What modes of collecting, representing, and knowing are appropriate to meet the conceptual and practical challenges of the Anthropocene? Which narrative forms and styles can help us to document states of flux and transformation, across multiple scales of space and time?
As a traveler on the Anthropocene River Journey , I propose to create an Upper Mississippi River Field Diary, with multimedia entries to be posted online. Each Field Diary entry will focus on a specific object, or “specimen,” found along the way. The selected specimens will be eclectic, storied, and difficult to categorize, creating the cumulative effect of a cabinet of curiosities. The spirit and tone of the Field Diary will alternate between wondrous discovery and ambivalent recounting. In addition to text, the Field Diary entries may include photographs, sketches, sound, and video, according to the demands of the object in question. By playing with the conventions of the travelog or field survey genres, my goal is to question how we measure, observe, and make sense of the rapidly changing landscapes of the present.
What modes of collecting, representing, and knowing are appropriate to meet the conceptual and practical challenges of the Anthropocene? Which narrative forms and styles can help us to document states of flux and transformation, across multiple scales of space and time?
This project is inspired in part by the Anthropocene Slam event held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014, in which individual presenters shared an object that was representative of the Anthropocene, and which audience members then voted on for inclusion in a cabinet of curiosities. In the volume that emerged from the event, titled Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, editors Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett (2018) make the case for an object-oriented approach to understanding planetary change. Objects, they note, crystallize the intertwined relationships between nature and culture, past and present, local and global. Importantly, they also offer possibilities for multiple futures, while at the same time questioning the notion of human exceptionalism. By curating and juxtaposing a number of different specimens in the Field Diary, I hope to bring to life some of the complex attachments and ecologies that make up the Upper Mississippi River region, weaving together stories about people, creatures, plants, and landscapes with broader social, political, economic, technical, and geo-atmospheric processes and rhythms.
Once my time as a Traveler has concluded, the Field Diary entries will be a jumping-off point for other contributions as well: I plan to develop some of the entries into longer nonfiction pieces that speak to the broader themes of the field stations, such as river-engineering, rewilding, agriculture, and biome change. In addition, I am interested in writing about how the project as a whole is negotiating between different ways of knowing and apprehending the landscape (for example, between artistic and scientific observational approaches, or between indigenous and settler-colonial cosmologies). Using the sound clips and interviews with fellow participants I collect during the Journey, I will also create an audio story about the collaborative nature of this research project. This story will be included as an episode for a podcast about fieldwork that I am launching with my colleague Christina Kim Chilcote next year under the title The Field.