{"id":2057,"date":"2016-03-04T23:00:51","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T23:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=2057"},"modified":"2016-10-14T00:54:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T00:54:05","slug":"anthropocene_observatory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/anthropocene_observatory\/","title":{"rendered":"An Anthropocene Observatory"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_2058\" style=\"width: 485px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2058\" class=\"wp-image-2058\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Deep-Time-City.001.jpeg\" alt=\"Performers in David Buuck's Buried Treasure Island: A Tour and Workshop\" width=\"475\" height=\"356\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Deep-Time-City.001.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Deep-Time-City.001-300x225.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 475px) 100vw, 475px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-2058\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Buried Treasure Island: A Tour and Workshop, facilitated by David Buuck (2013).<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong>I. The Geology of San Francisco<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>During the summer of 2015 NASA made a startling announcement: Pluto has geology. Images from NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft indicated the presence of active geological processes on this dwarf planet. Besides being a novel discovery, to my ears this was also a novel expression: geology as something that a planet can or cannot have, like biology.<\/p>\n<p>At this time I was participating in an Urban Fellow Residency in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.exploratorium.edu\/visit\/bay-observatory-gallery\">Fisher Bay Observatory Gallery<\/a> at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, as part of the museum\u2019s Environmental Initiative that includes writers, environmental scientists, urban planners, physicists, coders, data visualizers, botanical illustrators, and exhibit designers. My intersection with the\u00a0museum first occurred two years earlier, obliquely and off-site, on <a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/the-best-things-in-museums-are-the-windows\/\">a multi-day walk<\/a> that led from the Embarcadero to Mt. Diablo and whose attendant conversations revealed a number of\u00a0shared interests in language, landscape, and the challenge of articulating what Tim Robinson in <em>The Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage\u00a0<\/em>calls \u201cthe adequate step\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>our craggy, boggy, overgrown and overbuilt terrain, on which every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera [sic], and trips us with [\u2026] personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Two year later, following an invitation by curator Susan Schwartzenberg, the Bay Observatory provided an ideal setting to consider the &#8220;involuted complexities underfoot&#8221;: the maps, atlases, regional history books, and geologic guides of the Observatory Library (curated by the amazing\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.prelingerlibrary.org\/home\/\">Prelinger Library<\/a>) set against the backdrop of the craggy, boggy, overgrown and overbuilt terrain of San Francisco, and in particular an area (the Embarcadero)\u00a0reclaimed from the Bay with dredged sand and mud, waste rock and debris, the quarried face of Telegraph Hill, as well as hundreds of Gold Rush-era scuttled ships&#8211;and all of this resting on the\u00a0<em>\u201c<\/em>mountains of bulldozed hash&#8221;\u00a0(John McPhee) that occupied the place of any bedrock. Reflecting on this unsettled ground (doubly so because of the city&#8217;s\u00a0current eviction rate) and with the unsettling news that Pluto has geology ringing in my ear I began to speculate on the questions that occupied my residency:<em>\u00a0Can a city have geology?<\/em>\u00a0<em>How would this recognition disturb a sense of place?\u00a0How could this recognition alter the dimensions of a\u00a0step and the attendant poetics of walking?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/exploratorium\/status\/479489053830557697\">While browsing the Observatory Library<\/a> I had come across a number of geologic guides, from Clyde Wahrhaftig\u2019s legendary <em>Streetcar to Subduction<\/em> to Doris Sloan\u2019s <em>The Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region<\/em>. These guides detail the notoriously unsettled lithosphere beneath the city rather than the effects of the built environment on that lithosphere. But in a moment of lexical astigmatism I (mis)read the preposition \u201cof\u201d in \u201cthe geology\u00a0of San Francisco\u201d and took the phrase to refer to the city\u2014its inhabitants, its developers, its agencies, its structures and its infrastructures\u2014as an active geological process.<\/p>\n<p>Just as a Freudian slip can give insight into the working of the unconscious, a misconstrued preposition might offer a glimpse into an emerging state of affairs on a planet with seven billion inhabitants concentrated in metropolitan spaces. Are there urban landforms, are there anthropogenic strata that could be construed as a geology? Other volumes in the library, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/pubs.usgs.gov\/circ\/2004\/c1259\/\"><em>Shifting Shoals and Shattered Rocks\u2014How Man Has Transformed the Floor of West-Central San<\/em> <em>Francisco Bay<\/em><\/a>, offer some positive indications.<\/p>\n<p>Further evidence has been marshaled from an increasingly vocal contingent of geologists and atmospheric scientists who contend that humanity now constitutes a geological agency, and moreover that we have mined, eroded, burned, and bombed our way out of the Holocene and into a new epoch that has been given the epithet of the <em>Anthropocene<\/em>. While a working group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy deliberates\u00a0this new geological epoch, artists and writers are already contending, both playfully and critically, with the idea that humanity has geology. Perhaps with a more discerning eye we can also say that cities\u00a0have geologies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>II. A Peripatetic Reference Library<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While the ultimate material signature of\u00a0this new epoch might be\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.culanth.org\/fieldsights\/788-introduction-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen\">unseen<\/a>\u2014heavy metals in ice cores, radioactive nucleotides in sediment cores, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, worldwide\u00a0networks of subterranean infrastructures\u2014I began to speculate on how we might nevertheless\u00a0imagine and perceive the city\u00a0as a geological actor. One aspect of the\u00a0problem, as Rob Nixon succinctly\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/edgeeffects.net\/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls\/\">writes<\/a>, is that<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>we\u2019re simply not accustomed\u2014maybe even equipped\u2014to conceive of human consequences across such a vastly expanded temporal stage. How can we begin to internalize our role as Anthropocene actors, to inhabit that role feelingly?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To find at least a measure of the magnitude\u00a0of this task would be a start. A first step, so to speak,\u00a0might take the form of observing the <em>asymmetry<\/em> of a\u00a0footstep&#8217;s dimensions today,\u00a0the growing lack of equivalence between a stride and the stratigraphy it traverses, the (un)conformity between the human and the geological, the utter derangement of scale that even an ordinary walk can initiate in an age of planetary anthroturbation. <em>In One Step,\u00a0Travel From The Age Of Reptiles To The Age Of Mammals.\u00a0<\/em>An interpretive panel that I stumbled across\u00a0at the base of Mt. Diablo suggested to me that the perhaps impossible task of inhabiting the role of an Anthropocene actor might be undertaken\u00a0on foot.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_1107.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2094\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_1107-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_1107.JPG\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_1107-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_1107-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The question, now, is how to negotiate an\u00a0emergent\u00a0boundary with wildly fluctuating feet.<em> In On Step, Travel From the Age of Mammals to the Age of <a href=\"http:\/\/environmentalhumanities.org\/arch\/vol6\/6.7.pdf\">Plantations<\/a>. <\/em>Consider consumption footprints, carbon footprints, water footprints, and trash footprints: the human foot bears the mark of a planetary Oedipus, in that the average ecological footprint in the U.S. has swollen to an estimated 9.4 global hectares, or roughly a million square feet, according to the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/assets.panda.org\/%20downloads\/living_planet_report_2008.pdf\">WWF<\/a>. Per pair of feet.<\/p>\n<p>Drawing on my interest in walking as a form of knowing (and not-knowing), I began to collect\u00a0volumes for a Peripatetic Reference Library that would indicate\u00a0various pedestrian tactics\u00a0for inhabiting, perceiving, or otherwise observing the landscapes transformed by\u00a0anpthropogeomorphology and anthroturbation. The latter term, elaborated in 1999 by artist John Roloff in &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnroloff.com\/holocene_page.html\">Holocene Terrace<\/a>,&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0describes the disturbance, dislocation and restructuring of geologic formations and materials by human agencies into new forms. These processes have analogies in the natural world, such as: mining as erosion, transport as flow and construction as sedimentation. Likewise, the built topography of a city can be understood in geomorphic terms: streets as canyons, buildings as plateaus, sewers as caves and plazas as playas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A starting point was offered by <a href=\"http:\/\/cgsdigitalarchive.conservation.ca.gov\/cdm\/compoundobject\/collection\/p16780coll2\/id\/15781\/rec\/1\"><em>A Walker\u2019s Guide to the Geology of San Francisco <\/em><\/a>(A Special Supplement to the <em>Mineral Information Service<\/em>, Volume 19, Number 11, 1966) and its ten guided walks, especially \u201cA Petrographic Nature Walk through the Financial District.\u201d (Perhaps the most compelling evidence for considering San Francisco as a geologic force would be the absence of almost all of the buildings and ornamental features described in this walk.)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_3332.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-2097\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_3332-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_3332\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_3332-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_3332-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Smudge Studio\u2019s delightful <em>Geologic City: a Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York<\/em> (2011), which playfully draws connections between urban phenomena and geologic forces and formations, bookended the collection. Presented as a field guide and showcasing 20 sites to \u201csense the geologic pulse of New York City,\u201d this book is the kind of speculative tool that speaks to the itinerant patrons of the Peripatetic Reference Library. I&#8217;ve thought about adapting the guide to San Francisco under the title\u00a0<em>San Francisco is a Geologic Farc<\/em>e.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to\u00a0providing shelter for intellectual vagabonds, in what other ways might the Observatory offer insight into a new geological epoch in which the distinction between the built environment and its lithic substrate, between the local and planet, has become blurred? In what ways might it serve as an Anthropocene Observatory? If our species has unintentionally \u201cstumbled\u201d into a new geological epoch, to use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.1086\/596640\">Dipesh Chakrabarty<\/a>\u2019s term, it is appropriate that the Observatory&#8217;s curators seem to have somewhat inadvertently \u00a0brought\u00a0together a set of objects and instruments into a constellation that is deserving such a momentous title. \u00a0(In fact, I recently stumbled across a compelling film project by Armin Linke, Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi R\u00f6nnskog), and Anselm Franke called \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.e-flux.com\/announcements\/anthropocene-observatory\/\">Anthropocene Observatory<\/a>.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>Just as 19<sup>th<\/sup> century museums of natural history played an instrumental role in reconstructing the history of the earth, so too are contemporary museums emerging as key sites for inquiry into the volatile present and future of the planet. While proposals for monumental <a href=\"%20http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tech\/elements\/the-museum-of-unnatural-history\">climate-change museums <\/a>receive (and warrant) extensive media coverage, it seems to me that an equal or greater amount of attention should be focused on the re-purposing and re-functioning of existing museums&#8217; collections around questions of climate and the socio-political forces shaping it. (Here the interventions undertaken\u00a0by\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/thenaturalhistorymuseum.org\/about\/\">The Natural History Museum<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>deserve<i>\u00a0<\/i>special mention.)<i>\u00a0<\/i>\u00a0And here\u00a0the Observatory also seems uniquely poised to lead this inquiry.<\/p>\n<p><strong>III. A Step Back: Genealogies of Geological Observation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The more time that I spent time in the Observatory, the more I began to understand how this space both commemorates and is haunted by geologic landforms that have served as key sites of observation in the history of geology. Before determining its capacity to serve as an observatory for an emerging terrestrial stratum, I want to linger\u00a0on a few of that\u00a0genealogies of geological observation that inform this space.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. Observatory as Underland<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2065\" style=\"width: 460px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/ehdd-016.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2065\" class=\"wp-image-2065\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/ehdd-016-1024x824.jpg\" alt=\"Photo by Bruce Damonte.\" width=\"450\" height=\"362\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/ehdd-016-1024x824.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/ehdd-016-300x241.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2065\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bay Observatory. Photo by Bruce Damonte.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>First, you might imagine the glass encasement of the Bay Area Observatory as a subterranean space. Despite the Observatory\u2019s minimal interface between interior and exterior, over the summer I came to think of this glass enclosure as a pseudo-karst topography. In such a\u00a0cave-like landscape we\u2019re appropriately situated to contemplate the deep time of life. As Rosalind Williams shows in\u00a0<em>Notes on the Underground<\/em>, in the 19<sup>th<\/sup>\u00a0c., the underground facilitated both geologic observation and poetic inspiration unlike any other site. It was in these underground spaces that some of the most significant discoveries of fossils were made\u2014discoveries that led to the discovery of geologic time beyond human history\u2014such as the bone cavern at Gaylenreuth in Germany, explored and depicted by English geologist William Buckland (1784-1856), who held these fossils to be evidence of antediluvian life.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2066\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2066\" class=\"wp-image-2066\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth-1024x726.jpg\" alt=\"gaylenreuth\" width=\"550\" height=\"390\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth-1024x726.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth-300x213.jpg 300w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth-155x110.jpg 155w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth-350x248.jpg 350w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/gaylenreuth-546x387.jpg 546w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2066\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Section of the bone cavern at Gaylenreuth, Franconia, Germany. Printed in: The Wonders of Geology, Gideon Algernon Mantell, (1838).<\/p><\/div>\n<p>However, the relics housed in the Exploratorium\u2019s cavernous Observatory\u2014in particular artifacts\u00a0from scuttled Gold Rush-era ships\u2014are not of prehistory but rather of recent human history. In this way these objects might serves as props\u00a0in a\u00a0<em>pre-enactment\u00a0<\/em>(David Buuck) of a future diluvial event, where we are invited to imagine ourselves somewhere in the deep future looking back at relics of a common calamity from the deep past, namely the current inundation of the city by melting polar glaciers. (In fact, a slow flood event is currently modeled in the new\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lichen-projects.com\/installation\/\"><em>Changing Shorelines<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>exhibit, which spans the\u00a0last post-glacial maximum 18,000 years ago to the year 2100.) Against the backdrop of San Francisco becoming\u00a0inundated by rising seas, the relics from 19th century shipwrecks suggest those of the 21st.\u00a0 This anachronism is in fact the same move made by a key text of modernism, Walter Benjamin\u2019s\u00a0<em>Arcades Project<\/em>, in which he advocates a dialectical thinking that would recognize \u201cthe monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. Observatory as Cliff<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2105\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-1.37.28-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2105\" class=\"wp-image-2105\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-1.37.28-PM-1024x658.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2016-03-04 at 1.37.28 PM\" width=\"550\" height=\"354\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-1.37.28-PM-1024x658.png 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-1.37.28-PM-300x193.png 300w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-1.37.28-PM.png 1910w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2105\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Caspar David Freidrich, &#8220;Der Wanderer \u00fcber dem Nebelmeer&#8221; (1818). Exploratorium redux.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Second, the Observatory resembles a cliff, not only in the vertical perspective it offers of the Bay, but also in the way that it promotes cartographic vision and stratigraphic thinking. Starting around 1800 a new spatial awareness, encompassing the spatialization of time\u2014\u201cdeep time\u201d\u2014and the temporalization of nature\u2014\u201cnatural history\u201d\u2014begins to emerge from the vertical perspective afforded by the sheer granite mountains and cliffs in Germany and which form a primary topos in the emerging Romantic movement and the nascent earth sciences alike. The vertical perspective of the cliff, developed in conjunction with a concerted study of stratigraphy, informs many exhibitions in the Observatory, from the USGS sediment samples of San Francisco Bay mud to the NASA satellite images that cascade across the video wall.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. Observatory as Erratic<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2069\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-2.001.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2069\" class=\"wp-image-2069\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-2.001-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"Broadsheet_images Extract 2.001\" width=\"550\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-2.001.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-2.001-300x225.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2069\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Julius Schoppe, \u201cAbbildung des gro\u00dfen Markgrafen Steins auf den Rauenschen Bergen bei F\u00fcrstenwalde&#8221; (1827).<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Third, the Observatory resembles an erratic both institutionally and architecturally&#8211;as a foreign object deposited onto the original museum&#8211;but also as an object that furthers our understanding of deep time and glacial theory, as did the classic erratic blocks of Northern Europe. The large granite boulders that came to be classified and known as glacial erratics, as they had been picked up by expanding glacier and continental ice sheets and then deposited in foreign ground when those glaciers retreated, were some of the more crucial pieces of evidence both in reconstructing the planet\u2019s climatic fluctuations and in anticipating that climate\u2019s future volatility. Careful observation of these blocks, especially the depth and orientation of the grooves on their surface, led to the so-called glacial theory and the discovery of former ice ages. As the focus of the Observatory increasingly compasses climate change, it too offers a vantage point for understanding the startling volatility of the planet\u2019s climactic system.<\/p>\n<p><strong>IV. An Anthropocene Observatory or\u00a0A Cabinet of\u00a0Anthropocenic\u00a0Curiosities?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If the jumbled strata of the earth are a museum, as Robert Smithson writes, could we also consider the jumbled museum as a stratum of the earth? Just as the jumbled collection of objects found in Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosities were attempts to organize the organic and inorganic worlds in the absence of reliable taxonomies, so too does the array of geological objects and instruments in the Observatory testify to the inadequacy of existing taxonomies that distinguish all too rigidly between the cultural and the geological. What follows are some objects and instruments, drawn with one exception from the Observatory&#8217;s exhibits,\u00a0for either an Anthropocene Observatory or a provisional Cabinet of Anthropocenic Curiosities. \u00a0Like the misreading of a preposition, the aspect of these objects that interest me typically came from acts of reading, listening, and observing gone awry.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Seep City<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2070\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-3.001.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2070\" class=\"wp-image-2070\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-3.001-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-3.001.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-3.001-300x225.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2070\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Detail from Seep City.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>A featured map in the Observatory, Joel Pomerantz\u2019s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/seepcity.org\">Seep City<\/a><\/em>, charts the waterscape of\u00a0San Francisco, but the contour lines at five foot intervals also register an infrastructural footprint in the topography itself. Streets, highways, reservoirs and railroad grades interrupt the rolling contours with a deranged geometry of polygons and ziggurats, as though the landscape were in the process of crystallizing. At this level of detail the \u201canthropogeomorphology\u201d of the city, glossed as \u201cthe study of landscape altered by humans\u201d by Matthew Coolidge of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, begins to emerge.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Geotechture<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2064\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract.0011.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2064\" class=\"wp-image-2064\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract.0011-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"Photomontage courtesy of Bryan Connell. \" width=\"550\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract.0011.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract.0011-300x225.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2064\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bryan Connell, Photomontage from the Geotechture Observation Station.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>A deeper dive into the city\u2019s <em>geotechture<\/em>\u2014a portmanteau of \u201cgeology\u201d and \u201carchitecture\u201d and \u201ctechnics\u201d\u2014is afforded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bryanconnell.com\/geo.html\">Bryan Connell\u2019s touch screen survey instrument<\/a> for observing the brick warehouses of San Francisco&#8217;s Northeast Waterfront Historic District. Reading the buildings as a form of \u201chuman-mediated sedimentary layering\u201d amidst the \u201cbiogenic urban geology of the neighborhood,\u201d Connell\u2019s geotechture observation station also contains a photomontage of these buildings and the shale quarry landscape where they originated across the Bay. Rather than an act of artistic caprice, this photomontage rehearses the space-time compression characteristic of Anthropocene geographies in a time where transoceanic and transcontinental transportation systems have stitched together a global supercontinent that geographer Alfred Crosby calls \u201cthe reconstitution of Pangaea.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Financial District as Minescape<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-3.33.21-AM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2071 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-3.33.21-AM-1024x647.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2016-03-04 at 3.33.21 AM\" width=\"1024\" height=\"647\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-3.33.21-AM-1024x647.png 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-3.33.21-AM-300x189.png 300w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-3.33.21-AM.png 1238w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If the Geotechture Observation Station invites us to rethink urban architecture as geology, it also invites us to think of the quarries and mines that furnish the city\u2019s building materials as part of its geotectural legacy. As art historian Lucy Lippard writes in her recent <em>Undermining, <\/em>\u201cThe gravel pit, like other mining holes, is the reverse image of the cityscape it creates\u2014extraction in the aid of erection.\u201d The image of the mine as inverted city can be traced back to San Francisco and more specifically to Gray Brechin\u2019s <em>Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin<\/em>. Brechin argues that we should look to Sierra mines for the financial and architectural origins of the city, and to this I would only add that we should look to these holes and pits for the geotechtural legacy of the city as well.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Bay as Minescape<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The two USGS sediment\u00a0core samples exhibited in the Observatory attest to yet other minescapes being reconstituted throughout the region. Equal in length, but taken from different locations in the Bay, one mud core contains sediments deposited over several thousand years, while the other sample contains sediments only deposited since 1870. One\u00a0reason for the disparity can be attributed to the massive erosion resulting from hydraulic gold mining in the Sierra starting during the 1850s. The resulting sediment flows significantly altered the topography of the Bay, in some cases drastically, as well as various hydrological systems.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Protogaea Civica<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2072\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-4.001.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2072\" class=\"wp-image-2072\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-4.001-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"Broadsheet_images Extract 4.001\" width=\"550\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-4.001.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Broadsheet_images-Extract-4.001-300x225.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2072\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">John Roloff, Protogaea Civica I (Franciscan Formation\/San Francisco, CA). Flag Sequence from Top: Reinforced Concrete; Ferruginous Radiolarian Chert; Meta-basalt\/Greenstone; Graywacke\/Metagraywacke Sandstone; Shale Matrix Melange\/Shear Zone; Serpentinite.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Like \u201cfree-standing core samples,\u201d John Roloff\u2019s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnroloff.com\/geol.flag.sf_page1.html\">Geologic Flags<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>once arrayed at points around\u00a0the city, contributed in no small measure both to the possibility and impossibility of articulating the adequate step. Indicating lateral changes in the geologic information below them, the flags also register the anthropogenic strata directly underfoot, in this case reinforced concrete. While the flags might perturb patriots \u2013Should I pledge allegiance to the Pleistocene or the Holocene?\u2014ultimately they might facilitate a much-needed recalibration of our sense of place.<\/p>\n<p><strong>New Landmasses<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/banner-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2076 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/banner-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"banner-1\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/banner-1-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/banner-1-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/banner-1-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/banner-1.jpg 1936w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If a planet can have geology, and if a metropolis can have geology, can I have geology? Yes, according to Exploratorium Artist-in-Residence Ilana Halperin, who is currently developing a project with the working title of a &#8220;Library of Earth Anatomy.&#8221; I first encountered in Halperin\u2019s work in 2012 at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charit\u00e9. The focal point of the exhibition <em>STEINE<\/em> was a collection of body stones, and mounted on the main wall were hundreds of gall stones, bladder stones, and kidney stones that had been gathered and curated from the museum\u2019s archives. \u201cWe all form geology,\u201d announced the exhibition boldly, and these and other \u201cnew landmasses\u201d point toward a rapprochement between the human and its lithic counterparts. At the individual scale, Ilana Halperin\u2019s work observing, documenting, and participating in the formation of new landmasses helps us to understand our own minerality, our\u00a0need to recalibrate our sense of time and place in the city, and our deep response-ability for the planet. This, it seems to me, is the task of an Anthropocene Observatory.<\/p>\n<p>If\u00a0my residency largely took the form of walks&#8211;through the city, through time, through the museum&#8211;those conversations and and in landscape continue in writing. \u201cI am astounded,&#8221; writes W.G. Sebald of the log books in Southwold&#8217;s Sailors Reading Room in his fictional travelogue\u00a0<em>The Rings of Saturn<\/em><em>,<\/em>\u00a0&#8220;that a trail that has long since vanished from the air or the water remains visible here on the paper.\u201d The constellations of books and objects that formed over the summer may have been as evanescent as the ominous contrail at the outset of <em>The<\/em>\u00a0<em>Rings of Saturn, <\/em>but like that trail they might also mark &#8220;the beginning of a fissure&#8221; and moreover the beginning of a new geological boundary, a new dimension to the step,\u00a0a new way to see, to approach, and to traverse,\u00a0the museum.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><em>Thanks to the Observatory curator Susan Schwarztenberg and the members of the Environmental Initiative for hosting me, thanks to the SEED fund for financial support, and thanks to my\u00a0other\u00a0interlocutors and co-conspirators: Marina\u00a0McDougall, Kirstin Bach, Matthew Booker, Jane Wolff, John Gillis, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, Trina Noval, Bryan Connell, Ilana Halperin, Gaily Ezer, John Roloff, Michael Swaine, Chris Sollars, Ignacio Valero, Sara Dean, Lynn Marie Kirby, Seth Denizen, and many others.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Updated 14. March. 2016.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I. The Geology of San Francisco During the summer of 2015 NASA made a startling announcement: Pluto has geology. Images from NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft indicated the presence of active geological processes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newecologies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":59,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2329,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions\/2329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}