Writing

This process archive catalogs the artistic research, collaborative work, theoretical frameworks, material innovations and digital fabrication methods behind 1,311 Diamonds (2026), an intervention within the Dutch Royal Paleis Het Loo.

A voice becomes a mirror plane becomes a holohedral wand is a speculative fiction about the extraction of minerals in the deep sea. Narrated by a not-quite-human character, it tells the story of a deadening ocean, and the adventures of this shapeshifting being amidst the increased desperation to maintain the structures of life under capitalism. Full of grief and love for an ocean once known intimately and whose very colors have changed due to global warming, the character transforms beyond gender and human form to evolve as a symbiont with other life forms such as microorganisms with an appetite for stones. Could this inhuman appetite invite small forms of sabotage against extractivism?

The accompanying soundscape composed by Samuel Hertz immerses the listener in an oceanic underworld that has become the site of deep-sea mining, with recordings of low-frequency tones emanating from hydrothermal vents [1] and impulse responses generated by sounding signals to resonate within 3D models of mineral crystallographies. [2] The artwork was originally commissioned in 2021 by Radio Amnion as a sound work to be played for the ocean itself during the full moon, transmitted through a nodule of a submerged neutrino telescope that searches for dark matter. The telescope lies two kilometers deep inside a fault of the Pacific Ocean in the Cascadia Basin.

[1] Samples recorded by T. Crone, et al, “The Sound Generated by Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker Hydrothermal Vents,” Plos One (2006).

[2] 3D models were produced thanks to M. Aristov using VESTA: K. Momma and F. Izumi, “VESTA 3 for three-dimensional visualization of crystal, volumetric and morphology data,” J. Appl. Crystallogr., 44, 1272-1276 (2011).

Kinship is often extended as another name for care, implying that with mutual reliance comes reciprocity. But who among us has not been disappointed by our families, both chosen and assigned? Or perhaps we betrayed our own voluntary responsibilities to others, or committed an error of misrecognition when we offered a pact of kinship that was not returned? For example, the house cat caught a garter snake and was playing with its writhing, bleeding body in one of my earliest memories. I rescued the snake carefully from the cat and held its head in my hand, looking into its eyes to ask if it was okay. It snapped open and shut its diamond mouth full of blood, trying to bite me. I was confused by this response to being rescued from death, and promptly released it into the grass, protecting it from the cat’s hunt. A week later, the snake reappeared in the garden, larger and marbled with scabs from its wounds. I was delighted to see it alive and tried to say hello. The snake did not recognize me and slithered away from my hopes for reptile kin. Perhaps its suspicion was that care is another name for control.

A milky, cryptocrystalline chrysalis is precipitating beneath the root: magnesite.

From an intercontinental distance, I now watch them burn. I do not watch the videos or news reports. Instead, I log on to the glitchy government incident map that lags as it loads the sawtooth, matte pink perimeters that represent the live edges of wildfire. They lie, translucent and superimposed, above the shaded topographical rendering of the surface geography of a state. The names of highways and towns are still legible beneath its pink obliteration. Cool mint green represents the forests. Subterranean mineral stratigraphies are omitted from this dimension. I refresh the page every so often to catch the flat shape approaching the regions where my loved ones live. I superimpose its odorless and dissociated form onto my mental map of this land that, though at a great remove, shaped my being. My loved ones include the trees. I have only the capacity to digest this zoomed out, two-dimensional iconography of live catastrophe that omits all affect, texture, and consequence.

We are not just leaky vessels that drop fluids onto surfaces. We have become atmospheres.

A virus is an undead vector that traces both the beauty and abuses of our mutual reliance. The porosity of our bodies is the very interface of our social being. Where we connect and communicate lies risk for contagion. Porosity affirms that we are already multiple, interdependent and entangled. A virus is not a metaphor. Different viruses trace divergent choreographies of vulnerability, sociality, and capital markets. Their movements within our social and material lives can draw our attention to critical nodes.

One of these nodes is where notions of care and cure intersect, yet they must not be conflated. A biomedical cure for a virus depends upon—but is not the same as—the infrastructures of care-taking required to support complex needs for public health such as food, shelter, bodily autonomy, and mental health. Another critical node is where mystification and lack of open participation in decisions about pricing policies for publicly funded biomedical innovation enables the enduring power of pharmaceutical companies to prioritize profit over people’s lives in the face of public health crises.

Imaginary Explosions is an artist book rich with images, poetry, and synthetic photography. Its pages explore geological ruptures, the immense scale and deep time of sexual violence, and the reverberation of traumas through bodies across multiple generations of relationships and families. It is an experiment in sequential, narrative poetry. Sparse, material language combines with synthetic landscapes based on the computational radar topography of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.

The book is a time-based passage through a volcanic landscape devoid of referential scale and texture. Dilations of tone darken and lighten between the spare, imperfect dimensional descriptions that narrate fractured timescales of geological metamorphosis and landscapes of human violence, holding space for affective resonance. Landscapes are protagonists who can act as intimate interlocutors, and who can offer capacious inhuman kinship—especially when human brutality renders relationality incomprehensible. Can we begin to grasp the scope and scales of both geological change and the deep time of patriarchy, by becoming mineral ourselves?

A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists.

Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value of food, and nascent life forms running wild in the age of biotechnology all figure in this curated collection of essays and artifacts. Recipes provide instructions on how to cook acorn mush, make cheese out of human milk, and enliven forests after they have been clear-cut. The Multispecies Salon investigates messianic dreams, environmental nightmares, and modest sites of biocultural hope.