Fieldnotes

Sonoran & Mojave deserts 020170517 to 020170527

It was as if the city didn't want to let us leave, pulling us

back into it's humid lethargy. It took us more than two
days to leave Brussels (a train accident, flight delays,
arcane regulations, etc.) and when we finally landed in
Phoenix we were greeted by the dry warmth of desert
evening. is was a different kind of warmth, one that
glides across the skin rather than cloying and stifling.

We had arrived in the Sonoran desert. A place of

desiccated time, layered time, geological, vegetal,
human time. Here, time kneads the Earth’s crust into
deep folds, cracks and canyons. Plants lay dormant
through cycles of drought or grow slowly for
centuries, bursting into blossom a er the first rains.
Humans come and go. Blown through the ages like
tumbleweeds. ings don’t really decay here. ey
shrivel, dry up or slowly rust, yet remain present, as
they gradually erode into dust. A thick, dusty
atmo here of things that were, things that are and
things that might be. Densities and intensities
coagulating on a larger than human scale, illuminated
by stark light or lurking in the deep shadow.
 Our first impression was that of rawling suburbia, a
seemingly endless grid of ordinal numbers and presidents.
A city of three million people keeping the desert at bay. Yet
I dream of a hard and brutal
the desert refuses to be tamed. e dust from the big
mysticism in which the self
merges with a non-human "beyond" blows across the streets on the hot wind. It covers
world and yet somehow all surfaces, forms a thin crust and penetrates everything. A
survives still intact,
individual, separate. reminder that the heart of darkness is our neighbour.
Paradox and bedrock. Hidden beneath otherworldly rocks. A vast expanse with

—Edward Abbey "outstanding opportunities for solitude" prote ed by the

Wilderness A and it's own indifference.

A vastness that remains incomprehensible de ite

various attempts to focus and frame it, from early
Hohokam sites to contemporary land art. James Turrel's
"Air Apparent" frames the intense blue within a skyward
metal square. e ruins of the Casa Grande are host to an
array of sky-holes focusing sunlight and moonlight.
Lines and openings to mark solstices and equinoxes. One
ecific aperture oriented in su a way that it
illuminates ea 18.6 years during the lunar standstill.
 An inert ar ite ural element a ivated during an event of
ritual significance. From place to time, from earthly to cosmic.

Our bodies experience a radical disjun ion. Skins used to

the swampy conditions of the European Lowlands begin to
crack and it . Temperature rises above 40ºC (105ºF). De ite
the discomfort, the desert draws us in. Inho itable and
otherworldly, alluring and addi ive. A resonant, experiential
alterity. Neither “the mirror” nor “the lamp” will serve us here.
We need (to become) human receptors and listening devices.
Pra icing the cra of silence. Heterogeneous hearing.
Tuning to the world.

ere are others here listening too. An incomprehensible

historical grammar of rock formations. Alien plant
morphologies with antennae into parallel presents and
alternate futures. e rustle of slithering reptiles, the buzz of
invisible inse s and thick webs woven by secretive ara nids.

e world eaks to us in material forces. We gradually

begin to sense its overlapping relational fields. Other-
knowing, co-existence and reciprocal engagement.
Communing rather than examining, cross-pollination rather
than exploitation, reconciliation rather than redu ion. We
came, this time, to this place, to observe before intera ing.
As Karl S roeder's alience suggests, to "give the physical
world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is,
reality itself can tell us.” So, what would a thalient laboratory
in the Sonoran desert look like?
The heartland of zombie utopias
e desert seems to invite an unencumbered
experimentation. e savage romanticism of the Wild
West. “Let’s just try it out”. is isn’t a place to hesitate. e
desert is unforgiving. ere are no maybes, no
compromises. A polar opposite to our point of departure.
Yet people do try. “You have an idea? Great. Show me that it
works.” A heuristic culture of trial and error.

We sought out the consequences of mi laced

experimentation. Of experiments out of place. Of human
intervention in habitats generally inho itable to humans.
“There were people here and now they are not”. e Hohokam
tribe populated the Sonoran desert for centuries, then
disappeared. e name Hohokam itself translates to “All
used up” or “those who are gone”. A human civilisation with
an expiration date. A déjà vu? A signal? Phoenix becomes a
Hohokam perpetuation holding onto the promise of
permanence. Has Phoenix risen from its ashes,
transformed? Or are the ashes still to come?

We take the I-10 west, driving past dreams of free

settlements crumbling in the unrelenting dryness and heat.
Ghost towns, haunted utopias, evaporated opportunities.
Human dwellings abandoned and desiccated. A scattering
of burned cars, shot-up rusty cans. Guns and God. Forgiven,
yet not absolved. Desert center, Amboy, Eagle mountain
mine. Waste. Waste of ace. Waste and ace. It seems
easier to abandon than maintain here. Engineering
mistakes leading to inadvertent ecological transformations.
 e accidental, yet complete drainage of the Colorado
River in a series of mishaps that produced the now semi-
living Salton Sea. First Solar’s energy farm and unintended
soil erosion ma ine. e arid confluence of Joshua Tree
National Park where the Mojave and Colorado deserts
meet. Why even attempt to build cities in the desert? As
Becket e oes “Try again, fail again, fail better.”

We are witness to grand visions refusing to fade

from matter to memory. Domed stru ures barely
holding onto existence. Failed experiments hovering
in some zombie half-life; Bio here 2, Arcosanti,
repeating groups of eight. Half dust. Half baked. What
would a banishing ritual for these haunted utopias
look like? Could they be transformed, or gradually
reused and recycled, like airplanes in the Tucson
boneyard (309 AMARG)? ere are always risks to
experimentation. Most recently visible in te no-
utopian experimentation. e Alcor Life Extension
Foundation in Scottsdale keeps ongoing records of
"Su ension failures" in cryonics. e New Age slant on
iritual tourism in Sedona can provide salve, scandal and
swindles. Neorea ion (Dark Enlightenment) and New
Age existing as ea -other’s flipsides, collapsing the
complexities of uncertainty into a few sele parameters
or platitudes. e questions that current uncertainties
gives rise to can't be answered by a reversion to a
mythical "golden age" or mistaking a local maxima for
something more. ese are perhaps, warning signals of
the pre-modern perverted, good intentions gone astray,
of confusions between signal and noise. So, how can we
animate non-modern sensibilities without becoming
entrapped by dualisms of light and darkness, good and
evil, us and them, love and power?
 Animism, animation, re-animation
How do we translate animist attitudes towards the
interconne edness of all life into worldviews compatible
with contemporary (or future) te no-materialist
To engage with animism
necessarily involves being societies? We mulled over romantic poets and romantic
provoked to think more carefully ma ines, process philosophy and the creative process,
about what it means to be a
person. [T]he understanding that experiential topology and phenomenology, en antment,
persons always live in relation ecology and non-modern pra ices. We lingered in the
with others and, in animist
contested terrain of panpsy ism, where psy e is not
communities, are regularly
encouraged to act respectfully— “just” mind but soul, breath, life, vitality, being. Would
especially towards those one
“panexperientialism” be a more suitable term? Or should
intends to eat. That is, this
animism is always local and we refrain from ee and use the visceral language of
specific. It might not be at all experience? How do we eak of relations as well as
romantic, transcendent or
things? In many languages (including Mayan, Turkish,
esoteric, but might instead be
quite practical or pragmatic as ai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Tibetan) relational nouns
people negotiate everyday needs.
describe movements, relationships between things. Our
—Graham Harvey language could liquefy, become unstuck, mutate on
occasion, from ceremonial to the everyday. Communicate
to conne rather than disse .

Perhaps we’re a er a humanist (or at least humane)

view without anthropocentrism, balancing on a fine
edge between social constru ivism and social
engineering. Moving from social contra s to a natural
contra . From value to valuation (of matter, of ecology,
of experience…). From sequential decisions to layered
sele ions. From static matter to a ace of operation.
From the frame to framing. From facilitating to
communing, catalysing and awning.
 How do we decentre without falling into the abyss of
nihilism? Finding and cultivating places of care, empathy
and conviviality within the contemporary worlds. Increasing
the porousness between interiority and exteriority. From the
ace between the cells to the ace between the stars.

Amidst the many traces of human failure, we felt a

pervading sense of possibility, of resonance, confluence
and syn ronicity. Nearing the adjacent possible. From
myth making to re-animating myths and re-a ivating
inert (geological or ar ite ural) markers. Geomancy.
Material wonder. Walking. From shinto to shamanism (and
back again). In sacred refugia and wild san uaries.
Vaporous thoughts condensed into propositions,
commonplaces and fieldguides. ∆[∆] …until all our material
traces erode and conjoin with countless dust particles in
the ever expanding desert.
 In the same way the garden remains the
garden designed 500 years ago by a poet-
architect, even though every plant follows the
course of the seasons, rains, frosts, wind;
similarly the lines of a poem are handed down
over time while the paper of the pages on
which the lines are systematically written
disappears into dust.

–Italo Calvino
 Sono an dese t 020171123 to 020171206
anksgiving. A convivial gathering around a long
wooden table, laden with food and filled with laughter. e
familiar cadences of a feast, yet one with unfamiliar
origins. We were temporarily adopted, welcomed as
returning family. Kith and kin, ken or kin. Akin. Some
rootless others uprooted, weathering the end-of-term
academic storm. A temporary intensification of
familiarity. reads are picked up from conversations
months old. Our relationships with FoAM’s distributed
clan have begun to follow more closely the rhythms of
nomadic journeying. Deep and involved when we briefly
occupy the same atiotemporal locus, loose and relaxed
while we travel elsewhere. An irregular pulse of welcomes
and farewells, of subsuming and letting go.

We ent two weeks on and around e ASU Tempe

campus—immersed in university life and surrounded by
urban rawl—inquiring about the relationships between
people and the desert. Uncovering the mythical
foundations of contemporary lifestyles. Seeking out
counter-myths more closely attuned to the desert
environment. Exploring the topological aces of bodies
as fields, bodies as listening devices. Creating
propositions, designing experiments and publications.
Conversing. Reading. Listening. Aligning. Futurecra ing.
Socialising. Falling asleep and waking up to the sound of
airplanes and air-conditioning.
 From time to time we would follow the edges
between city and desert. Sear ing for sites of dust
and shadow, where the city-desert and the wilderness-
desert entwine. e Piestewa peak, Moeur park.

We followed shadows along the abandoned “Cut” of a

railway that was not to be, in the remains of utility
poles, in the cairns beneath a flight path and a wetland
between two highways. We traced a path of divination.
In the delirium of heat and jetlag, we hiked into the
Superstitions in sear of the mythical source of dust
storms, finding enigmatic petroglyphs and a dry creek
bed. From our higher vantage point the city became a
mirage, merging into the hazy plain pun uated by
saguaro ca i. Centuries of human inhabitation Deserts
evaporated in that mirage. Occasionally re-appearing
with small groups of hikers, a procession of jeans, t-shirts,
possess a
particular
trainers, ball caps, water bottles, snacks, dusty sunglasses.
At full-moon, we joined a larger group for a night walk in
magic,
the liminally illuminated Papago park. Silence without
since
stillness. e hum of internal and external traffic pulling
they have
at our attentions and perceptions.
exhausted
We wat ed e Last Angel of History eak of their own
fra ures and dislocation, weave musically and deploy futures,
science fi ions in whi alien ships take on multiple and are
sinister meanings. A stark contrast to the narrative thus free
simplicity of the exhibits at Superstition Mountain. We
listened to the Legend of the Lost Dut man, a story of
of time.
—J.G. Ballard
places where people, treasure, mines and even whole
towns vanish into the landscape, never to be found. We
traversed personal and cultural memories in sear of
an experiential imperative. Sacred obje s, colle ed
materials and traces of the desert across suburbia
became text. A tu of coyote’s fur, a date, a red rock, a
olla ike, and a drop of mezcal, drunk with friends
under the vast, darkening skies.
li 1
C14 Clocks
Mythologies
Xenogenesis
City and the City
Reclaiming animism
Governing the Commons
Anthropology in the time of the Anthropocene
e mushroom at the end of the world
e En antment of Modern Life
Body ritual among the Nacirema
e good natured feminist
e last angel of history
Customs in Common
Humankind
Anathem
2312
 Phoenix and its environs simultaneously fascinate and distance.

Our daily walk between the Anyplace AirBnB and Lab for
Critical Te nics (LCT) offered a brief opportunity for casual
ethnographic study. We were greeted warmly ea morning by
“Mexican” constru ion workers. e traffic light (with frog-like
certainty) ordered us to “WAIT” for the endless multi lane
procession of cars (single driver predominantly, with an
occasional "driverless" vehicle). e di ersed oir of homeless
veterans from the Endless War droning in refrain under their
most inventive shades. “Spare any change for a vet?” Nearby, the
Salvation Army Cafe serves Mat a Latte while half-finished
buildings advertise their future as generic condos.

On campus, e Biodesign Institute grows new copper-clad

extensions, while the English department is shuffled further from
the daylight. ASU is offering ex anges with an Australian
university to study cancers affe ing the Tasmanian Devil. We enter
the Synthesis Center, where clouds and simulated plants dance in
re onsive patterns around us. Outside, students are rushing to-
and-fro fuelled by coffee in take-out cups. In front of a strip mall,
cars are le running to keep the heat at bay. Arriving at our
temporary studio in LCT, we wat as our hosts unload a pack of
plastic water bottles. Tap water quality is troubling, they inform us.

Even our short commute across Tempe suggests that

environmental issues are an inextricable part of entangled
social, economic and political realities. As China Miéville
points out “Arms trading, dictatorships and murder are
environmental politics.” ey cannot be separated from
pollution, climate ange and renewable energy targets.
Dust Kapital
What are the environmental politics in the North
American South West, ecifically to life in the desert?
What are the implications for the people, plants, plastics
(etc.) and the environment they live in? What peculiar
futures or parallel presents exist in this “Valley of the Sun”?
What new worlds can emerge from a region swayed by the
unpredi ability of heatwaves, poor water distribution and
over-enthusiastic promises of the te industry?

We travelled through layers of signals, systems and

stories in sear of the hardened sediment of metaphoric
undercurrents. e libertarian ethos and protestant
work-ethic ration desert time into a neurotic drip and
trickle of temporal scarcity. Time is submitted to a
relentless economic valuation. ere is an inherent trust
in “the market” as regulatory system. Politicians gamble
with a growing population, in a labyrinth of tax benefits,
eap real-estate and myopic risk tolerance. Scale up
Arizona’s 5Cs (copper, cattle, cotton, citrus and climate).
Work must continue, no matter the conditions, in the
“Sand of the Free, Sprawl of the Brave”. S ool starts in
the hot, sticky month of August as kids hold tight to
youthful curiosity while navigating a system caught
between funding cuts. Idleness is still considered the
devil’s playground, siestas close to sacrilege. A distrust
of “elites” and the rhetoric of self-reliance encourage a
culture of conservative individualists and a precarious
belief in the Dominion of Man over Earth.

Water rights and food sovereignty stret public

infrastru ure close to breaking point. Environmental
problems tend to be tackled as single issues with
inventive te nological solutions. Water banking from
CAP & SRP is increasing reserves in the sub-basins
beneath the Phoenix metro area.
 All is shadow mixed with
dust, and there’s no voice
but in the sounds made by
what the wind lifts up or
sweeps forward, nor
silence except from what
the wind abandons.
—Fernando Pessoa
 At the Palo Verde Generating Station nuclear rea ors
are cooled by sewage from nearby towns. Non-native
oranges now thrive across the state. e “Smart City” of
Belmont is taking root, born in a fever dream of real-
estate eculation and the shimmering promise of
te nology. Yet a larger concern remains; Phoenix exists
far from equilibrium, requiring massive external inputs
for its continued existence. De ite the desert, not with
the desert. Holding onto an idealised image of urban life,
haunted by the shadow of its possible demise. Kept alive
by snow melt. Water, power and other essentials
imported from afar to maintain the appearance of a stable
oasis. e myth of the Wild West in a desert on demand.
e purity (and dread) of the Wilderness kept at arms
length, only to be occasionally appropriated for solitary
transcendence, urbophobian escapism and utopian
experimentation. Where both nascent and long gone
ways of life overlap. A “Tech Bro Guru” finds his place in
Sedona as a “polyamourous cult leader” wrapping a very
contemporary hollowness around huckster tricks and
Barnum effe s. Alongside King Clone (the unassuming
11,700 year old creosote bush) lie the ruins of a vanished
Pueblo Grande. And yet, here too could be found the
American Gods, time-unbinding desert monks and the
Dionysian world of the Carnivàle.
list2
e Wilderness A
e Dark Mountain
Hope in the Dark
Ecology of Mind
e Imperative
Solarpunk
Dust studies
Dark ecology
Book of Sand
Minutes to midnight
Too like the lightning
In praise of shadows
Autobiography of Red
Staying with the trouble
 list
3
A Pra ical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning
Into the universe of te nical images
Panpsy ism & Noumenautics
e word for world is forest
How forests think
Q is for Quicken
Point Omega
Ventus
Finite media
Crystal radio
Geology of media
Romantic ma ine
A journey to Shadow Belmont
Welcome to Shadow Belmont. A place deeply familiar with
shade. Shade ar ite ure, shaded tran ort, sheltered time.
A cityscape layered with a latticework of por es, pergolas,
verandas, galleries, awnings, canopies, umbrellas and trees.
From above the city is mirage-like as a desert garden. e
shade of high canopy covering ca imorphic succulent pillars,
doubling as public water sources. Closer to the ground, multi-
trunked mesquite marquees diffuse light across outdoor
kit ens and intimate courtyards. e ubiquitous antennae of
the place mingle with soaring ocotillo vines, their cabling
prote ed by dessicated saguaro skeletons. Solar-powered
screens radiate the shadow forecast and predi a cooling
breeze. e STA (Shade Traversal Association) maps show
real-time developments, with roads in dire sun coloured
flaming red. e droning of traffic blends into the murmur of
slowly adjusting stru ures finding and creating shade. e
continuous background hum of inse s, psy ic noise and
ambient communication.
 is is a city enfolded in the long temporality of the desert.
It abides in time marked by feasts and silences. A world
capable of sudden bursts of ecstatic a ion, like blooms a er
a desert rain. As all a ivity eventually ceases, idleness is
embraced, one of many te niques to attune to the desert. A
city in a city living the experiential time of iders, snakes and
saguaro. e variable abundance of time is sensed and
modulated by an antennae-centric te industry. Deep
listening te nologies. Nomad te on smart grids
accustomed to oscillations of resources. People and
te nology attuned to differentials and committed to the a .
From independence to interdependence. From individual
bodies to communal infrastru ure, the city is continuously
aligning with its anging conditions. A gradual redesign.
From behavioural ange to contorted comportment.

is place does not shy away from its own shadow. e

shadows of dust storms, water shortages, gun-slinging
individualism, heat delirium and venomous critters, the
fickleness of the desert and its inho itable heart. People
congregate under urban canopies. eir senses augmented
with panpsy ic te nologies, they hear those Who Shall Not
Be Named. ose who eak in heterogeneous voices. e
nameless dust clouds and rocky outcrops, the social inse s in
their frantic mounds. e shy reptilian monsters and passive-
aggressive ollas. e gloomy irits of cell towers and
brooding pygmy owls. In shady saloons cowboy hermeneuts
annel messages from barren lands. ey conscript guileless
snowbirds for expeditions into the shadow world.
 Occult sciences, fi ocriticism, and dust theory are
common fields of study. Entrepreneurial al emists
embrace the long process of transforming zombie-
utopias into compost for regenerative heterotopias.

e political and economic thaumaturges divide their

energies between experimenting with hybrid governance
stru ures and fighting shadowy battles for dominance
of the three pillars; market, government and commons.
Shadow Belmont is plagued by regular skirmishes
between hard-line libertarians, and the more convivial
cryptoanar ists. Meanwhile, the autonomous shadow
courts are sentencing property fundamentalists to shade
growth, under the wat ful eye of the IRS (Internal Review
of Shade) “In Shade We Trust!”
 In transition, the government fun ions as a medium
between humans and other entities in the distri . Water,
with all it's power, is treated as a nonaligned political
entity in its own right. e shadow minister of translocal
affairs advocates “the social responsibility of a coven” and
inclusion of an a for the rights of “diverse states of matter”
in her inaugural ee . With drought cycles lengthening,
water tokens flu uating and heat waves becoming less
predi able, self-reliance is gradually finding a place
alongside the security of intergenerational commons
management and stewarding the preciousness of life, in a
desert teeming with life.

And then it was time to depart. We run through the

usual routine of packing and cleaning. Everything is dusty.
As if the desert is clinging onto us as we take our leave.
Months later we’ll still find its particles mingling with dust
from elsewhere on our boots. Dust of places ground in the
mill of time. Places that remain lodged in the alveoli of our
lungs and the warm caverns of our hearts.
As the day comes to an end, the twilight dissolves the
surfaces, absorbing their colors, leaving their reflections
suspended in space. The luminous transparency in open
spaces condenses into beams and phosphorescence.
Things lose their separatedness. The shadows advance
over the colors and the contours that they outlined are
lost. Darkness infiltrates the landscape, obliterating its
paths and filling up its open planes. Overhead the blue of
the atmosphere recedes and the starlights drift over
unmeasurable distances.

—Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative

The true alien recedes interminably even as
it surrounds us completely. It is not hidden
in the darkness of the outer cosmos or in
the deep-sea shelf but in plain sight,
everywhere, in everything. Mountain
summits and gypsum beds, chile roasters
and buckshot, microprocessors and ROM
chips can no more communicate with us
and one another than can [an]
extraterrestrial. It is an instructive and
humbling sign. Speculative realism really
does require speculation: benighted
meandering in an exotic world of utterly
incomprehensible objects.

— Ian Bogost
Sono an & G eat Basin Dese ts
020180304 to 020180330

We landed at the Sky Harbour around midnight. A er a

dazed stumble through the near deserted airport we found
ourselves in a dark, semi-covered street, smelling of fuel and
stale exhaust fumes. Deep shadows lingering in the air
eckled with particulate dust. Distant sounds of unseen
critters, in a desert marked by stark contrasts between heat
and ill, adoration and dread, escape and extra ion.

Desert Attunement
Our gradual attunement to the desert expanse, its
climate, rhythms and scales became an experiment in
communing rather than examining. An exploration of an
embodied sense of layered time and material wonder. Being
part of the world without romanticising wilderness or
drawing hard distin ions between the desert and the cities
within it. And so we embarked on that most ar etypal of
American experiences, e Road Trip. Attunement to the
surfaces of the desert at the pace of modernity. Atypically, in
a small (by local standards) hybrid car.
 Here is the Stillness, which is not still even on a good
day. Now it ripples, reverberates, in cataclysm. Now there
is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat
in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the
land’s equator. (…) The line is deep and raw, a cut to the
quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and
glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This
wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then
the cleansing ocean will follow its lie to bisect Stillness
into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound
will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash
—enough to choke off the sky across most of the
Stillness’s face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere
will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve,
and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will
come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It
will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the
world will return to its old self. Eventually. (…) Eventually
meaning in this case in a few thousand years.

—N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

 An attunement at various eeds and human densities.
Attuning to the smear of the landscape sliding past while driving,
to the irregularities of the path while trail-running or hiking, to
the sounds of the frosty ground and howling wind while walking.
Along the Path of Time, where ea step marks one million
years. Down beyond the rim of the Grand Canyon, its scale
overwhelming physically and perceptually, joining the intrepid
3% of visitors who dare leaving the comfort of buses and paved
paths. We would stop and listen. Seek out faceted moments of
geomediation at the Hermits Rest, a er staring down e Abyss.
Layers upon layers, Bright Angel Shale, Vishnu S ist and
Zoroaster Granite. e Great Unconformity (an absence, a non-
layer). e desert irped and rattled and murmured, pun uated
every few minutes by the roar of an airplane overhead, buffeting
the atter of birds, cracking of wood, or an argument between
unseen humans. e effortless, unperturbed, lithic existence of
the planet present in its apparent stillness.

e atial and temporal scales in the desert show themselves

differently when experienced at eed. Driving through canyon
country becomes a movie of geological magnitude. What began
as a pale green plateau covered with the shy budding of early
ring lits into dark jagged lines. A crack in the earth. e
crack widens into a gorge and deepens into ravines. It lits open
the landscape until the horizontal plateau disappears into the
vertical crags of raw rock face. Geological scar-tissue as
monument to the violent, persistent forces shaping the earth.
E oes of an era before the planet became ho itable to humans.
Reminders not to take the Earth's ho itality for granted.
 A few hours (or moments) later time is adri , scattered,
discarded as it blows erratically along the roadside. e
highway turns north into the Painted Desert. We glide through
a gentler geological process—layered sedimentation of rock
and sand and ash. Reds, pinks, yellows, purples inter ersed
with gradients of dusty grey, black and white. e dust of
minerals layered with the dust of forests and crushed bones.
From afar the hills appear liquid, coloured with inks and
turbulent water. We drive through time-scales in whi rocks
behave like fluids. Layered time of fossilised erosion. What
might the thin layer of the Anthropocene look like, when
sedimented atop those older layers, with hues of non-
compostable plastics and industrial waste? What layers will
come next? What will cover the remnants of the human-
dominated sliver of deep geological time?

The parking lot near Horseshoe Bend was busy enough for
time’s acceleration to the eed of gnats and twit ing selfie
sticks. We found ourselves in the wake of a Japanese hip-hop
band, trailed by co lay girls, followers in full regalia, teetering
on the cliff edge in dainty high heels. Photogenic humans
photographing themselves in photogenic topography. Attuning
to digital mediation of landscapes framed at screen resolution.
No drones allowed. We were attuning to an Insta-desert in whi
moments of awe are carefully mediated. e experience validated
by small screens and prescribed per e ives.

In front of the legendary Antelope Canyon, our Navajo guide

warned us that this is a iritual place, where no-one (except flood
water) should enter. Yet she ushered us in. Uncanny sha s of light
framed by smooth undulating rocks guided our gaze as we
scuffled along in hazy shadows. ick dri s of dust stirred up by
thousands of feet. e per e ive anged with occasional
flickers of iron-ore coloured light, opening upwards into
cavernous formations. Looking up, we could have been in the
womb of the planet, all red and warm and smooth. Looking
around, reds turned into dusty browns, pinks and o res of
human faces. Some bewildered, some quietly overwhelmed,
others indifferent and impatient. A complicated tangle of humans
cramped between unyielding rocks, compressed into the slotted
time of a tour, rubbing shoulders with those who came before and
a er us. An attunement to the rhythms of desert tourism.
 Squeezed into the back of a truck, we trundled past the
Navajo Generating Station, a massive 2400 MW coal
Since a thing cannot be
power plant whose imposing stru ure rises from lands known directly or totally, one
leased by the LeChee Chapter of the Navajo Nation. Its can only attune to it, with
greater or lesser degrees of
smokestacks and powerlines deeply embroiled with the intimacy. This is not a
desert. Salient signposts of dark histories, a complicated “merely” aesthetic approach
to a basically blank
present and difficult futures.
extensional substance. Since
appearance can’t be peeled
On our way out of Page we crossed the modernist
decisively from the reality of
megalith of the Glen Canyon Dam, a solid promise of a thing, attunement is a
progress with scant regard for any detrimental side-effe s. living, dynamic relation with
another being.
We stopped, listened, documented. is too belonging to
—Timothy Morton, Attune
desert attunement in the Anthropocene.

In the roadside Rock Shop, near Orderville in

southern Utah, ancient minerals are broken into
unks, shards and pebbles, sold by weight, colour and
size. We couldn’t resist stopping to marvel at the colours
and textures laid bare in the bright sunlight. Obsidian,
septarian, copper ore, bloodstone, sodalite, desert rose,
amethyst geodes. Buying slivers and shavings of the
Earth’s raw flesh from a geological but er, wholesale.
 We drove further north, to the edge of the desert. Bryce
Canyon on the semi-arid Paunsagunt Plateau shares more
with Scandinavian or alpine biotopes than what we had
previously seen in the deserts of the Southwest. We were
greeted by snow, gnarly pine trees and cri mountain air,
contrasting with the pink and orange hues of the mysterious
hoodoos. ese ancient eroded rock formations extend
throughout several natural amphitheatres like the stuff of
myths. Hiking trails named “Queens Garden” or the
“Fairyland Loop” encourage ildlike fantasies and an easy
anthropomorphising of the landscape. According to
indigenous Paiute mythology, the hoodoos are remnants of
greedy To-when-an-ung-wa, the Legend People turned to
stone by the trickster god Coyote. A monstrous work of land-
art cautioning against “living too heavily upon the land”.

rough the bodies of the Legend People, with mud and

snow sticking to our shoes we slid and slipped towards an
empty riverbed, holding onto gnarly bristlecone pines. eir
bark twisted and turned around the trunks, textured in
convoluted alien scripture and secure handholds. Above our
heads the wind played the needles and dry bran es. To
these otherworldly instruments we added a rhythm se ion,
crun ing frost and squel ing sludge under our feet.
 At the bottom of the trail, the wind stopped. Silence
began creeping back into an already arse
soundscape. A drop of water. A solitary crow. A tiny
crack or slide of a sleepy mountain. And then, the
inevitable noise of humanity returned. e loud
voices of jets. Trail runners. A particularly asthmatic
motorbike in the distance soloing above the
luttering or estra of ringtones and notifications.
e invisible smog of noise pollution hovering over
the still places, cloudlike.

We travelled onwards as clouds loomed on the

horizon. Storm clouds. Dust clouds. Clouds of invisible
pollution. What appeared as pristine desert could
harbour an atmo here filled with airborne toxic dust
and deadly ground water. We followed clues from the
Center for Land Use Interpretation, driving through
Tuba City, a town known for its uranium mill from 1956
to 1966. e scars both visibly and invisibly remain.
Attuning to this landscape gave rise to a visceral sense
of unease, di lacement, halting conversations,
prolonged awkward silences and the hollow taste of
unseen dread, skewed injustices.

Tuba City Uranium disposal cell

Just outside the town we found the Uranium

Di osal Cell. Framed by barbed wire and DOE
warning signs, the Cell is a hermetic dull scar, far from
the e acle of “Atomic City” (neither Las Vegas nor
Los Alamos nor Midway), uniformly dark grey and
re angular cut into an amorphous arid plateau,
geometrically attempting to outlast the half-life of
uranium. An eerie regularity, in stark contrast to the
nearby Coalmine Canyon, whose contours continue to
ange over time, sculpted by erosion into gracefully
intricate carvings. e blacks, reds, yellows and whites
extending into the depths beyond sight. A temple of
lithic giants under a brooding sky. Worshipped by
flocks of crows and the occasional human.
It is not enough to fight for the
land; it is even more important to
enjoy it. While you can. While it’s
still here. So get out there and
hunt and fish and mess around
with your friends, ramble out
yonder and explore the forests,
climb the mountains, bag the
peaks, run the rivers, breathe
deep of that yet sweet and lucid
air, sit quietly for a while and
contemplate the precious
stillness, the lovely, mysterious,
and awesome space.

—Edward Abbey
 Dark clouds had covered the sky completely as we
began the slow descent from the Colorado plateau. We
followed miles of power lines and fences, occasional
ur es emerging from the mirage of an endless road.
No Sunset Crater, no Marble Canyon and no condors.
No dusk recordings. Instead, the highway framed in icy
rain lead us to the creature comforts of Flagstaff. e
historic Monte Vista hotel celebrating its famous
guests alongside ghost stories and disturbances (when
John Wayne met e Phantom Bellboy). Cra beer and
pizza. Motion sickness pills and "The Broken Earth".
A temporary listening station
e next morning, as we returned to saguaro country, the
clouds parted and temperature rose. We continued our
deceleration from 5000 miles in a day, 1000 miles in a week to
one mile in 10 days. We arrived and we stayed put. We
listened. Experiencing the desert at 0mph, as the warm light
of the a ernoon intensified into a blood-hued sunset, then
faded into cool shades of dusk, until the pinprick starlights
began blinking into existence, scattered across the desert sky.

e longer we remained still, the more frequently our

neighbours visited. Humming birds, lizards, inse s, crows, a
pack of coyotes, deer, javelina, even a solitary shapeshi er.
e no urnal scuttlings of unseen beasts. e brutal
non alance of bats eating crickets. A mundane e acle of
the everyday, indifferent to our arrival. Amidst this teeming
habitat on the edge of urbanity, we began eavesdropping on
the incomprehensible conversations of animate matter.
 Dust and ca i, trees and inse s, concrete and sunlight.
What could their voices tell us about the place? What
te nologies could provide a way of communicating (or
communing) within the narrow band of human awareness?
[Gordon Hempton] discovered What would those te nologies look like that could help us
that the use of a microphone
turned him into a better listener, attune to our surroundings, rather than distra ing us from
because he learned to take his them? How could we help ourselves listen to the entities we
cue from that tool, which didn’t
share the planet with?
judge the relative value of the
different sounds it was
absorbing. Having always in the
past striven to listen for the
“important” sounds, Hempton
stopped trying to prioritize based
on his own limited perspective
and discovered the majesty of the
uncurated soundscape.

—George Prochnik

We unpacked our ma inic assistants and ent

several days listening to the desert as our ears adjusted
and a range of microphones, headphones and eakers
widened the scope. We began to learn the subtle
variations in daily routines of plants and animals. We
explored the sonic textures of ca i, palo verde trees and
creosote bushes, listening to the wind on their skin and
caressing surfaces with sensing devices. We
experimented with dire ional and ambient recordings,
deliberate and incidental sounds.
 e Saguaro, the dawn orus, omnipresent engines,
and the occasional droning of military helicopters in
urban training exercises. Woodpeckers playing metal
imneys, thrashers mimicking police sirens, howling
conversations between dogs and coyotes at dusk. Above
and through it all, vast geological scales cast their long
shadows, imposing a silent, harsh indifference.

As our te nologies became conversation partners, we

summoned entities from so ware realms, to interpret,
translate, juxtapose and convolve the many overlapping
voices. We began to hear new patterns emerge, cut
through by fi ocritical yarns woven by our human
guests. Our composition emerging from impressions of
this urban desert as it is and as it might be, from multiple
per e ives and with many voices heard, but not
necessarily understood. Over time the sounds emanating
from the computers blended into the sounds outdoors
and the embryonic compositions in our heads. e voices
of the desert haunted us, following us through both
waking and dreaming worlds. Dwelling in a building
blending into its environment drew us further in.
 Our buildings are designed from the outside in
and the inside out such that their form is a
reflection of spaces within and never just form
for form’s sake. An authenticity of material
choices and rigorous detail resolution carry the
logic of ‘making’ and provide a weighted
connectedness to place (...) [A]ll our senses are
alerted and nourished. Our curiosity is piqued,
our time and place is reflected and respected in
unexpected ways. Our minds are opened to new
ideas, our confidence in the possibility of the
human endeavour renewed. We feel comfortable
yet challenged, understood yet urged to stretch.
We want to be in such places alone and together
with others. (…) We want such places to serve as
markers of our best efforts. We want such places
to exist beyond our lifetime.

—Will Bruder Architects

 Su places entwine human and environmental
energies into a home. A home that lends itself to deep
work and solitary refle ion as mu as to convivial
gatherings. Tables filled with seeds, herbs, grains and
flowers. Pinyon pine nuts, ia seeds, amaranth, sumac, Action on behalf of life
transforms. Because the
sunflower seeds, corn and mesquite flour. Agave and aloe relationship between self and
vera juice. Mezcal, pulque, tequila. A Dionysian feast the world is reciprocal, it is not
a question of first getting
heralding the season of flowering ca i and renewed
enlightened or saved and then
growth. Meandering alongside olla buds, nopalitos, acting. As we work to heal the
yucca, ocotillo and palo verde flowers. A celebration of earth, the earth heals us.

the vernal equinox, at a time when light and darkness, the —Robin Wall Kimerer
mundane and the sacred are equipoised. A time for
alignment and attunement. As we attuned to the vigour of
ring, the frosty thorns of winter were ritually banished
with scented smoke and resonant words…

On a tiny staircase conne ing the circular Kiva with

the desert, stood an abandoned statue of Kokopelli, the
trickster god of fertility, agriculture and music. An
au icious coincidence. We placed two bowls in
offering. One bowl of water and one bowl of creosote
bran es. When moistened, the oils in the rough
creosote leaves emit a scent reminiscent of the desert.
Dry, bitter and pungent. A scent announcing the season
of replenishment and renewal.
 By living on the edge between the desert and the city
built within it, our workflow gradually attuned to the
rhythm of our temporary habitat. We’d wake up before
dawn, together with the orus of wildlife and motorised
vehicles. Sunrise would bring about a marked sense of
acceleration, in re onse to the intensifying light and
temperature. Our work flowed alongside inse s and birds
busying themselves with their daily ores, until mid
a ernoon. en everything and everyone around us
seemed to decelerate. We followed the example of the
reptiles lazing atop scor ing rocks and would take a break
during the hottest part of the day. As the sun began its
descent, the pace would pick up again, in and around us.

We worked in a state of produ ive flow, ara erised by

concentration and deep absorption, whether we were
designing, composing, programming, cooking or writing.
A er dusk, the diurnal critters ex anged places with the
no urnal ones, air traffic lessened and we’d dri from
produ ive to refle ive, until the hushed atmo here of the
night encouraged sleep.
Shifting gears
With the experiments in desert attunement our creative
process began to merge with the atial and temporal [Andrew Ross] warns of an “eco-
qualities of the surroundings. A strong aesthetic resonance apartheid”, whereby low-income
neighbourhoods on the more
with the organic ar ite ure of our work ace and the polluted south side of the Salt
shimmer of the landscape. Yet the sense of being River (which once flowed
vigorously through the city and is
surrounded by boundless desert was an illusion. Our
now a trickle) are less able to
attempts to walk further than a few minutes in any protect themselves from the heat
dire ion were soon hindered by visible and invisible and drought than wealthier
citizens. “There’s a stark disparity,”
fences. ere are few traces of walking here. e only he says. “The resource havens,
suggestions of habitation were traffic noise, warning signs with their hybrid cars, their solar
panels and other green gizmos;
and the occasional flashes of light refle ed off distant
and the folks on the other side
surfaces. A place of beauty devoid of human conta . struggling to breathe clean air
and drink uncontaminated water.
Back in Phoenix. Within minutes of our arrival we were It’s a prediction of where the
attuning to time di ated by business hours rather than world is headed.”

cycles of daylight. Time as a commodity. Linear time,

—Joanna Walters
always slipping into the past or the future, just out of
rea . Beyond false refuges of partial attention, rapid
context swit ing and ronic busyness. A visceral
sensation of running out of time. Restlessness.
Numbness. Hypera ive anxiety. A psy osomatic
turbulence leaving heartfelt a irations in its wake.
 Our daily rhythm became halting. Stopping and starting.
Living between sto astic anging of gears in
intermittent traffic jams. Time was scarce, yet ace
appeared abundant. Commuting could easily devour hours
from ea day, across an urban landscape extending for
miles in a relentless rawl of city, suburbs, exurbs. Cars
remain a dominant feature of the landscape, motile
ar ite ures gradually transforming desert environs.

From the vantage point of air-conditioned motorised

vehicles the environmental and social ange seem
distant, or even nonexistent. Yet when we stepped out
and walked, we noticed small but promising pockets of
ange, growing like persistent weeds through the
cracks in the pavement. Colle ives and co-operatives
working to transform their neighbourhoods one lot at a
time. We walked through downtown Phoenix, across
Tempe campus, through farmers markets and desert
parks, along black shimmering a halt and tree lined
side streets. While walking, the rigid layout of the urban
grid is occasionally so ened by unexpe ed encounters.
e warmth of human conta rekindled by
acknowledging ea others’ presence. An occasional
smile, a simple compliment, or even a mumbled apology
when inadvertently bumping into a fellow walker would
re-establish a sense of conviviality.
 Meanwhile, on another street in Tempe, “An Uber
self-driving car hit and killed a woman crossing the street […]
marking the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle
and a potential blow to the technology expected to
transform transportation.” (Reuters)

What ensued was a predi able mix of outrage and the

sounds of a corporation distancing itself from re onsibility.
e opinion ma ine cranked into a ion. Blame was
thrown around casually, solutions were promised, tests
su ended, te nological progress was declared inevitable.
A clear pharmakon, with te nology in an ambiguous
simultaneity of problem, solution and scapegoat. Yet the
doubts remained. Doubts about possible futures and the
disjointed present, the urgency of significant ange and the
di roportionate insignificance of a ion.

Elaine Herzberg became the first pedestrian killed by a

self-driving car, joining other women remembered
primarily for their misfortune at the mercy of ma ines. In
particular, Bridget Driscoll, the first recorded death of a
pedestrian caused by an automobile in 1896 and Mary Ward,
possibly the first fatality caused by a motor vehicle in 1869.
While these women may be remembered as vi ims, there
extends a mass of anonymous urban walkers (and other n-
peds), plants, lands, microorganisms and macroscapes who
continue to be sacrificed on the altar of eed.
 Yet Phoenix is also home to the unique Museum of
Walking (MoW), “committed to people, land, action, and
site through the everyday act of walking”.

In cities built around cars, walking can feel like an

a of resistance or an a of hope. Purposeful walking
and aimless wandering alike. So, as guests of the
MoW, we invited the local inhabitants for a walk. A
soundwalk, a form of contemporary geomancy. A
pretext to re-discover a e s of their home and
glimpse alternatives that might not have been visible
otherwise. An embodied reading of the landscape as it
is and as it could be. Worldwalking, worldknowing and
worldbuilding together. Accompaned by the constant
hum of cars and inse s, beneath a busy flight path.

We crossed the threshold into the Moeur Park, a

dim tunnel under a busy highway, decelerated,
listening. e soundscape was subsumed into the
deep drone of traffic. Walking slowly, in single file.
Waiting for ea step to find its footing, as the senses
become engaged with traversing inner and outer
landscapes, simultaneously. We traced the edges of
the city and the desert, attuning to their complex
rhythms and relationships.
 Rhythms above and below, sharp interludes. Along a
path beset by the e re of an abandoned railroad, hollow
and dusty. Snaking along a resonant ridge haunted by jet
engines in the wind. Climbing through an outcrop of
boulders, hearing the rustling of arse undergrowth.
Aswarm with critters signalling. Absorbing the desert
expanse at dusk, in e Silence of the Ca i. A gentle turn
revealing urban soundscapes of civilisation in collapse.
Hushed darkness cut through the eerie river of tail-lights.
A descent, into the dripping, budding and irping of early
ring. e hollow dryness of a rustling desert, gradually
receding into the night with unseen others, uncanny and
quiet. We let our minds wander, inning new yarns,
possible lives lived otherwise. Of vapour trails writing
their poetry in the colours of sunset.
Our job is to amplify the black noise of objects to
make the resonant frequencies of the stu s inside
them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to
write the speculative fictions of their processes, of
their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands
dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder, and gypsum.
Our job is to go where everyone has gone before,
but where few have bothered to linger.
—Ian Bogost
Afte wo d Dust & Shadow was mythological from the beginning.
Stories wrapped in stories, wrapped in ever more stories.
Stories we told about the scope of the proje , about its
Adam Nocek & Stacey Moran
relevance for thinking sustainable futures in the desert
on behalf of The Center for
Philosophical Technology southwest. Stories we told ourselves about what the
proje was really about, establishing critical and
eculative distance from te nocratic solutionism and
business-as-usual. ere were stories we constru ed
about how we could work together as Professors,
nomadic pra itioners and a ivists. And there were
always stories about how it was going to end. How do we
conclude this story? Or do we? Maybe it continues or
maybe it ends right where it began: in sear of old and
new myths.

e Center for Philosophical Te nologies has its own

story about Dust & Shadow of course. In our version, the
proje began during a family residency with FoAM in
Brussels. ere, we began asking questions about how to
transform animism and other non-modern pra ices into
a praxeology for the contemporary world.

How might we transform philosophy into a te nics

These questions were in for thinking-feeling-pra icing otherwise? And what
many ways at the core of the
could be in more need of this philosophical te nicity
Laboratory for Critical
Technics, which morphed into than a rawling urban center in the middle of the
The Center for Philosophical desert? Our Field Marshal, Ron Broglio, was the missing
Technologies (CPT) in 2018.
link. He made it possible to work with FoAM in the
desert and to begin cra ing te nics for living and
dwelling otherwise.
 What became readily apparent as we resear ed the
urban desert, as we listened to it, and as we tried to make
sense of its contradi ory elements, is that the mythical
Paul Ricouer once noted in
nucleus upon whi its neoliberal and te nocratic logics
an interview that there is an
are built need a redesign. We need new myths. We need “imaginary nucleus” at the
new stories upon whi to build and redire our pra ices. center of every culture, and
this nucleus is the culture’s
But how do we go about this? How do we rewrite the “opaque kernel” that exceeds
all self-understanding and is
stories of progress, development, and competition that irreducible to any set of
we have inherited and so easily reproduce? We knew “explicit functions—political,
economic legal, etc” (Ricoeur
that our myths could fun ion as antidotes to the stories
and Kearney, “Dialogue With
poisoning our relation to the desert for so many Paul Ricoeur,” 236). It is only
generations. ey should also be attentive to indigenous when we “try to grasp that
kernel,” Ricoeur explains,
ways of knowing and being-with the desert. Our “that we may discover the
counter-mythology would be an amulet capable of foundational mytho-poetic
nucleus of a society” (239).
prote ing us from the many sedu ive, yet trea erous
sustainability narratives. Our design work appeared
more like wit cra than any recognizable human-
centered approa to sustainability design. It had to be
Our desert laboratory
carefully staged and lurk in the shadows. doubled as a secret lair for
occult practices where stories
e first experiments or ells cast would redire and rituals for parallel
human attention toward the many layers of sonic technologies, gnostic healing,
and mystical pedagogy could
experience. eir effe s are just beginning to take hold. If
be woven.
a soundwalk and album look like recognizable outcomes,
then this is a good thing: the amulet worked.

We see Dust & Shadow as one of many ongoing attempts

to pry open the cracks in our cultural imaginary and cra
propositions for prote ion, healing, and thriving in a
world that is in dire need of more shadowy pra ices.
 Dust & Shadow Fieldnotes

cba 02017–02019

Text, photography and book design by FoAM (Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney)

Produced in collaboration with Desert Humanities, Center for Philosophical

Technologies and The Synthesis Center at Arizona State University

Supported by GIOS (Global Institute of Sustainability), IHR (Institute for

Humanities Research) and PDF (the Panpsychic Development Fund)

Made with Scribus, typeset in Spectral, Bluu, PT Sans, Fluxisch Else and Sans Guilt (etc...)

With thanks to our gracious hosts and fellow explorers Ron Broglio (Field-marshal
of the Animal Revolution), Adam Nocek, Stacey Moran Nocek, Luke Kautz, Sha Xin
Wei, Erica Hanson, Angela Ellsworth and the Museum of Walking. Thanks to the
ASU Art Museum and Heather Lineberry, the Park Rangers of the Joshua Tree
National Park, Adriene Jenik and the participants of Drylab2023, Ivy and Fiona,
Community Food Connections, Will Bruder Architects, Songbird Coffee & Teahouse,
and the ASU students, staff and faculty. Thanks to all the animate, inanimate and
partially animate entities whose paths we crossed in the making of these
fieldnotes. The ecosystems of the Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin Deserts. Salton
Sea, Box Canyon and the Canyon Country. Thanks to the dawn and twilight
choruses around Cave Creek, crows of the Grand Canyon, itinerant coyotes, guard
dogs, javelina and the rock formations of Coal Mine Canyon. Thanks to the
creosote bushes, saguaro, nopales and barrel cacti, woodpeckers, rust, gravel, bats,
rocks, a family of rodents, rain and dust storms. Barley and Truffles (C. l. familiaris).
Thanks to the Air Apparent, crickets, beetles, humming birds, wasps, Arcosanti bells,
BNSF freight trains, Biosphere 2, helicopters of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit
and assorted air traffic, cars, trucks, sirens provided by the Phoenix Police
Department, several fences, and atemporal echoes from Navajo, Hopi, Tohono
Oʼodham and "those who are gone", the Hohokam

An online version of these fieldnotes can be found at

https://libarynth.org/dust_and_shadow/fieldnotes

The soundtrack can be found at

https://fo.am/ds-12
There is no word for
waLL in our language
—Verlon M. Jose, Tohono O’odham Nation
Pulvis et umbra sumus
We are but dust and shadow
–Horace