Timeshores

Recovered Anthropocene, An Archeology of the Future

Adam Nocek, Ron Broglio, Gabriella Isaac

The installation transports the viewer into an archeological exhibit in the future, anywhere from 500 to one million years from now. The objects presented here are what future archeologists might recover from the Anthropocene era of the southwestern United States and are labeled with their best guess as to what use and value the artifacts might have had. Imagine living in this unknown future and looking at mysterious objects from the early 21^st century—the mundane things we use and value today. Not only does this challenge us to occupy a perspective from a future that is impossible to occupy but it also invites us to interrogate the value we give to objects by asking whether we would be able to make sense of it in a future epoch that is very different from our own.

Oceanfront Property

3-Channel Video

Adam Nocek, Ron Broglio, Gabriella Isaac

There is a line from a George Straight song that goes, “I got some ocean front property in Arizona/From my front porch you can see the sea.” This video installation takes these humorous lines seriously and asks what would happen if Arizona did have a shoreline, as climate scientists predict will happen 500 to 1,000 years from now? Invest in this distant future now and get this (eventual) beachfront property at great prices! The video reminds us of how deeply anthropocentric it is to think that humans would still be here and functioning in a capitalist system to profit from global warming. The images are punctuated with quotations taken from sources on speculative real estate, financial capitalism, neoliberal theory, and critical and cultural theory to showcase how the lens of profit is capable of coloring our perception of even the most devastating climate events.

Underwater Archeology

Materials and design by the Laboratory for Critical Technics, Richard Turner, and Paul Harris

This installation transports participants to an archeological dig in the desert southwest. We ask that you take time to dig in the sand, manipulate and play with the rocks and debris. This responsive media installation encourages you to experience the different scales of time that are hidden from view. The materials on the gallery floor (on either side of the box) place you directly in the field. By manipulating them, you will find that a past and future ocean is sonically lurking in this desert excavation site. These desert temporalities are not predictable and easy to understand, however. Human and geological scales of time are intertwined in ways that often defy comprehension, and this installation asks that you experiment with these temporalities in order to find some temporary pattern or order to the sonic ocean concealed in this desert floor.

The box found in the middle of the fieldwork, transports you to the archeologists’ workstation. In manipulating the rocks and debris, you will discover that the sonic ocean is now more predictable and ordered than it was in the field. Cause and effect seem to have some bearing in this realm of archeological work. In short, our understanding of the underwater past and future of the desert is becoming more “scientific.” In time, these materials will become lifeless artifacts ready for display in a museum, like we find in the Recovered Anthropocene installation.

Shore Stone Gardens: the upper crust of earth's outer crust

Model homes by Richard Turner

California shore stones on loan from Paul Harris

Shore Stone Gardens represents a surreal estate speculator's vision of future developments, depicted here in a geologic time-scale model (1"=1 million years). This exclusive, reclusive complex, nestled in an uplifting landscape where the placid seas of the Gulf of Nevada meet the serene sands of the Arizona desert, offers unique opportunities to invest in luxury time-shares on the futures market. Ground was first broken for this cutting-edge tract by grinding tectonic plates during the late Anthropocene, which deposited California shore stones in the Arizona desert, and shifted the West Coast Lifestyle from Los Angeles to Phoenix.

Shore Stone Gardens creates a new form of post-Anthropocene organic architecture where the built and natural environments coalesce in an unfolding composition. Megalithic assemblages and sleek Retro Desert Modernist structures hug stunning stone outcrops in this bedrock community constructed exclusively from recycled materials (detritus, plastiglomerates, scrap wood and steel) and biochar (a composite of incinerated decomposed organic matter).

Urbane suburbanites frequent the Painter's Palette Arts Center and vortex-topped Civic Ark. Residents frolic in urban open spaces whose pristine pastoral atmosphere is preserved by a steel mesh air purifier tower, which doubles as a galactic antenna. Nearby, petric polyps suspended above porous rock formations provide housing for local troglodytes, a native population who now perform the minimal menial manual labor requisite in this technotopia. Shore Stone Gardens is an epoch event! Choice real estate like this is rarely traded on the time-shares market. We are selling out the future quickly—buy into it before it's gone for good!