Feral2

feral

Feral Atlas (Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou)

Feral is not necessarily a negative or positive word; it has different meanings in different contexts. In Feral Atlas, feral refers to a nonhuman entity (biological, chemical, geological) that is beyond human control.

feral effects are all around us. Flora and fauna adapt to and transform ecologies in tune with their own cycles and rhythms beyond the anticipation and control of human activities all the time. An apple tree thrives after a forest visitor tosses the core after eating an apple, for example.

The feral effects Feral Atlas is concerned with are the unexpected, non-designed consequences of human-made imperial and industrial infrastructures, which materially transform land, water, and air with such intensity that shifts occur in formally stable nonhuman ecologies. These shifts can create favourable conditions for living or non-living entities to run out-of-control, whose feral activities tip these ecologies from one state to another. Jellyfish caused ecological disaster in the Black Sea after being accidentally brought there in ballast water in cargo ships, for example.

feral effects occur across multiple, overlapping, and uneven scales and often go unnoticed and unattended—a consequence perhaps of the hubris of modernizing infrastructure projects—and so feral effects pile up. This accumulation of feral effects shifts interactions between humans and nonhumans across scales, creating new, life-threatening ecological conditions. This, Feral Atlas argues, is the more-than-human Anthropocene.

In these critical times we argue that we need urgently to learn methods and practices of attention to what our infrastructures do. Rather looking at feral effects as a result, Feral Atlas asks, what triggers and encourages them?

During the symposium Making Matters: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times, we (Feral Atlas members Lili Carr and Feifei Zhou) conducted a group exercise in noticing feral effects in the area where you live. The workshop instructions are reproduced below.

workshop: feral atlas as a verb

You are invited to explore the more-than-human worlds of Feral Atlas > www.feralatlas.org.

Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou

Making Matters Symposium 2020, 20 November 2020 | Driving the Human Opening Festival, 22 November 2020

introduction: feral atlas as a verb

The Feral Atlas concept of infrastructure-mediated state change is where ongoing human-made infrastructural processes radically change environments to the point where our social and ecological systems are tipped from one state to another. In Feral Atlas, we call these infrastructural processes Tippers. Tippers are a non-exhaustive set of verbs that express the transformative actions of human-made infrastructures.

This workshop is an experiment in noticing, recording, and expressing the actions of Tippers in our daily environments. Can we imagine ways of doing the infrastructural work we observe differently?

infrastructures

In Feral Atlas, infrastructures are technological apparatuses constructed to do kinds of work that (at least some) humans want done. Feral Atlas defines infrastructures in relation to three conditions:

1. Infrastructures are material apparatuses that affect landscapes, waterscapes, and airscapes.
2. Infrastructures are ‘public works’ in the sense that they involve many people and projects, and are part of broadly imagined campaigns to change landscapes in the interests of some kind of governance programme.
3. Infrastructures are apparatuses created by human design.

See Feral Atlas and the More-than-Human Anthropocene at www.feralatlas.org.

tippers

To show how infrastructures create state changes, Feral Atlas starts with the kinds of work they are designed to do. We ask: In the process of doing that work, what gaps and rifts appear in the state of things? What disappears? What proliferates?

Feral Atlas expresses Tippers as eight one-syllable words, each derived from the early history of the English language, and, as such, at the base of English-speakers’ experience. Consider these words as verbs; they describe things that people—and infrastructures—do. By classifying infrastructures according to these verbs, we aim to make clear the rifts that can appear when imperial and industrial modes of work take over from other ways of doing things.

• Notice TAKE as the action of ‘taking’.
• Notice SMOOTH/SPEED as the action of ‘smoothing/speeding’.
• Notice PIPE as the action of ‘piping’.
• Notice GRID as the action of ‘gridding’.
• Notice CROWD as the action of ‘crowding’.
• Notice BURN as the action of ‘burning’.
• Notice DUMP as the action of ‘dumping’.

See Tippers: Modes of Infrastructure-Mediated State Change at www.feralatlas.org.

exercise

Take a walk outside in the area where you live. What infrastructural work do you observe in action? Which Feral Atlas Tipper(s) could describe this work?

Observe infrastructures working as they have been designed and built to do—not infrastructures that are being misused, or have broken down. Can you think of any other Tipper categories
—other verbs—that could also describe this work?

Using video or sound recording, written text or spoken word, drawings, or photographs, try to capture directly the sounds and sights of infrastructural work and the scene in which this kind of infrastructural work is being done.

 

Feral Atlas uses short videos

and sound pieces to convey something of the sheer power
of Tippers, that is, their ability to rip apart existing social and ecological systems and to create new ones. This is just one of the ways Feral Atlas has attempted to capture the direct sounds, sights, and actions of infrastructural work.
We encourage you to come up with others.

Please be prepared to share with the group your first-hand observations and recordings. Do you notice any feral entities that attune to the infrastructural work you observe?

Look together at the group’s collection of observations and recordings. Notice the similarities in infrastructural actions manifest differently across scale, duration, and place. Can we imagine ways of doing the infrastructural work we observe differently?

 

For more Feral Atlas exercises, see Feral Atlas Exercises: Connecting the Material to the Place Where You Live at www.feralatlas.org.

The text for this brief has been adapted from Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene.

Curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou.