Michael Jones McKean has published the essay Earth Studies, as part of his guest-edited issue with Art Papers, Reworlding.

Michael Jones McKean will join Art Papers Executive + Artistic Director Sarah Higgins to discuss McKean’s guest edited theme: Reworlding. Higgins and McKean will also chat about how his practices as an artist, a researcher, and an educator informed the theme, particularly Twelve Earths—his planetary sculpture scaled to Earth itself.

Art Papers launched its Spring 2024 issue Reworlding, guest edited by Michael Jones McKean. Reworlding is a thematic exploration of the planetary with contributions by: Michael Jones McKean, Sophie Strand, Haley Mellin + Timur Si-Qin, Del Harrow, Gean Moreno + Stephanie Wakefield, Stephanie Bailey, and a roundtable with Angela Dufresne + Gordon Hall + Arnold Kemp + Michael Jones McKean + Aki Sasamoto + Nato Thompson + Rodrigo Valenzuela

In addition to the skeletal artifacts discovered at Abrigo do Lagar Velho, some ritual adornments made of shells and animal teeth were also discovered.

Here is a portion of our entry for ‘adornment’ from Twelve Earths’ research portal:

“…an adornment—a material thing—can affect the feeling of the wearer, influencing moods and modifying behaviors. In this way, an adornment may take on extradiegetic, talismanic properties wherein a wearer allows themselves to be actively contoured by qualities they believe to be embedded and alive within the adornment. In this way, a simple piece of jewelry, a shell, or new braid can unlock secret psychological dimensions within the wearer, activating dormant chapters of their being.”

Produced by A Lot of Moving Parts and Alex Goss

Congratulations to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory for passing an enormous milestone this past week—the coating of its 52,000 pound, cast glass main reflecting mirror: the M1M3. The mirror you see, spanning over 27 feet across, holds a delicate meniscus of silver. All told, the coating weighs just 64 grams—a few coins worth of metal jingling in your pocket harnessed to make contact with the outer limits of primordial light…

Michael Jones McKean will be speaking at Atlas Obscura's Ecliptic Festival in Arkansas' Valley of the Vapors, which is not coincidentally within the 'path of totality" to witness a rare total eclipse. The celebration spans over 4 days and promises to be memorable. For more information and tickets, visit Atlas Obscura's event page.

In the process of making our new website, A Lot of Moving Parts studio created a series of visualizations using Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s engineering schematics. Sequenced above is a look inside Rubin’s Telescope Assembly Mount: a structure anchored directly to the Andes mountains’ bedrock holding the mirrors and camera.

Michael Jones McKean will be speaking with Nato Thompson of The Alternative School on Instagram Live. The conversation kicks off a 12:00PM ET on The Alternative School's IG handle: @thealternativeschool

At Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Twelve Earths’ most recent location, we’re opening a channel to commune more intimately with the diverse stories the site holds. The bones and artifacts found at the site act as scientific tools, but also as psychic vehicles wherein time travel is possible; where bones become a body, one vulnerable, curious, loving, and loved. These more subjective details can be lost within the scientific record, but within the machinations of an artwork, there is an invitation to explore.

As a gesture toward this desire, we commissioned a series of drawings by illustrator Maxfield Schnaufer to help imagine possible moments, realities, and open questions as a poetic, if speculative exercise—an attempt to touch what perhaps will forever be beyond our grasp.

Portuguese newspaper Publico published an article highlighting Twelve Earths' announcement of Abrigo do Lagar Velho and the work that will come to unfold in the Lapedo Valley.

Abrigo do Lagar Velho
o / o o / o o o o o o o

39°45′19.41″N 8°44′6.92″W
Leiria District
Lapedo Valley, Portugal

Twelve Earths’ second announced location is an active archaeological site and Paleolithic rock shelter visited by humans for over a thousand generations.

The discovery of a ceremoniously child buried there 29,000 years ago helped to unlock secrets of who we are—the question of ‘humanity’ at its most profound.

In asking questions of nearly imperceptible contours of bone; tracing forensic clues locked in ancient pollen; probing meanings locked within the delicate carvings of animal teeth; in wondering about our past selves, we unwittingly uncover who we are.

The site preserves this idea, encapsulating it as a message: a reminder stored in bones and pendants and pigment of a deep connection to each other across time, customs, language, and space.

Portuguese publication Jornal de Leiria has spotlighted Twelve Earths and its involvement with the Abrigo do Lagar Velho site. Read more here.

Michael Jones McKean Studio, in deep cooperation with Fathomers in Los Angeles, excited to announce Abrigo do Lagar Velho as the second site in artist Michael Jones McKean’s long-form planetary sculpture Twelve Earths. This rock shelter, visited and occupied by humans for tens of thousands of years in the Lapedo Valley of Portugal’s District of Leiria, contains one of the most significant archaeological findings of the past century: the 29,000-year-old remains of a ceremoniously buried four-year-old child whose discovery helped change our perceptions of what it means to be human.

For full press release information: Português | English

For additional information, please contact:
[email protected]

Our perception of speed—fast, average, and slow—is innately relative and linked to one's body. But it is also linked to established codes and rhythms. For us, there exists an orthodoxy of cadence. Early on in Twelve Earths’ origin, there was the desire to create non-normative expectations around time, with an attention to how an artwork might develop a new approach to speed—moving slower.

The repercussions of this choice are manifold. At times Twelve Earths seems to disappear, especially on channels such as this one. But there is also the get-it-right conundrum of making things: wanting to put things into the world that feel considered. With this in mind, we have been working feverishly (fast, even!) on the announcement of our second site and the launch of our updated website. This process of attention and iteration has delayed our original launch date, with a new announcement date of November 14th now inching closer.

Michael Jones McKean will be giving a talk in Poreč, Croatia for the LSST @ Europe5: "Towards LSST Science, Together” conference. Michael will be sharing his work and research as Artist-in-Residence at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory as it connects to Twelve Earths writ large.

We made a short teaser using some ultra-rare Hi8 archival footage for Twelve Earths’ next site announcement.

Beyond the narrow sliver afforded by our sensory perceptions of the world, the universe remains unknowable. Yet our ability to look up and out begs an eternal question: what else is out there? An answer for some, and a thought experiment for others, is posed in the quantum hypothesis of 'many worlds:'

The interpretation explains that our act of observation forces a quantum state to appear resolved, positing that there are additional worlds created for each and every quantum possibility as yet to be realized. So, as you read these words you maintain continuity along a central arc, but from this arc a cascading procession of perpetually forking paths emerges—tiny, minuscule variations creating complete and separate universes. A number of possibilities so vast as to seem infinite.

For a longer, trippier dose, take a spin into our research portal.

In choosing the project’s twelve locations, so many factors were considered. Perhaps most fundamental was simply striving to connect together diverse expressions of Earth molding itself morphologically by way of terrains, landmasses, and ecologies. In this process of naming Twelves Earth’s ring path, an ‘island’ felt necessary. Here’s a taste of our research entry for 'an island:'

“An Island is landmass completely surrounded by water. The exact number of islands on Earth—ranging in size from Greenland to Palau’s Little Rock (pictured)—is unknown, though it numbers well into the millions. Of these millions, only about 11,000 islands are known to be inhabited by humans.”

Even as Twelve Earths lives day-to-day as a conceptual scaffold to explore our relationship to Earth, it’s also deeply grounded in the world by way of its 12 physical, and very real locations. Over the last few years, encounters with these places (still only one announced publicly) have existed multivalently: from spirited and emergent relationships with people to speculative geo-poetic field work. Along the way there’s also, of course, documentation. Here’s a few meta shots at some of 12E’s locations—documenting the documentation.

This morning, windows open, the bedroom alive with movement and sensation: a breeze. As Twelve Earths evolves, the invisible but unimaginably alive and energetic force of wind will play an important role. Here’s our research entry for 'The Intelligence of Wind:'

”We can describe the forces and conditions that create wind, but at the scale of one’s body, from within our envelope of skin, wind remains magical. Standing in a room, sheer curtains billow. An invisible wrap of coolness shrouds our faces, the smallest hairs alerted, the salty meniscus of our eyes caressed. Moving through the petrochemical fibers of clothing, wind finds contact with hidden-away skin. In a room, the breeze finds forgotten voids, discovering the space’s secret meta-volume. At once, the dust, the spiders, the shadows beneath the couch, and the life-smears above the headboard become known to the wind. Its intelligence is total. The curtain exhales and the wind dissolves, roving elsewhere.”