No new events scheduled for the time being ~obviously 💁🏻~ as we dis- and reassemble our interiorized landscapes of, and for, social distancing on an infinitely spinning hamster wheel of time.
…Over here, Nick @soundscrapers updated us about experiments with a sound bath that reassembles soundscapes of militarism into a therapeutic shelter.
Photo via vessel.fm, March 2, 2020
🦠 In lieu of the previous plans sketched out for attunements with site-specific memory processes within the Bay Area’s landscapes of explosivity, here is a recent paper I read at the UC Berkeley Geography Colloquium. This talk draws from a draft book chapter that studies the 1866 nitroglycerine explosion in downtown San Francisco at a Wells Fargo shipping yard and the methods of sitting with and standing still at sites of racialized exposure to industrialized geophysics.
In addition, Society and Space recently posted a juicy forum at their open site, edited by the A-team of Caren Kaplan, Gabi Kirk, and Tess Lea on “Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site:”
The pieces gathered here explore some of the outer reaches of modern militarization, in order to explicate new historical and geographical insights on the legacies of colonialism, imperialism and environmental extractivism.
Photo: train car filled with potash from kelp at the Hercules Powder Co, Chula Vista CA 1915
In my contribution —thinking about this in retrospect—I ponder the resignification of kelp as a suspicious package. 💥 That is, I explore how the extraction of kelp to make potash for explosives subsumes diverse oceanic ecosystems of seaweed forests into a logic of landscape combustibility which persists even under climate crises and decline.
Anyway, here are some more resources to refresh your logistical infrastructures of pandemicism…
Mouse eats scorpion and howling
Dossier co-edited by Crystal Mun-hye Baik and Jane Jin Kaisen at Social Text’s Periscope site with articles by Yong Soon Min, Suzy Kim, Soni Kum, Patty Ahn, Sukjong Hong, and Haruki Eda that consider the suspended space and time of Korea’s “demilitarized peace”
“respondents center a racialized, gendered, and feminist analysis to track accrued forms of colonial violence that remain on the fringes of inter/national negotiations for Korean peace, capitalist prosperity, and militarized stability” [click]
Decolonization Now for Puerto Rico, by Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan for NACLA Report on the Americas
The history of colonialism is ever-present in Puerto Rico, reflected in the island’s manifold recent economic, humanitarian, climate, and political crises.
Watch « Black Panthers » d’Agnès Varda à voir sur mk2 Curiosity (online free for just another few days (via Siddhartha Mitter).
Be sure to check out our friend and collaborator Kate Chandler’s new book from Rutgers University Press (2020). Big big congrats; can’t wait to dive in!!!
Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare
Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war.
Javier Arbona-Homar, for demilit