How to read space at the end of the world
Meeting 3 with Oriana Confente
Hello once again! <3
We’re back for our 3rd reading circle this summer. In our last few encounters, we’ve explored carceral spaces and sanctuaries. Both conversations were weaved through common threads of storytelling and shifting temporalities.
Continuing this momentum at our next meeting, we’ll ask: How to read space the end of the world? Which (sometimes topographical) stories can we trace through spaces at the edge of apocalypse? How do locative media, landscapes as data, and narrative practices align during moments of ecological and social urgency like this one?
Find details about when and where to meet us at the end of this newsletter.
Preliminary exercises:
Spend some time thinking about what landscape means to you.
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Go for a walk in your neighbourhood. Practice what Anna Tsing calls, “the arts of noticing” (Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 37), and consider the complex assemblages that build the environment around you. How is it layered with past, present, and future histories? How are you reading the landscape right now?
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Save your thoughts to share with the group, if you’re comfortable doing so.
Readings:
Between Landscape and the Screen: Locative Media, Transitive Reading, and Environmental Storytelling by Jill Didur and Lai-Tze Fan.
Critical reflections on their joint research-creation project, the GPS-enabled Global Urban Wilds app, mapping the Champ des Possibles. → Open article
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The Environmental Audiotour by Critical Environmental Data (Jussi Parikka, Paolo Patelli, and May Ee Won).
Six audiostories written for the Helsinki Biennial 2023. From the authors: “Imagine immersing yourself in data as you discover the intricate architectures of environmental sensing that surround us.”
Listen to as many episodes as you choose! → Open audiotour
Questions:
Consider Didur and Fan’s methodology of “embodied knowing” — “learning through encounter, awareness, physicality.” Do you feel entangled in space? How do we embody knowledge as we navigate spaces at the end of the world?
We’ve explored examples of locative media that include a GPS-enabled application and a site-specific audiotour. Both experiences utilize data from past, present, and future timelines. What are the similarities and differences between these modes of reading the landscape? Are there strengths or weaknesses to either approach in the context of climate change, or however you define the end of the world?
Didur and Fan encourage us to “wander,” “get lost in,” and “defamiliarize” urban wilds. Similarly, the narrator of the Environmental Audiotour guides listeners through non-touristic observations of Helsinki, sensing the city’s natural and artificial infrastructure — in a sense, getting us lost in the details. Is “productive hesitation” enough to combat the creeping toxicity of ecological crises? Does it need to be?
Further musings:
A few cool (*wink*) instances of site-specific storytelling and tracing exhibited in eco art.
Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997
Basia Irland, ICE BOOKS: Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, 2007—
Shelley Jackson, Snow, 2014—
When & where:
Join us on August 22, 2023 at 6:00pm in Parc Laurier.
Before the meeting begins, we’ll share our exact coordinates on Instagram (@endoftheworld.research) to help us find each other. Expect to spot us on picnic blankets along Mentana Street, possibly posted beside a lamp post parallel to the road, or some other patch of grass that we can borrow for the evening.
We look forward to seeing you soon xx
-End of the World Research