In 1972, Marcel Broodthaers opened the Section des Figures at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf (Fig. 1), in which he presented a catalog of hundreds of objects that all bore the image of an eagle. Some objects were historical artworks from museums and collections. Others were everyday objects, documents, reproductions, prints, slideshows, and so on. The only rule of entry for an object into the collection was that it needed to carry the “...image or name of an eagle (‘the emphatic exploration of a singular icon, the representation of the eagle’).” [1] This section was one of at least a dozen such sections in a larger expansive exhibition that simulated the sort of encylopaedic methodology that was typical of cultural institutions.

Two other 20th century conceptualists employ a similar conceit in their practice. In 1969, On Kawara created I Went, I Met, I Read, a four volume journal in which Kawara documented every personal journey, human encounter and newspaper article he encountered during that year into a single journal. (Fig. 2) Of course, Kawara is most well known for his date paintings in which a painting of the date would need to be completed within the same day and within such constraints an observer might see the slight variances that the daily events of the world may affect on the painter. For Kawara, “[time]...is...the small, daily accretions, the repetitions, the barely-there variation in daily routine, and the quiet, at times breathtaking, pronouncements comprised of simple action verbs: I got up; I went; I met; I read...I Am Still Alive.” [2]

Similarly, the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven spent three years chronicling, collating and assembling over 1500 documents, photographs, postcards, art objects, and sculptures into a rhythmic, seemingly methodical yet profoundly chaotic catalogue entitled Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983, or roughly translated “cultural history.” (Fig. 3) In contrast to her contemporary conceptualists in which rule bound systems were canon, Darboven “...never let order supersede invention. There’s no strict system...no secret code unlocks ‘Kulturgeschichte.’ Hers is a personal, imperfect vision that absorbs, but never fully clarifies, the 20th century.” [3]

This documentary-like work of Broodthaers, Kawara and Darboven, among others, inform a particular personal practice developed over many years. Depending on key inputs, specific rituals are developed as tools of examination. In the case of "Ephemera", daily half-hour sessions, called excavations, were employed. Each session was centered around exploring the catalysts of creation, mutation, and metamorphosis by exploring society, nature and the human problem as it is, where it has been, and where it could be. What would a “post-human” - that is to say, not void of humanity, but humanity’s metamorphosis, look like? The only rule of each excavation was to allow the documentarian to be divergent, to be open to the infinite, to be rhythmic, to be incomplete, and to suspend analysis in the spirit of dérive.

“Ephemera” is a survey of collected materials gathered through these daily rituals: a series of documents that simply offer departures from the collected detritus. These initial three entries explore thoughts around geological sediment, atmospheric dust, and their extraterrestrial counterpart, the meteorite. Moving forwards, the mandate for “Ephemera” is to grow towards an extrospective versus introspective response, from observation to participation and performance, from self-indulgence to generosity.

01 Sediment

It is, apparently, a documented misconception that the city of Vancouver is located on Vancouver Island, when it is in fact located on the Burrard peninsula, bounded by the Fraser river to its south and the Burrard Inlet to its north. Vancouver Island does exist however — formed by an oceanic rift that resulted in a volcanic accretion that rammed into the western edge of the North America some time ago. Separating the island from the city is a body of water called the Strait of Georgia, in which over two hundred smaller islands (collectively known as the Gulf Islands), inhabit, and into which the Fraser river thrusts millions of tons of sediment each year. [4] (Fig. 4) While Vancouver Island’s material composition, as would be expected given its origin, contains volcanic rock, it is also composed of sedimentary rock, which is often formed from the accumulation of small, “pre- existing rocks or pieces of once living organisms” [5] via a unique mixture of sources and transport processes, both natural and artificial. In aggregate, over time, they become concretized and compacted into layers, or strata, in which time, and thus history, become archive. Geologists study them as a person would a history book, slicing them with a knife and inferring truth about the past to inevitably explain the present, and predict the future: a genealogy of sorts. Yet in its present space and time, sedimentation is active, fluid, energetic, violent, creative, and transient - more rhizome than binary root. Each particle, billions among billions, is shaped differently, composed of mixtures of both natural and artificial compounds, sourced from distances far and near, carried by ice, water, rain, wind and other means; some at such slow velocities they seem as if they are not moving at all, and others as fast as the wind or water can carry them. Many particles dissolve in this mad swirl, while others aggregate, succumb to gravity, and settle: forming new spaces, pockets and islands that become primordial grounds for creation, disruption, destruction, illusion and imagination (Fig. 5, 6). If a casual weekend geologist could witness this phenomenon, he or she may determine that the swirl looks rather angry, in the Bachelardian sense. [6]

The notion of “sedimentation” is of course a well traveled idea: most famously by Merleau-Ponty (and his sedimentary relatives: Husserl, Ricoeur, and so on). In his 1945 book, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes: “there is a ‘world of thoughts,’ a sedimentation of our mental operations, which allows us to count on our acquired concepts and judgments, just as we count upon the things that are there and that are given as a whole, without our having to repeat their synthesis at each moment.” [7] Likewise to the geologic example, it doesn’t seem that he limits sedimentation to a purely historical record: “...this word ‘sedimentation’ must not trick us: this contracted knowledge is not an inert mass at the foundation of our consciousness...my present thoughts are not an absolute acquisition; they feed off my present thought at each moment; they offer me a sense, but this is a sense that I reflect back to them.” [8] In Aylie Baker’s Wave Patterns, a geologic record exists for the Sesario navigator: “...a navigator’s movements are guided not only by the phenomenal world but also by a deep respect for the ancient, living agreements that exists between ocean peoples and all ocean life.” Yet, in the same breath, she writes of the navigator in his or her present moment at sea: “...the canoe is at the heart of the world and the navigator sits at the very center of everything, quietly observing the shifting skies and seas from a place of stillness. Stars wheel overhead, swells and winds emerge from the horizon, and the islands slowly glide toward, around, and away from the canoe. There is no forward or back. Navigation cues come from all directions and the navigator is present to the entire sphere of sea and sky.” [9] A navigator who is consciously and unconsciously composed of deeply layered sedimentary rock, being transported fluidly, violently, creatively by the currents of the sea, wind and sky.

Perhaps the nature of our being exists in this suspension between the strata of our history and the present moment and all of its entrances and exits that we are taken through, by our own “free will” or not. This suggestion is a sort of “both-and” existence: we are swimming in both the concrete, compacted sludge of our histories that have fossilized over time, and the present angry swirl. In the geologic context, this is observable. It is empirical truth. The delicate balance between violence, destruction, stress, displacement and creation, biodiversification, regeneration can be simply understood as the natural order of the world. In the human context, however, this becomes rather problematic.

The first problem arises in the nature of the concrete sediment itself. Sedimentary rock is a compaction of sediment, a compositional artifact or photograph of a period of angry swirl: perhaps a hundred years, or a thousand years. Canonized within its structure are the remnants and monuments of a violent era of creation and destruction. However, what is not conveyed within the layers are the details: the currents, the speed, the “philosophy of the middle.” In other words, the concretized sediment lacks the full dataset. This problem is further compounded by the geologist, or the interpreter, who can only extract an even smaller dataset at a given time. The consequence, then, is an understanding of the world that can be severely compromised.

In the human context, both individually and collectively, the same problem arises. Our collective sediment history is an incredibly limited dataset, full of missing stories, context and understanding. Each community reads and writes its history for itself, omitting necessary context and details in order to create a foundation for a future generation. This block chain ledger, signed by each generation, creates a mosaic of mythologies, principles and values that build up structures to help subsequent generations to cope with the angry swirl. A conspiracy theorist would prefer to make the argument that there is a sinister plot afoot that spans generations. A more likely explanation would be simply a lack of computing power and memory, which results in the compaction of ideas — a need to write over a piece of paper because there is only one piece of paper. (Fig. 7) As any individual can relate, we require visual markers, taxonomies, memories, and constructed mediums such as language to help us catalog the human experience. The loss of data with each strata of our sediment results in degradations, or mythologies and imagination. These degradations become, over time, a way to read the sediment - a way to decode the compression of our collected knowledge. In image processing terms, we do not live in a “lossless” history, but rather a “compressed” one (Fig. 8) - one that requires imagination and guessing to fill in the holes, and thus our existence becomes a vibration between the real and the imaginary. Baker writes: “Hundreds of years of observing the planets, of striving to understand our place in the universe, of equations scribbled down and passed on to be elaborated over generations — all of that now gets compressed into the instruments that we use every day without a second thought. And the part of what feels so scary to me about witnessing the rise and application of GPS in my lifetime is that all those generations of learning are obscured, they’re hidden in code...even a map of home is a representation, a slice of space captured by the mind at a discrete point in time. It is always a fragment of the fabric of the universe...it is flat.” [10]

The second problem arises from the first. Natural sediment flow is fluid, active, stressful. In the geologic sense, it is within the edges of the sediment flow where evolutionary change occurs, where the transplantation of foreign composites and species form new geographies and geologies (eg. the microorganisms of the prismatic springs). In the human sense, the present forces, both natural and artificial, collide with our sedimentary history often with catastrophic results. In Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant echoed this sentiment: “...the hidden cause (the consequence) of both Myth and Epic is filiation, its work setting out upon the fixed linearity of time, always toward a projection, a project.” [11] He wrote of the abyss in describing the angry swirl that was the trans-atlantic slave trade: the sea as abyss, the slave boat as abyss, the “panic of the new land” and the “haunting of the former land” and “...finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed.” [12] Yet it is within this very real, very angry swirl, a velocity and flow that was imposed on the African by the compressed mythology of the European, that a sedimentary compression itself was birthed in the Caribbean (Fig. 9) In this we see the echoes of the natural geologic process of foreign sediment transported from distances afar to construct new firmament.

It is important to note that Glissant’s Caribbean is not an isolated example, but rather quite normative of human society. The stress forces that arise from this sedimentary soup of disparate mythologies, natural forces and patterns, created the hauntingly beautiful favelas of Rio (Fig. 10) that literally take the layered visual of sediment layers, the massive Kowloon Walled City (Fig. 11) and the constructed geometry of Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis. (Fig. 12) Yet it is within these violently constructed spaces, where individual humans who have been transported by forces outside of their control, give birth to a rich biodiversity, life bursting at the seams: new ideas, new perspectives, and new creative expression. The migrant, immigrant, refugee – those living in the suspension of the angry swirl – are the most alive and generous of humanity.

How then, should we navigate, if at all? The 20th century land-art pioneer, Robert Smithson, along with his contemporaries, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer, offer a possible way forward.

In the September 1968 issue of Artforum, Smithson, in a feature entitled “A Sedimentation of the Mind” wrote: “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s crust. When one scans the ruined sites of prehistory one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits. A rubble of logic confronts the viewer as he looks into the levels of the sedimentations. The abstract grids containing the raw matter are observed as something incomplete, broken and shattered.” In it he recounts a time where he visits a quarry in which he felt like he had “fallen into endless directions of steepness” as he “gaz[ed] on countless stratographic horizons.” He concludes: “How can one contain this ‘oceanic’ site? I have developed the Non-Site, which in a physical way contains the disruption of the site. The container is in a sense a fragment itself, something that could be called a three- dimensional map. Without appeal to “gestalts” or “anti-form,” it actually exists as a fragment of a greater fragmentation. It is a three dimensional perspective that has broken away from the whole, while containing the lack of its own containment. There are no mysteries in these vestiges, no traces of an end or a beginning.” [13]

Smithson’s commentary on time is apropos. Walter de Maria shared a similar sentiment when describing the power of experiencing a piece of art over time. His “Earth Room,” located in New York City, is a testament to this. (Fig. 13). Michael Heizer’s “City” is still a work in progress after almost half a century. (Fig. 14) More recently, the American artist Mark Bradford, is set to open his first exhibition in London, entitled ‘Cerberus’ this October, in which he returns to ancient human mythology as subject matter, while bridging it to his tradition of bridging art and the community (Fig. 15)

“‘Cerberus’ is an exhibition dedicated to places difficult and in- between, where conflicts arise, but also where the hope of resolution is to be found. Fundamental to these works is a process of layering. Just as the very fabric of each painting is formed from strata of pigmented paper which are scored, lacerated and stripped away, Bradford collides a multiplicity of references. The longer timeline of myth-making combines with events from more recent history and a trajectory of painting from the Hudson River School to Robert Rauschenberg via Asger Jorn...As Bradford explains, ‘I have always been interested in pulling the world that exists beyond the studio walls, and outside the art world, into the work.’ The titles ‘Cerberus’ and ‘Gatekeeper’ (2019) make metaphorical reference to notions of containment, of pressure building to an incendiary point, and also the idea of a border as a juncture or gathering place.” [14]

We cannot change the fossilized and concretized sediments that are deposited in our history, but we can read it through the lens of time, understanding that all of it is merely fragments of fragments. We can accept them, respect them, then confront and challenge them. We can attempt to navigate the angry swirl with “generosity” as Sloterdijk suggests in Stress and Freedom, [15] not with surface level gestures, but rather with a long, patient, obedience.

02 Dust

Whereupon sediment erupts into the atmosphere.

The smallest particles within the classification of volcanic tephra is generally known as fine volcanic ash, or volcanic dust. In the case where the finest of this dust reaches heights in excess of 40km during an eruption event — well into the upper reaches of the stratosphere — the dust can stay resident for as long as two decades and move for thousands of kilometers in any direction (Fig. 16). Depending on the individual particle size, eruption height, mobility vectors such as wind, and the overall density of the eruption, such events create observable phenomena. [16]

In the May 1883 eruption of stratovolcano Krakatau in the Indonesian islands, steam and ash lofted into the atmosphere for nearly three months. In August of that same year, a Hawaiian reverend named Sereno Edwards Bishop observed a diffuse halo around the sun. This same diffuse halo, later named after the reverend as the “Bishop’s Ring,” was observed again 2.8 years later in Europe and 3.1 years later in Colorado. All around the world, discolored sunrises and sunsets were witnessed due to the diffraction of light by the volcanic dust resident in the atmosphere. [17] Aesthetic variation was not the only observed effect, however. It is theorized that the mobility of the dust, thanks to it’s miniscule size, the sheer volume injected into the atmosphere, and its mixture with other gaseous releases such as sulfur dioxide caused global temperatures to fall in the following year, along with sea level rise suppression and weather pattern disruption. It wasn’t until the late 20th century, with the study of the eruptions of Mt. St. Helens, El Chichón and Mt. Pinatubo, that it was confirmed that such eruptions could cause global climatic impact. [18]

Human inclination is to search for such a synthesis of cause-effect, serialized into a historical narrative. The world experienced climate change because of a volcanic eruption, leading to change in global agricultural harvests, leading to regional food shortages, and so on. In every situation, the tendency of the mind is to organize, synthesize, and reach for conclusion. The unfortunate outcome of such patterns of thought is the creation of half-baked ideologies that separate and dismiss, sometimes to catastrophic effect.

The alternative is to consider the “island” as a singleton - a cellular automaton; and the “archipelago” as Turing machine. The life of the island is the genesis of climate. Each piece of microscopic dust is an island that contains within itself a microclimate — a dream where orders of scale, distance, and time are reconfigured. Such spaces require the full extent of inquiry, patience, study and dialogue. Every corner must be explored: the vectors that cause them to migrate over great distances, the textures of its landscape, its color palette, how time, gravity, sound, and temperature function, and so on. The dust should be understood as a liminal space - adrift in transition and disorientation, where time seems to fold on itself. It is within the knowledge of the single dust, that harmonies and dischords can be perceived between fellow specks of dust, and in which the larger atmospheric identity (the archipelago) and its effect can be discerned.

The past century has given rise to artists, thinkers and scientists who are considering this pathway to seeing. In 1970, the mathematician John Horton Conway constructed what is now known as “Conway’s Game of Life” to simulate this atmospheric dust by defining the life conditions of a single cell, and allowing the game to play itself out autonomously (Fig. 17).

Similarly, in 1956, Guy Debord proposed the “Theory of the Dérive,” in which the artist is challenged to erupt from the malaise of cause-effect and serial history, and move through a local geography by aimlessly wandering according to the potential encounters that result from the terrain itself, as opposed to the typical motivations of how we move . (Fig. 18)

Two years later, in 1958, composer John Cage premiered “Concert for Piano and Orchestra,” where the composition can be played “in whole or in part, in any sequence...in any duration, with any number of...performers.” [19] Of primary importance was for it to be played by the musician as an island of sorts, within the rules of the instrumentation, but all other dynamics such as time, particular instrument, amplitude, and so on at the interpretation of the artist. In other words, every performance of the concert was unique, adrift, slowly falling from the atmosphere at its own pace, according to the winds of the moment, where time, shape, texture and color were defined in real time.

The result was that every performance was notated as a particular variation, allowing for an infinite number of islands. Taken together, a topography is created: an archipelagic symphony. (Fig. 19)

In the late 1960s, a woman named Rei Kawakubo emerged in a patriarchal postwar Japan to launch the fashion label Comme Des Garçons. Instead of conforming to the social standard of beauty in her homeland, nor to the high Parisian standard, her work was described as madness and gained the label of “anti-fashion” and “Hiroshima-chic.” That terrible artificial atomic eruption that lofted destructive dust into the atmosphere is echoed in each hole- filled sweater (Fig. 20). Her “...aesthetic revolve[d] around a central inexpressibility, implementing a relentless system in which fabrics and techniques are destroyed and appropriated.” Like the dust adrift, each Kawakubo work is a particular climate of texture, material, and color. It is beautiful simply because it is a microclimate, not because a historical narrative has deemed it so. [20] A half-century later, Kawakubo persists, an atomic plume of dust still suspended in the atmosphere that continues to cast a long shadow on the world of fashion.

A more recent example is the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong’s “Weight of Insomnia.” A perpetual painting of sorts, the project is an automated system that utilizes data and algorithms to continually paint over a duration of time. It is as much performance of the moment as well as painted output. In the first phase of the project, Xiaodong tracked human subjects and physical objects as dust particles - people, buses, and other objects were turned into data dust that drove a robotic paintbrush. “What Liu’s canvases depict are a multiplicity of instants that are forever fluctuating, generating at each moment a new sediment of material accretion.” [21] The robotic arm, as an extension of Liu, takes note of each independent speck of dust, wrestles with it as it floats in and out of its view, to build an ever shifting atmosphere (Fig. 21).

Likewise, the 2010 proposal by New York architecture firm, WORKac for the replanning of New Holland Island in St. Petersburg leans into island’s microclimate (Fig. 22). By strategically forgetting the historical narrative of the island to the people of the city, as war monument, technological innovation, and abandoned ruin; WORKac saw the island as “...a series of nested voids” or individual cellular automatons (dust). Within each void is a stage for dialogue, physically opening them up to the sky to allow the public to embrace each physical pocket. They called each space an “island-as-void.” [22] Of particular value is what WORKac discovered in this approach: the “unconscious desire to discover something other than the expected and official narratives.” [23]

If we are to discover the possibility of new narratives, then the 21st century imperative for humanity is to consider that the collective atmosphere, or climate, in which we inhabit, is a symphony. Our fellow neighbor, a speck of dust adrift among seven billion, possesses a microclimate that is infinite in space and time that is worth exploring with utmost patience and consideration; for we are all dust.

“As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath...All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” — Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

03 Meteorite

Every year in the mid-summer months, the Perseid meteor shower becomes visible, as the dust cloud emitted from the Swift-Tuttle comet come into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere. A majority of the debris is burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, while some may make it the surface in the form of a meteorite. Swift-Tuttle is the closest flying comet to the Earth in the Solar System, and has been described as the “single most dangerous object known to humanity.” [24] Popular culture has generally viewed such phenomena as agents of destruction – catastrophic impact events that alter entire ecologies, destroy civilizations, and wipe out animal species. As such, meteorites have become standard fare in apocalyptic literature and media throughout history. (Fig. 23, 24) Just as early human civilizations deified cosmic entities like the sun, it is quite easy to see that earthbound events of cosmic origin, or quite simply, scalding rocks raining from the sky, might be indicators of a deity’s anger with humanity.

The past decade, however, is witness to a series of scientific studies that speak of the creative, or life-giving, potential of extraterrestrial matter that regularly penetrates the Earth’s atmosphere. In 2014, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison proved that plants could grow both in microgravity and within simulated lunar and Martian soil, which is very similar in material composition to volcanic soil from Earth. [25] In 2015, the NASA Ames Research Center reproduced the basic building blocks of RNA and DNA by simulating conditions in outer space. [26] Subsequently, in 2018, scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found an “extensive” variety of organics – viewed as direct evidence of complex prebiotic chemistry – in two meteorites found in 1998 named Zag and Monahans. [27] More recently, an international group of astrobiologists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University, Japan, discovered a series of “bio- essential” sugars in two carbon-rich meteorites named NWA 801 and Murchison. These sugars, specifically ribose and deoxyribose, are essential to the formation of biopolymers that are the basis for life, and the evidence of their existence in extraterrestrial form suggest that at least part of earth’s biodiversity may be of foreign origin. [28]

Similarly, microbiologists have shown that meteorites arrive in a particular ecology in a sterile form that is alien to its local environment can introduce a bacterial distribution change in the soil due to its abundance in energy generating material, thus creating variability to the microbiology of its locale. [29] A terrestrial analogue to this can be found in the ecology of beaver dams. When a beaver population moves into a new territory (foreign invasion), they build dams that alter the movement of water and create systemic changes to the local ecosystems from flora to fauna. On one hand, this invasive species can be viewed as colonizers, and on the other hand they may be viewed as generators of biodiversity, and both perspectives would be true. For one set of species, their appearance is tantamount to the apocalypse, and for another, biogenesis and biodiversity. [30]

In contrast to most 20th century tales of cosmic apocalypse, and perhaps echoing these recent studies, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey proposed a different kind of meteorite that arrived on earth’s surface – a perfectly formed, yet utterly mysterious, geometric monolith that connects past, present and future; a catalyst for the evolution of life. (Fig. 25) Perhaps it is possible that these seemingly invasive or destructive events, whether they originate extraterrestrially, volcanically, geologically through sedimentary shifts, or by human action; might simply be another input toward creation. In other words, not all falling particles from the sky, alien or not, signal the end nor the beginning of things but can rather be understood simply as opportunities. Whether the metamorphosis that is catalyzed is tenable, desirable, beautiful, or a grotesque perversion is as irrelevant as it is inevitable. Post atomic bomb Japanese culture is a prime example of the production of a multitude of narratives around both the tragic yet creative effect of unnatural (artificial or extraterrestrial) impact events, whose works “attempt to speak for history by employing a personal voice that has become well acquainted with ‘suffering, destruction, and renewal.’” [31] Here, the word “renewal” is key. Life persists. Films such as Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira do not end in the destructive moment, but rather understands that everything is in flux and moving in and with such events. The perceived alien invasion is simply another input towards the formation of a new identity that is ambivalent to the perceived natural order, which in the case of Akira, may have been the nuclear family or the national social history. (Fig. 26, 27) Otomo’s film is particularly valuable because it wrestles and ultimately relishes in the instability of things, and in that flux, renewal is found. Nothing is still, it is all moving, pulsing and vibrating with resonance and dissonance.

A potential problem with historical attempts to build the proverbial utopia is in its very definition: the search for perfection. In more contemporary terms, the qualification for utopia is based on valuation: a system is only perfect and ideal if it is valuable. False utopias, like WeWork, Uber and AirBNB are constructed and validated by their perceived valuation as quickly as they are torn apart for the very same reason. Ancient projects like al-Mansur’s round city of Baghdad, and the Han Dynasty’s approach to city planning, were all based on an architecture of value, and thus separation. (Fig. 28) In contrast, the examples of creation - of biodiversity that arises from sedimentary movement, atmospheric suspension of dust, and the catalytic extraterrestrial rocks perhaps offer a different point of view: that utopia is defined by movement, intermingling, and is instead a state and a mindset: a way of being and not a place, object or system that requires some kind of appraisal. This utopia is inherently without borders and inherently bricolage. The other is to be embraced as virtuous: the extraterrestrial meteorite welcomed and allowed to become an agent of metamorphosis. Utopia is “multiple, polyrhythmic,” to borrow the words of Henri Lefebvre. [32]

Such notions have emerged among contemporary writers. In a monthly column for the Swiss Architectural Journal Tracés, Leopold Lambert, writing about politics and archipelagos, posits that each island is distinct and unique in its continuously constructed identity, where “all bodies are welcome” and all bodies must confront the space they occupy. More importantly each island must be in dialogue with other islands. This dialogue is attenuated by the sea, in which he describes as a “region of flux. Fast fluxes, slow fluxes...the space of a constructive intensive movement.” [33]

Similarly, some schools of architecture – a practice that is often guilty for attempting to build utopic systems – have exhibited similar thoughts about movement. In 1969, a group of young Italian architects, self titled as Superstudio, presented a futuristic vision of a single global architectural monolith as a negative commentary on homogenization in Continuous Monument: an Architectural Model for Total Urbanization. (Fig. 29, 30) This negative utopia was a precursor to their 1972 Supersurface project which proposed a “global ‘circuit board’ that would transform the built environment from an architecture of singular objects to a continuous landscape on which people would roam nomadically,” and in which people would be “...freed from repetitive work, consumerist desires, hierarchies of power and violence.” [34] In 1974, multidisciplinary Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, proposed the New Babylon project at the Gemeentermuseum Den Haag and later in 1999 at the Drawing Center in New York City. The project was directly influenced by his prior involvement with the Situationists and their concept of derivé, and in it Constant proposed a series of linked structures in which human beings would be able to move freely in a post-metropolitan environment (Fig. 31). While both proposals were flawed in some way due to their hedonism and lack of dialogue, they did possess an alternative view of movement and fluidity that is resonant.

More recently, the American artist Ian Cheng produced a body of work known as the Emissaries Trilogy - a “...series of simulations that explore an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment.” (Fig. 32, 33) Cheng presents the work from the perspective of past, present and future, and in each case the agent, or emissary, is “...caught between unraveling old realities and emerging weird ones.” The simulations were non-deterministic and seemingly random and chaotic, and in the duration of the six year year project, Cheng writes: “In the process, I began to see the edges of a new layer of artistic activity. One that could organize my base ingredients — deterministic stories and open-ended simulations — into something more than the sum of its parts. Something meaningful yet alive, bounded yet transforming. I’ve been calling this activity Worlding.” [35] Cheng’s self discovery in his artistic practice yields a more nuanced take than Superstudio’s Supersurface or Constant’s New Babylon - a willingness to dialogue, be afraid of, and even love, with a sense of humility, to both the chaos of things unknown - extraterrestrials even, and of one’s own self, boundaries, time and history. This is both an act of submission and subversion. In a 2019 interview with Stuard Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of Media and Performance, Cheng concludes: “...the best way to overcome something is to actually look at it directly and try to fall in love with it...you face it and be fully in it and endure feeling destabilized or scared by being in it until that feeling is subsumed by a feeling of interest or even enchantment. Because once you’re in it, and interested, then you can adjust it.” [36]

If one were to attempt to construct this idea physically, perhaps the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s House N in Oita, Japan, may point to a possible archetype. (Fig. 34) House N is a structure that consists of three open shells nested within each other in which the residents move into and out of fluidly. By utilizing what amounts to open, indistinct boundaries, Fujimoto built a gradation of spaces to “... resemble...living among the clouds,” where “...an outdoor space... feels like the indoor and an indoor space...like the outdoors. In a nested structure, the inside is invariably the outside, and vice versa.” Fujimoto further declares that the shells are infinite in a world of infinite nesting - a “...continuum of a single subject,” and thus an “...undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell.” [37]