The conditions that obtained when life had not yet emerged from the oceans have not subsequently changed a great deal for the cells of the human body, bathed by the primordial wave which continues to flow in the arteries. Our blood in fact has a

01/14 chemical composition analogous to that of the sea of our origins, from which the first living cells and the first multicellular beings derived the oxygen and the other elements necessary to life … The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies. – Italo Calvino, Blood, Sea1 Kirsty Robertson What is a beach actually? It is marginalia, a footnote to the essay that is the ocean. Beaches are many things and can range from rocky outcrops to lush vegetation. But the sandy beach of popular imagination is made up of sediment, of particles coming from eroded coral reefs in the ocean, sediment from the sea floor, eroded sections of the continental shelf, or weathered and eroded rocks from nearby cliffs.2 In Hawai’i, volcanic basalt sometimes contributes to the mix, creating black beaches of small-to-tiny particles that are eroded by the constant, lapping wave action of the ocean. Beaches are far from sedentary. They are in constant motion, as wind and water wear away at rocks, coral, shells, and other matter. They also stretch across time as certain minerals, such as quartz and feldspar, are chemically stable and strong enough to last well through erosion, often forming the base of beaches millennia old.3 When are released into the ocean, they join this process, being broken down into smaller and smaller parts and adding to the sand mixture on almost all coastal beaches. Note: an archive of pure sand is an impossibility. No wonder that sand is often seen to flow through time, through the glass timer, to ebb and flow, to move liquidly across the face of the Earth. đđđđđđđđđđKamilo Beach, Hawai’i is a node where the ocean gets rid of foreign substances. The beach has long been known as a way station: stories are told that pre-contact, native Hawai’ians used the beach to harvest logs that had drifted into Kamilo from the Pacific Northwest, and that shipwrecked bodies often turned up there.4

e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r Currently, Kamilo is a terminal point in the circulation of garbage. The beach and adjacent coastline are covered in : as much as 90 percent of the garbage accumulated in the area is plastic. So much garbage collects here that can be found on Atlas Obscura’s compendium of bizarre and obscure places to visit, where it is described as “constantly covered in trash like some sort of tropical New

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST 02/14

Plastiglomerate sample/ready-madeđcollected by geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac at Kamilo Beach, Hawai'i, 2012. Photo: Kelly Wood. Courtesy of the artist.

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST 03/14

This and all subsequent images: plastiglomerate samples/ready-madesđcollected by geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac at Kamilo Beach, Hawai'i, 2012.đPhotos: Jeff Elstone.đCourtesy of the artist.

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST 12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST York City gutter.”5 It is a site of immense efforts evidence found in the rise of agriculture some at cleanup organized by the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, twelve thousand years ago? Maybe the start date a group that must constantly contend with the of the Anthropocene can be traced to a single ocean’s supply of new materials. day, that being the first nuclear test – the Trinity đđđđđđđđđđ*** test – in 1945, which deposited an easily đđđđđđđđđđIn 2012, geologist Patricia Corcoran and measured layer of artificial radioactivity into the sculptor Kelly Jazvac travelled to Kamilo Beach, global soil.8 The term “Anthropocene” remains following a tip from oceanographer Charles 05/14 stable/unstable, “not-yet-official but Moore that the beach was covered in a plastic- increasingly indispensable,” writes Donna sand conglomerate. Moore suspected nearby Haraway; near “mandatory” in the humanities, volcanoes were to blame. In fact, the plastic and arts, and sciences, if not elsewhere.9 Whichever beach detritus had been combined into a single (if any) start date is chosen, plastiglomerate – a substance by bonfires. Human action on the substance that is neither industrially beach had created what Corcoran and Jazvac manufactured nor geologically created – seems a named “plastiglomerate,” a sand-and-plastic fraught but nonetheless incontrovertible marker conglomerate. Molten plastic had also in-filled of the anthropogenic impact on the world; it is many of the vesicles in the volcanic rock, evidence of human presence written directly into becoming part of the land that would eventually the rock. be eroded back into sand. đđđđđđđđđđAfter collection, the samples gathered at đđđđđđđđđđThe term “plastiglomerate” refers most Kamilo Beach were analyzed so as to categorize specifically to “an indurated, multi-composite the plastics and the natural sediments that material made hard by agglutination of rock and together created the plastiglomerate whole. molten plastic. This material is subdivided into Following this, Jazvac showed the an in situ type, in which plastic is adhered to rock plastiglomerate in art exhibitions as sculptural outcrops, and a clastic type, in which ready-mades, to demonstrate human impact on combinations of basalt, coral, shells, and local nature. Finally, museums, among them the Yale woody debris are cemented with grains of sand Peabody Museum, the Het Nieuwe Instituut in a plastic matrix.”6 More poetically, (Rotterdam), and the Natura Artis Magistra plastiglomerate indexically unites the human (Amsterdam), reached out to collect and display with the currents of water; with the breaking the samples as specimens that captured down, over millennia, of stone into sand and changing natural history. These three paths bring fossils into oil; with the quick substration of that up a number of questions. What does it mean to oil into fuel; and with the refining of that fuel into understand part of the geologic record as a polycarbons – into plastic, into garbage. From sculptural object? Can art make visible a the primordial muck, to the ocean, to the beach, problem too large to otherwise understand? and back to land, plastiglomerate is an uncanny What can we learn from approaching the fraught material marker. It shows the ontological term “Anthropocene” as a creative undertaking inseparability of all matter, from the micro to the on a massive scale, even if the end result of that macro. creativity is the demise of a hospitable đđđđđđđđđđFollowing the research excursion to Kamilo environment for most species? What can art tell Beach, Corcoran and Jazvac argued in GSA Today us that stratigraphy cannot? that plastiglomerate was evidence of a plastic marker horizon that could contribute to the Cynical Smog and Mermaid’s Tears naming of a new era. The naming and dating of The invention of plastic is so recent. Its rapid the Anthropocene, an as-yet formally accumulation is as young as it is overwhelming. unrecognized and heavily debated term for a Considered against Earth’s five-billion-year life geologic epoch evidencing human impact on the span, it appears to arrive and cover the world in globe, relies “on whether humans have changed one simultaneous instant, unfolding through the Earth system sufficiently to produce a time and space into a future we cannot yet see. stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that Noted for its convenience and durability, plastic is distinct from that of the Holocene epoch.”7 emerged in part as a promise to displace other

While it is incontrovertible that humans have e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r products that relied on animal remains and impacted the planet, the strata to measure that natural resources: bone, tortoiseshell, ivory, impact in the global geological record remains baleen and whale oil, feathers, fur, leather, cork, controversial. Is the signature change a layer of and rubber. “As petroleum came to the relief of plastic sediment from the mid-twentieth the whale,” stated one pamphlet advertising century’s “Great Acceleration” of population celluloid in the 1870s, so “has celluloid given the growth? Does it begin with the Industrial elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a Revolution’s massive deposits of CO2 into the respite in their native haunts; and it will no atmosphere? Or perhaps it is lithospheric, with longer be necessary to ransack the earth in

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST pursuit of substances which are constantly history as long as the sand and as short as the growing scarcer.”10 invention of plastic polymer in a war-time đđđđđđđđđđInvented just after the turn of the twentieth laboratory in the 1950s. As Pam Longobardi century, the mass production of the synthetic writes, “Plastic objects are the cultural organic polymers of plastic only began in the archeology of our time, a future storehouse of oil, 1950s. Bakelite®, Styrofoam®, and Nylon® gave and the future fossils of the Anthropocene.”15 way to polymers, which could be đđđđđđđđđđPlastic production has quintupled globally molded and melted and remolded.11 Roland 06/14 since the 1970s to 265 million tons per annum in Barthes starts his meditation on plastic in 2010.16 As Heather Davis notes, plastic is Mythologies by noting, “Despite having names of immensely destructive, ecologically devastating Greek Shepherds (, Polyvinyl, both in the intensity of resource extraction ), plastic … is in essence the stuff of required to make it (a staggering 8 percent of the alchemy.” Plastic is the “transmutation of world’s oil production goes into the manufacture matter,” the transformation of primordial sludge and production of plastics) and in its disposal.17 into the modern, malleable, and convenient. The few minutes or days in which it might be Every fragment of plastic contains the geologic used as a takeaway container, a lighter, or a memory of the planet: “at one end, raw, telluric toothpaste tube belies both the multimillion- matter, at the other, the finished, human year process of its making, and the tens of object.”12 Barthes wasn’t actually thinking about thousands of years it is expected to last before oil when he wrote this; rather, he was focused on breaking down, finally, into its molecular the idea that plastic could be seemingly made compounds.18 In its plastic state, it is usually into anything. He was taken with the plasticity of quickly disposed of, making its way to landfills, plastic, and unconcerned with the backstory or but also into sewers or streams, where it often future impact. Plastic allowed for social mobility, ends up in waterways and on shorelines.19 increased consumption, and a seemingly bright, đđđđđđđđđđPlastic is not the irreducible product that hygienic, and accessible future for all. was once thought. Plastics do not biodegrade, đđđđđđđđđđPlastic soon shed its utopian allure, but in water, solar radiation on the surface leads becoming hard evidence for the three c’s – the to photodegradation, which is amplified by triple threat of capitalism, colonialism, and embrittlement and fragmentation from wave consumerism – as well as a kind of shorthand for action.20 The plastics in the ocean are mostly all that was inauthentic and objectionable about particles smaller than one centimeter in postwar everyday life. Plastic was just the latest diameter, commonly called microplastics, but evidence of bio-cultural cynicism. As earlier more poetically referred to as “mermaid’s tears.” forms of extraction – such as the exploitation of Although only 0.1 percent of plastics production rubber from trees and animals for their products is thought to end up in the vast islands of – became unfeasible, the continued expansion of microplastic debris in the world’s oceans, the three c’s was made possible through new plastics are nonetheless the primary source of forms of extraction, such as resource mining and marine . Highly durable, these oil-field development.13 While the site of microplastic fragments will last for hundreds or exploitation may have moved, the underlying thousands of years.21 Notes Davis, “After digging patterns of accumulation, colonization, and up the remains of ancient plants and animals, we consumption remained unchanged. are now stuck with the consequences of these đđđđđđđđđđWas Barthes correct in saying that plastic undead molecules, the ones that refuse to can be made into anything? In the past, it might interact with other carbon-dependent life have been assumed that “nature” was the one forms.”22 thing that could never be made from plastic. đđđđđđđđđđMost plastiglomerate is made from abstract Plastiglomerate suggests that this is no longer “plastic confetti,” “the embrittled remains of the case. It is an ecological paradox such that intact products.”23 The lighter-conglomerate is the mind struggles to separate its plasticity from exceptional for the legibility of the lighter as a its telluric oily past. Take, for example, a sample human-made object. Where ropes, nets, jars, collected from Kamilo Beach that is clearly a toothbrushes, bottle caps, can lids, and cigarette lighter and sand. And yet it is not. These are not e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r lighters can be recognized, plastiglomerate two substances glued together, but multiple becomes figurative, realistic. The plastic aspect substances that are one another. The lighter was gains a longevity and aesthetic vibrancy that it likely one of the billion plus made in China and would not otherwise have. The combination of Taiwan each year from parts sourced all over the rock sediment and plastic creates a charismatic world.14 It had already traveled the globe prior to object, a near luminous granite, pockmarked ending up on Kamilo Beach, where it melted, with color. Plastiglomerate is trace evidence of along with other microplastic flakes and confetti, human-nature interaction: plastic is made by an into a single substance, a glomerate with a anthropogenic action, and plastiglomerate is

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST made by a series of anthropogenic gestures that a thousand human settlements where a lighter create fascinating, disquieting objects. can be bought and thrown away. Perhaps on the western coast of North America. Perhaps on the Five Gyres eastern coast of Asia. The lighter ends up in the gutter. It waits for a storm. The water takes it. It Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its ends up in the sewage. In the sliver of water. In most dreaded creatures glide under water, the river. In the bay. In the ocean. In the Kuroshio

unapparent for the most part, and 07/14 Current. In the great churning mass of the Pacific treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest from where somehow, in a storm, in the winds, it tints of azure. Consider also the devilish ends up on Kamilo Beach in Hawai’i. brilliance and beauty of many of its most đđđđđđđđđđOr possibly, more likely, someone drove over remorseless tribes, as the dainty the rocky terrain of the Hawai’ian Island, hiked in embellished shape of many species of to a deserted and plastic-strewn beach, lit a fire sharks. Consider, once more, the universal to keep warm, and left the lighter behind. One cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures more piece of plastic on the sand. This is how it prey upon each other, carrying on eternal is with objects. They are mostly mute about their war since the world began. journeys, though most of them have traveled much farther than any of us. Consider all this; and then turn to the đđđđđđđđđđCovering almost 70 percent of the Earth’s green, gentle, and most docile earth; surface, “oceans define, sustain and consider them both, the sea and the land; characterize the planet’s ecology. More than half and do you not find a strange analogy to of our oxygen supply is produced by the something in yourself? microscopic plant life that suffuses the earth’s – Herman Melville, Moby Dick oceans, though for how much longer is unknown. This is where all life on this planet began and if it Whose lighter was it? A smoker in Los Angeles? dies it will take all of us with it.”25 After leveling Possibly in Tokyo? Maybe in Ojai? Or perhaps off between six and seven thousand years ago, someone rivers and canyons away.24 Upstream in oceans and seas have provided a sense of

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST 12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST

08/14 constancy, a rhythm to the Earth’s movement đđđđđđđđđđIt is not known how much plastic waste through space. Whereas on land, humans built oceans and waterways currently hold. up from agricultural settlements to choking Measurements were last taken in the 1970s, and cities, the seas seemed relatively changeless, even then they were largely guesswork and bringing death and fear in the form of storms, focused entirely on “visible” plastics, that is, attacks, the transport of enslaved captives, and those floating on the surface. Current estimates sunken ships, but also providing seemingly range in the order of tens of thousands of tons of endless navigable passages full of life and profit 09/14 plastic in surface waters of open oceans.28 But (for the few) – a largeness full of largesse. But plastics floating on the surface represent but a now, through the loss of megafauna from small fraction of the total, and that total is overfishing and habitat destruction, massive difficult to ascertain because microplastics pollution, and high levels of phosphorus and below a certain size (half a centimeter) are nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertilizer largely absent on the surface of the oceans. We use, dumping, and climate change, oceans are don’t know why.29 Additionally, as Ian Buchanan under extreme threat. As the oceans heat up, writes, microplastics form “a ‘strange attractor’ coral reefs are dying, and “jellyfish have bloomed for all the toxic scum floating elsewhere in the to such an extent they threaten to extinguish all ocean.”30 The microbial communities that other ocean life. They are an organic form of flourish on plastic microfragments are present junk.”26 Overfishing has decimated many “at a density and diversity much greater than populations, particularly of large animals such that of the surrounding ocean water.”31 Perhaps as whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and blue fin mistaking the small fragments for food, marine tuna. Oil and gas exploration threatens fragile life eats these toxic microfragments, at which ecologies across the globe, ranging from the point they enter the food chain, “completing the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico to the tip of vicious circle of toxins out and toxins in.”32 Argentina, and nearly all major bodies of water in đđđđđđđđđđThe constant movement of the Earth, the between. And on top of all of this, garbage and tide, and winds produces ocean currents that act effluents pour into the oceans at ever increasing at surface and depth in roughly unchanging rates.27 patterns over thousands of years, affecting land

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST temperature, the movement of water, and now, made by certain actions and off-gassing in its the movement of pollution detritus.33 The same own strange geological matrix.37 currents that are used by the shipping industry đđđđđđđđđđWhen it comes to using plastiglomerate as to map the fastest passages across the globe, part of a plastic marker horizon in determining the same currents that opened the world to the the potential start date of the Anthropocene, age of plunder and colonization in the fifteenth there is more at stake than simply whether or not century, currently churn the detritus of that the International Commission on Stratigraphy system into smaller and smaller fragments of 10/14 and the International Union of Geological microplastic. As Cózar et al. write, “[the] large- Sciences can agree that we have met all of the scale vortices act as conveyor belts, collecting criteria to define a new epoch. The hubris behind the floating plastic debris released from the self-naming an era is inescapable. As Métis continents and accumulating it into central scholar Zoe Todd reminds us, convergence zones.”34 The Coriolis effect, deflecting air along curved paths against the The current framing of the Anthropocene Earth’s rotation, has created five gyres, one in blunts the distinctions between the people, each ocean – five giant slow-moving vortexes nations, and collectives who drive the determined by the circulation patterns of wind fossil-fuel economy and those who do not. curl and torque. The complex and paradoxical experiences đđđđđđđđđđThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch, centered of diverse people as humans-in-the-world, in the Northern Pacific Gyre, is a combination of including the ongoing damage of colonial ocean currents, climate change, and unchecked and imperialist agendas, can be lost when . As plastics move from source to the narrative is collapsed to a ocean in the Pacific they get caught up in the universalizing species paradigm.38 ocean’s currents until a veritable soup of mermaid’s tears churns. Though huge in size The history of plastics, tied up as it is in (often compared to “the size of Texas”), the tiny colonization and resource extraction, clearly size of plastic particles and the fact that they are illustrates the unevenness at the heart of below surface means that the garbage patch is defining the Anthropocene. Additionally, the way invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps the five gyres that the Anthropocene tends to be used as overwhelm all forms of thought in their always-already underway highlights a destructive totality. Trying to describe the distinction, and by proxy a hierarchy, between indescribable nature of the thinness of plastic humans and nonhumans (or “more-than- sludge in the ocean, Max Liboiron has called it humans”) that perpetuates a nature-culture “plastic smog,” less like a garbage patch and divide and suppresses ways of understanding more like insidious but invisible pollution.35 the world that might be more relational than taxonomic. Todd writes, “I think that the danger Vibrant Matter in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is If the gyres are largely invisible, the release of exactly that it can itself become a colonizing surface plastics and microplastic fragments to force.”39 She reminds us that Indigenous Kamilo Beach, where they are combined with knowledges have space for the connection of all sand into plastiglomerate, presents an matter, while by contrast, settler knowledge interesting visual dilemma. Susan Schuppli requires the vibrant matter of a plastic stone to writes, “It seems we still need visual evidence tell this story.40 before we can act as moral agents. This regime of đđđđđđđđđđIf we are in a period highly impacted by visibility is a huge challenge. How do we act as human presence, it is worth remembering that ethical agents when there are all kinds of events the land is ahead of us in time, already aware of that don’t produce coherent visual evidence?”36 and influenced by the processes of extraction We might ask the same question of this newly and depletion whose effects are often only demarcated substance. As a geological artifact, recognized too late. But so too, human actions plastiglomerate is an indicator of human impact are part of a complex series of incursions that on the ecology of the Earth. As an artwork, affect more-than-human critters, the land, the plastiglomerate makes the familiar unfamiliar. It e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r air, and even the depths of oceans and reifies the unfathomable, consolidating and substrates of soil. The same is of course true of attesting to difficult-to-substantiate material plastic pollution. Plastics are bought and and social-political issues. Plastiglomerate is a discarded in much larger quantity in the Global remainder, a reminder, an indicator of the slow North, but the gyres ensure that the distribution violence of massive pollution. It brings together of microplastics in fact affects nonhumans prior deep geological time and current consumerism. to humans, while floating plastic depots tend to It also takes on the properties of what Jane accumulate in areas without the resources to Bennett calls “vibrant matter,” a lively thing clean them up or hide them, and in the bellies

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST and digestive tracts of those who would not understand it as art is, potentially, to see it as a recognize such a foreign substance as not being call to action. But that latter interpretation edible. demands seeing it as art made by the Earth, with đđđđđđđđđđPlastiglomerate clearly demonstrates the humans only as anonymous actors, as midwives permanence of the disposable.41 It is evidence of lighting the fires on the beach. After all, it is death that cannot decay, or that decays so slowly made from the most banal of substances: rock as to have removed itself from a natural lifecycle. and plastic, both easily available and easily

It is akin to a remnant, a relic, though one 11/14 melded into one. Most artists making imbued with very little affect. As a charismatic plastiglomerate are doing so as a commentary on object, it is a useful metaphor, poetic and human-made pollution. Although there are aesthetic – a way through which science and plenty of artists using plastic to comment culture can be brought together to demonstrate critically on waste, labor, and production, it human impact on the land. Thus, to understand appears that those specifically drawn to plastiglomerate as a geological marker is to see plastiglomerate seem rather to be oddly inspired it as unchanging. Plastiglomerate speaks to the by it, occasionally even going so far as to obduracy of colonialism and capitalism. The erroneously report that volcanic action creates melted veins of plastic that actually become the plastiglomerate, and that this in turn is evidence rock speak to how difficult it is to undo unequal of “nature adapting to technological surplus.”42 relations of destruction. The scraping out of Such statements are categorically incorrect, and plastic from the rock, melting down to separate hint at how, if the Anthropocene is a narcissistic the plastic from the sand, would result most category, then the art world is the mirror. To obviously in the destruction of the new object make such an object in order to question its and likely also the destruction of its constituent making seems a deeply problematic tautology, parts. implicated in an impulse that sees the đđđđđđđđđđNevertheless, plastiglomerate is a Anthropocene as a kind of celebratory seductive substance, attracting artists to both mechanism for human interaction with the collect and display it, and to make it. What does world. It suggests a constant search for new and turning plastiglomerate into an artwork do? To novel material with which to make a mark, a

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST gesture that is cognizant of capitalism’s love of dammed, dug up, cut down, flattened out, the new, even as it replicates it. Such impulses raised up, divided and sub-divided, also echo Jodi Dean’s perceptive analysis of a harvested, photographed, mapped, faction of the global left who experience a assayed, bought, and sold and generally certain jouissance at being in the know – to find manipulated in order to serve all-too- satisfaction in evidence of catastrophic climate human purposes.45 change while doing nothing to stop it (or actively perpetuating it). “Anthropocenic enjoyment,” she 12/14 An extractive and capitalist gaze renders calls it.43 plastiglomerate as matter and metaphor all too đđđđđđđđđđBut why should finding plastiglomerate and closely connected to a romanticization of the displaying it as a ready-made be any different? Anthropocene. As Jazvac understands, the ways Plastiglomerate is what Heather Davis calls landscapes are idealized, used, and viewed are “accidentally or incidentally” aesthetic.44 It is ideological. precisely the facticity of plastiglomerate, its đđđđđđđđđđUnderstood in this way, plastiglomerate has infrangibility, its constituent components and multiple overlapping identities. Pushing the analysis as both artwork and geological metaphoric understanding of its ontological specimen that make it fascinating. nature as far as possible, perhaps we can find in Plastiglomerate demonstrates an already the chemical chains of synthetic polymers existent artistic relationship between human and melded with the craggy scraps of sand a useful planetary action that can’t really be improved by theoretical model of the molecular, in line with rendering that relationship as solely human. Or that of the plant-life rhizome (Deleuze and perhaps more disturbing still, it demonstrates Guattari) that so dominated Anglo scholarship in the Anthropocene as a performance, an artwork the 1990s and 2000s.46 The ready-made geologic with the end act of planetary destruction. being of plastiglomerate speaks to more than đđđđđđđđđđThe extensive life span of pollution: also geology, the deep time of Earth, and rock do not need any further intervention to colonization, human-animal knowledges, illustrate their force. Perhaps, as Jazvac does currents of water, and the endless unfolding and when she shows the plastiglomerate as ready- collapse of life on Earth. We might conclude that made sculpture, we need to delve into what we “we have come into existence with and because already have, using plastiglomerate as object, of so many others, from carbon to microbes to sample, metaphor, talisman, and evidence. dogs. And all these creatures and rocks and air Following on Todd, Jazvac remarks on her molecules and water all exist together, with each uneasiness with the way that she is often other, for each other. To be a human means to be described as having “discovered” the land and water and air of our surroundings.”47 plastiglomerate, a word that has strong colonial đđđđđđđđđđ× connotations, and that imagines a manufactured I would like to thank Kelly Jazvac and Kelly Wood for their help with this text. It was written in my role as writer for the landscape as something like a frontier to explore projectđUnderstanding Plastics Pollution: Interdisciplinary and possess. Every time plastiglomerate is Collaboration and Forensic Methodology, developed by the shown, Jazvac notes, it is evidence of removing Great Lakes Plastics Pollution Think Tank at Western University, Canada. and describing something from a land that is not hers – an action that is misunderstood and perpetuated constantly in the coverage and use of plastiglomerate as material. Perhaps, then, it is an anticolonial and a feminist action to refuse to see plastiglomerate as an ideal object or substance that can be discovered, extracted, gathered, and used to bolster careers in a capitalist system or to highlight the “newness” of an anthropogenic substance. đđđđđđđđđđRefusal is a radical gesture in the contemporary art world, and drawing attention to the complexity of plastiglomerate as a ready- e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r made that is more than a ready-made, that is more than a new material, challenges the

extractive gaze … of the explorer, the prospector, the cartographer or the lumberjack [that] reduces nature to what Martin Heidegger (1977) called a “standing- reserve,” a cache of inert matter to be

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST đđđđđđ1 whether we are in an era distinct senility in adults. Ibid. t-we-do-about-rubbish. Thanks to Jayne Wilkinson, from the Holocene. “Bodies Beneath,” Drain (Junk đđđđđđ19 đđđđđđ31 Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) đđđđđđ10 Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac, Erik R. Zettler, Tracy J. Mincer, http://drainmag.com/bodies-b Susan Freinkel, “A Brief History “An Anthropogenic Marker and Linda A. Amaral-Zettler, eneath/ for pointing me to Italo of Plastic’s Conquest of the Horizon.” “Life in the ‘Plastisphere’: Calvino’s text. World,” Scientific American, May Microbial Communities on 29, 2011 đđđđđđ20 Plastic ,” đđđđđđ2 http://www.scientificamerica Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in Environmental Science and In his forthcoming book, n.com/article/a-brief-histor y- the Open Ocean,” 1. Technology 47 (2013): 137−46. journalist Vince Beiser traces of-plastic-world-conquest/ . The importance of microbes to the black market of sand, noting 13/14 đđđđđđ21 ocean, and hence planetary, that the seeming ubiquitous đđđđđđ11 Ibid. health, cannot be substance is actually under Ibid. Most household plastics underestimated. It is not yet threat, disappearing, and often are synthetic organic đđđđđđ22 proven but hypothesized that controlled by organized crime. compounds. They are synthetic Davis, “Life & Death in the plastics in the ocean will attract Sand, he notes, is the most used (human-made), organic (carbon- Anthropocene.” and allow the proliferation of natural resource in the world: based) chains of . certain kinds of microbes, thus “Sand is the thing modern cities đđđđđđ23 altering the chemical makeup of are made of.” Vince Beiser, “The đđđđđđ12 Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac, the world’s oceans. World’s Disappearing Sand,” Roland Barthes, Mythologies “An Anthropogenic Marker New York Times, June 23, 2016 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Horizon.” đđđđđđ32 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/ Giroux, 1972), 110–11. Buchanan, “What Must We Do 06/23/opinion/the-worlds-dis đđđđđđ24 About the Rubbish?” appearing-sand.html. đđđđđđ13 This passage echoes and draws Many of the oil fields in North from some of the theories đđđđđđ33 đđđđđđ3 America, among them the around object-oriented ontology, Ocean currents are extremely Many beaches now have to be Bakken oil fields in North among them Timothy Morton’s complex, and at depth, remain maintained, as human impact Dakota, the tar sands in Alberta notion of hyperobjects. In fact, only partially understood and has undermined the natural life and Saskatchewan, and Morton’s work is applied to a mapped. cycle of beaches. Dams on deposits in the Arctic, are on discussion of plastiglomerate in rivers, industry, building, and so land that has never been ceded. the catalogue for “Another Land đđđđđđ34 on have all impacted beaches, Further, the US-led invasion of … And in the Other, Our Own,” an Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in such that many have to be Iraq in 2003 has been oft exhibition that took place in the Open Ocean,” 1. resupplied with sand, often characterized as an act of Norway in 2015 (Ian Cofre, termed “nourishment sand.” neocolonialism for oil. “Another Land … And in the đđđđđđ35 Other, Our Own,” Prosjektrom Daniel Engber, “There is No đđđđđđ4 đđđđđđ14 Normanns, 2015 Island of Trash in the Pacific,” Kenneth Weiss, “Plague of Lighters are manufactured all http://www.prosjektromnorman Slate, September 12, 2016: Plastic Chokes the Seas,” Los over the world: BIC maintains ns.com/new-index-1/#/pedro-g http://www.slate.com/article Angeles Times, August 2, 2006 factories in France, Spain, omez-egana/). “Nature-culture,” s/health_and_science/the_nex https://web.archive.org/web/ Brazil, and the United States. Bruno Latour’s term for the t_20/2016/09/the_great_pacif 20121210215429/http:/www.lat Zippo also manufactures in the intermixture of the organic and ic_garbage_patch_was_the_myt imes.com/news/la-me- United States. The vast majority human-made, could also be h_we_needed_to_save_our_ocea ocean2au of cheap plastic lighters, applicable. ns.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_t g02,0,2177579,full.story. however, are manufactured in op; Max Liboiron, “Redefining China and Taiwan, many of these đđđđđđ25 Pollution and Action: The Matter đđđđđđ5 in the Chinese city of Wenzhou. Celina Jeffery and Ian Buchanan, of Plastics,” Journal of Material Atlas Obscura, “Kamilo Beach” Michael Backman, Inside “Introduction,” Drain (Junk Culture, vol. 21, no. 1 (December http://www.atlasobscura.com/ Knowledge: Streetwise in Asia Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) 2015). Liboiron’s article focuses places/kamilo-beach. (London: Palgrave MacMillan, http://drainmag.com/junk-oce on the distinction between 2005), 23. an/. plastic polymers (nontoxic) and đđđđđđ6 the hormone-disrupting Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. đđđđđđ15 đđđđđđ26 added to those Moore, and Kelly Jazvac, “An Pam Longobardi, “The Ocean Ibid. polymers (toxic). The idea that Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in Gleaner,” Drain (Junk Ocean), vol. plastic itself is not toxic, but the Future Rock Record,” GSA 13, no. 1 (2016) đđđđđđ27 plasticizers are, massively Today, vol. 24, no. 6 (June 2014) http://drainmag.com/pam-long Callum Roberts, The Ocean of complicates the stories of harm http://www.geosociety.org/gs obardi-the-ocean-gleaner/. Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea that can be told about plastics, atoday/archive/24/6/article/ (London: Viking, 2012), 1–20. and confuses meanings of i1052-5173-24-6-4.htm. đđđđđđ16 pollution, health, and harm. Andrés Cózar et al., “Plastic đđđđđđ28 đđđđđđ7 Debris in the Open Ocean,” PNAS Cózar et al., “Plastic Debris in đđđđđđ36 Colin N. Waters et al., “The vol. 111, no. 28 (July 15, 2014): 2 the Open Ocean,” 6. Lucas van der Velden and Rosa Anthropocene is Functionally http://www.pnas.org/content/ Menkman, “Dark Matters: An and Stratigraphically Distinct 111/28/10239.full.pdf. đđđđđđ29 Interview with Susan Schuppli,” From the Holocene,” Science, Hypotheses include sink Dark Ecology, 2016 vol. 351, no. 6269 (January 8, đđđđđđ17 processes that take place http://www.darkecology.net/d 2016) Heather Davis, “Life & Death in through micro-fragmentation ark-matters-an-interview-wit h- http://science.sciencemag.or the Anthropocene: A Short and submersion into the susan-schuppli. g/content/351/6269/aad2622. History of Plastic,” in Art in the sediment, or ingestion by marine Anthropocene: Encounters organisms, specifically đđđđđđ37 đđđđđđ8 Among Aesthetics, Politics, mesopelagic fish, who in eating Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac, Environments and and defecating the plastic add Political Ecology of Things “An Anthropogenic Marker Epistemologies, eds. Heather weight to it that causes the (Durham, NC: Duke University Horizon.” Davis and Etienne Turpin formerly buoyant substance to Press, 2010), 1–20. (London: Open Humanities sink to the bottom – in sum, đđđđđđ9 Press, 2015) “microplastic fragments could đđđđđđ38

Donna Haraway, “Tentacular http://heathermdavis.com/wp- e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r also reach the bottom via Caroline Picard, “The Future is Thinking: Anthropocene, content/uploads/2014/08/Life - defecation,” a proposition, it is Elastic (But it Depends): An Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” e- and-Death-in-the-Anthropoce noted, that requires further Interview with Zoe Todd,” Bad at flux journal 75 (September 2016) ne.pdf. quantitative testing. Cózar et. al, Sports, August 23, 2016 http://www.e-flux.com/journa “Plastic Debris in the Open http://badatsports.com/2016/ l/75/67125/tentacular-thinki đđđđđđ18 Ocean,” 2–5. the-future-is-elastic-but-it - ng-anthropocene-capitalocene - Plasticizers are correlated with depends-an-interview-with-z chthulucene. Other terms, such infertility, recurrent đđđđđđ30 oe-todd/. as Haraway’s “Chthulucene,” or miscarriages, early-onset Ian Buchanan, “What Must We “the Capitolocene” and others, puberty, obesity, diabetes, Do About the Rubbish?” Drain đđđđđđ39 are also useful, though the reduced brain development, (Junk Ocean), vol. 13, no. 1 Zoe Todd, “Fish Pluralities: proliferation of neologisms may cancer, and neurological (2016) Human-Animal Relations and simply work to cloud the issue of disorders such as early-onset http://drainmag.com/what-mus Sites of Engagement in

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST Paulatuuq, Arctic Circle,” Inuit Studies, vol. 38, no. 1–2 (2014): 217–38.

đđđđđđ40 Distinct from but paralleling Todd’s argument is that of Rob Nixon, who addresses what he calls environmental “slow violence,” the violence enacted by extraction, emissions, and pollution, which unveils itself 14/14 slowly across time, as an “unevenly universal” burden, one that will tend to be experienced inequitably. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

đđđđđđ41 Heather Davis, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” PhiloSOPHIA, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 233.

đđđđđđ42 Elise Lammer, “Review,” Mousse Magazine, July 19, 2014 http://moussemagazine.it/sal ts-artbasel-2014/.

đđđđđđ43 Jodi Dean, “The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change,” e- flux journal 69 (January 2016) http://www.e-flux.com/journa l/the-anamorphic-politics-of - climate-change/. Dean is not totally on board with art-science collaboration, which she sees as a repetition of past failed experiments writ anew. She argues for an anamorphic approach to climate change activism – an approach from the side. Perhaps our approach to plastiglomerate fits this criteria, moving beyond a traditional art- science collaboration.

đđđđđđ44 Davis, “Life & Death in the Anthropocene.”

đđđđđđ45 Peter Hodgins and Peter Thompson, “Taking the Romance out of Extraction: Contemporary Canadian Artists and the Subversion of the Romantic/Extractive Gaze,” Environmental Communication, vol. 5, no. 4 (2011).

đđđđđđ46 See Heather Davis on the molecular: H. Davis, “Molecular Intimacy,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), 205–11.

đđđđđđ47 Heather Davis, “The Land and

Water and Air That We Are: Some e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 8 — d c m b 2 0 1 6 đ K i s t y R P l a s t i g o m e r Thoughts on COP 21,” NYAQ, March 15, 2016 http://sfaq.us/2016/03/the-l and-and-water-and-air-that-w e-are-some-thoughts-on-cop-2 1.

12.13.16 / 14:51:17 EST