Afterlives IV, Earthbound

Everything is sediment on a long enough timeline. Everything on the surface of the Earth that is, and that means anything left behind by humans, all the cities, cars, datacenters, mobile phones, and dishwashers. But it’s not just about a dystopian sci-fi imagination of the future, but rather how the intrusion of made-made materials fundamentally alters mineral and geological forces in the earth. For instance, studies have shown that microplastics alter the structure of riverbeds by modifying how sediment accumulates. What happens in a tectonic subduction zone when airports and data centers get pulled underneath it? In this work, I depict a swarming collision of quotidian objects, mostly from 3D scans of things in the real world. Found objects, rocks and boulders or sculptural assemblages made in the studio. All these things come together with some nerdy math as well. The swarming motion is driven by a strange attractor equation called the Hadley attractor, which was meant to model Hadley cycles, those are atmospheric currents that change directions at different latitudes. These atmospheric systems are going through radical shifts due to climate change, climate instability due to crossing certain thresholds and limits, and so the title Unstable Limits is thinking about how anthropogenic change, that is, human actions, is not only affecting the natural world, but also the ability for humans to even inhabit it.