Navigating the Lost Scales

Instructor: Posthuman Studies Lab Date & Time: Saturdays, November 21, December 5, 19, January 9 11 AM - 13:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: The Soviet rural economy launched the grand-scale nature transformation process during which all temporalities and creatures became embedded into the upbuilding of the communist future. This process unfolded within two dimensions: on the one hand, post-war industrial intensification of cities distorted the geological structure of the planet and its temporal synchronization; on the other, agrobiological approach to nature radically changed the form of terrestrial surface and species composition while generating toxic biological hybrids (e.g. Sosnowskyi’s Hogweed). Such a complex geo-ecological transformations led to the disorder of original co-relations between human and non-human scales. That closed the door to default anthropocentric cartography, according to which expansive human order remained secured from local non-human scales. In the post-Soviet world, where different orders and temporalities are enmeshed, we can find the ‘lost’ scales of powerful non-human politics. Today invasive hybrids of Lysenko’s agrobiology, Soviet mechanical engineering, and cosmonautics have returned to the wild and formed their own political alliances against which human statehood is engaged in a struggle. Treating the ‘lost’ scales as ferals, we propose a new cartographic method. It investigates possible ways of navigation between human and non-human scales to re-establish the opportunity of shared map. During the Seminar we will try to consider the Russian Ferations’ map as a possible form of community in the condition of erosion of common politics and future.

* Russian Ferations project is a map designed on the basis of field research of local territories. The map links the real distribution of feral politics with multiple research models (natural sciences, sound art, bio art, generative art, theory and philosophy). Biological strains, soundscapes, 3D-scans, narratives and alternative forms of thought uncover the multilayerness of the worlds creating by ferations.

IMAGE: A roughly 30-story-deep sinkhole appeared Sunday in Guatemala City. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PAULO RAQUEC

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