Geopoetics is less a field of study than it is a style of thinking, one that imagines geography and the macro material world not as resources or territory, but as sites of meaning. Geopoetics embraces deep time as a core aspect of understanding Earth, and our embedded existence in it. The subject embraces layered ecologies of place, community formations, symbiosis, and animacy as possible angles to explore Earths' storehouse of meaning.

On a ridge peak rising 9000 feet above sea level in the Andes Mountains are a cluster of intensely powerful celestial observatories. Among them is the nearly complete Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. With first light expected in 2024, Rubin will begin a ten-year observation of the sky, producing the most precise map of the universe ever created and redrawing our understanding of the cosmos and our place within it.

Rubin comprises billions of decisions materialized in individual components, patents, touches, and technologies, all serving to intensify human capacity for visualization and understanding. The observatory exists as a set of thresholds for what can be made material at this moment.

The same conditions that make for near-perfect earthbound astronomy (high elevations, a remote location, arid conditions, stable weather) also act as agents for the preservation of the viewing object itself. This ridgetop inadvertently enshrines LSST within a longer durational horizon, preserving it for future generations as a strange, complex, and distantly knowable machine — a beacon reporting to the future our current dreams as well as our abilities.

Historically, a diaspora was an occurrence of mass human migration prompted by coercion, violence, or an otherwise unintended uprooting. Diaspora leans on the notion of “homeland” and a mass, usually sudden, population departure from that homeland to one or numerous host countries. Diasporas are characterized by sustained connection to their homelands by individuals’ and communities’ maintaining political and/or cultural ties. Oftentimes, those individuals and communities never fully integrate — by choice or not — into the host culture.

At its conception, the notion of diaspora described a condition of spiritual anguish accompanying the dispersal of the Jewish people beyond the Holy Land. This continued into the twentieth century, when other globally scattered groups began to adopt the term, such as Armenian and African peoples. Today, diaspora describes migrations of many kinds, including corporate and informational movement.

India is connected to the world's largest diaspora from a single country, with an overseas Indian community estimated at over 17.5 million people. As the effects of climate change begin to transform more and more parts of the world, a looming climate diaspora will continue, displacing millions of people around the world.

Scientifically, an event is an emergent, temporal gathering of energies coalescing more or less coherently. As with anything durational, this cohesion is not final, with all events eventually evolving, degrading, and transmuting. At each moment, there are an infinite number of temporal possibilities swirling, yet most do not cohere into the unison of an event. Events exist at all registrations of size and temporality: a star’s supernova event, the formation of a long-chain molecule, a common campfire, and more. Even as events are transpiring continuously and at all scales, not all events are equally significant or resonant. A relatively small, deeply anomalous event can have asymmetrically large implications.

With more than 7000 turbines arranged in a gridded pattern on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, the Gansu Wind Farm is the largest wind farm — and among the largest power stations — on Earth. The vast complex, easily seen from outer space, covers more than 100,000 acres of desolate landscape and is capable of generating 20,000 MW of electricity, enough energy to fully power a small country. The placement of the farm is based upon a set of rare geological and meteorological occurrences that have created consistent, intense winds for thousands of years.

Despite the enormity of the farm and the seeming anonymity of its produce, the quotidian worlds touched by the wind are many: a small nightstand light illuminating pages as a child reads in bed; a bullet train speeding across the countryside; vast supercomputers running facial recognition software. Through the farm, the wind is radically reconditioned into experiences, capacities, moments, data, and time.

Beyond the very narrow sliver afforded by human cognition, the universe is largely incomprehensible. The many worlds interpretation provides an explanation for the act of observation that “forces” a quantum state to appear resolved by positing that there are worlds created for each and every quantum possibility to be realized. From the universe we exist in right now runs a central path, but from that path will be a procession of perpetually forking paths - tiny variations of reality that create a number of possible worlds so vast as to seem infinite, but it is not.

This theoretical framework although profound, has little implication sensorially on our day-to-day lived reality, even as you have read this entry countless trillions of new worlds have branched off into their own distinct and separate realities, forever fracturing. A forest of all possible realities. 

“[The] thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.”

excerpt from The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

In an age where densely populated cities generate concentrations of light that can be viewed from space, large swaths of populations are divorced from a relationship to the sky. Much of the last generation has never seen a true night sky, with the Milky Way and nebulae fully visible, with their naked eye. Unlike our ancestors who were able to experience and commune with the night sky at will, massive light pollution has moved wider society away from such relationality. Some spaces still honor the importance of a clear sky. Often marked by observatories or remoteness from human activities, Dark Sky Locations deploy strategies similar to national sites of heritage in their organized attempts to cherish a true view of the night sky.

Cerro Pachón, Chile–the site of Vera C. Rubin Observatory–is one of the darkest sky locations. Far from any major city and perched at high altitude with little to no cloud coverage, it is an ideal location for the observatory’s constant sky survey.

Stick charts have been made and used by the Marshallese in Micronesia for hundreds of years to navigate the open seas of the Pacific Ocean by canoe. These stick charts, though seemingly crude, are highly precise and represent an important contribution to the history of cartography and oceanic navigation due to their elegant system of mapping swells and currents.

Bone is the mineral, lithic, internal scaffolding of all vertebrate animals—including humans. Bone anatomy among seemingly disparate species existing in diverse habitats is strikingly similar, composed of regular features: a cranial system, vertebral system, protection of organs via ribs, and bones for limbs. When conditions are right, bones over time can transmute into stone, becoming part of a fossil record.

Bones are also ubiquitous objects. Considering just Homo Sapiens, there are approximately 20 quadrillion individual human bones that have exisited...

As we move around, we encounter object-fields: the predictable chaos of a table after a dinner party, a newly organized bookshelf, a primeval forest floor, a child's unmade bedroom. In each of these spaces, there’s an invisible valence generated by the objects contained in the field that claims hold on them, and momentarily, on us. The valent pull is liminal and delicate, but the tonality and distinct character of each field would be demonstrably altered if something was removed or even repositioned slightly—the magnetism recalibrated, the poem rewritten.

Within this concept, there are unusual moments when a set of objects within a field develops dimensional clarity and continuity. A special form of material solidarity emerges: object harmonics. We realize that these aggregative, seemingly random forms in space are linked in an ontologically and spatially meaningful way. Our mind shutters off whole chambers in devotion to these few things in space. The fullness of the light and the triangles and distinctions of you and it vanishes and, for a moment, things feel infinite and complete — majestically, ecstatically human. As you bask in the eloquence of this suddenly interconnected world, off to your right, in your vision’s periphery, something shifts. Perhaps just a shadow. Your gaze immediately switches back to the object-field as you stagger to reclaim the brilliant balance of the moment. But it’s passed, and the feeling of realness, wholeness, interconnectedness, and satiated empathy becomes rounded, dulled. This visit to a kaleidoscopic world dims, and space, which only moments ago exceeded earthly dimension, rushes back to the limits of corporality. As you survey the object-field, still drunk in the secret afterglow of the moment, the sweet ecstasy you felt seconds earlier tips mournful as you realize this moment cannot be repeated, never prompted on cue. Three and a half seconds have ticked by; we stare into the field, and the objects remain, volunteering.

The Zip disk was first introduced by Iomega in late 1994 and quickly found a niche with college students and small businesses. The rewritable and removable storage device technology quickly obsolesced and was surpassed by CD-Rs and eventually USB flash drives. Although Zip disk storage capacity, when measured by contemporary standards, is miniscule, at 100 MB, the platform is stable and continues to be used in retro-computing, as well as in aviation for Jeppensen navigation database updates.

Scale is a human construct used to help understand the size of objects in relation to other objects and ourselves. Even as “scale” can be a powerful cognitive tool, it also exists as an overarching hegemonic system constraining how we imagine and perceive realities—our bodies being the conductor of this hegemony.

If we allow ourselves the psychic latitude to pause the belief that our own physical thresholds and sensorial capacities represent guideposts for true ontological limits, and begin reorchestrating an imaginary based on the inevitability of infinitely larger and infinitely smaller spaces, we obliviate our bodies as proxies to reality. We enter into peace with spaces, distances, and scales of time that surpass comfortable notions of ourselves, of being human. At this moment, the profound strangeness and beauty of Earth finds space to rush in.

A collection of scholarly essays commissioned by NASA in 2014 navigating the challenges that will face humanity in the event of extraterrestrial contact and the ensuing attempts at meaningful communication. This publication draws on the expertise of individuals beyond the usual scope of astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, wisely drawing in contemporary anthropologists, cultural historians, semioticians, and archaeologists into the inquiry.

An archive is a collection of stored materials that are preserved around a particular topic, comprising both digital and physical objects. Some archives are living, sustained through generations of collective labor and belief. The scale and scope of archives varies greatly. Some are informally housed in basements, shoeboxes, binders, and spare closets. Others exist institutionally, with codified record-keeping systems, organizational strategies, codes of ethics, and material technologies to ensure the longevity of the artifacts at hand.

An exceedingly rare circle event. A group of hundreds of dark-winged fungus gnat larvae form a circle during mass migration in the larval stage. The closed circle is believed to be formed accidentally when the head of the mass accidentally overtakes its own tail. As more insects join, a strangely beautiful larval contra dance ensues.

Discovered in 2013 in Rising Star Cave in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, Homo naledi existed some 335,000 to 236,000 years ago. The discovery of H. nadeli further emphasized the extended period hominins lived on earth, from as early as one million years ago to as late as 20,000 years ago—including the species H. habilis, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, H. floresiensis, H. rudolfensis, Australopithecus sediba, and many others. This diversity of morphological expression has made some evolutionary scientists begin reclassifying Homo sapiens not as the apex human of development, but as one of many sapiens, in the process proposing new taxonomies, i.e. H. sapiens-neanderthalensis, or H. sapiens-sapiens.

Continuously published since 1888, its iconic yellow spines grace countless shelves and fill hidden-away attic boxes in many American households. The monthly volumes have managed to inspire generations of children, teenagers, and adults alike to discover an expansive world with awe and fascination from the comfort of their armchairs and blanket forts. 

Despite now publishing 35 local editions around the world for places including Japan, Slovenia, Indonesia, the UAE, Kazakhstan, and Thailand, deep within NatGeo’s historical DNA exists, perhaps inadvertently, a silent motor of global gentrification. Simultaneously sparking readers’ curiosity toward animal and microbial life, diverse human populations, geology, and archaeology, it also captions the Earth as a set of statistics, facts, tables, and yummy nature photos — alongside problematic ethnographic examinations — contouring a manageable, Linnaean template to imagine a wholly anthropogenic Earth, delimiting panoptic shadow realties in favor of bright-lit, desk-based, pseudo-colonialism. 

In truth, its virtues as a source of information and inspiration, especially before widespread use of the internet, probably outweigh its flaws, but a proper critical examination of the seeds it has planted within generations of youth feels appropriate, if not overdue.

Water birth is a birthing style adopted by some humans in which the expectant parent, or surrogate parent is intentionally immersed in water for some or all of the labor and delivery process. It’s believed that the natural buoyancy provided by being in water while undergoing labor is of benefit by lowering physical and emotional stresses for the laborer and baby, thereby alleviating pain naturally while increasing oxygen flow and improving the effectiveness of contractions.   

The first documented water birth occurred in 1803 in France, but there is anecdotal evidence of water births being practiced for millennia all over the world — from South Pacific Islanders giving birth in shallow seawater, to Egyptian pharaohs born in the Nile, women of Guyana in South America going to a special demarcated zone along a local river to give birth, and many more.

For some, the decision to give birth in water is linked to the urge to provide a more hospitable, transitional zone between the womb and the baby’s entrance into the world — warm water becoming an interstitial step between the amniotic fluid and the atmosphere of Earth.

Our existence is not singular because nothing makes itself in isolation. We are always accompanied and accompanying, always interconnected. Even our bodies are microcosms composed of a nearly unthinkable number of microorganisms that make every process within ourselves possible, crafting material stories within and without our bodies. Looking outwards, this multiplicity is felt across all kinds of species boundaries: we only belong insofar as we inter-belong, being and unfolding in everyday acts of symbiosis, knitting a dense meshwork of embodied perspectives.

A rock shelter is a naturally occurring architecture formed when a series of large rocks create an eve, or vault, protecting would-be people under it from the elements. Through time, this simple lithic morphology has magnetized humans, becoming places of habitation. More contemporarily, rock shelters have thus frequently become sites of archaeological excavations.

The rock shelter at Lagar Velho is limestone—a sedimentary rock composed of calcium carbonate and formed from primordial organic remains. Because of its unique composition, limestone acts alchemically to preserve bone matter and fossilized objects, which in part created the conditions for the bones at Abrigo do Lagar Velho to be preserved.

The deepest depths of the sea, the edge of a cliff, the electromagnetic feel of touch, the complexity of a cellular organism, quantum dis/appearance: all of these sensations, big and small, inspire awe. Awe is an experience of scale directly correlated to your experience of your own body. It’s an experience where the sheer massiveness, intricacy, or intimacy of a thing, vista, experience, relationship, or concept exceeds you, along with the language and brain-space we use to access, describe, and interpret it. Awe can put us beside ourselves. It can move the bounds of what we thought was possible, both in concept and feeling.

The Paranal Observatory ia an array of four telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert that includes the famed Very Large Telescope (VLT). Among the lines stacking the observatory's C.V. are: pioneering observation techniques leading to the first direct image of an exoplanet; tracking stars around a supermassive black hole; recording the farthest known gamma-ray source; and serving as a set location for numerous Hollywood films.

Archaeology exists as an umbrella holding an entire subset of disciplines dedicated to uncovering time across different registers, such as Archaeoastronomy, Acoustic Archaeology, Experimental Archaeology, Future Archaeology, and New Archaeology. Archaeology is the study of history and prehistory using materials that have been excavated from Earth. Anchored by material culture, the field uses everything from organic remains to manufactured objects in order to grasp at the deep timelines and stories congealed in our present. Historically, the discipline has been extractive, rubbing against the many ethical quandaries related to excavating burial remains and sacred artifacts. Embedded in the practice is also the sensitivity of deciding who will steward objects, tend to their material condition, and properly contextualize and share their cultural meanings.

Shown above is a Neo-Assyrian clay tablet depicting a planisphere or star chart dividing the sky into eight sections that represent the night sky over the ancient city of Nineveh on January 3 and 4 in 650 BCE. Astronomers have identified the chart as depicting the modern constellation Gemini.

A simple limitation undergirds our most basic ability to perceive a three-dimensional object: At any moment, we can only witness one side at a given time. Even as we move about the object, a shadow side will forever be hidden from view. From a sculptural standpoint, our inability to perceive an object in total creates a set of psychedelic, formal, and conceptual opportunities. 

Cartographers have puzzled over this conundrum as it relates to the Earth in very different ways for centuries. The problem distills to a seemingly simple task: how best to flatten a sphere allowing for all-at-once viewing without compromising the map’s accuracy. This undertaking has been attempted dozens of times with different flat projections, yet each generates a crumbtrail of sacrifices in the quest: strange polar distortions, split-up spaces, compromised legibility, and general esotericism.  

In the diagram shown, which uses the triangle as a basic unit, the Dymaxion map was developed by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao as an attempt to show Earth’s continents with minimum distortion. The projection added a novel feature: the ability to fold the map into a three-dimensional icosahedron, a polyhedron with twenty faces, suggesting the volume of the planet.

The term “techno-animism” relates to a spirit world conferred through our digital and networked technologies. As we accumulate ever more technologies that remove us further from direct sensorial  knowledge, we step inadvertently into a magical realm where things perform intricate tasks in secret, removed from view. Here, things can be reimagined as newly spiritualized, enchanted. Our smartphones, the gestalt of which no single human being understands, operate effortlessly, forecasting limitless horizons. The glassy, black keeper of all languages, all knowledge, and all images — a vast and seemingly complete world conferred invisibly through signal.

The Mir Mine is an open-pit diamond mine in the Siberian region of eastern Russia and is one of the largest excavated holes on Earth. Opened in 1957, the mine currently produces about 10 million carats of diamonds per year and is scheduled to remain in operation through 2070.

A mine is the enduring anthro-morphological imprint on and below Earth’s surface as a result of the systematic excavation of geological materials — precious metals, minerals, elements, rare earth matter, gemstones, and rock — that were distributed throughout the Earth’s crust at the time of its formation. Mines, then, are our archaeological legacy, a robust and time-stamped record of insatiable development, expansion, and material transmutation. The process of extracting these non-renewable resources is degenerative and polluting, with lasting negative environmental impacts. 

There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the planet has been completely stripped of its original deposits, skinned and barren. The twisting, esoteric, once-buzzing subterranean pockmarks will go dormant, yet humans’ thirst for resources will not. One possible scenario, albeit with apocalyptic undertones, will be that resource extraction will simply pivot to landfill mining, beginning a second wave of mining operations that some researchers posit we are already slouching toward. An alternate if decidedly sci-fi horizon is the no longer nascent prospect of interplanetary mining operations.

The Tevatron is a massive particle accelerator at Fermilab just outside Chicago, Illinois, whose principal circular shape can be seen from satellite view. The laboratory studies events at the scale of femtoseconds—a billionth of a trillionth of one second. The machine enables a kind of time travel, allowing humans to reach back and study the immediate, split-second moments following the creation of the universe.

Sky surveys, in contrast to astronomical capture that focuses on a singular object, seek to map or image swaths of sky. They are some of the most important databases for astronomy. In a way, we can and have engaged in surveying the sky with the naked eye. Many cultures with ancient astronomical practices did not rely on imaging technology, but rather on spotting areas of darkness and illumination in the night sky. These surveys belong to an ancient lineage of mapping that has advanced over many generations as technology has advanced beyond that of our visioning limits.

Unlike a typical observatory–which is used to observe select areas and objects in the sky–a sky survey observatory captures a series of fragments that encompass the entire observable sky. These images are repeatedly stitched together to create a moving image map of the sky. For this reason, sky surveys are particularly useful in finding moving objects.

Although the weakest of the natural forces, gravity exerts the most influence at a macroscopic scale, guiding the formation of all matter in the cosmos. On Earth, we experience gravity as an invisible background logic binding and fixing matter on the planet. The totality of gravity’s forces (our planet’s rotation and the Moon’s push and pull) at any moment on the surface of Earth is measured as a unit: 1G. Yet because humanity’s emergence is framed in part by gravity’s binding logic and because we are coevolving with other organisms also beholden to its measure, we seldom feel it as an aberrant event. Even so, gravity and its effects can be witnessed all around us — raindrops falling from the sky, drooping and sagging skin on aged bodies, a rock tossed upward only to return to the ground, a slouching wildflower thirsty for water.

The image depicts the mummified hand and forearm of an unidentified premature baby found in the village of Nyárlőrinc, in Southern Hungary, in a medieval cemetery. The hand was discovered holding a copper coin, a custom practiced to help ensure the deceased entrance to the afterlife. Copper has natural preservative qualities, and the coin inadvertently mummified the fetus's small hand.

We descend from others. Ancestors are our shared antecedents, tracing an unbroken chain of survival linking ourselves to our parents, their parents, and parents’ parents. This leads us back to somewhere in the Cambrian Explosion, to a single common ancestor for every living being on Earth.

Broadcast from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico on November 16, 1974, the Arecibo Message (as it has come to be known) is a binary code aimed at the M13 globular star cluster, some 25,000 light years from Earth. The message when deciphered contains pictogram encryptions for the numbers 1-10, elemental atomic numbers for DNA, nucleotide formulae for DNA, double-helix of DNA, a human figure, our solar system, and information about the originating transmitting telescope.

A circle is a shape whose perimeter line curves in on itself, connecting, and in the process creating two discrete zones: an interior space and an exterior. The circle and its dimensional expression, the sphere, can be found at all scales on Earth and in the cosmos: subatomic orbits, the formation of stars, the optics of a full moon, the eye’s iris and pupil, a midday rainbow, water ripples, tree rings, and countless more. As a primary form in which matter on Earth self-organizes, morphologically the circle is an essential concept in engineering, mathematics, calculus, geometry, geodesy, and astronomy.

Earth’s daystar: From our terrestrial vantage, the Sun is a blazing alien disk that predictably traverses the sky, warming and lighting all before slipping beneath the horizon. Its observable skypath and pitch are consistent year over year, but change subtly each day, quietly announcing Earth's journey around the star with respect to its axial tilt. 

All life on Earth has a co-evolved dependency with the sun, its consistent nuclear forces distributing to us just a tiny fraction of its total heat-energy production from some 93 million miles away. All life, from the microbial Proterozoic to multicellular Cambrian explosions, the megafauna of the Mesozoic, and our lives within the Anthropocene, are beholden to the Sun.

As we look out our window this evening to commune with the Sun setting over the horizon, we can easily imagine our early archaic ancestors a mere two million years ago witnessing an identical solar event. Watching the orb grow strange, elliptical, large, red, low. Shadows elongating toward eventual darkness. Though we might consider this sunset-event as a singular moment of the day, it is occurring continuously as a circadian wave wrapping around the Earth in perpetuity. Within each object, stone, plant, being, and building is located a hidden memory-core indexing this rhythmic moment in common communion with our 4.6 billion-year-old sun.

The liminal zone where land and water meet. In its interstitiality, the shoreline proposes a number of unsolvable questions involving measurement. From satellite perspective, the total shoreline of the world measures about 356,000 kilometers. As one zooms in closer to Earth’s surface, however, the fractal quality of the shoreline grows, and with each magnification this cumulative length increases exponentially.

Located in Central Portugal, the Lapedo Valley is a small limestone canyon carved by the Caranguejeira River, 14 km away from Leiria, and 24 km from the Atlantic Ocean. Over eons, the river sculpted the valley’s stone walls and unique protective eaves. This natural ebb and flow of water over time slowly deposited rich sediments that flora could lay roots within. In turn, the emerging flora attracted fauna that were contained within the valley–this made hunting easy for human populations, with the added feature of close shelter.

The valley famously contains a rock shelter and archaeological site where a ceremoniously buried Upper Paleolithic child–also known as the Lapedo Child–was found.

Located within Lighthouse Reef, about 43 miles off the shore of Belize, exists the Great Blue Hole. Made popular by Jacques Cousteau in the early 1970s, the 318-meter-wide and 124-meter-deep sinkhole continues to magnetize the collective imagination of people the world over. The sinkhole is relatively young, formed intermittently during Quaternary glaciation periods 153,000, 66,000, 60,000, and 15,000 years ago.

TODAY, ANOTHER UNIVERSE, 2020
by Jane Hirshfield

The arborist has determined:
senescence      beetles      canker
quickened by drought
                           but in any case
not prunable   not treatable   not to be propped.
And so.
The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.
The trunk where the ant.
The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.
The bark   cambium   pine-sap   cluster of needles.
The Japanese patterns      the ink-net.
The dapple on certain fish.
Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.
The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.
Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.
Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

The image depicts an aspirational but defunct data storage device that ceased production in 2013. The MiniDisc was billed as the optimal music delivery format after CDs came to prominence in the early 1990s, as MiniDiscs combined the digital clarity and listening ease of CDs with the durability and recordability of cassettes.   

Released in 1992, the Sony MZ-1 was the first MiniDisc player to hit the market. The player used the Faraday effect to read the disc with a simple laser and binary code. The compressed sound that is produced by the player is lossy audio; psychoacoustics use the inherent flaws in human sensorial perception to create compressed audio that sounds identical to the uncompressed version.

The format’s demise was built into its origin, which coincided with the emergence of the internet. Although offering very real archival advantages, the MiniDisc could not functionally compete with the internet’s budding file-sharing platforms.

Scientists model the flow patterns of Earth’s liquid outer core in a period of normal polarity; the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, however, presents periods of magnetic abnormality in its magma striping. Here, blue lines are magnetic fields that point toward the center, while yellow away.

This flow pattern generates the Earth’s magnetic field: as convection motions caused by differences in pressure, temperature and composition cause the iron components of Earth’s core to flow, the Coriolis effect forces these into whirlpools. This motion generates an electric current that, in turn, produces the magnetic field.

The glyph was designed by artist Michael Jones McKean with consultation from Jeremiah Chiu. The design leans heavily on the use of the circle within symbology to represent the whole. Bisecting the circle is a straight vertical line denoting the equator. Twelve smaller circles populate the outer diameter, representing each site along the line. The relative spacing between each of these outer circles, although approximate, echoes the actual distance between sites relative to each other along the ring.

Whether thatched, woven, felted, woolen, cotton, quilted, knitted, crocheted, patchwork, fleece, hide, down, or poly-filled, a blanket is a flexible object scaled to the human body functioning as a medium to help its user trap and retain radiant heat. Humans having long ago lost our ancestral fur, a blanket became a necessary proto-technology — a soft, pliable external membrane conforming to the shape of our bodies, helping to stave off chills and regulating temperature. 

The object is typically used during rest and sleep, enfolding and encasing the body or bodies, not always for warmth per se, but for comfort in a broader sense, extending to the psychological state of the blanket-barer. 

The shape and size of blankets through time have been bound by the same distinct anthro-dimensions, linking disparate cultures, peoples, and times through a shared object. Different climates and technologies dictate material shifts, but within an enormous bandwidth of possible variants, there exists a narrowly defined, predictable, and ultimately normative form that continues to be made today.

Belief in ghosts predates written language. Embedded deeply within our oldest belief systems, folklore traditions, and organized religions, ghosts continue to grip us in the modern age. Superstitions and beliefs leaning on the existence of ghosts usually center around the death of an individual, the dead’s spirit claiming a ghostly presence. Ghosts, being elusive, typically displace no volumetric space, yet can claim psychogeographic hold over a place. They are weightless, yet in certain forms, like a poltergeist, can exert material force creating physical disturbances.

Ghosts, in their occupation of extra-dimensional spiritual space and prevalence across history, hint at humans' preoccupation with the afterlife and a quest toward pattern-finding and meaning-making. In this way, ghosts and hauntings are a convenient vessel to attribute any number of unknown forces or events. Ghosts, like shadows or echoes, define in the abstract the contours and limits of human knowledge. Real or imagined, actual or metaphor, they add vital texture to a living world by prompting a contemplation of the interdimensional qualities of consciousness, linking us to ancient and alternative systems of knowledge.

Located in Venezuela, Angel Falls is the world’s highest uninterrupted waterfall with a height of 979 meters (3212 feet), almost twenty times the height of the famed Niagara Falls on the United States–Canada border. The local Indigenous population near Angel Falls — the Pemon — called the falls Kerepakupai Vená, translating to "waterfall of the deepest place." 

The falls are part of a surreal landscape, one seemingly conjured within a CGI environment, composed by dozens of tepuis — flat table-top mountains — and what geologists believe are the mountainous remnants of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana. At two billion years old, some of these structures are among the oldest in the world.

From top left, clockwise: (1) An internationally recognized warning sign, often meaning dangerous radioactivity, used also in computing to mean external or offline storage, referencing the magnetic tape cassettes once used for storing data. (2) Alchemical symbol for gold, also used in pre-Columbian Peruvian holy statues. (3) From the Hobo symbology meaning “here lives a kind woman, tell a pitiful story.” (4) Ancient Chinese ideogram for sunrise, used later in Western astrology with a similar meaning.

Twins are a pair of beings born from the same birth. Twins are produced either as two discrete fertilized eggs or as a singular fertilized egg that splits into two, resulting in identical genetic information. The latter, known as identical twins, exist as genetic doubles, creating the salient reality of repetitive life forms.

Although we have records of early prehistoric sculptures (Venus of Willendorf, et al.), the very first three-dimensional compositions will forever remain in question. They could have very well been something like an inspired twist of hair — an inchoate braid. It's not difficult to imagine Homo habilis parting a friend’s hair, twisting it together, and remaking it into a new, beautiful shape, an extension of simple communal grooming rituals. Our predecessors may have easily found pleasure in the act, not just for the utility of social bonding, but also for a distant, emergent feeling of signification.

A rainbow is an ephemeral, out-of-time object activated by our optical sensory perception. Its gestalt form — a perfect semi-circle composed of individual colors — is produced from the precise triangulation between the sun, water drops in the air, and a human or avian viewer. These three elements must align in perfect symmetry, creating a fixed 42-degree angle from the apogee of the arc, to result in the essential multicolored spectral form. 

A rainbow is one of the most universal forms, transcending time, language, and culture. In its rarity, the sudden emergence of a rainbow is charged with meaning and significance. Interpretations of the rainbow have formed the foundation to countless origin myths and stories.

Witnessing a rainbow is a fleeting experience that binds us to a brief moment in time, while also bridging generations. When we see a rainbow, we commune with our ancestors, seeing exactly the same colors and shapes they saw while astral projecting into the future, sharing in the experience of an identical, out-of-time form that our children’s children will eventually see. Coded within the rainbow is  consistency, an extreme fidelity to its essential form. It does not evolve or degrade in the same way as the organic, the mechanical, or even the geologic. It is constant.

A stone is tossed upward over a pond. The object crests and begins its inevitable fall. The stone picks up velocity as it descends and makes contact with the pond. The water's surface, previously held in tension by a tiny molecular membrane, is disturbed. As the stone sinks to the pond's depths, a column of water rises upwards, peaking, then buckles quickly in a compensatory downward direction, and water ripples stretch outward in concentric capillary waves. On the pond’s surface plane, perfect circular formations are distributed rhymically in every direction.

All bilaterians are thought to have descended from a common ancestor that appeared early in the Cambrian Period, somewhere inside 485-540 million years ago. Over this time span, mammals emerged and evolved more complex cranial systems, including the neocortex  -  which controls higher-order functions such as, cognition, complex motor commands, spatial reasoning and advanced communication. Each mammal species' individual brain morphology and size underscores a set of capacities. 

Brain to over-all weight ratio is generally accepted as a norm when classifying animal intelligence. By sheer size and weight the sperm whale has the largest brain.

The transversal view of a tree exposes its growth rings. Using dendrochronology, we can decode the tree's inner life, including its age, exact year of formation, and history of fire, seasonal weather patterns, disease, climate change and more. In periods of fast growth in the spring, trees form an outer light ring, while periods of slower growth in the autumn are responsible for the dark rings. These rings are used by paleoclimatologists to study past climate conditions as far back as 10,000 years ago. 

The notion of growth rings for moderns is ubiquitous, but knowledge of these rings is not mentioned in the historical record until 300 BCE, in Greece, when advanced metallurgical techniques emerged that could produce saw blades capable of cutting small trees.

An extreme physiological event in which a new human is born—most normatively through the vagina of an adult woman, though in modern times frequently via a cesarean section. Historical precedent attributed female gender to birthing individuals; however, transgender males and gender-nonconforming individuals are also capable of giving birth. The birthing process might be described as both out-of-body and of deep embodiment, with active labor sometimes lasting five hours or more. For humans, the event—along with its bookend, death—is perhaps the most significant waypoint of shared life on Earth. 

A defining physical characteristic of the emergence of H. sapiens was the growth and development of our frontal cortex. With this added cranial girth, birthing became more difficult, arduous, and at times  perilous. This lingering precipice of danger underscores a baseline evolutionary contract, a silent genetic determination, that even while actively courting death’s threshold, our brains in the end had to win out. 

The ceremony of birth, although largely proceduralized in the West, exists as a continuous, unbroken event relay all over Earth, one of pain, exhaustion, elation, and promise. The emotive catharsis that birth brings is at odds with its ubiquity, with 3.5 human births occurring each second.

A boundary is a delineation—politically, physically, spiritually, or emotionally—that defines a threshold or limit. The notion of a boundary in a geopolitical sense is tied to a set of agreed-upon geographic borders that describes in highly specific terms a physical area governed by a particular entity. 

When physically encountered a border can at times feel arbitrary but the structures defined by the complex political and legal machinations maintaining the border via laws, treatises, compacts, land theft, military-might, and the concept of citizenry itself are anything but. This matrix of agreements and their upkeep can lead to widely differing ad hoc solutions, as seen with the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where the tension on both sides of the border has crystalized into major military installations, with each literally prepared for nuclear war. Or the blindingly complex geopolitics circulating around the Gaza–Egypt–Israel barrier. Or the political stakes held in tension by the US–Mexico border.

Existing inside our current lived moment, Twelve Earths falls solidly within the logic of geopolitical boundaries, yet it also casts a wider, panoptic net, imagining speculative borderless conditions. Functionally, 12E’s ring stretches around Earth and passes through 20 countries at 40 discrete border crossings. In the process of circling the globe, it passes through regions, municipalities, cities, neighborhoods, villages, factories, homes, and living rooms, representing a rich diversity of earthly ethnographic possibilities. 

On one level, the ring exists as a omniscience eye, unconcerned with the anthropogenic logics governing political boundaries. So, as it traverses regions maintaining strong national identities and borders, it does so skirting through delicate alpine ecosystems. It traverses rivers with spawning fish. It traces a line through unimaginably dense forests with still undiscovered fauna. It makes contact with 3000-year-old termite mounds and vast, hidden-from-view mycelium networks. It wraps through undersea hydrothermal vents and the alien microbiomes they support. A reef system, an owl’s nest, a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. Worlds within worlds within worlds, unbound and incognizant of borders within anthro-state conventions.

Of the over 100 globally distributed nuclear test and detonation sites in the world, the Nevada’s Yucca Flat was the most active, ground zero to 739 nuclear tests. Yucca Flat is part of the Nevada Test and Training Range in Nye County, Nevada, an enormous classified area, roughly the size of Rhode Island, earmarked entirely for nuclear testing and waste storage. Its open, sandy geology and easily drilled sedimentary layers made the area ideal for both atmospheric and underground nuclear tests. Incredibly, Yucca Flat, known as the world's most irradiated location, is less than an hour’s drive from Las Vegas.

The site, and to the south, Yucca Mountain—the United States’s primary nuclear waste depository—are indigenous lands of the Western Shoshone peoples, who still claim legal rights over the area and consider Yucca Mountain a sacred site.

Scientists have long theorized the existence of other planets outside of the Solar System, but until recently, they could not confirm it. The first true detection of an exoplanet took place in 1992 with the discovery of several terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. In the years following, humans’ known cache of exoplanets has grown exponentially, totaling 4268 confirmed exoplanets as of 2020. 

As spending on costly speculative science is driven to some degree by public support, exoplanet research has inevitably slouched toward an interest in ourselves. This built-in anthropocentrism has manifested an urge within exoplanetary research to discover ourselves again in the cosmos, the search for a planet identical to Earth.

Somewhat rare, virtually silent energy stations requiring a large circurcular footprint and precise geometry, concentrated solar power plants are currently located in Australia, South Africa, Spain, Morocco, the United States, India, and China. In each example, a tall, central monolith is erected. Stored in its apex are thousands of pounds of salt. Circling this vertical structure are hundreds of identical, concave heliostats tracking the sun’s daily arc across the sky. With geometric precision, the sun’s rays are reflected toward the top of the tower, heating the salt until it is molten. This burning core turns water into vapor which acts upon a turbine, in turn producing electricity. The tower glows — a small sun that can be seen for miles. The structure is a temple to the sun, a techno-spiritual zone of awe and surrender.

An aerial image of beached sperm whales from November 14, 2017. Whale beachings, a type of animal suicide, are still largely mysterious events, though there is evidence that whales have engaged in this behavior throughout history. A few explanatory theories circulate, involving environmental changes, echolocation, and geomagnetic disturbances, as well as strong social cohesion among larger cetaceans.

An adornment is an addition to the body worn to enhance or distinguish the wearer. Adornments can include cosmetics, jewelry, clothing, accessories, hair grooming, body modifications, head gear, tattoos, and piercings. Perforated shells are considered among the oldest additive adornments found at human sites dating as far back as 160,000 BC. Adornments can be worn to communicate cultural, social, or religious information about the wearer such as their gender role, area of origin or, life passages. It also functions as an expressive art reflecting tradition, nature, craft and personality. 

In addition to outwardly communicating information about an individual, adornments can affect the self-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 within the adornment. In this way, a simple piece of jewelry, or new braid can unlock secret psychological dimensions within the wearer, activating dormant chapters of their being.

Even as many adornments can subtly alter the psychology of the wearer, they can also determine - subtly or remarkably - how the body is able to perform. Illustratively, footwear actively conscripts or enhances a new set of capacities to the wearer, influencing gate, verticality, speed of moment, and self-consciousness.

Pictured here are more than 50 massive, upright stones arranged in a 110-foot-diameter circle comprising a late Neolithic to early Bronze Age megalith in Northern Ireland. 

A megalith is a massive stone typically arranged in coordination with other stones and deliberately placed by prehistoric cultures. While visually similar, megaliths vary broadly in location, size, purpose, and configuration. They can be seen all over the world, scattered throughout Africa, Asia, stretching to the Korean peninsula, and as distant as Micronesia, but live most famously at sites like Easter Island in the Pacific and England’s Stonehenge.

Exactly how megaliths were moved into place and why remains a matter of speculation. It seems some were tombs; others appear to align astrologically, pointing to a function as archaic observatories or, more simply, elaborate solstice clocks chiming once per year. More speculatively, others may have been part of elaborate ley lines drawn in the landscape. In all cases, they appear to hold a ritualistic presence.

The objects, in their massive weight—some stones are heavier than a tractor-trailer and likely were hauled twenty or more miles—present a series of open questions about our ancestors' relationship to time and permanence and the built-in communicative possibility of their actions, made permanent in stone surviving vast stretches of time.

CosmicOS, is one of various language systems designed by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) community in attempts to develop a mode of communication with intelligent extraterrestrial life. CosmicOS was inspired by Hans Freudenthal's Lincos language system that functions using mathematical principles and logic. The message is written with only four basic symbols representing the binary digits ‘one’ and ‘zero,’ and open and close brackets.

Within the Alto Molocue District of Mozambique, Mount Lico's 700-meter sheer walls hide away a caldera — a volcanic crater. Long dormant, the volcano improbably holds a 30-hectare old-growth rainforest, whose relative inaccessibility and invisibility from ground level has protected it from human intrusion.

A circle’s creation creates a delineated interior zone, while in the process establishing a secondary zone of non-containment: the outside. The modeling of these two zones creates a tension between the perception of inside and outside space. If not careful, this diagrammatic naming of “inside” and “outside” can become more real than reality itself. This seemingly basic understanding can be released through a reimagining of this construct of division.

In 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote in A Thousand Plateaus:

“Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join the forces of the future, cosmic forces.”

Mourning is the non-linear practice of processing the passing of a being. While it is often ritualized with rites and conventions to ensure the safe passage of a being, and to honor the tender transition between life and death, mourning is typically a process that cannot be predicted or circumvented. Although sometimes given a distinct envelope of time to process, mourning can bend across time and over lifetimes, etching stages of emotion, affect, and ritual over its course. Mourning is often experienced socially as an externalization of feelings of sorrow and grief, inviting these to be held communally. The depths of one’s grief often echoes in parallel the love one has for the deceased, and calls for complex, devotional untanglings commensurate with that care.

Open Signal, or 12E|OS was a convening held in the summer of 2018 in West Hollywood (see the entry for “Open Signal”) that sought to speculate on a set of probing questions about deep time communication. Prior to the weekend retreat, which included twelve invited participants from around the world, artist Michael Jones McKean and co-curator David Kim created a reader to distribute to Open Signal participants.

Among the texts shared were: Hannah Arendt’s “Man’s Conquest of Space”; David Bohm’s “On Communication”; Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel”; Italo Calvino's “The Sword of the Sun”; Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Circles”; Donna Haraway’s “Making Kin”; a medley of short quotes on memes and communication theory; the Sandia Report; Samuel Scheffler’s “The Normativity of Tradition”; and Susan Sontag’s “The Aesthetics of Silence.” These readings are followed by a compendium of images. The reader is available as a PDF upon request.

Housed now in the Museum of London, this ceramic tin-glazed earthenware plate was allegedly discovered in the London Sewer. The plate was most likely made in Southwark, England, in 1661. It is unknown exactly if this phrase was at the time meant to convey “we are, together, of this Earth,” or to be taken more comically (“we are just dirt”).

A song is a vocal incantation performed by a number of animals on Earth, including humans. Song, being an inherently ephemeral form of expression, lacks material embodiment making it largely absent within our archaeological record before the advent of recorded audio platforms. 

In the modern era, love songs are by far the most common form. The stylistic range of possible songs is breathtaking, but a number of formal qualities seem to persist: the use of an intro, verse, refrain, chorus, hook, bridge, break, repetition, and outro all executed within three to four minutes.

Although most popular music has an extremely short cultural half-life, some songs manage to connect listeners across time, space, and social boundaries. The pop genre is a site of tremendous competition with the goal of achieving mass appeal, yet these songs must operate within an extremely narrow bandwidth of creative possibility and adhere to pre-established orthodoxies.

At the risk of over-determining scope, studio recordings that reach levels of perfection might be “Walk On By” (1964) by Dionne Warwick; “Hold Me Now 12” Extended Mix” (1983) by the Thompson Twins; "22nd Century" (1971) by Nina Simone; “Sara” (1979) by Fleetwood Mac; “Buildings” (2013) by Yung Lean featuring Thaiboy Digital and Bladee; “Nights,” (2016) by Frank Ocean; "My Favorite Things," (1961) by John Coltrane (w/ McCoy Tyner); or "Helplessly Hoping" (1969) by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Such extreme levels of sonic coordination achieve something close to transcendence into a higher order of creation. In these and similar cases, the song becomes divine, mystical, seemingly delivered into the world without creation, as if it were always there. 

A subset of recorded live performances might fall into a separate category, where song and performer momentarily cohere, reaching the highest limit of joy. In instances such as these, one can find beauty where a shadow of terror forms, reminding us of our own fragility and inevitable oblivion. Songs of this ilk might be “Love Cry,” a bootleg recording from John Coltrane’s funeral in 1967, by Albert Ayler; “See My Jumper Hanging On the Line,” a 1978 field recording by R.L. Burnside; or “Walk In The Park,” Live at WFUV/The Alternate Side, by Beach House.

Red ochre is a natural terracotta-hued, clay-earth pigment that contains a mixture of ferric oxide, clay, and sand. It has been found in archaeological sites throughout Europe and Asia, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic. Its presence indicates early human associations of color, meaning, ritual, and symbolism. Those buried were often enshrouded in thickly painted red ochre hides, in effect staining recovered bones a deep red color. This color–and its powerful association to bodies through blood–likely had symbolic resonance for ancient people.

Archaeoastronomy is the interdisciplinary field that merges the study of the sky with analysis of how the sky has determined ancient cultural patterns, behaviors, and methods. As a study, it also focuses on symbols and myths that are born from the sky.

One of the largest areas of study included in archaeoastronomy is the link between astronomy and agriculture in ancient civilizations. In the ancient capital of the Tawantinsuyu, Machu Picchu, an observatory was built using two man-made lakes as mirrors to the night sky. These proto-mirrors let the Incans know what seasons were approaching by analyzing how the constellations lined-up in the lakes. These constellations were uniquely viewed in concert with dark patches–nebulae or dark clouds — in the milky way to form the images of animals that would represent the seasons.

The image depicts a virtual reconstruction of a Neanderthal fetus based on the fossil remains of a neonate Neanderthal discovered in the Mezmaiskaya Cave in Russia, and an adult female Neanderthal discovered in the Tabun Cave in Israel. 

Modern technology and recent fossil analysis have allowed archaeologists and anthropologists to virtually reconstruct and study the conditions of childbirth and early development of Neanderthals to better understand the evolutionary development of modern humans. The reconstruction suggests that Neanderthal’s encountered similar obstetric challenges as modern humans based on newborn cranium sizes. These challenges would necessitate having social structures within communities in place to help with the birthing process.

A caldera is a massive geomorphic object created in the wake of a volcanic eruption. The object exists as forensic evidence relaying intricate details of the past volcanic event. Formally, a caldera is typically circular, bowl-shaped, with nearly vertical walls. Over time, land collapses into its interior volume created by the emptied-out magma chamber. The biggest calderas can reach 50 km in diameter. Some become filled with water.

An MRI machine is an intricate machine for advanced medical diagnostics that in its complexity culls the limits of Earth's material storehouse. The machine expresses these thresholds by underwriting a new form of animism: techno-animism. Although the machine's inner workings are mappable, they escape the complete grasp of any one individual, creating an object of mystery and unknowability. The object is the final site harnessing massively diverse processes and scales—from operations at huge rare-earth Gadolinium mines in Mongolia to invisible super-charged magnetic fields realigning the rotational axis of protons found in living tissues.

How water emerged on Earth has been a mystery to researchers, though a number of theories exist. One posits that water didn't so much emerge on Earth as accumulate through trillions of meteorite impacts, each containing some amount of water. The Allende meteorite fell in Mexico in 1969 and has helped support the science behind the theory of asteroidal water. The idea that water — the defining substance of Earth from which all biotic life has evolved — is actually extraterrestrial in origin challenges a set of presumptive origin myths and links all earthly life more directly to the larger cosmos.

The Pinus longaeva bristlecone variant is a rare tree species found only in the subalpine groves at high altitude in sections of Utah, Nevada, and eastern California. Bristlecone pines are among the longest-living life forms on Earth, with some trees aged over 5000 years. They are particularly well adapted to survive in harsh environments with dry, rocky soil, cold temperatures, high winds, and short growing seasons. These conditions in aggregate serve to slow the tree’s physiology, dialing down metabolic consumption, wherein the tree lives within an envelope of exceedingly slow, steady-state growth, subsisting near the threshold of dormancy.

This coral atoll consists of 40 islands and is part of the Ralik Chain of the Marshall Islands. Inhabited as early as 1000 BCE, Enewetak Atoll was used as a primary nuclear testing ground from 1946 to 1958 for the United States. On the atoll's easterly edge lies the Runit Dome, a massive concrete dome completed in 1980 to bury an estimated 73,000 cubic meters of radioactive material.

A garden is a planned or semi-planned outdoor space where humans tend to vegetal life. Gardens can be for aesthetic enjoyment, food production, or some hybrid of both. In each case, the care of a garden can bring deep pleasure to the gardener. There are many normative garden formats with varying aesthetic protocols, yet many, especially private gardens are more or less unplanned. 

Some gardens become intergenerational projects, and their upkeep and maintenance is shared, dissolving individual authorship in the process. A garden’s unspoken contract of care extends indefinitely into the future, a preserved trust that someone will adapt, maintain, care for, and continue the garden. This commitment is silently embedded within the garden’s logic; its distinction among other things, its beauty, and its coordinated and accreted efforts all silently signal to future generations that it is special and should be maintained. A garden is a hyperbolic space, one that even in its most naturalistic state is a construct, seated within the world but separate from the world at large.

Harboring the world's southern magnetic pole, the icy landmass is the world's driest, coldest, windiest, highest, and most sparsely populated continent. Although it congregates a global hub of research stations led by 29 nations, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty denies any nation’s claims to its land and with it bans all military activity, mining, and nuclear research.

Pictured here, an elegant expression of the golden ratio using circles.

Memes are a de facto mode of communication for generations reared since the popularization of the internet. The meme exists both as a pathway to specific information and as an entrance to a club, with the ability to decode a meme offering proof of access. Because memes exist within an endless web of self-referentiality, the ability to decipher a meme can require hours, if not years, of accumulated attention, tracking more and more subdivided and arcane annals of popular internet culture. 

The meme pictured leans on the myth of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The format consists simply of four quadrants, each a representation for the horsemen’s plagues: famine, war, death, and pestilence. In this much discussed variant from 2017, famine is depicted as Tide Pods; war as Ugandan Knuckles; death as Logan Paul; and pestilence as the “lost spaghet.” With precise vectorial knowledge, one can unlock the meme and gain access to a complex, long-form joke, albeit one with an exceedly short shelf life.

At its simplest, shelter is a found or constructed proto-architectural structure for habitation. It is a zone that shields us from a degree of danger, real or perceived, while increasing one’s comfort, however slight. On one side of the spectrum, shelter can exist as a ready-made creation of Earth–like rock shelters and caves–or as a skeletal architecture that provides a simple roof with otherwise no separation from the exterior world. At its most insular, shelter can incorporate a cascade of increasingly industrial technologies to build more complete removal from the exterior world: concrete walls, climate control, piped in/out water supply, and custom zones for highly specific activities.

Mathematical definitions, relaying in the most direct terms a set of mathematical precepts —a primer for communication, The drawing was produced by Frank Drake for the Voyager spacecraft Golden Record.

First released in 1962, the compact cassette tape is a form of media consisting of magnet-coated, polyester plastic film that is passed and wound between two miniature spools. The format was plagued by poor sound quality and durability issues but was hugely popular—due to its portable format and the ability of users to record sounds from the radio and other sources and to make copies of existing recordings—before being made obsolete by CDs. This capacity to make recordings from life kicked off a multi-generational project that has divided and encompassed real and performed experience—creating a proto site to practice hyperbolic performativity, more contemporaneously embodied within social media and an emerging Web 3.0. Speaking about the advent of the cassette tape, Andy Warhol said: 

“The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it's not a problem anymore. An interesting problem was an interesting tape. Everybody knew that and performed for the tape. You couldn't tell which problems were real and which problems were exaggerated for the tape. Better yet, the people telling you the problems couldn't decide anymore if they were really having the problems or if they were just performing. During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me.”

Self-healing concrete is created by adding select bacteria to a novel concrete mixture that facilitates autogenous repairs. Over time as cracks inevitably emerge in the cured surface, rainwater seeps in, activating the dormant bacteria, which begin feeding on calcium lactate (present within the mixture) which then transforms into insoluble limestone. This limestone scars over, effectively repairing the cracks. 

The bacteria also consume oxygen and steer this corrosive element away from any metal rebar reinforcements, deterring rust and adding another firewall to decay. The bacteria can lie dormant in the concrete for up to 200 years, essentially creating a living structure that sustains itself over several generations.  

As Twelve Earths explores the communicative possibilities related to extended, extra-generational time horizons, we also are experimenting with materials — some highly speculative — that may help to encode a communiqué.

Proposed as a thought experiment on identity and the reality of objects, the metaphysical conjecture imagines Theseus’ ship moored at an Athenian port. According to legend, the people of Athens made a pact with Apollo to maintain Theseus’ ship in battle-ready condition. This practice continued for over 200 years. Over the years, piece by piece, the entire ship, though still identical to the original, was replaced until none of the original ship’s materiality existed. A central question emerges: Is the Ship of Theseus still the Ship of Theseus, or has some new object replaced the prior? 

Addressing the question proposes first that objects are not immune from time, and are seated within four dimensions — three spatial and one temporal. Arising from this baseline, the question of identity can chart numerous paths. One proposes that the deep material, atomic reality composing an object, although entirely real, is not the location wherein identity exists. The ongoing maintenance of an object’s gestalt form re-energizes its hold on an agreed-upon identity.  

Another interpretation is that the ship, despite all intentions, will always be a different version of itself regardless of repairs. With each sliver of time, an object is created anew—a fracturing and wholly discrete history of unique entities.

Classically, craters are the result of massive meteorites making impact with the Earth's surface, the quintessential circular indentation evidence of the impact long after the event itself. In the age of the anthropocene, craters at the scale of super-large impact events can also be created through human intervention, as is the case with the 1962 Sedan Crater in Nevada. This 390-by-100-meter crater is the result of a nuclear test, the largest cratering shot produced by the infamous Plowshare Program, which in the process exposed over 13 million people to radiation in an instant.

In centuries past, massive churches, castles, mosques, pyramids, and megalith structures were among a group of complex intergenerational building projects, some taking more than 100 years to complete. Today, even the most extensive structures now can be constructed in little over a year. However, a small cadre of object-architecture exists that stretches the limits of technical possibility and financing. Among this small group are astronomical observatories.

As of August 2020, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (pictured here in August 2018 and formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) perched atop Cerro Pachón in the Coquimbo Region of Chile is still under construction. The object was conceived of abstractly as early as 1996, with a full-scale design completed in 2008; site excavation commenced in 2011. With construction delayed due to COVID-19, first light and final commissioning have been pushed to 2022–23. 

Aside from COVID, the extended timeline is due to a number of factors: the object’s raw technical ambition pushing construction into unnavigated territory, as well as the closely couched and cascading economic realities of building a complex machine on a remote mountaintop location with equipment fabricated around the world with miniscule tolerance thresholds. Further, time itself becomes a competing factor wherein a project must weather vastly different funding climates with multiple global economic slowdowns, rebounds, and expansions; differing political imperatives that call into relief cross-border collaborative efforts; or even intra-border, left-right political sea changes. All the while, the speed of technological change runs parallel to construction, threatening to obsolesce elements of the project before it's even complete.

The Atacama is a desert located in the North of Chile, bordering Perú. One of the driest locations in the world, it was part of the massive 15-to-16th-century Tawantinsuyu Empire that ran vertically across a large swath of the continent. The Atacama Desert consists of a massive plateau along 1000 km of South America’s Pacific coast line, whose 5000 m elevation provides an optimally dark environment for various astronomical observatories, including those on Cerros Pachón and Tololo.

Under construction in the Antofagasta region of Chile since 2014, the Cerro Dominador Solar Thermal Power Plant’s concentric array of 10,600 mirror heliostats came online to produce power in February 2020. As with all concentrated solar facilities, the system’s ground-based, concave mirrors track the Sun, angling its light and heat energy towards a central tower. The Cerro Dominador Facility tower holds an astounding 45,000 tons of molten salt containing heat energy that is stored to be converted to grid-based electrical energy.

Humans have traveled to and inhabited every region of Earth’s landmasses. Theories of early migration track hominins moving from Africa in waves starting about two million years ago with H. erectus, traveling as far as Eurasia. Other archaic humans such as H. heidelbergensis, the likely ancestor of Denisovans and H. neanderthalensis, followed soon after, crossing land bridges soon to be covered by water. However, the remains of archaic species such as H. floresiensis in Indonesia and H. naledi suggests the possibility that these species may be descended from people potentially predating H. erectus, calling into question theories of that species existing as the original pioneering ancestor.  

Modern humans are speculated to have dispersed from Africa around 300,000 years ago, interbreeding with local archaic varieties of human as they reached inner Southeast Asia around 60,000 years ago. What is considered the main wave of modern humans started 55,000 years ago, spreading across the globe. This migratory wave is thought to have ended 4000 years ago in Polynesia. Rapid dispersal across every region of Earth evidences a species that at the very least was curious and committed to movement, if not outright exploration.

Believed to be the eerie remains of a massive swordfish, the large eyeball depicted here washed ashore in Florida in 2012, presumably after being excised by a deep-sea angler. The object arrives on shore as omen, a talisman of dark, foreboding futures.

Books are a durable technology designed at the scale of the human body to store and transmit information. Books emerged out of tablature, scrolls, and codices as a way to record and share increasingly complex, usually textual information. There have been approximately 130 million book titles published in history, but this does not account for the vast numbers of unpublished works, diaries, journals, zines, and artist books that also exist within the form. In total, there are hundreds of billions of books in circulation and private collections. 

Mass literacy emerged in lockstep with the development of printing presses capable of producing manuscript copies for cheap distribution. In this way, books exist both as vessels of specific information but also invent the possibility for information itself to newly exist and be transmitted. Born out of the magical, nonlinearity of oral folklore traditions, books, and with it reading, brought on a new style of thinking, imagining, and processing. With its determined linearity, as well as baked-in deployment of “beginnings” and “endings,” books and book reading also ushered in a shift in how we began to reconceptualize time.

A ritual is an iterative act, co-created and renewed by those choosing to enact it. Rituals can be either private, community-based, or institutionally scaled. They can be performed for any number of purposes, including but not limited to: good luck, superstition, spiritual and religious communion, social cohesion, or the simple act of finding pleasure in continuity and purpose through codified repetition. As a container of spiritual entanglement, rituals are often enforced through handed-down gestures that take symbolic significance. However, there is always the threat of risk here–should the ritual be simply “performed,” through repetition, the very acts that once built meaning and definition could become flat robotic gestures, thoroughly devoid of real embodied meaning.

A series of pendants were discovered in 1998 in the Lapedo Valley of Leiria, Portugal, at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho archaeological site. They were found alongside the remains of a ceremoniously buried skeleton now known as the “Lapedo Child.” The site revealed a tiny perforated shell. The shell, a common Littorina obtusata, or flat periwinkle, was coated with ochre pigment and featured a pronounced, intentionally carved-out, circular hole. The shell’s discovery near the child’s neck led researchers to believe that it was part of a necklace, perhaps a pendant.

Accompanying the shell were a series of ochre-stained, perforated deer canines. It is believed that the teeth formed a headdress for the ritual burial. The smallness of these objects–none over two centimeters–and the delicate handiwork adds to a feeling of preciousness. Infused with the life of the maker and the wearer, the amulet provides a form of metaphysical protection, whether for a wearer in this plane or someone who has passed into another.

The child’s remains and ceremonial artifacts are kept in the National Archaeology Museum in Lisbon, Portugal.

On December 31, 1986, after five sequential one-year performances staged in and around New York City, artist Tehching Hsieh released a characteristically enigmatic letter stating that he had a thirteen-year plan. During that time he would make art but not show it, and this work would conclude on his 49th birthday, the eve of the new millennium. Along with this short missive, he released an image listing the span of years bookending the project, along with the word “EARTH.” He then largely disappeared from public life. 

Hsieh emerged on January 1, 2000, releasing a simple, text-based collage that read, “I kept myself alive. I passed the Dec 31, 1999.” For all of Hseih’s legendarily intense rigor, this new work, in its outward laissez-faire formlessness, alienated many of his admirers, who considered it a footnote to his earlier performances. 

Over time, the piece in its scope and simple terms — living on Earth; staying alive; experiencing time and life directly, unperturbed by the framing machinations of performed gestures — is one of the most misunderstood, enigmatic, and important artworks of the last century.

The Great Circuit, 2004–06, is a conceptual artwork by Michael Jones McKean that determined the longest straight-line route around the earth that someone might conceivably travel. The route takes into consideration the millions of imperceptible shifts in elevation encountered when traveling on foot to ultimately arrive at the longest path around the Earth. The project in many ways is the foundation for Twelve Earths.  

The Great Circuit began in 2004 as a conceptual query into static limitations of our physical worlds overlaid by our ever-increasing technological capacities to decode previously unsolvable riddles. After two years of studio research, McKean—with the help of Grand Arts, in Kansas City, Missouri—commissioned the University of Kansas Department of Geography and Cartography to build a computer program to sift and arrange billions of newly available geographic data points. In late spring of 2006, the route was discovered.

The original Gaelic name for the cave, An Uamh Bhin, translates to “the melodious cave” because the ocean winds seem to sing as they pass through this geologic system. Renamed later for a hero in Irish mythology, the cave structure is composed of a stunning example of hexagonally jointed, vertical basalt columns formed by Paleocene lava flow. The cave architecture feels more in line with a CGI environment than slo-mo geologic creation.

An object is an entity that has acquired material coherency and can be distinguished from other things, other objects. The coherence that maintains an object’s discrete reality can be extremely ephemeral, like with super-heavy, short-lived elements that exist for only fractions of a second — or, inversely, highly stable, as in enormous superclusters containing hundreds of galaxies. Objects, however seemingly stable, are in processes of transmuting into other morphological forms, other substances, or in some cases other kinds of objects altogether. This transformation occurs at vastly different temporal registrations — from the million-year tectonic clock of a mountain range to the overnight ripening of a banana.

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert is an astronomical interferometer that uses 66 radio telescopes to achieve the world's most sensitive millimeter and submillimeter wavelength observations.

The Richat Structure in the Sahara Desert is a deeply eroded, massive circular dome with a diameter of 40 kilometers (25 miles). Its origins are still mysterious, but it is believed to be what remains of a geologic dome formed about 100 million years ago. The patterning and concentric variation somewhat particular to the Richat are a result of the harder and softer sedimentary rocks eroding at different rates.

Although the site has led to many archaeological discoveries including Acheulean stone tools, it is believed that the structure’s defined circular gestalt shape was not discovered until humans made their way into space and could see it from high above.

Shown here is an image of Hurricane Lane, a Category 5 tropical cyclone which existed for 14 days in 2018 in the Pacific Ocean, eventually making landfall on Hawaii. Hurricanes are emergent weather events that gain strength based on a number of macro-scale forces: the Earth’s spin, oceanic warming patterns, and a combination of cool temperatures and high humidity in the lower to middle troposphere. The formation of the central eye relays visibly that the weather event has achieved full coherency, maturing into its short but powerfully destructive life as one of Earth's most massive objects.

Pangea is the earth's most recent major supercontinent—the congealed, momentary meta-continent composed of the planet’s currently distributed land masses. The supercontinent was centered on the equator and surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa. Pangea assembled 335 million years ago from earlier continental units including Laurentia, Baltica, and Gondwana, which had previously broken off from the preceding supercontinent Pannotia. Pangea began to break apart into the present-day continents 175 million years ago, with Australia being the last continent to cleave from the Arctic around 55-60 million years ago. The formation and separation of landmasses is understood in terms of plate tectonics. Today, the breakup continues in the Red Sea Rift and East African Rift. Future major supercontinents are predicted to emerge in 250 million years.    

Pangea and its steady slo-mo morphological transmutation over billions of years evidences vast  expanses of temporal variability occurring simultaneously on Earth. Imagine the lifespan of a fairy fly, an insect barely larger than the period at the end of this sentence: its birth, growth, reproduction, and death compressed within just a few turns of Earth on its axis.

Launched by the European Space Agency from the Guyana Space Center aboard Ariane 5 in 2002, Envisat — short for “environmental satellite” — is now an inactive, eight-ton satellite orbiting the earth every 101 minutes. The largest civilian object in space, the satellite helped make huge leaps in the holistic study of Earth’s systems, including atmospheric chemistry, ozone depletion, oceanography, wind, hydrology, agriculture, hurricane formation, elevation modeling, pollution, cartography, and climate change. In 2012, the satellite lost contact with Earth, but it continues its orbit, which pivots around the North and South Poles, slowly tracking over the entire surface of the planet each year.

Considered some of the most sophisticated skywatchers in pre-Columbian North America, the Skidi Pawnee mapped and recorded the celestial region above their lands with near-perfect accuracy. The Skidi Pawnee were less concerned with the sun and moon, focusing most of their astronomical efforts on further-away stars, from which they believed they had once descended. A particular circular constellation the Skidi called the Council of Chiefs formed the basis of their culture, the circle shape guiding everything from governance and architecture to social interactions, agriculture, and religious beliefs.

Designed in South Korea in 1987 primarily for the US market, the Clairtone 7985 Promax J-1 Super Jumbo (sometimes branded as “Tecsonic”) is a massive boombox stretching 31 inches long and 16 1/2 inches tall, weighing over 25 pounds with 10 D batteries installed for portable operation. The boombox itself is an assemblage of hundreds of discrete interlocking, cast and factory-fabricated parts. 

The object factored heavily into the plot of director Spike Lee’s famed Do the Right Thing (1989). In the film, the boombox was carried by Radio Raheem until its emotional climax in which the owner of Sal’s Pizzeria destroys the object with a wooden bat, setting into motion Raheem’s death at the hands of police by chokehold asphyxiation. Simply following plot points, the boombox could be written away as an elaborate MacGuffin device, but its energy and ontology in the film run much deeper, as it is the medium Raheem uses to interface with the world. Metaphorically, the boombox becomes a campfire, a talisman, a techno-amulet, an oracle that is itself powerful, empowering its users through its mystical, agentic properties.

Care practices are formations of community maintenance that begin on a one-to-one scale, with the fractal potential to replicate at the scale of an entire community and beyond. At their most aspirational, care practices are ritualistic in their consistency, impetus, and devotion. They seek mutual preservation, nourishment, growth, and proper respect executed through an infinite number of sensitive gestures and offerings. The practice of caring for another being–an object, or body in the widest sense–demands a kind of other-seeing that dissolves one’s own ego. To care is to attend to another’s needs and desires; listening for how to proceed requires an act of unfolding our assumptions about the other. A practice of care is a transferable skill set offering endless seeds for creativity in the flow of iteration; these seeds are necessary to both express love and offer protection.

Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, known familiarly as Siegfried & Roy, were German-American magicians made famous by their feline stage companions, often white lions and tigers. During a 2003 performance, a white Bengal tiger named Mantecore mauled Roy, severing his spine and nearly causing him to bleed to death. The event led to the cancellation of the duo’s show at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas and effectively ended their careers.

The moment of contact between Mantecore and Roy can be viewed deterministically as an inevitable live-action metaphor, in which the animal’s activated agency lives in response to a human — and especially Euro-American colonialist — desire to control nature and to re-contour its inherent wildness; to tame, dominate, and possess it.

In 2020, Roy died of complications from the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

The image depicts a Sony CD-R (compact disc-recordable), a standardized object exactly 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick. The flat, round form encodes data on reflective material, sandwiched between polycarbonate etched with microscopic bumps that interact with a laser from either a compact disc player, for music, or an optical drive, for computer applications and files. All data encoded on CDs is binary, existing as ones and zeros, making it largely inaccessible without a translator. The format was co-developed by Philips and Sony in 1979 and was released publicly in 1982. The CD, like vinyl albums, 8-track, cassette tapes, VHS, beta, Zip drives, and floppy disks, is obsolete, with the production of CDs having largely phased out by the mid-2000s. Well over 200 billion CDs have been manufactured.

The Vera C. Rubin Telescope employs the most powerful camera ever built. Built at SLAC in California, at 5.5 ft (1.65 m) by 9.8 ft (3 m) it is roughly the size of an SUV. Its vast sensor works as a techno iris, and at 3,200 megapixels, it will unlock more details of the universe than we could have ever imagined. The camera's base, built directly into bedrock, binds the camera to Earth itself. Poetically, this appendage to Earth can be furthered, the camera viewed as a prosthetic eye made for the Earth to see and connect with celestial-kind.

Lifetime is the temporal envelope in which a form (organic or inorganic) exists before undergoing a final-state change that ends the continuity towards existence. For organic entities, a lifetime is normatively bookended by one’s birth and death. Lifetime more speculatively can be expanded to include non-living entities–a VHS player, a house, etc. The endurance of objects through planned obsolescence, disintegration, and perceptions of brokenness informs the rubric of product design–beginnings and endings marked by production, replacement, and disposal. The pathway of a lifetime converges, diverges, and intimately overlaps through time. It weaves between objects, animals, humans, plants, planets, and the universe itself. As inexact segments, lifetimes are often optimized, whether foreclosed or lengthened, for desired outcomes: the elongation of an average human lifespan, the space-age promise of plastics.

An earthquake is a geological event perceived as the shaking of Earth's surface, sometimes felt simultaneously by millions of people spread over thousands of square miles. An earthquake is usually the result of at least two tectonic plates moving and grinding against one another. Earthquakes are short but extremely memorable moments, where the trusted ground itself, along with our vertically built environments, becomes momentarily unreliable, fluid. They mark instances of extreme awareness that our physical world, which generally appears stoic and inert, is undergirded by unpredictable, chaotic, and unimaginably strong forces.

Because of its relative isolation on the Floridian Peninsula and sheer distance from the Bering Strait land bridge, which historically delivered migrating people out of Asia into North America, it is believed that the first human populations arrived to what is now referred to as “Cape Canaveral” only about 10,000 years ago, extremely late. 

Before the colonial era, the Ais and Timucuan people both frequented the area due to its abundance of seafood and edible vegetation. Having never physically visited the cape itself, the infamous conquistador Juan Ponce de León claimed the region for Spain while searching for the fountain of youth; its first documented mention, though, as “Cape Canavera,” dates some 50 years later to 1564. The location was briefly under French control before being reclaimed by the Spanish, and then years later became a British territory under the first Treaty of Paris. The area eventually became a US territory in 1783, following the Revolutionary War, and was granted statehood in 1845. 

In the summer of 1950, the United States’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known commonly as NASA, designated Cape Canaveral as its primary launch site. The location offered an amalgam of nearly perfect geo-conditions (its poor weather withstanding) for large-scale rocketry operations. Next to acres and acres of unpopulated land to its east, the cape juts into a horizon of water in the Atlantic Ocean. Further, the site capitalizes on its relative proximity to the Earth’s equator, where the linear velocity of Earth’s surface is greatest, allowing aloft spacecraft launched at a slight easterly pitch to be aided by Earth’s natural rotation, within seconds placing rocket over sparsely populated ocean waters where spent combustion stages can crash-land in isolation.

The blue whale is the largest animal ever to have existed on Earth. There are four blue whale subgroups, the largest growing to nearly 100 feet in length and 173 tons in weight. Though hunted nearly to extinction by the twentieth century, blue whale populations have since rebounded, though they still face significant threats from illegal whaling, collisions with vessels, ocean contamination, and global heating. 

Although researchers have assembled many agreed-upon biological facts about blue whales, little is understood about their lives behaviorally. Further, much of our working knowledge of whales has been re-evaluated as false misunderstandings based on our own myopic anthropocentrism. For instance, as blue whales are generally found alone or in small groups, early researchers surmised inaccurately that they must be asocial. In actuality, echolocation and their excellent sense of hearing — amplified by their claim as one of the loudest animals on Earth and the vast distances sound can travel in salinic ocean water — enable blue whales to communicate with friends, lovers, and relatives up to a thousand miles away.

“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?”

—Saidiya Hartman, from “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route”

Spaces are enclosures of a physical, emotional, or metaphysical nature. Space can constitute an unrestricted area, a container of intentional time and space, a place of belonging, or the distance between things. While space can refer to emptiness, it is inherently full: of molecules, of moisture, of affect, and of the infinite potential to hold and to shape. Space is where we measure and balance our own subjectivites, understanding the distance that can be breached between a me, and an us.

According to Karen Barad, human touch is but an electromagnetic interaction. Devoid of physical contact, touch involves sensing electromagnetic repulsion between the surfaces of yourself and another, between one object and another. In this technical cul-de-sac, however, there exists an infinitude of potential to sense, feel, and be moved. As Barad writes, “So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others—other beings, other spaces, other times—are aroused.” A touch’s momentary union unleashes a sense of corporeal belonging, transformation, and co-creation, reaching beyond a discreet moment of contact’s seemingly ephemeral reach.

Hominids encompass all types of Great Apes in the Hominidae family, including their extinct immediate ancestors. Species such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans characterize the traits and morphology–bipedalism, bilateral symmetry, two arms and two legs–that distinguish hominids as a subcategory of primates. Humans also notably comprise this family, alongside our extinct subspecies: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and more.

Apple is a multinational technology company that was instrumental in ushering in the age of personal computing. The company, despite its folkloric beginnings in a suburban California garage, directly employs more than 137,000 people, but its global job footprint in aggregate is well over 10 million, including 2.4 million people in the United States and 4.8 million people in China. About 12,000 people work in the official headquarters in Cupertino, California — a massive circular building (pictured here from satellite) with a one-mile circumference.

Apple was the first company on Earth to be valued at more than one trillion US dollars, and as of early  2021, exceeds two trillion dollars, fiscally exceeding the GDP of all but a handful of wealthy countries. Although Apple is recognized for creating the era of personal computing under the wing of its co-founder and first CEO, Steve Jobs, the company also created a series of diminutive objects that paradigmatically altered the technological landscape, in process re-composing the nature of lived experience in much of the world. Perhaps no device has been more significant than the iPhone — a small, networked, touch-screen device released in 2007 during our still-nascent, utopian understanding of technology, its powers, and its possibilities. 

Surpassing the discrete artifacts created by the company, the Apple brand, in its vast reach and global ubiquity, supersedes any one person, object, store, or factory, even surpassing the company’s extreme monetary evaluation. Its scale of operations is aligned with planetary processes, tectonic in scale, a pure hyperobject materially influencing global systems, from mining operations in West Papua and Mongolia to vast supply-chain networks crisscrossing the earth and geo-politics. The company, when understood through its vast, disambiguated flows of energy, is astonishing in its aggregate power as a single entity.

Oceans comprise the fluid, dynamic, and still largely unknown aquatic world. It is well known that 71% of Earth is covered in salinic water, yet this fact conveys little of the ocean’s true gestalt, its incomprehensible living volume. Although partitioned into discreetly named zones — Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic — Earth’s oceans are an interconnected body, 350 million trillion gallons of liquid continuously circulating at a global scale. Imagined differently, the ocean’s surface meniscus exists as an unbroken plane wrapping around Earth, yet this membrane also exists as a psychic divide, splitting the world in the realms of the atmospheric and the aquatic, essential partners forever alien to each other.

Being of the Earth, we have normalized its systems, rhythms, and events, in the process taming much of the strangeness and mysterious beauty that exists all around us. There are perhaps no phenomena more bizarre, as well as universally ubiquitous, than Earth’s tides. Our Moon — proportionately a massive object in our solar system, so much so that the Earth and Moon are technically designated a double planet system — generates a strong gravitational grip. This hold is reified most noticeably as tidal events that cause the earth’s oceans to bulge and recede twice per day on most coastlines.

The alignment of the Sun, Moon, and Earth during new and full moon phases generates even more pronounced and extreme tides, known as spring tides, when the solar gravitational pull is combined with the lunar. Inversely, during quarter moons, a more subtle neap tide results from lunar and solar gravitational forces acting against one another.

A mountain on Moen (the largest island in Chuuk, within the Federated States of Micronesia), Tonnachau rises to a height of 1100 feet, or 340 meters. The mountain has had mythical and cultural significance within Chuukese society throughout the island chain’s history, dating back as far as 4000 BCE. Twelve Earths’ Michael Jones McKean was born on Moen in 1976, near the foothills of Tonnachau. Its shape has occupied his dreams into adulthood.

Considered a megacity, Chongqing is home to more than 8.5 million people and is nested within a larger municipality of nearly 30 million people. Winding through Chongqing is the ancient Yangtze River, an important source of water, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, and industry since the region's continuous settlement starting in 316 BCE.

The Teignmouth Electron is a 41-foot plywood and fiberglass trimaran sailing vessel helmed by Donald Crowhurst from 1968 to the summer of 1969. The craft was designed with the intention of sailing the fastest solo race around the world without stopping. Based on modified plans by Alfred Piver, the Electron's construction was squeezed into what would become a dangerously compressed production schedule. Entering open seas for the first time in the autumn of 1968, the boat immediately encountered problems, with fittings breaking, hulls taking on water, and erratic steering issues menacing the entire voyage. 

With these problems hampering progress, months into the race Crowhurst intentionally reported a false position slightly ahead of his actual location. At this moment, reality cleaves into two lived experiences for Crowhurst and the Electron. Every preceding day over the next eight months, Crowhurst plotted two locations: an imagined false journey around the world at breakneck speeds, and a factual one in which he circled the doldrums of the South Atlantic, waiting for the invented Electron to chart back to the Atlantic where they could merge and return home.  

This proved astoundingly difficult. After months alone at sea, on June 24, 1969, in Logbook 2, which chronicled his true nautical positions, Crowhurst began a feverish 25,000-word manifesto about the nature of existence and humans' relationship to time and space. The work is framed by moments of immense beauty, lucidity, and genius, and also loopy and mad offerings including instructions for humankind to reach transcendence.

The snippets of his journal that have been publicly released offer a rare portrait into an extreme moment: the mind outwitting itself while negotiating the precipice of truth, time, and life itself. His final, haunted words read: “It is the end, it is the Mercy.” Crowhurt is believed to have committed suicide shortly after. The Electron was found nine days later while ghosting into a shipping lane. Onboard, both of Crowhurst's log books were left in plain view, offering a key to unlock his months alone at sea.

Forecasting is an ancient process of making predictions about the future based on available data from the past and present. Tens of thousands of years ago, as human populations shifted from hunter-gatherer communities to more complex agrarian societies, more reliable methods of prediction rose according to societal sophistication. Understanding predictive seasonal rhythms necessary for cyclical farming, i.e. when to plow, seed, grow, sow, and preserve, was an early form of forecasting that lived in parallel to mystical divination techniques performed by shamen, fortune tellers, psychics, oracles, clairvoyants, witches, and prophets. With continual shifts in technology, the roles of those collectively agreed upon within a society to vision and foretell possible futures has changed in lockstep. 

Modern forecasting is increasingly done computationally with massive datasets capable of revealing more latent patterning and trends. Although an algorithmic process might appear novel, the computer, aided by satellites and globally networked, real-time systems, is simply the most modern tool of divination — an outgrowth of systems that have included cards, crystals, rods, runes, tea leaves, bones, sky charts, calendars, folklore, religion, statistics, and more.

Near the conception of Twelve Earths, in late 2016, artist Michael Jones McKean created a list of categories that, in its breadth and scope, attempted speculatively to describe Earth via a discrete selection of locations, objects, and events that would be unified spatially by a perfect ring around the Earth. These preliminary categories ranged from sites of high technology to locations harboring ancient flora, from globally networked mining complexes to places of archaeological significance, from geological anomalies to results of ecological trauma, from birthing wards to remote islands, and many more.

These categories acted as the frame from which a massive coordinate-database of locations was generated. From this archive, an algorithm was developed to search for circular patterns within this sprawling, naturally chaotic dataset—in the process drawing millions of rings around the Earth, while connecting billions of recombinatory possibilities.

From this enormous bank of rings, a process was established to begin honing an inactionable number of possibilities into a smaller group that could be studied and analyzed by hand. This process distilled millions of rings down to hundreds, giving way to a final selection of candidates that could be more deeply studied. From this analysis, four rings—each remarkable, strange, mysterious, and tonally idiosyncratic—were studied in granular detail. Finally, from this intensely research-driven, process-oriented approach, the Twelve Earths ring path gradually and gracefully emerged.

Fairy circles are small circular patches of barren land ranging from 7 to 49 feet in diameter. The origin of these circles is unknown, with theories stretching from the quotidian to supernatural, spanning folklore and science. These vegetal patterns were until recently thought to exist only in southwestern Africa, until similar rings were documented in the Pilbara region of Australia.

Mourning is the outward display of grief over the loss of an entity important to the mourner. Historically, Western scientific orthodoxy forwarded the notion that animals lack the necessary intelligence to emote and grieve. Our lag in understanding (or misunderstanding) of animal grief can be attributed to lack of non-anecdotal data, but also our built-in anthropological biases, which can short-circuit cross-species empathic understanding. 

Many animals have been observed showing signs of grief, including crows, ravens, dolphins, orcas, and chimps. Elephants have powerful contact calls that can be heard and recognized by members of their herd miles away. When researchers played field recordings of a deceased elephant’s call, herd members ran with urgency toward the sound. Upon arriving to only a speaker broadcasting sounds, their excitement switched to confusion and sadness. This emotive reaction was witnessed two years after the elephant’s death.

When researchers told Koko—a captive western gorilla famed for her use of sign language—that her friend, a kitten, had been struck by a vehicle, she ignored them for ten minutes, after which she signed "bad, sad, bad," "frown, cry, frown, sad, trouble," and “kitty, sleep.” Later researchers heard her imitating the sound of human weeping.

Alex, a gray parrot who was the subject of a 30-year experiment in avian learning, showed the emotional intelligence of a toddler. Falling suddenly ill, his last words revealed a self-awareness of his own abstract mortality: “You be good, I love you, see you tomorrow.”

The Large Hadron Collider is perhaps the most complex machine ever built. Its primary gestalt is a massive underground tube 27 kilometers (17 miles) in circumference buried deep beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. The machine was painstakingly built over a decade with the input of over 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries. At its simplest, the LHC is a device used to conduct experiments to test scientific theories. During operation, the site draws roughly 200 megawatts of electrical power from the French electrical grid, equivalent to about one-third of the energy needed for the city of Geneva in a year. 

The processes that unfold within the LHC, although materially real — protons racing around the massive tube at 11,245 revolutions per second — are largely invisible. Tests on site exist not as something to verifiably witness but as results to decode later by sifting through massive streams of data — up to 30 petabytes per year — produced by the machine’s computer arrays. Within these massive libraries of data, a series of hidden ciphers exist, gesturing toward answers of some of the most enigmatic questions humans have ever asked: What is the origin of mass? What was it like before creation? How does time work? Does the universe have an edge?

Prescribing to the many-worlds hypothesis, there exists a conceivable version of the world split off from the one in which you are reading this caption right now. In this new speculative world, given some baseline, agreed-upon criteria (such as the elimination of unnecessary suffering, maximal flourishing for all living entities, harmonic scaling, etc.), there exists objectively a most perfect version.  

Even in the entirely imperfect world that we all exist in currently, we manage to catch momentary glimpses of perfection at the scale of our bodies — a split second where total rightness flashes before us. The moment is fleeting, fragile, lasting for a second or two at most.

Life on Earth represents an emergent property of the cosmic energy received from the Sun. The conversion of solar energy into complex biologic life underscores efficiency as a driver of evolution, as this principle creates competitive advantage in the contest among organisms for energy.

Bipedalism as an evolved trait in hominins has been connected to advanced tool use, sight enhancement, and extended reach (in both a causal and consequent capacity, or as both a causal and consequent factor), all of which served as possible competitive advantages. Recent studies also highlight energy efficiency as a potential contributing evolutionary factor, as bipedalism uses 75 percent less energy than quadrupedalism. However, this advantage is effectively zeroed-out as soon as cadence shifts to bipedal running, which is 75 percent less efficient than walking.

Arranged concentrically over 480 acres, 2650 mirrored heliostats direct and focus sunlight toward a central tower containing massive quantities of salt. The salt acts as a storage medium or battery for the collected heat, turns molten, and continues to produce electricity through the night.

Big Data Astronomy is an emergent branch of astronomy using huge, decentralized computing power to shift the boundaries of our understanding of the cosmos. It can translate post-human amounts of data into connections or pixels we ourselves could never see, or synthesize.

As technology threatens the myth of the astronomer gleaning cosmic insights by gazing into the night sky through a telescopic eyepiece, there is an allure of working with ever-burgeoning data sets, where a single night’s observation could yield more data than could be analyzed by a village of individuals in an entire lifetime. For example, the Square Kilmere Array, planned for 2027 in South Africa and Australia, plans to generate the amount of data that roughly currently comprises the entire internet, every year.

Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who made significant contributions in our understanding of galaxy rotation. These research observations eventually led her to prove the existence of dark matter. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) was renamed after her, recognizing how the telescope, like Rubin, could have a similarly massive impact in the field of astronomy and study of dark matter, making it the first US national observatory to be named after a woman.

Rubin was born July 23, 1928 in Philadelphia. Like many of the renaissance scientists who paved the way for modern science before her, Rubin showed an early aptitude for art. Her teachers encouraged her to pursue art, deeming art a more proper career for a woman, despite Rubin also expressing an interest in science. Defiant, Rubin became the sole graduate of Astronomy at Vassar. As a professor, she inspired a generation of women to pursue the historically male-dominated field of astronomy.

Located in the Tnorala Conservation Reserve in Australia, Gosses Bluff Crater — known as ‘Tnorala’ to the Western Arrernte people — is believed to be the eroded remains of an approximately 142.5 million-year-old meteor impact. The 22 km wide crater site is considered sacred to the Arrernte. According to folklore, the crater was formed by a celestial baby, nested in a woven basket, accidentally dropped from the Milky Way and crash landed on Earth. The baby’s parents still search for their child and can be found in the night sky as the constellation Corona Australis.

The modern hospital emerged in its current form around the eighteenth century as a site where medical care is administered to people. It is an agreed-upon, default location where modern humans give birth to offspring, convalesce, and finally return to die. The hospital building itself is a kind of earthbound pivot between the birth of a human life and that life’s end. Deterministically, this pivot point connects two seemingly infinite lines: one traveling backward, enfolding all the past events leading up to birth, and the other, afterlife, a line unfolding forward into the future.

Related to New Animism, environmental personhood is a legal process wherein an object or an assemblage of objects become legally recognized as individuals, with all the rights commensurate with personhood. Some entities that have attained personhood include Mount Taranaki, in New Zealand (pictured above); the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, in India; the Vilcabamba River, in Ecuador; and the Atrato River, in Colombia. The legal process is controversial, though becoming less rare, as communities and activists left with little recourse to protect the environment use the law as a conservation tactic.

Much has been written about the legal status of personhood (see environmental personhood) conferred to objects within nature. Taken alone or in part with other forms of nouveau spiritualism, or reapplied to new materialist philosophies, this legal process could be interpreted as evidence of an emergent form of animism.

With the Age of Enlightenment, humans began unraveling the inner life of matter, and with it, Western intellectual orthodoxies shifted in lockstep away from long held strains of animist thinking. As technologies developed, natural systems became more deeply aggregated; the singular body became a container of organs. Those organs derived from tissues. Tissues broke into cells, which revealed molecules and then atoms. More advances invited entrance into a subatomic world of protons and quarks and bosons. 

Historically, with each new stage of scientific aggregation, we depart from more fully communing or being at peace with an enchanted whole. New Animism suggests a re-assembly of these knowable parts into a singular unit — one that doesn’t dispense with accrued knowledges of the material world (be it folk or scientific) but polishes these newly revealed facets crystalline, turning matter into something uniquely kaledescopic, powerful, and strange.

Intricate quarries cutting deep into the Apuan Alps within the city of Carrara, Italy, have been continuously operated since the early second century CE. In total, the quarries have produced more marble than any other location on Earth. The famed white and blue-gray stone has been transported all over the world, from India to the Philippines, from the United States to the United Kingdom. Viewed abstractly, the mountain can be seen as having exploded into atomized fragments now the world over: a suburban kitchen countertop, a vast tiled floor in a mall in Chengdu, a prized sculpture from antiquity in a museum in Southern Africa, the Titanic’s sunken interiors at the bottom of the Atlantic, or trashed slabs in a St. Petersburg landfill. The marble, a durable material cipher, is a global-scale, archaeo-crumb trail precisely mapping human desires and waves of globalism.

A bright yellow polyethylene tray frames its contents, including soil, sand, and stones, shrouding still unknown artifacts from a dig site.

A generator's function is to unlock energy stored within a petro-state, converting it so that it may be consumed electrically. Objects powered by electricity—air conditioner units, laptops, microwaves, server farms—feed off this ancient reserve of compressed time, creating a hyperbolic release. The overabundance of released energy distorts time, as it has existed on the planet, and in the process destabilizes Earth-scale systems reliant on stability, resulting in shifts such as climate change.

Anthropocentrism is the belief that humans are the most important entity in the universe. The belief has long been central to Western spiritual, intellectual, and cultural belief systems. Arguably, humans have been engaged in a slow-motion, staccato advance toward more fully embracing a *de-*anthropocentric experience of life and living.

This decoupling from Earth’s central narrative had audacious and violent beginnings with the advent of heliocentrism, the scientific discovery that Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa. So strong is the human desire to plot ourselves at the center of all experience that heliocentrism has had to be discovered in multiple ways and places, repeatedly over thousands of years. 

De-anthropocentrism exists parallel to a longer arc of justice related to anti-racism; feminisms; vegetarianism and veganism; and deep ecology and environmentalism.

Albert Ayler was a saxophonist and leading innovator within 60's era Free Jazz. Ayler’s incendiary compositions quoted simple brass marching band rhythms and gospel hymns, dotted with delirious repetition often bending into berserk tonal breakdowns. His compositions referenced a spiritual horizon underscored by short, evocative titles: Spirits, Vibrations, Saints, Mothers, Children, Angels, Bells, Spirits Rejoice, and Holy Family. He often performed the same group of compositions again and again, searching not laterally, but for deeper reserves within each new improvisation.

In 1967, he performed with his brother, Donald, at John Coltrane's funeral in New York City delivering perhaps the most moving performance ever recorded - Love Cry. The 6 minute work crescendos with Ayler entering vocally, wailing, shouting; simultaneously channelling joy, rapture, and terror.

Straddling the border of Poland and Belarus, the Białowieża Forest is the largest remaining primeval forest of Europe, having gone largely undisturbed since the last glacial recession 10,000 years ago. The forest-relic — a vestige of what the entire European Plain once looked like — is now in decline, as its ancient and seemingly invincible ecologies confront global heating and geopolitics. While dying trees energize the soil’s restorative capacities, eventually recharging the forest’s canopy, climate change far outpaces the forest's naturally programmed ability to auto-correct — a pressure only heightened by increasing rates of legal and illegal logging.

A set of urgent, open textured, difficult questions emerge:

Is it wise, or even possible for humans to assist this paleoecology, whose interconnected mycorrhizal intelligence we are now beginning to understand?....

As we advance into deeper stages of the Anthropocene, is any effort to preserve “the natural forest” based in wishful idealism?...

As we train ourselves toward apprehending longer, non-human time horizons, should we discard “stability” and balance” as we desire them to be, and instead find comfort in Earth as an natural apocalyptic agent, wherein energetic assemblages like Białowieża thrive in meta-equilibriums largely invisible to humans?....

Straight lines rarely occur in nature, making their occurrence when observed outside the built environment something rare, even strange. Yet, hiding in plain sight is perhaps the oldest, most recognizable and striking straight line: the horizon.

A circular, 16-mile-wide, 14.8 million-year-old impact crater nestles beneath checkered farmlands and red-roofed villages in the Bavarian countryside just north of the Danube River. The force and heat of the Ries meteor’s impact created in a millisecond a new type of rock—suevite—within which is embedded 79,000 tons of microscopic diamonds. The quarried remains are dispersed within the medieval stone structures of Nördlingen, a walled village whose circular shape mimics the massive crater’s outer concentric perimeter.

The Ries is the only crater of its kind on Earth, sharing morphological similarities with impressions found only on other planets and moons in the solar system. This kinship presents an ideal site to study extraterrestrial geologies, and also to understand more deeply how a fleeting event 15 million years ago continues to inflect life within the crater itself.

The horizon is an unattainable limit perceived as being perpetually at the edge of the witnessable world where the earth and sky appear to touch. As our planet is spherical, the horizon exists as an ever-shifting threshold.

Through time, people have gone to extreme measures to see and commune with the horizon. The Aguada Fénix site in the Mayan Lowlands is a massive, thirty-foot-tall earthen platform that frames a volume bigger than the pyramids of Egypt and reaches just above the Yucatán tree canopy. In this open expanse, people can see the horizon in any direction. For the Korowai people of the rainforests in southeastern West Papua, the horizon is all but invisible in the dense overstory of the forest there. Ingeniously, the Korowai build elaborately engineered structures at seemingly impossible heights among the treetops to gain views of the horizon.

Whaling describes the deliberate hunting of whales for food and resources. The industry evolved from a subsistence practice in coastal communities to a sophisticated and insatiable globalized paracolonial industry. Fleets of ships crossed vast oceans in pursuit of a diminishing extranatural resource to power empires back home.

The hunt and ship-based rendering process bridges the pathological: Men with spears and hooks butcher mammals that dwarf them in size; a slightly larger ship groans under the weight of a fresh kill; hours or even days pass while refining—cutting, burning and melting—the carcass to its viable component parts.

The uses for those whale parts (bones, meat, blubber) were varied and, though vital for a time, quickly obsolesced in the marketplace. Whale meat today is riddled with carcinogens and heavy metals, the by-products and markers of the Anthropocene, which whaling played an essential part in creating, effectively forming a material feedback loop. The primary export, whale oil, was a sort of skeleton key to modernity, powering steam engines and lamps; lubricating wristwatches, skillets, and automotive transmissions; cleaning factory floors; and serving as a salve for trench foot.

In parallel with biologic death, humans (and Homo neanderthalensis) have engaged in ceremonies around death for hundreds of thousands of years. Ceremonial practices relating to death range widely, from secular events engineered for the living to process grief, to a vast array of religious, spiritual, and mystical ceremonies each nodding differently to the supernatural. Some believe the performance of specific rituals will unlock access to the afterlife. Various objects and processes for preparing the dead have also been observed—including coffins, shrouds, adornments, crypts, mummification, assorted cremation practices, endocannibalism, embalming, and ritual dissection.

Childhood is an interstitial zone of early development in humans, historically bracketed by infancy and the onset of puberty. However, this designated bookending is perpetually in flux as cultures continue to segment out additional psychological zones of adolescence within human development. This remodeling, coupled with the effects of vast generational wealth inequalities and longer life spans that extend the terms of parental support, has effectively feathered out the boundaries of pre-adulthood. To combat this, government entities have sought to delineate the beginnings of legal adulthood (typically ages 15 to 18) and have by proxy determined the temporal envelope of the child and the distinct rights of children. 

Childhood, or more precisely the concept of “the child,” exists politically as a perpetual horizon, an abstraction of innocence and hope contained by futurity and unrealized potential. In this way, the child is often weaponized as leverage within political theater.

Near the desert village of Derweze in Turkmenistan, there is a massive 230-foot-wide crater on fire that is colloquially known as the Door to Hell. In 1971, Soviet engineers in search of oil fields began drilling. Their operation collapsed into a large pocket of natural gas, and the crater was set on fire to prevent massive emissions of methane into the surrounding area. It was predicted to burn out within a couple of weeks but has been burning nonstop for nearly 50 years.