Mar 18

Mar 18 ecotronica

In this text Nolan Oswald Dennis asks how the formation of a club, an example of “organized intimacy” as he writes, can become a research methodology informed by material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. The Black Earth Study Club is unitary by its references, named after the planetary agglomerations of fertile soil, colloquially called ‘black earth’, and forms of collective thinking known as ‘black study’, thus exploring the planet as a spiritual-material-Social entity.

The black earth study club is a conceptual proposition and a research methodology. This means that through the structure and program of a study club we would like to develop and research ways of relating to this planet through the transformational logic and critical sociality of black liberation theory.

A club is a voluntary association, a provisional community and, especially relevant for this research, a modulation of recreational possibility into a form of social life. A key question for this fellowship is, can we mobilise this form of social life into a research methodology?

A supplemental intention of this black-earth-study-club during the digital earth fellowship is to identify and explore sensorial infrastructures which we can “wreck, scavenge, retool, and disassemble” for our project of non-reductive planetary solidarity. Together.

The key infrastructure we have been looking at are ecotrons: shared experimental facilities designed to produce valid knowledge through the controlled manipulation of enclosed, simplified ecosystems. These instruments physically and electronically integrate environmental chambers to simulate animal and plant life in particular ecosystems at multiple trophic levels

Let me say from the outset, the history of ecotronic infrastructure (starting with warden cases and greenhouses) is irrevocably colonial. As much as colonial relations of power still structure conditions of planetary life, the present and the future of ecotronic infrastructure is also colonial. The black earth study club approaches all such infrastructure with the understanding that within the colonizing earth exists a decolonizing earthing. It is our club work to be that earthing. To modulate Linda Tuwihai Smith, we remember that the present of ecological modelling is permeable to the time now (colonial), the time before that (sovereign), and the time to come (decolonial).

So for the black earth study club the question moving forward is how, or whether, it is possible to pursue our decolonial work within a terminology of micro-ecological engineering. Simply put, is there an other disposition in what Granjou and Walker call “an anticipatory technoscience of civilizational security”. Especially when we understand our decolonial task as changing “the order of the world.. A program of complete disorder”.

The future of this research path is a deeper dive into the design and research practices of artificial ecosystems: a close reading of the biological and environmental variables measured, manipulated and controlled, as well as the planetary narratives and ecological promises being co-developed as models of social life. This research will be parsed through a programme of gardening, hiking and other forms of organised intimacy. This decolonial adventure into ‘Big Ecology” technical systems is grounded by Audre Lorde’s injunction:

everything can be used

except what is wasteful

(you will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction)

even when they are dangerous

examine the heart of those machines you hate

Before you discard them

And encouraged by John H. Lawton’s description of environmental control as a “feed-forward” not “feed-back” system. Which we take to mean the future is ours.

Important Media

A third university is possible - La paperson, University of Minnesota Press, 2017

How to make soil out of almost anything https://www.instructables.com/Make-Garden-Soil-from-any-Dirt/

References

la paperson, a third university is possible, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press) 2017

Granjou, C. Walker, J., “Promises that Matter: Reconfiguring Ecology in the Ecotrons”, Science & Technology Studies #29, 2016

Lawton, J.H., “The Ecotron facility at Silwood Park: the value of “big bottle” experiments”, Ecology Vol. 77 (Issue 3) 1996

Tuwihai Smith, L., Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, (Zed: London) 1999

Easterling, K. Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructural space, (New York: Verso), 105, 2014

Granjou, C. Walker, J., “Promises that Matter: Reconfiguring Ecology in the Ecotrons”, Science & Technology Studies #29, 2016

Fanon, F., The Wretched of the Earth, (Penguin Classics: London) 1961

Lorde, A., For Each of You, from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company) 1997