University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Encounters with the Anthropocene: synthetic geologies, diegetic ecologies and other landscape imaginaries

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Encounters with the Anthropocene: synthetic geologies, diegetic ecologies and other landscape imaginaries

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Content Encounters with the Anthropocene:
Synthetic Geologies, Diegetic Ecologies and Other Landscape Imaginaries

By:
Aroussiak Gabrielian

Supervisor:
Dr. Holly Willis

Committee Members:
Dr. Andreas Kratky
Alex McDowell
Dr. Jeff Watson

External Member:
Dr. Steve Anderson

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the USC Graduate School
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy (Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice))
University of Southern California

August 2019
Gabrielian 2

Table of Contents:

I. Abstract 04
II. Acknowledgements 05
III. Introduction 09

a. Formations 10
b. Leanings 11
i. Theories 14
ii. Methods 16
c. Encounters to Follow (Chapter Breakdown) 20
i. Food 20
ii. Water 21
iii. Waste 21

IV. Encounters

a. Food 23
i. The New Materialism of Food 25
ii. The Ethics of Food 32
iii. Our Second Mouth 35
iv. Food Cultures + New Rituals of Food 36
v. Technofutures of Production + Consumption 38

b. Water 41
i. Warm Wet Breath 43
ii. Our Planetary Hydrocommons 51
iii. The Material of Wetness 54
iv. Water Memory and Waters of Memory 56
v. Aqueous Ethics 57
vi. Hydro-Sociality 59
vii. Sterilization or Fertility 60

c. Waste 62
i. Wasted Bodies 62
ii. Waste-land 66
iii. Infrastructures for Life 69
iv. Anthropocenic Grief and Atonement 70
v. Our Techno-Legacy 75
vi. Posthuman Afterlife 77

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V. Speculations (List of Figures)

a. Posthuman Habitats 23
i. Diegetic Prototype 24
ii. Multispecies Habitats 28
iii. Waste Cycles 29
iv. Cross-Pollinators 30
v. Renal and Digestive Systems 35
vi. Menu Items 37
vii. New Social Rituals 38
viii. System Layers 39
ix. System Components 40

b. Transcorporeal Atmospheres 41
i. Human Respiration System 44
ii. Variegated Membrane 45
iii. System Anatomy: Responsive Outer Skin 46
iv. System Anatomy: Synthetic Inner Organs 47
v. Human Moisture Circulation 48
vi. Plant Transpiration Process 49
vii. New Interdependent Rituals 55

c. Near-Extinction Rituals 62
i. Compost Food Web 64
ii. Compost Recipe 66
iii. Base Body Chemistry / Waste Body Burden 68
iv. Biochemical Phases 72
v. New Rituals of Mourning 73
vi. Atmospheric Sacraments 74
vii. Non-Compostable Remains 76
viii. Emergent Foraging Ecologies 78

VI. Movement Toward 79
VII. Bibliography 81

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Abstract:
In the current geologic epoch of the Anthropocene, in which humanity has directly altered
atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, and biospheric systems, developing design methodologies
that help steer ourselves, our communities, and our environments toward more ethical futures is
critical for planetary survival. Leaning on scholarship that challenges the Humanist imagination,
including Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Material Feminism, and New Materialist
Environmentalism, and integrating adapted methods applied in Speculative Design, Design
Fiction and World Building, this practice-based dissertation speculates on our Anthropocenic
crises in order to imagine methods of coexistence, of both living and sharing this broken planet
with others – human and otherwise.

The dissertation takes on human-induced environmental catastrophe that impacts species and
landscape processes across scales – from the microscopic to the atmospheric. While bio-, geo-
and hydro-engineering technologies have been developed and proposed to counteract the damage
we have done, this project aims to provide an alternative to these so-called “fixes” by inspiring
us to imagine a more compassionate and collaborative form of earthly inhabitation. The
speculations below attempt to make palpable the psychically distant worlds of the microbiome
and the arctic ice sheets, bringing climate stress and adaptation into the physical and corporeal
realities of our everyday lives.

Through three interrelated yet distinct encounters with matter: Food, Water, Waste, this
dissertation speculates on the task of “living with the trouble” (from Haraway, 2016), while also
pointing to methodological and pedagogical inquiries for design.
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Acknowledgements:
Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we walk, the
ever-changing skies, mountains and rivers, rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit
and the tools we use…the innumerable companions, both non-human and fellow
humans, with which and with whom we share our lives?
– Tim Ingold (2011)
1

This project would not have been possible without a myriad of more-than-human encounters
leading up to this instant in time.

I begin by acknowledging first my dissertation chair, Holly Willis. It was in Holly’s class, “From
Cinema to Post-Cinema: History, Theory, Practice” that I was first exposed to the work of Rosi
Braidotti, which fueled my thinking around the speculative design project associated with the
first chapter, Posthuman Habitats. This was also the semester when I had just returned from
having given birth to my daughter Zabel, and a time when I was keenly aware and astounded by
my body’s ability to produce and deliver the exact nutrients that this new being required. It was
there in class, engorged, hormonal and lactating, that I started to imagine the ways in which we,
as geocentric subjects (to borrow from Braidotti), and particularly our bodies, could feed more
than just our kin. Holly’s feedback in class and beyond, as she went on to become my
dissertation chair, has been critical in the directions in which I have navigated this work. But
beyond this more typical exchange, I am more so grateful to Holly for letting me follow threads
not directly related to this project and for trusting that I would find my way back to it. That
freedom has enriched this project beyond any gift I can quantify.

1
Tim Ingold, Being Alive (New York: Routledge, 2011), xii.
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This project has also benefited tremendously from the support and feedback of the remaining
members of my dissertation committee comprised of four brilliant individuals who all share in
common an unwavering generous spirit. I have immense gratitude for: Andreas Kratky for
challenging questions around technology and for his generosity of time and knowledge; Alex
McDowell for continuously providing opportunities to apply these wild ideas in practice; Jeff
Watson for fascinating references, for ethical leanings and futures thinking; Steve Anderson, for
being instrumental in creating this amazing program in which I have been immersed in the past
five years, and for his immense generosity - of time, of experience, of resources, of knowledge.

During the critical earlier stages of the project Vittoria Di Palma served on my qualifying exam
committee and helped me hone in on the ways in which this hybrid dissertation best addressed
questions of “landscape.”

I am grateful to my colleagues in the Media Arts and Practice PhD program, many of whom have
influenced my leanings and sharpened my thinking around this work and beyond. I must also
recognize Elizabeth Ramsey, without whom, I would be completely lost.

I came to USC, after an established base in critical landscape thinking-making, which was
influenced and encouraged by mentor and friend at the University of Pennsylvania, Anuradha
Mathur. No other landscape thinker-maker has had a bigger impact on my creative and
intellectual development. Her influence is everywhere in these pages.

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During a critical moment in my thinking around this project, I was extremely fortunate to receive
the Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and spent the year
abroad in Rome reading, thinking, making. The time at the Academy proved invaluable for the
development of the ideas here, as well as for the creative process hence described. It was at the
American Academy, and with their generous support of funds and personnel, that I was able to
build the first prototype of Posthuman Habitats. This was done in collaboration with Alison
Hirsch and Grant Calderwood, who, as a microgreens grower, worked alongside us to make sure
the plants thrived on the cloaks; Irene Tortora, local fashion designer, distributed the weight of
the soil pockets ergonomically on the cloaks; Alessandra Vinciguerra, local seamstress, stitched
the base material; chef Chris Behr and his team at the Rome Sustainable Food Project, harvested
the crops and designed the “future-forward” finger foods for the opening night of the exhibition;
Emily Scheffler, our tireless intern from the Tyler School of Art; Stefano Silvia, dear friend and
installation fabricator at the American Academy; and Ilaria Gianni, the curator of the exhibition
in which it was displayed. Conversations with attendees of the exhibition who encountered the
work also proved incredibly valuable to the project’s further development.

Beyond the prototype, I must call out a few individuals responsible for directly or indirectly
impacting the trajectory of this project while in Rome: John Oschendorf provided invaluable
advising; the work of many of my colleagues but especially that of Abigail DeVille and Bissera
Pencheva which impacted me beyond comprehension. I additionally benefitted from exchanges
with: Rosetta Elkin, around seeds, roots, plants and their swarms of cells; Joanna Klink around
the sky; Teresita Fernandez around geology; Suzanne Farrin around water (among other
things…). I must also thank the many gendered mothers of 5B, who kept us sane.
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Finally, this project would not be possible without the love and support of my family, both
inherited and chosen. I highlight a few key influences below:

As mentioned above, in 2015, I welcomed new life into this world with the birth of my daughter
Zabel. My family then grew again in late 2016 with the birth of Zaia. Zabel and Zaia, you have
enriched my thinking, my creative process and my life in ways that are too complex to articulate
here. Thank you for giving me the hope for the futures that I have developed within these pages.

Where there is life there is also death. In 2017, I lost my maternal grandmother, Emma. She had
raised my two siblings and I, and her loss was devastating as I considered her a mother. I aspire
to love with the same intensity that you loved us - fully, unconditionally, and most vivid in my
memory - completely selflessly. I dedicate this work to you and to the innumerable sacrifices you
made for us.

Finally, fellow collaborator, companion, co-parent and coconspirator – Alison Hirsch. There are
not enough co-terms in this world to describe the myriad of ways we are entangled in and with
one another. This dense thicket of a life that we have woven together for the past 15 years has
been such a significant source of nourishment – intellectual, creative, personal. I feel fortunate to
be able to think and make alongside you every day and I benefit daily from your sharp eye and
benevolent feedback. Your fingerprints - physical, mental, and otherwise - are all over these
pages. Thank you.
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Introduction:
This work finds its origins in questions rather than in answers. Most significantly, how to live
(and die) in the ruins of what we have created. In the current geologic epoch of the
Anthropocene, in which humanity has directly altered atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, and
biospheric systems, developing design methodologies that help steer ourselves, our communities,
and our environments toward more ethical futures is critical for planetary survival.

Aided by advanced capitalism and bio-genetic technologies, humans have radically disrupted
human interactions with the multispecies world and turned ecosystems into a so-called
“planetary apparatus of production.” Scholar McKenzie Wark describes this phenomenon as a
series of metabolic rifts, where “one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to
make things for humans.” As waste is not returned to feed the system’s self-perpetuation, “the
soils deplete, the seas recede, the climate alters, the gyre widens,” in Wark’s words.
2
Leaning on
scholarship that challenges the Humanist imagination, including Posthuman Feminist
Phenomenology, Material Feminism, and New Materialist Environmentalism, and integrating
adapted methods applied in Speculative Design, Design Fiction and World Building, this
practice-based dissertation speculates on our Anthropocenic crises in order to imagine future
mechanisms for planetary survival that are more ethical, more inclusive, and more just.

Deploying design as research - as a mode of inquiry that is active and exploratory - the
dissertation elaborates on current critical design practices to generate alternative futures that can
open new perspectives on the challenges facing us. Speculative in scope, it aims to torque our

2
McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London/New York: Verso, 2015).
Gabrielian 10

imaginaries to help us re-think our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this
planet.

Recognizing the diverse forms of consciousness and symbiotic expressions of care shared within
interdependent webs of life that exist across scales of time and mass, the dissertation provides
humans a means to participate in this network of exchange, hoping that we might better
understand the agency, vitality and collaborative sociality of the biophysical world (and our
place in it) – as a model for existence.

Formations:
The content of this dissertation was not produced in a linear manner – nor does it have to be read
in that way. The work consist of three encounters with matter, all interwoven yet also readable
independently as distinct chapters: Food, Water, and Waste. These encounters are both physical,
partially explored through speculative design prototypes; and theoretical, explored through
written scholarship. Themes connect one chapter to the next, connect practice to theory, theory to
methodology, methodology to pedagogy, and back again. The need for a conclusion has been
eliminated as this work is not meant to convince the reader but rather, to expand thinking and
open up questions on how our collective futures might be imagined otherwise.
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Figure 1 - Three Chapter Interaction: An early diagram showing the chapter interactions. Threads of theoretical
positions will weave in and out of the speculations as substantiations, responses and a means to open up further
curiosities.

Leanings:
Scholar Maggie Nelson in “A Sort of Leaning Against” puts forth a model of practice for writing
with others. The leaning against she is talking about “brings one into the land of wild
associations, rather than that of grim congenital lineage.” She speaks of ideas as “things that can
be arranged, synthesized, associated, and felt” and that these ideas, thoughts, and words are in
essence shared, “they surround us like an ocean,” and writing, to Nelson, is like dragging a cup
through those communal waters and seeing what one gathers. Her interest is in “dramatizing this
coexistence – showcasing the situations we find ourselves in, in which dependence on others – or
at least relation to them – is the condition of possibility for self-reliance.”
3

In this project I extend Nelson’s model into design practice and address how designing with
others - dynamic biological systems, ecologies, microorganisms, matter, etc – (as opposed to

3
Maggie Nelson, “A Sort of Leaning Against,” in The Writers Notebook II: craft essays from the Tin House
(Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2012).
Gabrielian 12

designing to solve problems), might bring us closer to more ethical interspecies relations and
interactions. It envisions design as cooperation and collaboration across media – utilizing not
only the agency of the designer but also that of all matter. While the idea of designing with
dynamic systems is part of the ethos of the contemporary landscape architect, whose medium
(the physical environment) is always in the process of becoming, this idea of the agency of
matter additionally comes out of my leanings on political theorist Jane Bennett whose book,
Vibrant Matter, aims to discredit the notion that matter is passive, inert or “raw” material that
depends on humans to give it agency or “liveliness.” Rather than a resource, a commodity or an
instrument under human control, Bennett’s book focuses on nonhuman “actants” (from Latour)
and their ability to “produce effects,” as well as to form assemblages or “working groups” with
humans.
4

This work projects a mode of environmental existence that dismantles the idea of “human
exceptionalism” and demonstrates the complex webs of life upon which humans depend. It is a
project that recognizes the precarity of life on our planet as human-induced climate change
accelerates planetary decline and forces us to imagine a future without “Us.”

This project inspires actual and direct dialogue – facilitated by technology – with the materials of
landscape which have been rendered mute by “our” sense of human exceptionalism. It breaks
down the unproductive binary historically set between Nature and Technology by leaning on
technology to enable this necessary exchange. At the same time, it often struggles with
acceptance of the conditions we have created, yet determinedly rejects a restorative ethos

4
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), see Preface.
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recognizing its complete futility. Instead, it attempts to avoid any naïve sense of restoring earthly
equilibrium – a condition that has never existed – and imagines a “machinic ecology” (see
Guattari, 1989) that revels in the entanglements of life, and the inevitabilities of death.

The most primary issue at hand is the topic of climate change and human-induced environmental
catastrophe that impacts species and landscape processes across scales – from the microscopic to
the atmospheric. While bio-, geo- and hydro-engineering technologies have been developed and
proposed to counteract the damage we have done, this project aims to provide an alternative to
these so-called “fixes” by inspiring us to imagine a more compassionate and collaborative form
of earthly inhabitation. The speculations attempt to make palpable the psychically distant worlds
of the microbiome and the arctic ice sheets, bringing climate stress and adaptation into the
physical and corporeal realities of our everyday lives.

The project hopes to give voice to the non-human – a kind of planetary justice aimed at
dismantling the privileging of “Man” as the voice of all things. It is also explicitly feminist and
deliberately and predominantly leans against the voices of “Others” (most especially Donna
Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, Astrida Neimanis, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Mel
Y. Chen, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Heather Davis, among others). These voices from outside
the dominant majority are those that I have chosen to lean on, to build on, to amplify.

Through three interrelated yet distinct encounters with matter: Food, Water, Waste, this
dissertation speculates on the task of “living with the trouble” (from Haraway, 2016
5
; see more

5
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press,
2016).
Gabrielian 14

below). Each chapter designs a specific speculation around each theme which is then situated
within and elaborated through scholarship that challenges the humanist imagination while also
pointing to methodological and pedagogical inquiries for design.

Theories I Lean On:
The “Others” listed above, which I depend on for intellectual enrichment and foundational
thinking for the dissertation, emerge out of interconnected webs of discourse that weave
together: Feminism, New Materialism, Environmentalism, Posthumanism, Phenomenology. I
start and end with Donna Haraway, particularly her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin
in the Chthulucene (2016). Her thinking behind living and dying together [multispecies] in the
ruins that we [humans] have created (or “staying with the trouble,” rather than denying it or
delusionally attempting to turn back), while making trouble that “stirs up potent response” about
how to move forward, has guided me through this process.

Feminism through materialist and ecopolitical frameworks challenge the emphasis on the
discursive and dig deep into the physical matter that make up the human and more-than-human
world (bodies, substances and environments, to Alaimo), while continuing to address structural
inequalities and the careful attunement to difference characteristic of the feminist project. Gender
and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, particularly her conceptions of hydro-feminism and her
book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) (among many other essays),
were additionally pivotal to speculative thinking, particularly, but not exclusively, for the chapter
on Water. She reminds us that we are all bodies of water, framing this hydrocommonality as
Gabrielian 15

“gestational milieu” or “facilitation of the not-yet” that “flows through and across difference.”
6

As a “planetary circulation system”
7
that surrounds and fills us, as well as permeates in and out
of us, water denies the humanist model of discrete individuality. While the “facilitation of the
not-yet” suggests optimism for what is to come, her arguments are counterbalanced by other
(capitalist) logics of water including contamination, dissolution and destruction, which remind us
that we are not equalized by our shared wetness. This is clearly most immediately pertinent to
water – as medium, material, method, but Neimanis’ feminist perspectives on embodiment and
ecological ethics infuses all three chapters.

The final of the triad of scholars that loosely corresponds to the material triad of the chapters is
Stacy Alaimo [she appears most in Food but is influential throughout] and, most predominantly,
her ecocultural concept of trans-corporeality, particularly as framed in Bodily Natures: Science,
Environment and the Material Self (2010). Her emphasis on the permeability of bodies as a
challenge to the humanist model of discrete individuality had clear impact on Neimanis. She
explores the mobile “interconnections, interchanges, and transits” between human bodies and
nonhuman natures – including creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents and other actors.
Arriving at the understanding that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is
always the very substance of ourselves” offers a profoundly altered conception of the human self
that provides a kind of foundation for all the speculations.
8

6
See Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality: What Flows beneath Ethics,” in Thinking
with Water, eds. Cecelia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGills-Queens University Press,
2013), 75; and Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism, Or: On Becoming a Body of Water,” in Undutiful Daughters:
New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny
Soderback (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 90.
7
Cecelia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis, “Introduction,” in Thinking with Water, 11.
8
Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010), 4.
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The work of these scholars has a deeply ethical orientation that challenges injustices that impact
a “more expansive sense of we.”
9
These frameworks likewise reject technophilia without being
technophobic, refusing to see a split between nature and technology. As Astrida Neimanis points
out, “Donna Haraway’s (1985) celebrated figure of the cyborg reminds us that bodies have been
technological (and racialized, and gendered, and hybrid assemblages of naturalcultural worlds)
all along.”
10

Methods I Lean On:
Before beginning this doctoral program, I was trained and had a career in landscape architecture
and architecture. Both fields are predominantly driven by problem-solving methodologies,
obviously with critical exceptions that have stimulated my continued inquiries into the design of
the built environment. Very generally (I could write endless pages situating critical discourse in
landscape architecture), landscape architects aim to shape the environment in ways that benefit
local and regional ecologies and urban public space, but the discourse and the practice is largely
eco-normative, restorative and neoliberal (again with some important exceptions, most primarily
in academia).
11
My design practice, foreground design agency, is a critical landscape practice
that attempts to dismantle such approaches, which rarely challenge us to see differently or

9
Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 12.
10
Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 10.
11
In some ways, framing landscape within the discourse of the posthuman is relatively straight-forward, particularly
since landscape architect Ian McHarg’s 1969 book Design with Nature, seminal to shaping the modern practice of
landscape architecture, situated “Man” as just one fairly small part of the earth’s global ecosystem – or biosphere.
McHarg thus framed landscape as a complex web of interdependent systems – a parallel to cybernetics. Landscape
as system was thence codified. Yet McHarg, like his 19
th
-c. predecessors, wrote dogmatically against the offenses of
industrialization, citing Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962) which identified the
detrimental effects of DDT (pesticides) on the environment – thus enforcing the nature-technology dichotomy. He
defined the profession as “healing,” “protecting,” “managing” or “stewarding” environmental health. Likewise
McHarg’s emphasis on the closed predictable behavior of the “biosphere” acting as a single “superorganism” has
since been criticized by ecologists (and since, many landscape architects) who recognize that systems can no longer
be seen as closed, self-regulating entities. See Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Press,
1969).
Gabrielian 17

outside the realm of our comfortable expectations. This dissertation thus engages speculative and
critical methods of design and applies them to the built environment. It takes cues from discourse
around cinematic “world-building,” while the catalytic base material for these worlds in the three
speculations below are those in which we are currently immersed (rather than a fully constructed
world as is the case in transmedial science fiction, from which this discourse emerged). I ask
fundamental questions within this approach, such as how do we take what we have created, and
imagine an alternative course, other than business-as-usual? How do we arrive there? What are
the consequences and “world-builds” around the speculative futures that emerge from our very
real and deeply troubling present? These are some of the questions that have fueled me
throughout this process. I have been cautiously impacted by the optimistic agency of speculative
design as defined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in Speculative Everything:
As we rapidly move toward a monoculture that makes imagining genuine
alternatives almost impossible, we need to experiment with ways of developing
new and distinctive worldviews that include different beliefs, values, ideal, hopes
and fears from today’s. If our belief systems and ideas don’t change, then reality
won’t change either. It is our hope that speculating through design will allow us to
develop alternative social imaginaries that open new perspectives on the
challenges facing us…This is where speculative design can flourish – providing
complicated pleasure, enriching our mental lives, and broadening our minds in
ways that complement other media and disciplines. It’s about meaning and
culture, about adding to what life could be, challenging what it is, and providing
alternatives that loosen the ties reality has on our ability to dream. Ultimately, it is
a catalyst for social dreaming.
12

Critical and feminist speculative design, might best describe my approach, which both hopes to
catalyze social dreaming and provoke critical evaluation of where we are and where we are
headed, as a society and as a species. “World-building,” as defined in texts such as Mark J. P.

12
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 189.
Gabrielian 18

Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012),
13
suggests
the invention of “worlds” that are closed systems – inviting multiple inputs but moving toward
the idea of “completion,” similar to thinking around Utopias. Likewise, world-building is
human-centric – worlds are built around the human. There is also a neoliberal orientation to
world-building, as well as speculative design and Design Fictions since particularly these latter
methodologies have primarily emerged from (and been in service of) product design and the
production of objects for consumption. Instead, I deploy principles from Future Studies and
particularly Stuart Candy’s ideas on “experiential futures,” which challenge Utopia/Dystopia
binary thinking and aim to “pluralize the future” via a “platform for public imagination,” yet still
with a level of criticality. Rather than the design of objects or products, the ideas here are more
aligned with “experiential scenarios” in the sense that the speculations are designs for systems
that are responsive to change and instigate change in the world of our everyday lives.
14

My critical and feminist design methodology aims to dismantle structures of power and privilege
that render specific humans, species, matter silent. I call my approach a landscape-oriented
practice of design, impacted by my training in landscape architecture and particular thinkers
within the discipline that have really questioned its medium (landscape) and methods
(architecture) to develop a design framework that is both adaptive and responsive to the dynamic
medium, and catalytic and imaginative, rather than closed and confining (see, for instance James
Corner
15
and Anuradha Mathur; more on the latter in the following pages). As a medium that is

13
Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York/London:
Routledge, 2012).
14
See Stuart Candy, The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios (Manoa:
University of Hawaii Ph.D. Dissertation, 2010) and Stuart Candy, “Whose future is this?,” TedX Talks,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgVxu2mdZI (accessed April 3, 2018).
15
For an anthology of Corner’s thinking, see The Landscape Imagination, eds. James Corner and Alison Hirsch
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014).
Gabrielian 19

always in the process of becoming, landscape and the liveliness of its composite material
(“natural” or “constructed”) is a way of thinking (I use this to counter Marxist geographers who
have long critiqued it as a way of seeing, or a distanced abstraction). Instead of its historically
scopic connotations, I embrace it as the physical and material synthesis of the biophysical world.

Through this project, I have come up against the fields of Biodesign and Bioart and feel both
aligned and critical. The former, which uses biological systems (largely, but not limited to
bacteria, tissues, genes) to manufacture objects and infrastructures that support human survival –
often by exploiting or manipulating those systems, is problematic in the framework of designing
with, in multispecies collaboration. However, the work to follow is clearly engaging in both
design and the materials of living matter, hence it might be situated in and in critique of this
discourse.

While I have formulated my intellectual framework and methodological approach as the counter
to human-centricity, the (human) body is, in fact, fundamental to each of the speculations (most
particularly Food). As I state above, my focus is on making palpable the psychically distant
worlds of the microbiome and the arctic ice sheets, bringing climate stress and adaptation into
the physical and corporeal realities of our everyday lives. The visceral and affective dimensions
of the human body – in phenomenal presence – is the medium through which I attempt to
produce such immediacy. Each one of the speculations likewise catalyzes or requires (for
survival) new rituals that force humans out of their exploitative relationship with the more-than-
human world and learns to collaborate and thus co-evolve toward more sustainable models for
Gabrielian 20

living. These are the kind of “experiential scenarios” I imagine would ultimately bring about
transformative change.

The final speculation – on Waste – has a section devoted to its “afterlife.” But the other two have
afterlives that have the potential to be equally inventive. How would architectures, lifestyles,
technologies (etc) adapt through time to the physical possibilities laid out here? I invite others to
imagine the increasing complexity in these infinite critical world-builds. I find most comfort here
not in the role of Author of these speculated worlds, but a “conjurer” in the words of
anthropologist of art/science/ecology, Natasha Myers, that “improvis[es] with worlds in the
making.”
16

Encounters to Follow:
This dissertation consist of three encounters with matter, all interwoven, yet each chapter can
also be read as a discrete essay: Food, Water, and Waste. Threads of the above-described
theoretical positions will weave in and out of the speculations as substantiations, responses and a
means to open up further curiosities. Below is a brief breakdown of each chapter.

Food
This chapter focuses on “food” – recognizing the term’s inherent contestations of meaning –
from the purely biological or metabolic processing of nutrients to sustain life and growth, to the
cultural (and its politicization including questions of justice and access), to the aesthetic – the
experience of consuming landscape matter – animal, vegetable, mineral. The speculation –

16
Natasha Myers, “This is an Introduction, or, What is Happening?” in Between Matter and Method, eds. Gretchen
Bakke and Marina Peterson (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017), xii.
Gabrielian 21

Posthuman Habitats - aims to evoke questions across this spectrum of food – to ultimately
address a way of living (and dying) in the ruins of what we have created – as a collaborative
practice of feeding each other.

Water
With an increasing “global water crisis” challenging the survival of most of earth’s extant
species, this chapter does not provide solutions, but the writing and associated design
speculation, Transcorporeal Atmospheres, attempt to dismantle thinking about water as a
commodifiable private resource and to reinstate the planetary hydrocommons. It evokes the
“gestational ethics” of water’s creative and connective capacity – denying the humanist model of
discrete individuality – and attempts to formulate an aqueous ecopolitics that might be wielded to
address water crisis and conflict.

Waste
This chapter considers the material waste of death, particularly in the face of mass species
extinction. Returning to Haraway and her narrative futures she titles “Children of the Compost,”
in this chapter, death is framed as an active material process of decay and recomposition. The
speculation, Near-Extinction Rituals, imagines how the more-than-human bodies that will
accumulate from human misdeeds will not be wasted – they will be mourned in new rituals of
grief that aim to catalyze ethical thinking and mobilized action. At the same time, it imagines
how and what our toxic legacies will contribute to life to come. As a renewed way to think
metabolically of “dead matter,” this chapter on Waste returns to the food chain, thus returning us
to the beginning, but, hopefully, with altered or recentered consciousness.
Gabrielian 22

Ultimately these encounters address not only how design could and should evolve to address the
impossible questions and issues of our time but, more significantly, how we want to live in the
future. Where is it that we want to move as a species? And how will these future encounters in
turn move us? Rather than seek closure, the speculations simply attempt to open possibilities for
moving forward.

Gabrielian 23

Encounter 1: Food
Natural equilibriums will be increasingly reliant upon human intervention… We
might just as well rename environmental ecology, machinic ecology… In the
future much more than the simple defense of nature will be required… The
creation of new living species – animal and vegetable – looms inevitably on the
horizon, and the adoption of an ecosophical ethics adapted to this terrifying and
fascinating situation is equally as urgent as the invention of a politics focused on
the destiny of humanity.
- Felix Guattari (1989)
17

Such “creation of new living species” assuredly stimulates a Pavlonian response by bioengineers
eager to manipulate life to ensure human survival amidst human-induced environmental chaos.
Yet rather than bioengineering these new living species as a human-generated quick-fix to
“problems” of our day, I first turn to feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s “Children of the
Compost” to imagine how to co-evolve a multispecies existence that revels in the entanglements
of life.
18
Conceptualizing a collaborative practice of “living and dying together” on a planet
altered by centuries of economic, cultural and ecological exploitation – what Guattari would call
“Integrated World Capitalism” – attempts to put such an ecosophical perspective into practice.

This chapter focuses on “food” – recognizing the term’s inherent contestations of meaning –
from the purely biological or metabolic processing of nutrients to sustain life and growth, to the
cultural (and its politicization including questions of justice and access), to the aesthetic – the
experience of consuming landscape matter – animal and vegetable. This project aims to evoke

17
Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone Press, 2000; original French, 1989), 66-67. Emphasis by
the author.
18
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 134-168.
Gabrielian 24

questions across this spectrum of food – to ultimately address a way of living (and dying) in the
ruins of what we have created – as a collaborative practice of feeding each other.

Posthuman Habitats are cloaks of plant life that are intended to provide sustenance to the wearer,
as well as flourish as expanding ecosystems that attract and integrate other animal and insect
life. Responding to theories of the “Posthuman,” distinctive subjects and environment are blurred
and hybridized. Here, bodily systems and plant ecologies are symbiotic. Fed and nourished by
bodily wastes, the garments promote healthful diet and lifestyle and inspire outdoor exposure to
optimize photosynthesis. These assemblages are not intended to be closed ecosystems but are
open to external input and “disturbance,” particularly through essential pollinators that introduce
new species into the garments and create unexpected hybrids. The material of landscape – its
moisture, weight, vitality – becomes a second skin – one that both insulates and unifies our
bodies with the living world in which we are immersed. The act of dressing oneself in living
matter becomes part of the landscape experience – whereby we lose our sense of discrete self and
become one with our habitational field in a kind of transcorporeality of the living world.

Gabrielian 25

Figure 2 - Diegetic Prototype: Responding to theories of the “Posthuman,” this design speculation imagines
possible futures that integrate, serve, and advance more than just “Us.” Here, bodily systems and plant ecologies are
symbiotic. The material of landscape – its moisture, weight, vitality – becomes a second skin – one that both
insulates and unifies our bodies with the living world in which we are immersed. The cloaks of edible plant life are
intended to provide sustenance to the wearer, as well as flourish as expanding ecosystems that attract and integrate
other animal and insect life. The act of dressing oneself in living matter becomes part of the landscape experience –
whereby we lose our sense of discrete self and become one with our habitational field in a kind of transcorporeality
of the living world.

As a wearable landscape system (Figure 2), the living cloaks explore the blurred distinctions
between nature-culture, human-machine, and celebrate hybrid ecologies and synthetic forms of
nature that are representative of our (bio)technologically mediated experience. In particular, the
speculation comments on the complete end to romantic notions of “nature” and recognizes that
even our bodies have become part of this deliberately engineered existence.

The New Materialism of Food
Food is the composite web of the technical, ethical, cultural and affective. It is also “the material
embodiment of an incredibly complex but largely invisible assemblage of trophic encounters
between different living species.”
19
Yet humans have intellectually positioned themselves
outside the food chain, despite being host to millions of microbial organisms that are both
nourished by our interiors and exteriors and are essential to our survival: “They feed off of us;
help us digest our meals; protect us from disease; and as recent research has suggested, may even
have the potential to influence our moods.”
20
In addition, food scholar Kelly Donati, in her
article “The Convivial Table: Imagining Ethical Relations Through Multispecies Gastronomy,”
recognizes this “disavowal” of human integration in trophic chains through our rituals of death,

19
Kelly Donati, “The Convivial Table: Imagining Ethical Relations Through Multispecies Gastronomy,” The
Aristologist: An Antipodean Journal of Food History 4 (2014), 128.
20
Donati, “The Convivial Table,” 131; referring to research by E.A. Mayer, “Gut feelings: the emerging biology of
gut-brain communication,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 12 (2011), 453-466.
Gabrielian 26

This disavowal is evident in our most profound rituals for commemorating life.
The late environmental philosopher Val Plumwood pointed out, just before she
passed away in 2008, that western mortuary traditions of entombment in coffins
reflect a profoundly selfish reluctance to give our bodies back to the earth – a
desire to transcend nature by putting a barrier between the human body and the
living organisms that would feed on it. At funerals, we tell ourselves the cycle of
life ends with ashes and dust. Only the ghoulish would point out, as Plumwood
might if she were alive today, that the worms crawl in and the worms crawl out.
Like it or not, the final act of our human death is to give forth non-human life.
From this perspective, humans have a very different and less comfortable place in
this world
21
[more on this in the final speculation].

While we tend to situate the “exceptionalism” of humans outside the food chain, many including
Plumwood and Haraway
22
have identified that we are less human than we would like to admit.
According to Donati, “ninety percent of the DNA in our bodies belongs to microbial entities that
inhabit our interiors and surfaces.”
23
Such microbial life that we depend on for survival remains
somehow too psychically and visually distant for us to recognize. Acknowledging our reliance
on these more-than-human forms of life is an essential first step to this co-evolutionary process
to achieve a positive food future.

We are similarly ignorant of the microbes, fungi and insects that exist within the soil that is base
of the terrestrial food chain. German forester Peter Wohlleben whose book, The Hidden Life of
Trees (2015, has experienced widespread popular appeal, explains,
For us humans, soil is more obscure than water, both literally and metaphorically.
Where is it generally accepted we know less about the ocean floor than we know
about the surface of the moon, we know even less about life in the soil… There
are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.
A mere teaspoonful contains many miles of fungal filaments. All these work the
soil, transform it, and make it so valuable for the trees.
24

21
Donati, “The Convivial Table,” 130-1; citing V. Plumwood, “Tasteless: Towards a Food- Based
Approach to Death,” Environmental Values 17 (2008), 323-330.
22
Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
23
Donati, “The Convivial Table,” 131.
24
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from A Secret
Gabrielian 27

This is one example of much recent attention that has been given to the multispecies complexity
of life particularly as related to food – see also the oft-cited book by Anna Tsing, Mushroom at
the end of the world (2015) on the interspecies dependence of human-disturbed forests and
matsutake mushrooms, a delicacy in Japan that commands astronomical prices.
25
In terms of soil
as the foundational matter of the food chain, efforts today to respond to population growth and
rapid urbanization have inspired technocratic investments in soil-less food cultivation in the form
of hydroponics and aeroponics, vertical farming, floating farms, etc. While Posthuman Habitats
optimizes on moisture-retention felt used in fabric-based green wall technology, it creates soil
through time that is kept close to the body by the dense interweaving of accumulative matter.
Ultimately the cloaks themselves can be returned to the ground as compost. As others have
noted, humus and human have the same etymological root; this speculation attempts to explore
humus as something that synthesizes the human and nonhuman.

The garments become a new skin that biosynthesizes the human body into the non-human
systems making up the rest of the habitat (Figure 3). As multifaceted assemblages, they integrate
all trophic levels or succession of organisms within the food chain. Most primary are the
photosynthesizers (1st trophic level) or plants including herbs, greens, fruits, vegetables, legumes
and fungi, that require sun and water as inputs. 2nd and 3rd trophic level organisms are essential
for the breakdown of organic matter to sustain a healthful humus layer that nourishes the entire
system. The high level predators of the 4th and 5th trophic levels are largely composed of
pollinators which are essential to the perpetual regeneration of the skin and optimal “crop”
production. The garments are intended to be optimal habitats for pollinators since these creatures

World (Vancouver/Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2015), 85.
25
Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the end of the world (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Gabrielian 28

are essential for food production. Cross-pollination sets in motion the hybridization of bodies as
well as bodies with the whole environment (Figure 4).

Figure 3 - Multispecies Habitats: The garments become a new skin that biosynthesizes the human body into the
non-human systems making up the rest of the habitat. The diagram illustrates the multifaceted assemblage, the
components of which are all required for healthful functioning of the new hybrid ecosystems. The garments
integrate all trophic levels or succession of organisms within the food chain. Most primary are the photosynthesizers
(1
st
trophic level) or plants including herbs, greens, fruits, vegetables, legumes and fungi, that require sun and water
as inputs. 2nd and 3
rd
trophic level organisms are essential for the breakdown of organic matter to sustain a healthful
humus layer that nourishes the entire system. The high level predators of the 4
th
and 5
th
trophic levels are largely
composed of pollinators which are essential to the perpetual regeneration of the skin. The system takes cues from
regenerative agricultural practices.

Gabrielian 29

Figure 4 - Cross-Pollination: The assemblages are not intended to be closed ecosystems but are open to external
input and “disturbance,” particularly through pollinators that introduce new species into the garments and create
unexpected hybrids. The garments are intended to be optimal habitats for pollinators since these creatures are
essential for food production. Cross-pollination sets in motion the hybridization of bodies as well as bodies with the
whole environment.

This returns us to the world of Deleuze and Guattari’s nature, which is not classified by genus
and species and “does not define living bodies by their organs and functions,”
26
but sees nature
as a series of “machinic assemblages” in which humans participate but have no privilege. Using
the indistinguishable boundaries between the wasp and the orchid as an example, they introduce
these assemblages as emergent unities that respect the heterogeneity of their components.
27

26
Alain Beaulieu, “The Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, 2 (2011),
79.
27
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987; original French, 1980), 11.
Gabrielian 30

We might additionally consider Georges Bataille’s ideas about “becoming human,” which to
him, is the “evacuation of the heterogenous” or the “negation of nature”
28
or the homogenization
of the complex assemblages celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari. The heterogenous “consists of
everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste [including] the waste products of the
human body and certain analogous matter…” Ted Steinberg in Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in
American History (2002) “urges us to consider ‘how the ecological consequences of eating and
flushing become so invisible, so enmeshed in the wish to forget.’ Forgetting that bodily waste
must go somewhere allows us to imagine ourselves as rarefied rational being distinct from
nature’s muck and muddle.”
29

Figure 5 - Waste Cycles: The recycling of wastes is essential to the perpetuation of the habitats. The plants
themselves convert carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. Using a process of
forward osmosis, urine is converted into water (by forcing it through a semi-permeable membrane that filters out the
salt, ammonia, etc). Organic matter becomes compost as it is processed by worms and other insects and nourishes
plants. Manure of the small animals that occupy the system additionally fertilizes the plants. Finally, dead organisms
provide food for organisms and contribute to the humus layer.

28
Gerald Bruns, “Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways),” New Literary History 38, 4 (Autumn 2007), 707.
29
Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 8. Quoting Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Gabrielian 31

The recycling of wastes is essential to the perpetuation of the Posthuman Habitats (Figure 5).
The plants themselves convert carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen through the process of
photosynthesis. Oxygen can be captured and stored for when air quality diminishes dramatically.
Urine is collected by catheter, stored, filtered and used to irrigate the plants that provide the base
for the system to thrive. Since urine is sterile, low in pathogens and 95% water, it is ideal for
irrigation. Using a process of forward osmosis, urine is converted into water (by forcing it
through a semi-permeable membrane that filters out the salt, ammonia, etc). Organic matter
becomes compost as it is processed by worms and other insects to nourish plants. Manure of the
small animals that occupy the system additionally fertilizes the “crops.”

From Bataille also comes the question of how the human body might be returned to the
responsive or receptive condition of flesh which is shared with animal. In her book on “bodily
natures,” Stacy Alaimo questions, “Perhaps the most palpable trans-corporeal substance is food,
since eating transforms plants and animals into human flesh.”
30
I return here to Deleuze and
Guattari and the concept of the body without organs and “dismantling the face,” which are
aspects of becoming-animal.
31
Here I rely heavily on literary theorist Gerald Bruns who cites
Deleuze’s book on artist Francis Bacon, specifically the chapter, “The Body, the Meat and the
Spirit: Becoming Animal.” Without the face, Bruns notes, “the body becomes-animal, that is
becomes flesh or meat.” Again, according to Bruns, Bacon once said: “I’ve always been very
moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat… Of course, we are meat, we are potential
carcasses. If I go into a butcher shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of

30
Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 12.
31
“Dismantle the face” comes from Deleuze’s book on the artist Francis Bacon: Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The
Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003), 19. Reference from
Bruns, “Becoming Animal,” 711.
Gabrielian 32

the animal.”
32
Posthuman Habitats introduces a responsive and receptive system that attempts to
reintegrate the human into the heterogeneity of “nature’s muck and muddle” by “becoming
animal,” or re-becoming flesh – a flesh that is ultimately consumed by fellow species. While
humans thrive off the system output, they are only one small part of the process that sustains the
biodiverse habitats. Because habitats that support unique forms of biodiversity are rapidly
disappearing from the earth, these garments become a new “machinic ecology” to which plant
and small animal species would adapt.

The Ethics of Food:
This design exploration leads into a conversation about food ethics – both as an issue of access
and security for human communities around the globe, and the repression of non-human actants.
In terms of the former, Posthuman Habitats responds to impending food and water scarcity and
the nomadic existence that characterizes our age of human migration. With increased awareness
about globalized food industries and their unsustainable carbon footprint, it imagines new ways
of reconnecting the food producer and consumer to develop more self-reliant, resilient and just
food networks. Severe drought and diminished soil quality from industrialized farming, as well
as sea level rise and climate events will force us to think harder about the future of food
production and security. The microhabitats proposed here allow the urban dweller to live off-the-
grid, providing immediate access to “landscape” and sources of food.

I turn briefly to the activism of Vandana Shiva in seeking food justice. A public intellectual and
fierce critic of corporatized agriculture – the production of food as commodity rather than

32
Bruns, “Becoming Animal,” 712. Citing an interview with Francis Bacon from David Sylvester, The Brutality of
Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1962–1979 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 23, 46.
Gabrielian 33

nourishment, Shiva has been the subject of equally fierce attempts at discrediting her “science,”
as a means of silencing the common sense perspectives she puts forth. She recognizes the global
food crisis as derivative of food’s commodification, leading to rising food prices, diminishing
nutrition through industrial processing, corporate control through biological patenting of
genetically-altered seed, environmental decimation, and social instability. “This paradigm… sees
nature as dead matter. This paradigm sees humans as separable from the rest: the seed from the
soil, the soil from the plant, the plant from the food, and the food from our bodies… The future
of food depends on remembering that the web of life is a food web.”
33
She continues, “Industrial
agriculture is rooted in a patriarchal scientific paradigm that privileges violence, fragmentation,
and mechanistic thought. Rooted in ideologies of war [specifically chemical pesticides and
herbicides derived from biological warfare generated during WW2] , this paradigm promotes
Monocultures of the Mind and monocultures on our land, denying the knowledge of agroecology
and of diversity.”
34
Critical of Darwinian models of fitness and survival, she states, “life does not
evolve through competition; rather, life evolves through cooperation.”
35
She thus reframes the
human community as “cocreators” and “coproducers” with the non-human world.

Shiva is perhaps too binary and too invested in a restorative model, rather than positioned to
imagine how to work with the ruins of our current reality, thus set in contrast to Haraway’s
position that we must “cultivate and invest the arts of living with and for damaged worlds in
place, not as an abstraction or a type, but as and for those living and dying in ruined places” (see
above). Yet Shiva’s emphasis on localization, biodiversity, the conservation and renewal of

33
Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2016), x, xv.
34
Shiva, 113.
35
Shiva, 6.
Gabrielian 34

natural resources, of seed freedom, of living soils are intended to find their way into Posthuman
Habitats. As extensions of our flesh, these microhabitats are completely localized, denying the
complex and oppressive supply chains, and the exploitation of distant labor of industrialized
food. Recognizing that rice, wheat and maize make up more than 50% of humans’ caloric intake,
the cloaks offer the possibility for more immediate access to diverse forms of nutrition and the
contradiction to the monocultural and chemical-dependent land practices of industrial
agriculture. It also promotes a plant-forward diet, recognizing unsustainable practices of meat
production and consumption have significant impact on planetary health.

At the same time that we can celebrate the hyperlocality of more-than-human food generation,
the cloaks do take some human-initiated work that would dramatically change behaviors and
practices throughout the globe. The human would need to seed and care for the cloak, as well as
one’s body since the ecosystem is partially watered and nourished by human waste. Seeds would
need to be collected and stored for continued propagation and sharing of culinary wonders. Seeds
could be saved and shared with fellow humans in celebration of and gratitude for the world’s
robust diversity.
36
Ultimately, these forms of care would reveal the complex entanglements of
more-than-human life. However, the intention is not a naïve quest for balanced relations but also
perhaps a form of atonement. The wet, heavy, urine-soaked cloak that teems with life provides a
kind of exposure to the harsh realities of what it means to live in the ruins we have created.

36
Recently, the New York Times published an elongated opinion piece by chef Dan Barber, called “Save our Food:
Free the Seed” (June 7, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/sunday/dan-barber-seed-
companies.html?searchResultPosition=1 (accessed June 8, 2019). It offers insight into the urgency for seed saving
and sharing and dismantling corporate biopatents on seed.
Gabrielian 35

Our Second Mouth
In her paper “Posthuman Food,” emerging food theorist Siobhan Watters brings up the
genetically modified photosynthetic human pictured in the Japanese anime, The Knights of
Sidonia.
37
While perhaps another possible future for human survival, similar to the idea of
bioengineering all needed nutrition into a pill or drink, Posthuman Habitats instead attempts to
collaborate with cospecies in order mutually survive and thrive. The speculation also revels in
the aesthetic nature of food – here both the experience of being haptically enmeshed in the more-
than-human world, wearing the aliveness of our food web – and the experience of what Michel
Serres calls “our second mouth” of the synthesis of smell and taste (overtaken by the first, of
language) (Figure 6).
38
It is a mouth characterized by opening and welcoming sensation.

Figure 6 - Renal and Digestive Systems: The habitats activate the digestive and renal systems of the body. The
garden cloaks are irrigated by sweat and urine, filtered by the technology of reverse osmosis.

37
Siobhan Watters, conference paper presented at What is Life? (University of Oregon-Portland, April 7, 2017), 4,
https://www.academia.edu/32484966/Posthuman_Food (accessed May 2, 2019).
38
Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum, 2008; original French,
1985), 153.
Gabrielian 36

Posthuman Habitats attempts to reactivate our second mouths and challenge our coded affective
tolerances and stimuli. We live in our shit and urine and welcome insects and microbes into our
thickened skin. We cannot but become animal as we ingest that very same skin, further
complicating our relations to the abject.

Food Cultures + New Rituals of Food
The Slow Food Movement, initiated in the 1980s, has largely led the fight against global food
homogenization (“McDonaldization”), recognizing the richness of human expression and
connection created through long-practiced customs of food preparation and eating. Posthuman
Habitats clearly imagines a new set of more-than-human customs and practices emergent around
the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food, which breaks down the commodity chains
of industrialized farming and eating (Figure 7). The expectation is the garments will include
entanglements of species adapted to particular climates and evolve together as the climate
changes. Since the garments are human-initiated assemblages, they would most surely reflect the
cultures, customs and climates from where they emerged. But they additionally celebrate the
possibilities of fusion and hybridity made inevitable by a culture of hypermobility. As a
counterpoint to such aesthetically-deprived speeds of mobility, the cloaks additionally force
humans into a kind of slowness required to provide the attention and care necessary for survival
of the interspecies system.
Gabrielian 37

Figure 7 - Crop Output / Sample Menu: 40 different crops were grown on the diegetic prototype, harvested by the
Rome Sustainable Food Project and made into “future-forward” finger foods. Each cloak produces 20 lbs of crop –
enough to feed a family of three for three weeks or to make a plant-based meal for 200 people. The following four
menu items were prepared by the Rome Sustainable Food Project for this project: Tied Lettuce Bundles: mix of
lettuces and sprouts studded with preserved citron and tied into a bundle with green onion; perfect cubes of
marinated strawberries; sprouted lentil crema, garnished with sprouts and radishes; and fried leeks and herbs, serves
in a cone and eaten like shoestring fries.

The cultivation and harvest of these habitats instigates new social rituals (Figure 8). Seed-
sharing has the potential to become a new system of currency. Communal meals require
collective harvests and the location of ingredients on bodies of others. The practice of the harvest
becomes re-ritualized as a collective act of labor and a celebration of a closer relationship
between acts of production and consumption. Yet rather than a nostalgic desire to return to the
“natural economies” of preindustrial societies, we speculate on food production in the new
planetary landscape of depleted soils and the increasing threat of food insecurity. We collectively
ingest this shared harvest – binding us together in a secular act of communion.

Gabrielian 38

Figure 8 - New Social Rituals: The harvest of these habitats instigates new social rituals. Communal meals require
collective harvests and the location of ingredients on bodies of others. The habitats are the ultimate farm-to-table (or
body-to-mouth) experience. Finally, the rituals of gardening become a form of bodily grooming – the better the
gardener, the healthier the body and habitat.

Technofutures of Production + Consumption
Like all the speculations, Posthuman Habitats is rife with contradictions and tensions emergent
from an unresolved attitude toward the technologies that have contributed to our current
environmental circumstance. Yet it attempts to generate a possible future for living and dying
together, in the ruins of what we have created (see Haraway). Though the felt system used to
generate the cloaks has been used prolifically to create vertical gardens throughout the world
(Figure 9), its potential for garmenting the body (and feeding the world’s human and non-human
populations) has not been explored. Growing on felt is just one of many agricultural
“innovations” intended to offer solutions to diminished or depleted soils created by industrial
Gabrielian 39

processes including agriculture. Yet this speculation is not intended to propagate this “solution”
by continuing to release us from the responsibility of working to repair – in highly adapted form
– what we have obliterated. Instead, the hope is the cloaks themselves create healthful soils.

Figure 9 - System Layers: The microhabitat is stitched from moisture-retention felt used in fabric-based green wall
technology. Though this felt system has been used prolifically to create vertical gardens throughout the world, its
potential for garmenting the body (and feeding the world’s human and non-human populations) has yet to be
explored.

The Digital Revolution will continue to dramatically impact the nomadic possibilities of the
urban dweller whose “home” is no city in particular but thrives off perpetual global mobility.
The microhabitats ensure this is possible, always guaranteeing secure food access, while, as
described above, they will require moments of slowness necessary for the care of our symbiont
species, and thus the survival of the assemblages in which we are enmeshed. Smart farming
technologies that sense and monitor nutrients and water would prevent systemic stress and
provide alerts when more care is necessary (Figure 10). The hope is these technologies of care
Gabrielian 40

would assist in the adaptability to internal and external stress, thus strengthening systemic
“fitness”
39
in this new “machinic ecology.”

Figure 10 - System Components: The basic components of the system are the garments themselves which can be
stored on mannequins. When not worn, life-support is provided by intravenous irrigation (filtered urine). The cloaks
are additionally equipped with moisture and nutrient sensors which activate the water pump when needed or if worn,
prompt the wearer to go outdoors if more sunlight is required.

39
I use this Darwinian term with some hesitation recognizing his uneasy relationship with feminism. I am drawing a
bit on Elizabeth Grosz’s somewhat revisionist analysis in “Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a
Possible Alliance,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 23-50. Grosz reevaluates the meaning of “fittest” as “not the victorious species – the ‘winners’ of
evolutionary struggle at any particular moment – but those most open and amenable to change” (32-33; my
emphasis).
Gabrielian 41

Encounter 2: Water
Our milieu – in the ocean, in the water-drenched soil, in the water-saturated air –
is always more or less watery. We are not only of water, but in water.
– Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis (2017)
40

To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water.
When “nature calls” some time later, we return to the cistern and the sea not only
our antidepressants, our chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace
excretions, but also the meanings that permeate those materialities: disposable
culture, medicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect.
– Astrida Neimanis (2012)
41

Because water travels… across geographical and political boundaries, it is
undoubtedly wise to adopt the environmental axiom that in a very real sense “we
all live downstream.”
– David Macauley (2010)
42

Depleted aquifers from groundwater mining; diverted, overdrafted or dammed waterways
altering hydrologic systems and habitats; acidifying oceans impacting the possibility for
sustained life; lake eutrophication (algae proliferation); wetland destruction; chemical runoff
from industry and agriculture; toxic tailings ponds from large-scale extraction (such as the Tar
Sands in Alberta, Canada) causing alarming rates of cancer in “downstream” communities;
increases in water-borne and water-vector diseases like cholera and malaria; climate extremes in
the forms of too much and too little water – floods, cyclones, droughts – unequally impacting
communities deemed disposable; increasing shortages of potable water and the privatization of
drinking water as commodity accessible to too few; political and military conflicts over water
(often disguised as “religious wars”
43
). The interconnected anthropogenic water crises of our

40
Chandler and Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality,” in Thinking with Water, 75.
41
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 87.
42
David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 49.
43
Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2001/2016),
preface.
Gabrielian 42

planet are exacerbating at alarming speed. While there is notable literature on the urgency for
water management and watershed protection, as well as climate change mitigation, the following
is less about “solving” “wicked problems” that perpetuate consciousness of water as “resource” -
to be controlled and managed, collected and contained. Instead, it attempts to dismantle this
resource ideology and instate a new consciousness of wetness.

At the same time that I recognize such assaults on the global hydrocommons, the speculation to
follow attempts to arrive at heightened understanding of our watery milieu, accepting water as
medium, connection, as commons that “flows through and across difference.”
44
So rather than a
solution-driven narrative – from hydroengineering to global water management regimes
45
– the
following instead attempts to evoke an ongoing engagement with a water-world in flux.
46
As a
“planetary circulation system”
47
that surrounds and fills us, that leaks, seeps, oozes, saturates and
soaks both given bounds (skin, etc) and constructed barriers (levees, etc), water denies the
humanist model of discrete individuality or fundamental autonomy. By “thinking with water” we
may imagine “embodiment in ways that challenge the phallogocentric Enlightenment vision of
discrete, atomized, and self-sufficient, Man.”
48

Specifically, this chapter engages the thinking of cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and her allies
in material feminism and posthuman phenomenology that have developed a body of literature
which reframes water from object or Other to material medium – both facilitator and actant.

44
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 90.
45
Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 20.
46
See Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of
Transcorporeality,” Hypatia 29, 3 (Summer 2014), 561.
47
Cecelia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis, “Introduction,” in Thinking with Water, 11.
48
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 88.
Gabrielian 43

Aside from occasional supplements brought in on comets [and volcanoes etc
49
],
the water we drink and touch is the same water that erupted as steam at the origins
of the earth… [These waters] are the moisture we exhale with our breath, the
blood, sweat, urine, and breastmilk that flows or evaporates from openings in our
bodies. At the same time, these waters have the capacity to make things new, to
act as agents of birth, rebirth, purification, and germination.
50

Chandler and Neimanis suggest “as the facilitative milieu for all life,… water models a mode of
sociality… that dissolv[es] the sovereign self in a becoming-responsive to others, both human
and more-than-human.”
51
While water can most certainly be a powerful force with its own
dynamic agency (rather than exclusively facilitative as Neimanis promotes), it is this responsive
mode of sociability with the more-than-human world that the speculation Transcorporeal
Atmospheres aims to instigate.

Warm Wet Breath
Transcorporeal Atmospheres imagines how to make palpable our planetary hydrocommons
through an assemblage that revels in the entanglements of life – an aqueous mode of “living and
dying together” in the ruins of what we have created (see Haraway). It recognizes water in all its
states – particularly in its least visible – as vapor, and its subversive permeation through
supposedly sealed membranes (Figure 11). Specifically, it welcomes “breath” as a communal
action that makes airborne particles of water that we collectively inhale and release with the
more-than-human world. The speculation makes manifest the communal processes of
transpiration and condensation through a conscious collective breath. By gathering the water

49
See Francisco De Assis Matos De Abreu, André Montenegro Duarte, Mário Ramos Ribeiro, Ana Rosa Carriço De
Lima, and Wellington De Jesus Sousa, "The Hydrologic Cycle: An Open or a Closed System?" Revista Geográfica
137 (2005), 109-22. The authors actually argue that the hydrologic system is not as “closed” as is widely accepted
and describe both lost water and juvenile water that enters the system.
50
Janine MacLeod, “Water and the Material Imagination,” Thinking with Water, 49.
51
Chandler and Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality,” 63.
Gabrielian 44

vapor of this communal exhale, we may recognize the agency of this immersive material
medium.

Figure 11 - Human Respiration System: The air animals breathe becomes humidified by our aqueous interior
before it is exhaled. All breath is a process of exchange. Exhaled air from humans contains approximately 75.0%
Nitrogen, 15.0% Oxygen, 0.9% Argon, 4.0% Carbon Dioxide and 4.0%-6.3% water – released fifteen to twenty-five
times per minute.

Environmental philosopher, David Macauley describes, “The physiology of individuated and
deeply personal breathing, however, passes quickly into more communal territory when we
reflect on the notion that our breath is routinely circulated and shared with others… We are
conspiring – literally, breathing together – and to contemplate this fact can dramatically change
Gabrielian 45

our lives to reveal new ways that human others and nonhuman otherness are woven into the very
elemental conditions of our existence.”
52
Cumulatively, breath creates an atmosphere, whose
etymology comes from the Greek atmos meaning “vapor” and sphaira, meaning “ball.”
Transcorporeal Atmospheres thus creates such a communal sphere of vapor in which we
conspire. It takes the form of an undulating volume created by a strategically porous membrane
(Figure 12).

Figure 12 - Variegated Membrane: The speculation revels in the material wetness of ambient and landed moisture
– in the air, dripping from the vapor catchers, evaporating from the soil and its billions of microorganisms, and
transpiring through the plants.

52
Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 26.
Gabrielian 46

Within it plants, bacteria, fungus grow, transpire and collaborate in this moist environment,
while insects and mobile species can enter and exit. It has sunken apertures that invite bodily
participation in this vessel of warm wet breath shared across the living world and the non-living
matter on which it depends (Figure 13). For survival of oneself and the collective on which one
now depends, the human must press up against the membrane and breathe through the tubular
mouthpieces that extend from the “organ” layer and that filter and collect breath (Figure 14).
Vapor capture fabric collects the moisture from plants, animals, and deliberate breath and gathers
it for wider use in this symbiotic hydrocollective – for hydration and bathing.

Figure 13 - System Anatomy: Responsive Outer Skin: The surface of the outer membrane is texturally variegated
in response to specific site data. Concave areas collect rainwater and offer opportunities for diverse species to drink
and bathe within these holdings. Convex areas are based on the topographic and vegetal specificities of the site in
order to fit comfortably and without disturbance into its specific terrain. Openings within the membrane allow
human-animal access into deeper areas of the volume. Transpiration vessels as well as mouthpieces extend from the
organ layer beneath penetrating the surface to allow contact with human mouths for exhaling vapor into the system.
Gabrielian 47

Figure 14 - System Anatomy: Synthetic Inner Organs: Intended to create a sub-watershed for the survival of
symbiont conspiring collectives, the synthetic inner organs act as the plumbing for the overall system. Human breath
is expelled into the system via mouthpieces that extend into the membrane layer and allow physical access for our
bodies/mouths. Vessels throughout the system capture the transpiration and evaporation of water through the plants
and soil. Taking cues from vapor catching materials currently used in parts of the world, the inside of the organs is
lined with a mesh, collecting water droplets from vapor along its network of fibers before directing it within piping
to a subgrade aquifer below.
53
The system is not closed, so exposures by mobile species to virus, bacteria, pollution,
contamination that might be a systemic input also pose the possibility for destruction of those susceptible and the
alteration of ecosystems that might not include “Us.”

Macauley continues, “The troposphere – that part of the atmosphere where the air constantly
changes and where the living live – is the product of all of our respiration and photosynthesis.
All those daily breaths. The air is not a thing or a place. It is the continual product of

53
The organ system takes cues from biomedical equipment such as the DXS digital access catheter
(https://www.strykerneurovascular.com/us/products/access/axs-catalyst-6) but reimagines these at a much larger
scale and for a different purpose altogether. The mesh system lining the inside of the organs takes cues from fog
catching materials used to harvest moisture directly from the air (https://www.climatetechwiki.org/content/fog-
harvesting).
Gabrielian 48

communion.”
54
Much more intimate with the ground than the troposphere, which extends six
miles above earth’s surface, Transcorporeal Atmospheres creates a yet another, more palpably
communal, sphere of vapor with each component playing a role in the functioning of the
emergent whole – yet a whole that is open to disturbance.

Figure 15 - Human Moisture Circulation: The average human takes in 2500 ml of water per day through foods,
beverages and metabolism. The output of water is the same as the input, 2500 ml, which is released from our bodies
as urine, sweat, feces, and via our lungs.

The air animals breathe becomes humidified by our aqueous interior before it is exhaled. All
breath is a process of exchange. Exhaled air from humans contains approximately 75.0%
Nitrogen, 15.0% Oxygen, 0.9% Argon, 4.0% Carbon Dioxide and 4.0%-6.3% water – released
fifteen to twenty-five times per minute (Figure 15). Plants transpire. Water is absorbed from
their roots and transported as liquid to their leaves via xylem or a plant’s vascular tissue. Small
pores on the leaves allow water to escape as vapor. Of all the water absorbed by plants, less than
five percent remains in the plant for growth. During times of drought, plants continue to pull

54
Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 327.
Gabrielian 49

water out of the soil until depleted (Figure 16). As a landscape designer in Southern California,
water harvesting is considered mainstream “best practice.” Transcorporeal Atmospheres uses the
ethos of the harvest – as a collective act of gathering and celebrating the sustenance of life – as
its point of departure, while imagining how that harvest can bring humans – in full corporeal
presence – into collaboration with species upon which they (mostly unconsciously) depend for
survival.

Figure 16 - Plant Transpiration Process: Plants transpire. Water is absorbed from their roots and transported as
liquid to their leaves via xylem or a plant’s vascular tissue. Small pores on the leaves allow water to escape as vapor.
Of all the water absorbed by plants, less than five percent remains in the plant for growth. During times of drought,
plants continue to pull water out of the soil until depleted. The amount of water released from plants depends on the
species of plant and its surface area. For instance, 1 acre of corn releases 4,000 gallons per day, while a single oak
tree can release up to 40,000 gallons per year.

The hydrologic cycle describes the movement of water molecules as they rise from the Earth's
surface to the atmosphere, and back again. Powered by energy from the sun, this system is a
continuous exchange of moisture between the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land.
55
While it
can be argued that our hydrologic system is not necessarily closed, the water gained via meteors

55
NASA GSFC, “Water and Energy Cycle,” https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/focus-areas/water-and-energy-
cycle (accessed May 2, 2019).
Gabrielian 50

and volcanoes, and lost at oceanic subduction zones,
56
produces a balance that is unique amidst
the innumerable disturbances of the planetary world (as we move further from the illusory
“equilibrium paradigm” that dominated ecological thinking into the 1970s
57
). Transcorporeal
Atmospheres offers, un-nostalgically, a moment to revel in that tenuous balance of our dynamic
water-world (also recognizing that that “balance” is actually no such thing, since fresh water has
diminished dramatically because of anthropogenic water-as-resource thinking). I say un-
nostalgically, as the speculation also offers a heightened consciousness of what it means to share
this aqueous milieu – as we release into it the materialities of “disposable culture, medicalized
problem-solving, ecological disconnect” (see Neimanis above). The idealistic hope is that
instilling a collective sense that “we all live downstream” (Macauley above) might force human
participants to practice better bodily and earthly care.

In a recent meditation on giving and receiving compassion, I was guided to imagine my inhale as
a means to nourish the self with kindness and exhale to express compassion for someone I care
about who might be struggling. While a non-religious but spiritual person, I recognize the
principles of Mindfulness permeating Western industrialized culture and optimistically recognize
its benefits to relieve everything from PTSD to eczema (recognizing in other cultures this
attentive form of consciousness is an existential model for living). As the inhale is the first
autonomous human gesture, here, Transcorporeal Atmospheres attempts to awaken this

56
See De Assis Matos De Abreu et al, "The Hydrologic Cycle."
57
See ecologist Robert Cook’s “Do Landscape’s Learn? Ecology’s ‘New Paradigm’ and Design in Landscape
Architecture,” in Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton
Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 2000), 120, in which he describes this transition from
equilibrium paradigm to disturbance model.
Gabrielian 51

elementary and shared “culture of the breath,” for which French feminist Luce Irigaray argues in
her later writings, as an alternative to Western standards of knowledge formation.
58

Our Planetary Hydrocommons
As a collection of waters shared between terrestrial beings, we may consider, here, the
evolutionary theories of the “hypersea” – or the emergence of terrestrial life from the sea and
how such life actually carries the sea within it. Hypothesized by Mark and Dianna McMenamin,
they trace life in the ocean through its 3.5 billion year history until animals, plants and fungi
emerged from the sea carrying its fluid within – or creating a new sea within its collective tissue
with complex connective mechanisms through which nutrient-rich fluid could move.
59
Hypersea
attempts to explain this geophysiological entity as consisting of plants, animals and fungi and
their symbionts, parasites and hyperparasites on land. Enforcing such notions of the “internal
watery habitat of land animals”
60
in a section on the elementalism of water, Macauley articulates,
In composition, seawater is, in fact, close to that of blood with a main difference
being that blood contains iron (and less salt) while seawater possesses
magnesium. Our connection with the oceans is still evident in the fact that our
eyes must be bathed frequently in salt water, and our body – like the sea –
requires a prescribed range of saline in order to sustain life.
61

Such a theory, that we carry the sea within our collective tissues and share it through complex
mechanisms of symbiotic exchange, provides us with a means to imagine the planetary
hydrocommons on which we all depend and interdepend. Mielle Chandler and Neimanis
introduce our watery commons as a “gestational milieu.” Neimanis explains,

58
See Luce Irigaray, Le temps du souffle [The Age of the Breath] (Rüsselsheim: Christel Gotten Verlag, 1999).
59
Mark and Dianna McMenamin, Hypersea: Life on Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
60
Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 125.
61
Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 45.
Gabrielian 52

As a facilitator, water is the milieu, or the gestational element, for other watery
bodies as well. Mammal, reptile, or fish; sapling or seed; river delta or backyard
pond—all of these bodies are necessarily brought into being by another body of
water that dissolves, partially or completely, to water the bodies that will follow.
On a geological scale, we have all arisen out of the same primordial soup,
gestated by species upon watery species that have gifted their morphology to new
iterations and articulations.
62

Again, this is not to romanticize this fluid commons as the salve that can heal planetary rifts.
Neimanis continues to remind us (perhaps not often enough?) that,
When you or I drink a glass of water, we come into contact with all of our
companion species that inhabit the watershed from which that water was drawn...
But we [also] connect with the sedimentation tanks, and rapid-mix flocculators
that make that water drinkable, and the reservoir, and the rainclouds, too.
Hypersea extends to include not only terrestrial flora and fauna, but also
technological, meteorological, and geophysical bodies of water.
63

Depending on how effective those methods are at making that water “drinkable” (for humans),
we also come into contact with traces of industrial effluents, pharmacological excretions,
stormwater runoff from oil-slicked streets, pesticides that leach into aquifers which are pumped
by wells, etc. While gestation is the “facilitation of the not-yet” and the optimism for
potentialities of what is to come, it is counterbalanced by other logics of water including
contamination, dissolution and destruction (see more on this in “Aqueous Ethics” section
below).
64
As facilitator or an agent or even force of change – the means rather than the ends –
water both reflects or registers the places and things through/over/under (etc) which it flows,
carrying with it an endless material archive of the, now Anthropocenic, world, and has the
dynamic capacity to shape and shift that which we deem most stable – it is both agent and has
agency. Transcorporeal Atmospheres recognizes the potency of water’s elemental force, and
these vessels of collected transpiration upon which we depend for hydration gather the

62
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism.” 87.
63
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism.” 86.
64
See Chandler and Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality,” 65.
Gabrielian 53

multispecies world in new rituals of exchange that force us to “adopt the environmental axiom
that in a very real sense ‘we all live downstream’” (see Macauley above).

Water and the Hypersea allow us to imagine what a transcorporeal consciousness could be (see
Stacy Alaimo, 2010). As our perspiration, urination, defecation, ingestion, ejaculation,
menstruation, lactation, tears and breath reveal, bodies are permeable entities through which we
modify and influence each other. Alaimo calls upon physicist Karen Barad’s theory of intra-
action as “fundamental entanglement whereby individual entities cannot be said to exist as
things-in-themselves and instead find meaning or expression only through their co-creative
relations with other entities.”
65
This resonates with choreography and movement scholar Erin
Manning’s discussions around the body that emerges from new materialist theories (and the body
that enables new materialisms to emerge):
Not individual but individuation. Not subject but collectivity, differential on the
edge where the force of life meets life itself. Not the body after the subject…But
the body before the subject, in advance and always toward subjectivity (rarely
there), the body as transindividuation, the body as resonant materiality, the body
as the metastable field before the taking-form of this or that. The body, always
more than one, replete with the force of life…The body, more assemblage than
form, more associated milieu than Being.
66

Transcorporeal Atmospheres is such an assemblage intended to create a sub-watershed for the
survival of symbiont conspiring collectives – giving and receiving waters in a kind of co-making
that gestates the “not yet” – new possibilities for interspecies relationships and perhaps even new
forms of life and living together. At the same time, it acknowledges that individual decisions
impact the collective on which all symbionts interdepend, perhaps inspiring less self-promotion

65
Quote from Neimanis and Walker, “Weathering,” 564-565; citing: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 128.
66
Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 30.
Gabrielian 54

and more investment in the hydrocommunity. Perhaps. Yet the system is not closed, so
exposures by mobile species to virus, bacteria, pollution, contamination that might be a systemic
input also pose the possibility for destruction of those susceptible and the alteration of
ecosystems, which ultimately might not include “Us.”

The Material of Wetness
A collaborative partnership of design thinkers has served as mentors to me through my training
as an architect and landscape architect – Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. They have
focused their intellectual attention to dismantling the Othering of “water” – something to be
controlled and managed. As Indian designers and postcolonial thinkers, they have focused their
work on geographies with aqueous extremes, with particular attention to attitudes towards the
monsoon since the colonizing of India. Instead of something to be managed, drained, controlled,
Mathur-da Cunha recognize “rain is everywhere until it is water somewhere.” They dismantle the
thinking of rivers as “lines” separating land from water, recognizing all the world is a gradient of
wetness.
67
In his recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, da
Cunha argues that the representation of the Ganges, reaching back to ancient Greek cartography,
has situated it at odds with Ganga, a “rain terrain.” He claims,
Ganga’s Decent [the descent of rain or the goddess, Ganga] situates everyday
experience in a ubiquitous wetness rather than on a surface divided between land
and water or dry and wet. It is to say that postcolonial India lives materially,
practically, and philosophically in wetness rather than on the banks of rivers and
their extensions in pipelines, canals, gutters, and drains… Ganga’s Descent
anchors time in the moment of precipitation of the hydrologic cycle when wetness

67
Books co-authored by Mathur and da Cunha include: Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain
(New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006); Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001); SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2009).
Gabrielian 55

is everywhere in the air, earth, plants, and animals and before it is made into water
set apart from land somewhere.
68

Transcorporeal Atmospheres revels in the material wetness of ambient and landed moisture – in
the air, dripping from the vapor catchers, evaporating from the soil and its billions of
microorganisms, and transpiring through the plants. It offers no opportunity for separation as
“water” since the capturing membrane is penetrable by mobile species to enter into the vessel of
collected breaths and drink, bathe, breathe from its aqueous interior (Figure 17).

68
Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 293.
Gabrielian 56

Figure 17 - New Interdependent Rituals: The speculation undoubtedly generates new collective rituals that revel
in the union of the breath. If we imagine how this might extend beyond the human, we might be able to harness an
ecoculture of the breath that brings interspecies difference into the immediacy of our everyday existence. A
gathering of the collective and ongoing exhale and the environment of wetness shared in acts of drinking and
bathing, as well as surviving and growing together, might just generate that ethics of responsivity that could yield
more optimistic possibilities for living together on this precariously shared planet.

Water Memory and Waters of Memory
As stated above, water or wetness is a material archive of the lives through which it has gestated,
passed, transported, touched, disturbed and destroyed. It picks up and conveys traces of those
pasts in an aqueous register that collapses time. In her essay on the “reading the sea of memory
against the flows of capitalism,” Janine Macleod argues “as the medium that carries away the
dead and nurtures the unborn, water is uniquely capable of symbolizing multi-generational time.
In some sense, it actually is multi-generational time”
69
and it is inevitably laced with the effects
of capital and byproducts of capitalism.

As an open but intimate system, Transcorporeal Atmospheres acts as a palpably manifest register
of capital flows and body-material processes. Its formulation was additionally impacted by the,
arguably pseudo-, science of “water memory” which posits that “water ‘notes’ the external
influences that have acted upon it”
70
through its molecular structure (the experiments that have
supported these claims over the past thirty years have taken many forms
71
). Despite the refuted
experiments, the idea that the molecular structure of water can be altered as a material register
picking up stories as it flows downstream – through time and space – inspired thinking behind
this collective pursuit. A collection of memory, a vessel of time collapsed into a common sea of

69
MacLeod, “Water and the Material Imagination,” 49.
70
Bernd Kröplin, Water and its Memory (Stuttgart: Gutes Buch Verlag, 2017).
71
French biologist, Jacques Benveniste (1988), Professor Bernd Kröplin at Stuttgart University, Dr. Masaru Emoto,
a researcher in Japan, etc.
Gabrielian 57

aqueous exchange. It provides opportunity to put us into intimate contact with those stories and
beings that came before and find replenishment in this interspecies, intergenerational
collaboration.

Aqueous Ethics
This material archive, brought into intimate contact with our everyday lives, aims to inspire
ethical questions related to the “flows of power caught up in our planetary watercourses” and,
with hope, urgent actions related to how we dwell in relation to our “more-than-human watery
others.”
72
Yet, as I have hinted at thus far, the thinking behind Transcorporeal Atmospheres is
laced with conflict and the recognition of inequity often missing from the ecocultural ideology
formulated up by many of the authors cited here. While the intention is to bring visibility to the
interdependence of life necessary for planetary survival, how these hydrocommunities are
created and, specifically, who is included, and thus who is excluded, is always latent in the
discourse around “Community.” That question remains relatively unresolved in the speculation
but not unappreciated. The speculation imagines that in the future, we will depend on these
aqueous commons as symbiont collectives that evolve and adapt with or without “Us.” Yet they
offer freedom of movement (for mobile species) and the chance to participate in other
hydrospheres, thus always presenting some element of “risk” – of exposure to forms of breath to
which systems do not have time to adapt and are thus “disturbed” (in ecological terms) or
altered.

72
Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis, “Introduction,” in Thinking with Water, 20.
Gabrielian 58

While the hope is to create some form of aqueous equalizer recognizing wetness is a shared
condition, the thinking behind the ideas here recognizes that we do not currently all share the
same water. Poor black citizens drinking leaded water in Flint, Michigan worry about their
children’s cognitive development, while Inuit women in the Artic nurse their young with
breastmilk made toxic by the northward drift of pollutants from faroff industrial centers of the
globalized world. Neimanis describes,
Innu women’s breast milk is an especially toxic substance, absorbing the liquid
runoff of a global political economy that produces vastly divergent body burdens.
The inequalities of neocolonialist globalization course through waterways at
scales both individual and oceanic. Nursing one’s young becomes a complex
congeries of questions in which we all are implicated… The flows of global
power meet the flows of biomatter.
73

We are not all downstream. But the speculation hopes to bring visibility to the idea that we could
be. The hope is that it does not neutralize difference but identifies difference and inspires
adjustment to integrate difference into the always-adapting system.

Thus far, I have largely ignored the ambiguities of wetness – its lack of bounds and absolutes.
The speculation is intended to revel in the open-endedness of living (recognizing the only
concrete aspect of life is death), so the fluid terrain that the speculation aims to create and
metaphorically harness imagines how the world could be otherwise and how nothing is certain.
Again Neimanis,
Thinking about our selves and our broader communities as watery can thus
unmoor us in productive (albeit sometimes risky) ways. We are set adrift in the
space-time between our certainties, between the various outcrops we cling to for
security. It is here, in the borderzones of what is comfortable, of what is perhaps
even livable, that we can open to alterity—to other bodies, other ways of being

73
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 95.
Gabrielian 59

and acting in the world—in the simultaneous recognition that this alterity also
flows through us.
74

Rather than “stopping” or fighting climate change, as goes the popular political narrative, the
hope of the speculative project is to bring climate stress into the realm of the familiar and
familial. To bring it in from the out theres of the arctic circle and the ozone layer, into corporeal
intimacy and the transcorporeality of shared matter necessary for the survival of all living beings,
it aims to open up different kinds of political and ethical orientation and action. It is not about
engineered solutions or fixes to Climate Change – the objectified beast we are all fighting at the
same time we are complicit in the systems of its creation and perpetuation (such fixes include
cloud seeding to create rain and other forms of weather modification). Instead, it aims to alter
consciousness and imagine a future where we are living regeneratively rather than exploitatively
– in this case, out of the realities of need as we all barrel toward planetary decline. Neimanis and
Rachel Loewen Walker reflect on gestationality as catalytic of “a politics of possibility and an
ethics of responsivity…[which] recognizes that the dream of solution must give way to an
ongoing engagement… that must necessarily extend beyond our individualized ‘home’ to the
larger transcorporeal one that we share.”
75

Hydro-sociality
Transcorporeal Atmospheres undoubtedly generates new collective rituals that revel in the union
of the breath. Irigaray argues that we return to the elemental act of breathing as a means for
connection, noting that Christian, Hebraic, Islamic and Far Eastern cultures look to the animating

74
Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 96.
75
Neimanis and Walker, “Weathering,” 561.
Gabrielian 60

breath as a source for spirituality.
76
If we imagine how this might extend beyond the human, we
might be able to harness an ecoculture of the breath that brings interspecies difference into the
immediacy of our everyday existence. A gathering of the collective and ongoing exhale and the
environment of wetness shared in acts of drinking and bathing, as well as surviving and growing
together, might just generate that ethics of responsivity that could yield more optimistic
possibilities for living together on this precariously shared planet.

Sterilization or fertility
Transcorporeal Atmospheres is likewise intended to challenge our hygienic comforts. The art
and practice of city-building in the west has always embraced the notion of drainage and
protection from dampness which is associated with the spread of disease (see Vitruvius’ De
Architectura from the 1
st
-c. BCE, for one early instance
77
). Into the 19th-century, we began
sealing our architectures off from the elements to manufacture sanitary conditions that would
slow the spread of infection, reduce humidity and standing water. This “watertight urbanism”
78

of the Modern city has sterilized and dehumidified our air and contributed to the reduced
capacity of human immunity (see the recent New York Times article “Your Environment Is
Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared”). For tens of thousands of
years, human immune systems have evolved and adapted to the multiple challenges posed by
interactive exchange with the more-than-human world. Over the last two hundred years, hygienic
practices to bolster our defenses against disease have also cut off exposure to the microbes –

76
Luce Irigaray, Between East and West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); cited in Macauley,
Elemental Philosophy, 318.
77
Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by M H. Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960)
(originally: De Architectura, 1
st
-c. BCE).
78
Carolina Gonzales Vives, “Dehydrated Architecture,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed.
John Graham (Zurich: Lars Mueller, 2016), 329-337.
Gabrielian 61

bacteria and parasites that helped teach and hone the immune system, and have thus increased
the incidence of allergies and chronic immune system disorders.
79

Transcorporeal Atmospheres tries to challenge the fear around exposure to catalyze an
evolutionary process that will ultimately lead to strengthened and new co-dependencies. By
drinking the breath of others – human, bacteria, plant – filtered through the soil and plants, we
accept the risk to individual survival and contribute to a symbiont evolution. The most adaptable
and responsive organisms to this renewed symbiosis will ultimately survive with each most
efficiently contributing to the collective. Disturbance to this system can happen in instants,
through the introduction of a new organism or virus, or over time, as the environment evolves
into a new form adapting to the conditions of the present. Again I end on a Darwinian tone but
again thinking not of competition, but cooperation in the quest for utmost fitness or adaptability
to change.
80

79
Matt Richtel, “Your Environment Is Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared,” New York
Times (March 12, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/health/immune-system-allergies.html (accessed May
2, 2019).
80
Again I cite Elizabeth Grosz who challenges the simplistic argument that Darwin’s theories are determinist: “If
Darwin locates chance at the center of natural selection, as that which indicates an organism’s openness, its
potentially mortal susceptibility to changing environments, environments hitherto unseen or not yet in existence…,
then from this time on, the random, the accidental, that which befalls an individual entity, becomes an essential
ingredient in the history and development of that entity and in the group in which it lives and interacts” (Grosz,
Darwin and Feminism,” 37-38).
Gabrielian 62

Encounter 3: Waste
The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to
live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to
stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters
and rebuild quiet places... Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that
is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot
compost piles.
– Donna Haraway (2016)
81

Wasted Bodies
In both the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) imaginary and the Humanist tradition, the body
is a passive vessel for the spirit and the mind, respectively (very simply). In the industrialized
West, that then disposable body is ritually buried in designated ground, often after embalming
with formaldehyde “to preserve the living from contagion.”
82
This fear of “exposure” – once
perhaps a legitimate fear – actually creates a deeper contagion, toxifying the body and any
creatures that attempt to consume it, as well as the waters with which it comes into contact. The
body as vessel – “our vile body” (Philippians 3:21) is waste and is wasted. There is no “dust to
dust” in this equation, as the body is “returned” in highly altered form.

This final speculation revisits the idea of living and dying together in the troubled present and,
while we do, to make trouble that stirs powerful response to our current planetary condition.
Literature on the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Necrocene (etc) considers mass death from
sweeping species extinction (the “Sixth Extinction” of planetary life
83
), and the acceleration of

81
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 1, 4.
82
William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995), 58.
83
See especially Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt &
Co, 2014).
Gabrielian 63

human decline via resource wars, starvation, dehydration, toxic exposures, etc. Yet very few
actually address the experience of death and “afterlife” in this context – what it means to
contribute to the stirring up in death. One exception is Roy Scranton’s “reflections” on Learning
to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) where he asks “How do we make meaningful choices in the
shadow of our inevitable end?... The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as
individuals, but as a civilization.”
84
The text is clearly anthropocentric – in its foreboding the end
of “civilization.” Yet here, I am not interested in death as the end of human achievement and
progress, but death as an active material process of decay and recomposition. Here, the more-
than-human bodies that will accumulate from human misdeeds will not be wasted – they will be
mourned in new rituals of grief that aim to catalyze ethical thinking and mobilized action.

The following speculates on how to die in the Anthropocene – not as a doomsday surrender, but
how death – and at the mass scales we are facing – can contribute to planetary resilience. I return
to Haraway’s Children of the Compost who “came to see their shared kind as humus, rather than
as human or nonhuman.”
85
The current speculation titled, Near-Extinction Rituals, imagines how
to die – quite literally – “in hot compost piles” (see Haraway above). Here, we welcome the
bacteria in the intestines that quickly devour what they had maintained – swelling our bellies
until we rupture with gas. The fungal blooms and insect larvae, the beetles, worms, mites that
leave only clean white bones.
86
Buddhist tradition in China includes the Medieval practice of

84
Roy Scranton, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times (November 20, 2013) in a
preliminary article on the subject (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-
anthropocene/, accessed May 2, 2019). This kind of discourse – that we are doomed and must except it – is just what
others have recoiled from as a kind of release from responsibility and mobilized action (see conclusion in Jedediah
Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
Scranton’s book is: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of a civilization (San Francisco:
City Lights Publishers, 2015).
85
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 140.
86
Logan, Dirt, 56-57.
Gabrielian 64

exposing the corpse in an open area as an offering to hungry birds and beasts, a ritual perpetuated
in Tibetan Buddhist sky burial practices.
87
Here we offer our bodies to the soil in hopes of
contributing to this limited living system that is the “infrastructure of life” (Figure 18).
88

Figure 18 - Compost Food Web: Each species depicted here serves a particular and specific purpose in the
decomposition process. The bacteria in our intestines quickly devour what they had long maintained – swelling our
bellies until we rupture with gas. The fungal blooms and insect larvae, the beetles, worms, and mites eat away at our
remains leaving only clean white bones. The process moves from the first level consumers to the third, until all
organic matter is converted to nutrient-rich soil.

87
Seth Faison, “Lirong Journal; Tibetans, and Vultures, Keep Ancient Burial Rite,” New York Times (July 3, 1999),
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/03/world/lirong-journal-tibetans-and-vultures-keep-ancient-burial-rite.html,
(accessed May 2, 2019). See also Nancy Menning, “Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination,” in
Mourning Nature: Hope at the heart of ecological loss and grief, eds. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 50-53 (Kindle Book).
88
See María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Encountering Bioinfrastructure: Ecological Struggles and the Sciences of Soil,”
Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 28, 1 (“Absences,” 2014), 26–40 (p. 27).
Gabrielian 65

Near-Extinction Rituals, imagines what landscapes of both grief and atonement might be in
service of times to come. Rather than discarding other-than-human carcasses out of view or
pumping human bodies with preservatives, multispecies remains are collected and made oddkin
in hot compost piles. While the speculation takes cues from the mainstreaming trend of “natural”
or “green” burials with its recent first legalization in the state of Washington,
89
the hope here is
bodies are not buried or set in closed vessels with microbial or fungal “ingredients” that speed
the decomposition process, but gathered in open air and transformed into rich living soil in a
multiyear process that extends death and offers possibility for the proliferation of those suited to
survive.

Influenced by the process of “Mortality Composting” (Figure 19) particularly farm animals,
especially windrow composting or open piles, the process of decomposition takes many months
and emits odors and hot steam that elongate the life of death in a process that generates
significant energy. Laying the bodies and adding amendments of other composted bodies of
plants, animals and their microbial and fungal partners which trigger the decomposition process,
are aspects of the performative work process required as atonement for complicity in ecological
destruction. Exposures to decomposing flesh and their odorous outputs that the wind carries into
the realm of our everyday lives remind us of our complicity and aim to mobilize action.

89
The speculation recognizes the rising green burial industry has birthed the inventive sensitivities of entrepreneurs
such as Katrina Spade at Recompose who use a vessel system that decomposes bodies into soil in thirty days
(https://www.recompose.life). The biodegradable Infinity Burial Suit that has a built in biomix of mushrooms and
other microorganisms to “aid in decomposition, work to neutralize toxins found in the body [through
mycoremediation] and transfer nutrients to plant life” was invented Jae Rhim (http://coeio.com). Maurizio Montalti
has since developed a similar product as part of Officina Corpuscoli (http://www.corpuscoli.com).
Gabrielian 66

Figure 19 - Compost Recipe: Rather than discarding other-than-human carcasses out of view or pumping human
bodies with preservatives, multispecies remains are collected and made oddkin in hot compost piles. Bodies are
gathered in open air and transformed into rich living soil in a multiyear process that extends death and offers
possibility for the proliferation of those suited to survive. Building on the process of “Mortality Composting”
particularly farm animals, especially windrow composting or open piles, the process of decomposition takes many
months and emits odors and hot steam that elongate the life of death in a process that generates significant energy.
Laying the bodies, and adding amendments of other composted bodies of plants, animals and their microbial and
fungal partners, which trigger the process, are aspects of the performative work process required as atonement for
complicity in ecological destruction.

Waste-land
In her historical account, landscape historian Vittoria Di Palma traces the term and the idea of
“wasteland” to “any place that is hostile to human survival” – whether that means an uninhabited
desolate place – the translation of the Biblical desertus, or sites ravaged by industrial or military
operations and its byproducts. She argues that “one reason why wasteland has occupied such a
pivotal place in Western cultural imagination is because it has a capacity to trigger a strong
emotional response,” which she characterizes as disgust. She continues to trace the aesthetics of
disgust through the landscape imaginaries of 17
th
- and 18
th
-c. Europe. She synopsizes from her
investigation that disgust is most fundamentally a fear of contamination or violations of the
body’s envelope, “affiliated… with the ‘darker’ or ‘lower’ senses of touch, taste, and smell. It is
Gabrielian 67

an object’s potential to adhere to the skin, or, even more disturbingly, to enter the body via the
mouth or another orifice, which most incites the reaction of disgust.”
90

I bring this analysis into the current speculation for a number of reasons. First, a kind of
wasteland – desolate, uninhabited place – came to mind when I imagined sites of mass death
(evoking imagery of Cambodian “Killing Fields”). Thus it served as a kind of early catalyst for
thinking about critical alternatives. Second, the subject of the speculation is the dead body as
repellent object “that harbors a paradoxical duality, a mixture of repulsion and allure,”
91
which
Di Palma includes as a fundamental character of disgust. Finally, it led to issues of toxicity as
contemporary wastelands are largely defined by Di Palma and others as contaminated by toxic
industrial byproducts, making them uninhabitable. Toxicity is a major source of species die-off’s
and the contamination of bodies deemed disposable, as waste.

With a simultaneous repulsion and attraction – this fear of violation or contamination of the
body’s envelope thus brings me to the “queer productivity of toxins and toxicity”
92
– which
permeate us through the air and water and bring us together in networks of shared contamination.
As I identify in the previous chapter on Water, this is not to say that toxicity equalizes. In the
essay “Toxic Animacies: Inanimate Affections,” queer theorist Mel Chen indexes just a few of
the toxic inequalities that characterize our current environmental circumstances:
There are those who find themselves on the underside of industrial “development”
— women hand-painting vaporous toys by the hundreds daily without protection;
agricultural workers with little access to health care picking fruit in a cloud of
pesticides, methane, and fertilizer that is breathable only in a strictly mechanical
sense; people living adjacent to pollution- spewing factories or downwind of a

90
Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), Introduction, 1-11.
91
Di Palma, Wasteland, 8.
92
Mel Chen, “Toxic Animacies: Inanimate Affections,” GLQ 17, 2-3 (2011), 281.
Gabrielian 68

refinery installed by a distant neocolonial metropolis, or in the abjected periphery
of a gentrified urban “center”; those living in walls fortified with lead that peel
inward in a false embrace; domestic workers laboring in toxic conditions, taking
into their bodies what their better-vested employers can then avoid.
93

Figure 20 - Base Body Chemistry / Waste Body Burden: The chemical composition of our bodies – human and
otherwise – are being altered by the synthetic chemical agents that make up the landscapes of our everyday lives. As
bodies break down in a compost of death, microbial and fungal species neutralize the pathogens and some toxins
that make up that anatomical register of chemical exposure. Yet the resulting soil is both rich with nutrient and a
record of just how disposable we were ultimately deemed, as heavy metals and ingested microplastics inevitably
linger.

93
Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 276.
Gabrielian 69

While toxicity breaks down our discrete individuality through its pervasiveness and unbiased
interpenetration of our orifices, structural violence ensures heightened exposures to those
deemed most disposable.

The chemical composition of our bodies – human and otherwise – are being altered by the
synthetic chemical agents that make up the landscapes of our everyday lives. As bodies break
down in a compost of death, microbial and fungal species neutralize the pathogens and some
toxins that make up that anatomical register of chemical exposure. Yet the resulting soil is both
rich with nutrient and a record of just how disposable we were ultimately deemed, as toxins –
particularly heavy metals and ingested microplastics – inevitably linger (Figure 20).

Infrastructures for Life
Soil enters this speculation through the discourse around care, particularly as formulated by
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, a scholar in science, technology and organization who explores the
ethics and politics of care in the more-than-human world, with a particular emphasis on the
“endangered living worlds” of soil. Focused on the slow creation of healthful soil, she critiques
the linear productionist logic of rapidly prepared “soil,” amended with chemical fertilizers to
optimize “yield.” She sees the slow process of soil generation and the work and care of its
multispecies world as an example to both learn from and participate in as “making time for care
time.”
94

94
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care,” Social Studies
of Science (2015). See also her book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Gabrielian 70

Caring for the windrow piles of bodies and watching the slow material process of decomposition
and recomposition challenges technoscientific timescales and offers insights into the agency of
matter, as it emits heat, odors, and welcomes seed dispersed by animate phenomena of the living
and synthetic worlds. The process dissolves the individual into “unexpected collaborations and
combinations” and welcomes new life adapted to times to come.

Anthropocenic Grief + Atonement
Posthuman mourning is a complex process as grief – for those with any sense of ethics – is
infused with guilt for complicity in the destruction and killing of species on which we depend.
“We must mourn not only what we have lost, but also what we have destroyed,” says Nancy
Menning in her essay “Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination.”
95
The anger,
distress, hopelessness and despair associated with grief in both the personal sphere and the
fearful dimension of mass loss is mixed with guilt and the need to atone. Near-Extinction Rituals
aims to direct ecological grief to a collective experience which strengthens commitments and
mobilizes action that offer opportunities for repentance and redemption. These new kinships,
linked through “vulnerability and finitude of the other,” transform despair into action.

By examining diverse and divergent religious approaches to death (“the religious imagination”)
focused most on practices of mourning, Menning argues, rituals to mourn human deaths “helps
us imagine potential rituals to mourn more-than-human losses.”
96
In the chapter, she explores
four such approaches – Dagara (indigenous people of West Africa), Jewish (reciting Kaddish),
Tibetan Buddhist (see above) and Shiite Muslim, the latter of which offers insight into “the

95
Menning, “Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination,” 39.
96
Menning, “Environmental Mourning,” 58-59.
Gabrielian 71

special challenges of mourning losses that are complicated by guilt.” She uses this example to
demonstrate how complicity might turn guilt into more productive ends:

Husayn ibn Ali was the grandson of the prophet Muhammed. In 680, in efforts to provide
leadership to the Muslim community in the face of what was considered the unjust seizure of
power by the Umayyads, his army never arrived and he and his family were massacred on the
holy day of Ashura, a day set aside by Muhammed a half century earlier for fasting and
atonement. Menning traces the centuries of evolution of Ashura in Shiite culture because of a
sense of complicitness for the death of Husayn and his family. She describes the ten-day ritual
that includes a procession behind a symbolic coffin while participants weep and beat themselves,
battle reenactments, recounted narrations of the betrayal, a visit to the tomb of the dead, self-
flagellations. She continues, “By reliving the events as participants in a ritual, his supporters join
together to transform what happened – not the fact of what happened, but its meaning. Their
historic absence in the battle at Karbala is redeemed by their ritual presence now. Though deeply
complicit in Husayn’s death, participants promised never to be absent again, vowing to
henceforward be present when God’s will is to be done or when social injustice must be
confronted.”
97
According to Menning, rather than self-flagellation, modern Shiite Muslims in
Lebanon donate blood to local bloodbanks to commemorate Ashura.

97
Menning, “Environmental Mourning,” 54.
Gabrielian 72

Figure 21 - Biochemical Phases: Composting engages three main biochemical phases: As soon as the bodies of the
deceased are covered with earth, microbial organisms begin the decomposition process. Temperatures then rise
within the compost pile, reaching 130 degrees as the chemicals interact and react to one another. This phase thus
creates a mass of steam that rises from the earth. As oxygen is mixed in with the pile, hydrogen dioxide, nitrogen
dioxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia are released. Once the bodies have been converted into soil so have they been
enriched with nitrogen, potassium, zinc, manganese, copper, iron, and phosphorus, making the soil quite fertile with
nutrients.

Here, the atonement ritual is not self-flagellation but learning to live with the trouble we created
and caring for the dead in a way that recomposes death into life for times to come. These rituals
have the chance to correspond to the stages of compost generation (Figure 21). It starts with the
laying of the dead on the earth and covering the body with soil made from companions in death.
Gabrielian 73

No holes are dug but the dead are given a blanket of warm life-from-death and are situated on the
ground of the living. The second stage is the generation of heat as the chemical process begins
and releases hot steam. The spiritual associations of this rising steam are hard to miss, as the
energy of the living is released in animated and immersive materiality – an enveloping cloud that
acts as vapor, permeating the flesh in a binding embrace. The final stage to this elongated
exchange with death is the contact with the soil created – physical remains that can be touched,
held, transported or left in place. The sacred ground and both its vastness and immediacy aim to
make climate change more palpable – to bring it from the out there into corporeal intimacy and
the transcorporeality of shared death (Figure 22), (Figure 23).

Figure 22 - New Rituals of Mourning: Caring for the windrow piles of bodies and watching the slow material
process of decomposition and recomposition challenges technoscientific timescales and offers insights into the
agency of matter, as it emits heat, odors, and welcomes seed dispersed by animate phenomenon of the living and
synthetic worlds. The process dissolves the individual into “unexpected collaborations.”

Gabrielian 74

Figure 23 - Atmospheric Sacraments: New rituals of mourning have the chance to correspond to the stages of
compost generation. It starts with the laying of the dead on the earth and covering the body with soil made from
companions in death. No holes are dug but the dead are given a blanket of warm life-from-death and are situated on
the ground of the living. The second stage is the generation of heat as the chemical process begins and releases hot
steam. The spiritual associations of this rising steam are hard to miss, as the energy of the living is released in
animated and immersive materiality – an enveloping cloud that acts as vapor, permeating the flesh in a binding
embrace. The final stage to this elongated exchange with death is the contact with the soil created – physical remains
that can be touched, held, transported or left in place. The sacred ground and both its vastness and immediacy aim to
make climate change more palpable – to bring it from the out there into corporeal intimacy and the transcorporeality
of shared death.

Gabrielian 75

Our Techno-Legacy
Without chemical intervention (i.e. preservatives), bodies of the animal kingdom begin to
decompose in minutes. The exact counterpart to our fleeting discreteness is that which
characterizes the stratigraphic record of the last 100 years – the multiple synthetic polymers we
know as plastic. As Heather Davis notes in her essay, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and
Other Queer Futures,” the immortality of plastic ensures its thick presence in the geologic record
of the 20
th
-century forward, in the new rock of the plastiglomerate.
98
While compost can
neutralize pathogens and break down some toxins, microplastics (and heavy-metals) are resilient,
despite their disposability in the Anthropocenic imagination. While celebrated in abundance
throughout the world, particularly since WWII, these immortal plastics, which are made from
fossil fuels (which are compressed bodies of ancient plants and animals) and disrupt the
endocrine and reproductive systems, contribute to our demise and outlive us, setting the stage for
planetary futures. Microbial life has already evolved in the depth of landfills to feed off the
energies of plastics and we can only imagine what technoscience will do as an exploitative quick
fix to our “waste problem” in short years to come – a “technobacterial future” as Davis terms it.
In the oceans, where microplastic abundance accumulates, the “plastisphere” has emerged, with
thousands of different species of bacteria and viruses found living on single pieces of
microplastic.
99
Davis continues, “It is unknown whether these bacteria and viruses were eating
the plastic, or merely found it a perfect milieu. But in time, it is quite likely that these vibrant
attached communities may develop complex bacterial societies, flourishing on their synthetic

98
Heather Davis, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” philoSOPHIA 5, 2 (Summer 2015),
231-250.
99
Davis cites: Erik Zettler, Tracy Mincer, and Linda Amaral-Zettler, "Life in the 'Plastisphere': Microbial
Communities on Plastic Marine Debris," Environmental Science and Technology 47 (2013) 7137-46.
Gabrielian 76

surfaces, eating each other and the vast sources of unlocked carbon energy, mutating and
evolving.”
100

Figure 24 - Non-Compostable Remains: The plastics and heavy metals in the bodies of humans and the infinite
species they have exploited will remain and accrue in these material piles of death. While the composting process
breaks down much, what toxicity remains offers the possibility for biological adaptation through slow or filtered
exposure. While the afterlife of these places of decomposition and recomposition, mourning and atonement, are the
creation of complex living systems that become an infrastructure for life to come, through time they will surface
other remains of humans’ technoaugmented cyborgian selves – gold teeth, dental fillings, prosthetic joints,
pacemakers, microchips, and all the future technofossils that will characterize our age. The surfacing of these
memorial artifacts of might contribute to elongated rituals of death in a kind of archival accumulation of remains.

I go into depth about the plastisphere (Figure 24) here because I expect these plastic futures to
proliferate in landscapes of decomposed and recomposed matter. The plastics and heavy metals

100
Davis, “Toxic Progeny,” 235.
Gabrielian 77

in the bodies of humans and the infinite species they have exploited will remain and accrue in
these material piles of death. While the composting process breaks down much, what toxicity
remains in the soil offers the possibility for biological adaptation through slow or filtered
exposure. Our techno-organic futures are unknown in these posthuman approaches to death, but
mitigation or “returning to nature” (whatever that is) is not the aim. In elongated rituals of loss,
mourning and atonement, this slowed exposure aims to catalyze new forms of adaptation.

While the afterlife of these places of decomposition and recomposition, mourning and
atonement, are the creation of complex living systems that become an infrastructure for life to
come, through time they will surface other remains of humans’ technoaugmented cyborgian
selves – gold teeth, dental fillings, prosthetic joints, pacemakers, microchips, and all the future
technofossils that will characterize our age. The surfacing of these memorial artifacts might
contribute to the elongated rituals of death in a kind of archival accumulation of remains.

Posthuman Afterlife
These piles of mortality compost will undoubtedly capture the dispersal of seeds and become
fertile ground for an adapted vegetative layer fed by the energies below and food for those
creatures above, including humans. The practice of foraging in these landscapes of spontaneous
growth, fueled by the “wastes” of multispecies bodies and their residual toxicities, becomes part
of the elongated practice of mourning and atonement, as well as adaptation through slow
exposure (Figure 25). The ingestion of the residues of death bring us back to the idea of
becoming animal as “eating transforms plants and animals into human flesh” (see Alaimo quote
in “Food”). The Food-Water-Waste triad thus has a metabolic nature, returning us to the
Gabrielian 78

beginning, but, hopefully, with altered or recentered consciousness. Here, our flesh merges with
our planetary companions, creating “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot
compost piles.”

Figure 25 – Emergent Foraging Ecologies: The practice of foraging in these landscapes of spontaneous growth,
fueled by the “wastes” of multispecies bodies and their residual toxicities, becomes part of the elongated practice of
mourning and atonement, as well as adaptation through slow exposure.

Gabrielian 79

Movement Toward:
If we do not seek to fix what has broken, then what? How do we resolve to live
with brokenness, with being broke…?
– Jack Halberstam, introduction to The Undercommons (2013)
101

In their collaborative venture into the undercommons, authors Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
introduce the practice of “feeling through others” via the concept of “hapticality.” As an
alternative to the technoscientific logics of advanced capitalism, and traced to the trauma of
being collectively contained in the “hold” of African slaveships, hapticality is “the capacity to
feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you...” They
continue: “The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a
new feel in the undercommons. Previously, this kind of feel was only an exception, an
aberration, a shaman, a witch, a seer, a poet amongst others, who felt through others, through
other things.”
102
This “feeling through others” is a visceral form of sociability and an immediate
and pre-conscious registration of others – through sensation, as affect. The horrific particularity
of “the hold” is both unique to the experience of blackness, while the idea of hapticality that
emerged from this particular horror and that Harney and Moten see as ultimately generative,
might have further resonance.

The speculations in this dissertation grasp for an adapted form of hapticality to bring us together,
not in terror, but in sensate contact with the bodies of others – human and otherwise – to register
palpably the crisis that surrounds us. This existential planetary crisis has emerged from those

101
Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons,” in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 5.
102
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor
Compositions, 2013), p. 97-98.
Gabrielian 80

same logics of colonialism and advanced capitalism that constructed “the hold.” Perhaps the
speculations attempt to arrive only at the gift it yielded – the gathering of dispossessed feelings
in common – largely through forced touch – or the bringing together of those species and peoples
dispossessed and providing experiences or modes of survival through which to “feel through
others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you,” in all extremes of pain,
sorrow, sickness and joy. Jack Halberstam states in the introduction of the book that Harney and
Moten’s work does not seek to offer a prescription for repair, but is rather about “reaching out to
find connection…about making common cause with the brokenness of being…”
103
The
structures of all suppression: white supremacism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the
degradation of our biophysical world are fundamentally entangled. And it takes
acknowledgment, as Halberstam advises in the introduction, that these structures are “not only
bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”
104
The speculations offer a method of coexistence,
of both living on and sharing this broken planet with others – human and otherwise. They are
about the commons, our commons.

103
Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons,” 5.
104
Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons,” 10.
Gabrielian 81

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Asset Metadata

Creator Gabrielian, Aroussiak (author)

Core Title Encounters with the Anthropocene: synthetic geologies, diegetic ecologies and other landscape imaginaries

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Publication Date 07/31/2019

Defense Date 06/10/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropocene,biodesign,critical design,design fiction,Landscape Architecture,material feminism,new materialist environmentalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,posthuman feminism,speculative futures,world building

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Willis, Holly (committee chair), Anderson, Steve (committee member), Kratky, Andreas (committee member), McDowell, Alex (committee member), Watson, Jeff (committee member)

Creator Email aroussiak.gabrielian@usc.edu,aroussiak@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-201773

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