Desks
New Ecologies
The ongoing mutation of ecosystems beyond a safe operating space for life also dismantles those legacies of humanist thought implicated in such widespread environmental destruction. New ecologies, taking stock of these novel environments, are emerging to reorient the terrain of our thinking in this, the geological epoch widely known as the Anthropocene.
Can Germanics Make Bricks?
The blog post below was going to be one of those pieces of writing that, drafted in a flash but then neglected for too long, was going to remain in draft form. […]
Unlost in Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee
Following a recent reading given at the University of Washington in Seattle by the writer Katja Petrowskaja from her book Maybe Esther, an audience member posed a particularly difficult question. Perhaps provoked […]
Lee Chang Dong’s “Barn Burning” (2018): Adaptation in Full Torque
Lee Chang Dong’s masterpiece, “Burning” (2018), currently winding its way along the screens of art cinema, is a guided tour through the contemporary Korean economy and its cultural surround. All the more […]
Notes on Turbidity (The Bay as It Is)
I. The Turbidity of Classification Turbid. Latin turbidus confused, turbid, from turba, confusion, crowd, probably from Greek tyrbē, confusion. Measuring turbidity, defined as the cloudiness or haziness of a liquid, is relatively straightforward. Submerge a Secchi […]
Landscape and Memory: A Review of The Word for World is Still Forest
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. […]
Culturally Endangered: A Review of “Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species”
At a time when the destructiveness of human beings, as a crudely unified force of nature, is bulldozed across the digital and analog spheres of life on Earth, Imagining Extinction (2016) challenges […]
Chernobyl, the place and the word
Following a brief delay due to the Soviet cover-up, Chernobyl has become —overnight and the world over—a symbol of tragedy, a disaster all the more fearsome because of its imperceptible and yet […]
An Unsolicited Donation to the Chernobyl Herbarium or: The Ruderal Poetics of Artemisia californica
The explosions that Michael Marder draws our attention to in Fragment 16 of The Chernobyl Herbarium (“Chernobyl, the place and the word”) are manifold. The site of a pogrom before it was […]
The Pharmacy of Plants
Janet Laurence’s artworks express her hopes for a life in union with nature. She cares for plants, and cures with plants, as they provide sustenance, shade and oxygen for other species. Laurence […]
An Anthropocene Observatory
I. The Geology of San Francisco During the summer of 2015 NASA made a startling announcement: Pluto has geology. Images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft indicated the presence of active geological processes […]
Numeracy and the Survival of Worlds
My post today includes the writing of two guests: Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, whose long-awaited Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies went live today. Scroll down for […]
Ecologies of Waste
Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the existence of an artist in residence program at the San Francisco dump is the fact that this program has existed for decades and will […]
Reading at the Roche Limit: A Review of “Fantasies of the Library”
In commemoration of National Library Week I want to share a remarkable new book, a book that gathers many libraries between its cerulean covers, a book whose bibliographic imaginary is not national but planetary. […]
Living the Good Life after the End of the World: On Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene
This October, at the House of the Cultures of the World (HKW) in Berlin, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) will commence a series of meetings […]
Two Walks: Re-enacting Rivers and Exploding Farms
The art of walking is often a melancholy one. Its slowness breeds languid reveries, intense brooding, and earthbound ponderings that can tend toward a state of paralysis (think of Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia). […]
Dueling on Quicksand: On Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract
Michel Serres begins The Natural Contract with a chapter simply titled “War, Peace.” Right away, something is afoot here signaling that this will not be a story about opposition as usual, not […]
The History of Dust
A particle of dust holds many histories. There is the history of its own becoming. Everything in matter exists in a form waiting to be broken. Dust begets dust. The world has […]
Subnature Writing
He believed that he could communicate with a network of non-human intelligences that had sought refuge in marginal and hidden locations. They were determined to preserve the possibility of life’s survival on the planet and […]
The Best Things In Museums Are The Windows
Under the right conditions, a walk can become a critical spatial practice. Harrell Fletcher recently set up those conditions with a four-day, 40-mile trek from the Exploratorium to the peak of Mt. […]
Keystone Species
As an apology for the push of The Nature Conservancy to form partnerships with major corporations, director Peter Kareiva recently made a statement that provoked several heated, high-profile conversations: “If one considers […]
Call/Appel/征集/Ruf—for Submissions
Feedback is a weblog publication of Open Humanities Press, a community of critics dedicated to writing at the generative interfaces between established disciplinary, institutional, and social territories and protocols. The […]
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