CO-MODIFIED: Rocks on Vinyl comprises nine 6’ x 3’ banners displayed like convention signage. They are presented as a series of speculative geomedia landscapes that explore contemporary human entanglements and collaborations with the lithosphere, activities that are transforming the earth’s surface and registering in its stratified depths. Animated by an affective, aesthetic appreciation of stone, these works invite reflection and discernment in a historical moment defined as the geologic now.
The stories of earth and humans are written in stone, from tectonic plate movements and the rock record to Neolithic cave paintings and stone circles. These histories are becoming increasingly inextricably intertwined, as ‘The Great Acceleration’ has brought humans to a geologic juncture in their evolution (the Anthropocene). This ‘geologic turn’ entails an epistemic and ontologic shift from “deep ecology” to “dark ecology” or “inhuman ecology,” in which clear divisions between nature and culture or ecology and economy can no longer be drawn. The lithosphere is not a passive planetary crust on which humans act but a form of media, an agential archive with whose lively forces we communicate and interact in complex ways. Human-lithic engagements deepen and diversify as stone becomes philosophically more vibrant (lithic as lively matter), environmentally more vulnerable (fracking, mining), scientifically more vital (mineral evolution), and aesthetically more valued (viewing stones, art of ‘the geologic’).
Consistent with its attentiveness to environmental issues, the exhibit is designed for maximal mobility and minimal carbon footprint. The 162 square feet of visual images and nine display stands, responsibly ordered at a small local business, easily fit in a single receptacle. The durable, colorful vinyl banners invite creative adaptations as shelter (tent?), clothing (poncho?), or tarpaulin (bicycle cover?), initiating a sustainable art market practice of purchase-and-repurpose.
This work was presented at the first meeting of GeoMedia Research Network, where a central topic was the meaning and viability of the term 'geomedia.' As a verbal-visual, critical-creative intervention, CO-MODIFIED theorizes geomedia as a concept through a series of studies in geomedia understood as a genre.
--Paul A. Harris & Richard Turner