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Without a Future, We Can Be Forever

Despite the diminutive size of our bodies, the Earth, in all its grand scale and complexity, is managing to grow inside us.

Entwined with the whaling industry, then, which peaked in the mid-19th century, was the violence of a colonial modernity that rendered the world open for the taking.

What separates us, the living, from our recent ancestors, is that we have inadvertently become not just people of the planet, but planetary people. And as planetary folk, we’re the generational interlocutors of interlocking, simultaneous and earth-scaled challenges—something called the polycrisis.

In ecology, a place that comes into being only when two other places meet, is called the ecotone.

Organizing these materials in our studio is the outermost tip of a complex global distribution network of intricate webs of highways, shipping routes, rail lines, and flight paths—a planetary vascular system and neural network, a pulsing flow of matter and information covering the surface of the earth.

Each collaborative entity mobilizes its own kind of micro-performance, but together they maintain a coherence through the way we simultaneously apprehend them in the sensorium. As such, the materials feel less instrumentalized by aesthetics and more mysterious.

David Kim and Michael Jones McKean consider the immensity of the horizon and the poetics of a global body.