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DEEP TIME RAPID TIME RESEARCH:

Our recent work has fallen under the research program of “deeptime+rapidtime”. We are interested in investigating ideas of temporality in relation to both deep time and rapid time (e.g. rapid climate change).

This work has lead to a lot of research -- with soil scientists and plant scientists, geologist, clothing designers, urbanists etc.

We have completed two early research components. One in Cleveland (see link) and one in Denver (see link). Now we are preparing to travel to Baffin Island, as well as about to begin installing a research center at Grand Arts in Kansas City.

We will make much more on this project appearing in the next few weeks.

Here is a link to our Baffin Island Research Blog (link)

Below is our original conceptual sketch -- much has changed.

Deep Time + Rapid Time: spurse and others at Grand Arts

A. FOUR GENERAL CONCEPTS:

1. A Project to engage with deep time:

65 million years ago the entire interior of North America was flooded -- from Texas to the Arctic -- this is now called the Great Inland Sea or the Cretaceous Seaway. Now 65 million years later North America is slowly flooding again. The Arctic is melting and water levels everywhere are rising. In forty-five years it is predicted that the Arctic waters will be free of ice during the summers.

The Great Inland Sea, which encompasses Kansas City and the Arctic, has a 65 million year old history of transformation and dynamic evolution; it also has a future which is approaching far more rapidly.  spurse is interested in making explicit these geological, environmental, astronomical, social, and biological histories (and futures ) by re-conceptualizing the Inland Sea as a space of dynamic interchanges/intersections and transformative histories where deep time (measured in the millions of years) meets this forty year period and the specific tactile, qualitative trajectories are revealed and opened to experimentation. 

Why deep time? One of the reason for our current global condition of Rapid Climate Change is that we as a culture have not developed a sense of the vast temporal scales of our actions -- what does it mean to us that the half life of nuclear material is thousands of years or that rain-forest will be gone in 200 years because of events begun in our lifetime? How do we experience such scales? How do we engage with such scales and complex forms of causality? In this regard we need to develop new senses of time and causality as well as develop new complex cosmologies that link our human actions, and time scales to this much larger sense of time and more complex sense of causality.

2. A project to engage with migrancy:

This is the coming era of the refugee and the migrant -- both human and other. Our homes and futures are visibly without certainty. We are ill equipped to even begin to conceptualize our own future refugee and migrancy status -- as events such as the aftermath from Hurricane Katrina suggest. What is the mobile infrastructure to respond to such conditions? Here we would like to suggest that it is all well and good to try and prevent these changes from happening or to critique such changes -- but they are happening and will happen -- so it is just as crucial to find and develop new ways of engaging with these coming changes that are both rigorous and positive -- in a sense we need to begin to embrace these changes.

3. A project to inscribe our fluid histories in the lands as we move and as they move:

How do we remember? How could we see the depth and future of the present? Why does information have to leave the world that it is generated in? Why does information come to reside in Libraries? Why do we imagine information separate from the world it is in relation to? Could not information today remain in the world that it comes from -- the very location of the event/concern or issue? Digital technologies now allow for information to be embedded into actual landscapes -- a good example of this are GPS navigation systems where data and landscape co-emerge for the user. Various Augmented Technologies are being developed to allow this to happen in far more sophisticated manners. There is a system to allow data to be collected and deposited as a virtual overlay in the Landscape that it comes from -- this is made visible through very normal looking glasses with projection onto the glasses (a type of “heads up” display). These forms of situated visualization allow for interactive, situational, and contested forms of visible flows of transitive data to be engaged with, added to, and transformed in a world that is both contested and rapidly changing.

We would work with the developer of one such system (Sean White -- a researcher at Columbia University) to develop a simple portable unit designed to address the issues of this project (he has already developed various successful portable systems for researchers such as plant botanists).

This system would allow the development of a world thick with histories where the virtual is constantly folded back into the actual and where the dispossessed (both human and non) can fold their agency, lives, and practices back into the changing geographies.

It is important to begin work with these systems in the field of cultural production and critical experimentation as the military, science, and big business are developing a new series of dimensions to the actual and new forms of engagement and agency -- this is the new topology of visuality -- a dense multidimensional quasi-actual quasi-virtual space of data swarms that augment and re-situate current geographies and spaces of engagement.

4. A project to foster systems of ground-up autonomy and politics

These new systems have the potential to allow for new forms of situated emergent localized politics that rapidly flow between the local and the global, between the social and the biological, between one species and another -- the possibilities for new forms of situated visualization combined with a new ethos of the refugee/migrant subject begin to develop a new politics of place that is quite unique and quite important.

We are not certain exactly where this will take us but we feel certain that this is a key terrain of our future and a key terrain to be strategically re-imagined in terms of the possibility for forms of autonomous self determination.

B. PROJECT OVERVIEW

This project would be set up as a research project to develop and test a cohesive “refugee system” which would address questions of (1) deep-time, (2) how to move across the land, (3) methods to record/inscribe a vast array of histories via emergent place envisioning and place embedding technologies. These systems and concepts would be researched, tested and developed in Kansas and Nunavut. In Kansas we would be looking into how the past is inscribed in the land and in Nunavut we would be looking at the emergence of our global future with the emergence of rapid climate change. We would work in these two areas to research, develop and test the systems. This project should be a test case for an approach to habitation and community organization that situates itself in the space of complex times. We imagine in the simplest sense a data visioning system that places one in a vast, deep and dense field of billion years of history as well as multiple emergent potential futures. And that this envisioning system is linked to a way of moving through and organizing the world.  The work should foster the further development and actual use of these systems -- in short this project should not be merely speculative or offer a one of a kind solution but become something widely adapted. A North American migrant/refugee system.

This project is organized into seven research areas (described below) and the work will be completed primarily through a series of workshops and intensives (also listed below):

1. Astronomy Research (with University of Kansas at Lawrence and others): How do we envision deep time? As we look out into the night sky we are seeing into the past -- millions and billions of years into the past -- the earth is bathed in the deep past. The universe is 13.7 billion years old and we can see back 13.3 billion years.

2. Cretaceous Sea (with the Paleontologist Glen Rocker and other is West Kansas): Ninety million years ago an interior sea covered most of the interior of North America. Kansas is located in the heart of this region and is historically the center of much of the research into the Great Inland Sea. We have formed a collaborative partnership with the paleontologist Glen Rocker to do research into this period.

3. Early Prairie Research (with The Land Institute and Stan Cox): The Kansas prairie is the site of many key contemporary debates about land use, environmental change and sustainability. The Land Institute, located just outside of Salinas, is a research center that is trying to develop new forms of grasses, and grains based upon how the prairie looked and operated a few hundred years ago. Here contemporary history is being folded into the future.

4. Historical Document and Material Culture Research (with the Linda Hall Library (Kansas City), The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center (Brunswick, ME) and other locations): We will be carefully studying documents and maps of early explorers and others. We will also be looking at Marine and Arctic Clothing -- especially that of indigenous cultures. We will be working with the Linda Hall Library to curate a series of related drawings, maps and note books. These will be shown concurrently with our exhibition at Grand Arts. We plan on borrowing clothing from various institutions for our exhibition at Grand Arts.

5. Augmented visualization and data recording system (with Sean White and Petia Morozov, Columbia University): We are interested in how data is transforming our landscapes and our subjectivities. Our reality is densely permeated with data fields and these are currently being used in very interesting manners. We will develop software to allow the collection and visualization of deep-time and rapid time data in the field.

6. Augmented Psycho-geographic Travel and Equipment Testing: We will design and build a basic travel system that has three components: (1) Clothing, (2) housing, and (3) an augmented data visualization and recording system. Housing system: redesign a modular form of refugee/migrant tent/housing system. Based upon a modular component system that would allow form adaptability to differing climates, uses and cultural contexts etc. Such systems simply do not exist. This in itself is a real necessity. Clothing system: the similar principles would be applied to a simple clothing system. Energy system: housing and clothing should integrate energy and resource collection (such as rain water collection, solar power and wind power etc.). In addition how is cheap digital communication fostered and supported. We will then utilize this system to make a test research journey from Kansas City to Nunavut.

7. Installation of Prototypes and Deep Time + Rapid Time Refugee/Migrancy Research Center (Grand Arts): We will set up a product test lab and research center in Grand Arts. This will synthesize all of the previous endeavors and present a complex and coherent way to understand the relation of Deep Time and Rapid Time and how our response can be a creative social and political act to rethink space, place, and social agency.