The Radical Anthropocene
The Radical Anthropocene is an interactive kaleidoscopic digital wallpaper installation wherein the participant assembles marine debris under a live camera.
“The Radical Anthropocene” project is based on a prior work I created for Summer at SAM in 2015. That work, titled “Digital Kaleidoscopes of Nature,” was an interactive workshop wherein people visiting the Olympic Sculpture Park could select from plant cuttings from the park to create digital kaleidoscopes. Remembering that work, the team at SAM approached me to adapt the project to become a wallpaper rather than a circular kaleidoscope that would be placed in response to William Morris’ wallpaper.
When considering the material or objects for the wallpaper, I thought about Morris and his ethics, values, and poetry, paying particular attention to the idea of coming up with a beautiful and complementary system to reference within the work. I knew I didn’t want to buy mass-produced items, but I did want to talk about industry and where we have come since Morris’ era. His care for our relationship to nature and warning of the future that might occur due to industrialization were the cohering agents when I determined what the objects should be that created the digital wallpaper. We are literally in the middle of a waste crisis on multiple levels.
Perhaps the Naturalists of the Anthropocene are those that are working to clean up the Earth, invent sustainable materials, and regenerate human culture on the planet.
The Ocean Blue Project is one such group. Based in Oregon, they regularly organize community beach cleanups to extract from the ocean the detritus of industrialization. The oft-called “marine debris” that was sent to me for selection and placement in the exhibit was a myriad of plastic forms, shapes, textures, and colors – some recognizable objects, others only fragments, and all created through a process of industrialization.
I teamed up with my colleague, Dr. David Gibbs, a senior research scientist at ISB, who created the project’s code in Python. We worked collaboratively through GitHub with SAM’s Cooper Whitlow to complete the project.
This work was presented in the education response space at the Seattle Art Museum for the Victorian Radicals exhibition held from June 13 – September 8, 2019.
