol and Julian for joining us in the session, and
to Helena and Mark for allowing us to view their film. We look forward to
seeing how the projects develop.
Bibiography
Hall, L.
(2018) Matterlurgy
selected for the Creating Earth Futures Commissions. Available
at: https://www.crisap.org/2018/01/22/matterlurgy-creating-earth-futures-commissions-2018/ (Accessed:
14 May 2019)
Hunter,
H. (no date) Rehearsals
for Uncertain Futures. Available at: http://www.helenahunter.net/rehearsals-for-uncertain-futures (Accessed:
27 May 2019)
Morrow,
S. (2018) 20 Things
You Didn’t Know About… Sand. Available at: http://discovermagazine.com/2018/jun/20-things-you-didnt-know-about–sand (Accessed:
27 May 2019)
Serres,
M. (1982) Hermes:
Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins
University Press.
Tsing,
A. (2015) The
mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist
ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
