The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple

The Anthropocene Temple is a wallpapering for the future. The Temple explores Anthropocene futures and expresses these interests in relics of distant hypothetical pasts but contained in a installation space representative of a place in the deep future. In essence, long shadows of the future are cast by a source in the present, to craft a solastalgia for something ill-defined, and that has not yet fully come to pass. Using a technique called regressive infinity, we can glimpse a metaphor writ infinite and inescapable that shows how we are patterning a world of our own making. All of the Relics experiment with presenting, and re-presenting hyperobject materials including lasers, plastics, ceramics, and uranium glass among others, while meditating on real-world hyperobject relics of our current civilizations. These include nuclear waste disposal sites, massive movements of natural resources, invention and proliferation of man-made materials such as plastics, simulacra of nature, and the scars of environmental catastrophe. The works are highly aesthetic as through and encourage exploratory audience experiences so that they function as a soothe for the dark subject matters that dominate our world today, and will continue to do so into future. The work is therefore geared toward fostering a contemplation toward the ways we control and thus pattern the world, but also on a deeper level of what we leave behind, not only as refuse, but as impact. The work can be fascinating to interactive with, even positive considering the subject matter, but at it's core is a bleakness or emptiness that we must grapple with, and overcome, or by it be undone.

The works connect to my broader practice through an ongoing investigation of our current, human-influenced, geologic era, the Anthropocene—the new epoch that I believe evolved alongside the ascent of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically the work investigates the ways in which we structure and define our relationship to the natural world through design. In particular I’m interested in how humans affect the interdependent mesh of all living and non-living things with whom we share this Earth, and how our understanding of nature is impoverished when defined by ideologies that limit our relationship with it.