It feels strange to remind about the water pollution again. Everyone has seen photographs of a turtle stuck in a plastic six-pack wrapper and everyone got the message. Why bring it up again? Did the turtle do a bad job? The turtle, probably, did too good of a job and became the iconic image of water pollution. This image is so bold that it always comes first and obscures the rest. That’s why it’s important to bring the current state of affairs closer to us from time to time.
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The planet is surfaced with things. Things for tracking and sensing, things for commuting, things for mediating, things for dealing with every activity a human engages in. It’s even surrounded by things as space technologies, dust and paint are circulating in the Earth’s orbit, unbound. Things and design of things are what differentiate us from other species and make us human, oftentimes in a meaningful way. We make things and things are in turn making us. Things are entangled with all the major environmental issues – polluted and acid waters, rising temperatures, and habitat loss. Things are the origin of excessive carbon dioxide emissions, things make up wastelands, and things are made for cutting, digging, and excavating.
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Since moving to Finland I’ve been enamoured with the accessibility of nature, the ease at which one can slip into it, unnoticed, and become fully immersed - and in my experience easily lost. The forests here are quiet, less occupied by wildlife compared to the forests of my home in Canada. They are largely uncluttered, both visually and audibly. It’s as if they are just forests, and not home to an entire ecosystem of organisms and communities. The trees, flora, and fauna are all seemingly neutral to their surroundings. On the surface, they are passive observers, the ‘historical actors’ of modern forestry (Tsing, 2017, p. 202). But below the soil is an active network of communication, much like our own human data infrastructures.
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The label of origin (you know, the tag that says for example Made in Finland) has its origins already in the ancient Egyptian culture [1], where it was used as a sign of quality; if a pot was made in this or that village, it meant that it had to have certain standard of quality. It has been used in the similar fashion throughout the millennia. Today the label of origin does carry other messages beside its original use. If a product is labelled to been produced in certain East-Asian countries, the likelihood of it being made by a child in a sweatshop is exponentially larger, than a t-shirt made in Finland. This gives the buyer the opportunity to choose, whether they wan’t to support the shop that produces their stuff in the sweatshops in the first place. Most people do not give this choice much thought, but it’s important that the possibility to choose is available.
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This project comes as an introspection of my own involuntary participation in mining and its influence and presence on the Anthropocene. It’s not peaceful or structured, it is chaotic in nature and related to the rising demand of raw materials needed to keep the information society running. Over 60 billion tonnes of resources are mined from the earth every year [1]. This includes metallic ores, fossil fuels and minerals, essential for devices needed for crypto mining to communication gadgets and lithium-ion batteries. The depletion of Earth’s resources is fast and gaining speed every year.
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Due to the pandemic our recent experiences have been mostly happening digitally and online. Like many others I have been wondering a lot about shared moments and my relationship with culture and media. As it has been shown the live aspect of many events is still hard to translate digitally although there has been enormous progress in the field in a short amount of time. The thing that is the most exciting for me about creating something together is that it happens temporarily in that very moment and is determined by the people experiencing it. Through our time spent learning about technology and its effects on our environment this fall, I was inspired to create something that is to be shared physically and outside of the digital realm of recorded media.
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As media technology advances, an ambivalence emerges compared to Utopia and Dystopia. The ambivalence-diametrical features of the world where we humans live- can be beneficial or detrimental to our lives. If the characteristics exist while balancing each other, they can eventually coexist and perform valuable functions. Then, in the Anthropocene, how can the media's ambivalence toward humanity achieve a more advantageous coexistence out of the dichotomy?
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