Over-hearing in the Anthropocene

Margaret Woodward

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Abstract

To listen in the Anthropocene is an act of acknowledgement. It is a complicity with and responsibility to the more than human world. As poets, artists, writers and publishers how do we make what is overheard – signals of loss and extinction, moments between presence and absence, languages of inanimate and animate – heard?

Paying attention to the quixotic, irreversible moments that have become signals in the register of the Anthropocene, this essay addresses the question ‘What is listening in the Anthropocene?’ by exploring the relationship between listening, hearing, publishing and being heard. The collaborative creative practice I share with Justy Phillips (under the name A Published Event) pivots on the act of making public, where publishing is understood as a form of art practice. One technique we explore through speculative publishing, we call ‘language-ing’, a bringing into language a lived experience of listening-with. Throughout this speculative essay, an accumulating lexicon turns the body towards hard to detect signals, sometimes registered as absences – as genocide, as gaps in the geological record, habitat extinctions, retreating glaciers, mineral and emotional exhaustion or sensory loss. Recent work from A Published Event and collaborations with other artists frame the essay, including Lost Rocks (2017-21) and Erratic Ecologies (2019-20), both of which are included in the Listening in The Anthropocene online exhibition.

Keywords

Geology, Anthropocene, glaciology, publishing as art practice, erratics

 

To listen in the Anthropocene is an act of acknowledgement of complicity with and responsibility to the more-than-human world. What is listening in the Anthropocene, and what and who can be heard? These questions are at the core of this essay, part of which flows from the keynote presentation for the Listening in The Anthropocene Symposium in August 2020, the other part drawing on projects from the collaborative creative practice of A Published Event which pivot on publishing – the act of making public. A Published Event are based in nipaluna/Hobart, in lutruwita/Tasmania where we work with language, ideas and publishing to make long-term relational artworks through shared acts of public telling. We use chance encounters, constructed situations and the shared authorship of lived experience, through publishing-as-art-practice, to co-compose complex fields of social, cultural and political relations. Alongside the projects and ideas presented in this essay emerges a speculative process of language-ing, a lexicon for listening in the Anthropocene gathered from our creative practice.

Anthropocene

Since Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen first coined the term the Anthropocene in 2002, it has become firmly embedded in the vocabulary of science but not always from within the discipline of geological sciences. There has been a flourishing of geological discourse in a wide range of disciplines outside of geology, significantly from the arts and humanities. Despite continuing debates within scientific circles regarding the validity of the term for adoption into the official nomenclature of geological ages, epochs and eras; the concept of the Anthropocene has mobilised political scientists, philosophers, artists and the media allowing ‘new vocabularies to surface’ (Bobbette and Donovan 5).

With our desire to bring new languaging to the surface, the nomenclature and lexicon of geology is a revealing place to start to unravel this narrative. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, as colonised worlds were mapped and surveyed for geologic wealth, landscapes were inscribed with the coloniser’s familiar nomenclature, and in the process of laying claim, enduring reminders remain. There is nowhere more evident of this than in lutruwita/Tasmania where the peaks surrounding the west coast mining towns (Mt Lyell, Mt Sedgewick, Mt Murchison, Mt Owen, Mt Humboldt, and Mt Darwin, to name a few) are all named after prominent British male geologists and natural historians, perpetually tethering them to the movement of geological knowledge outward from their imperial origins.

epoch

Similarly, the names of geological epochs were derived from British places and people by geologists Murchison and Lapworth. Hence the stratigraphic record of Devonian (named after Devon), Cambrian (after the ancient people of Cumbria), Silurian (the ancient Silures of Wales) and Ordovician (after a Celtic tribe), carry forward in time (and backwards) the inscriptions of geological history, and the legacies of exploration and exploitation. The extensive network of influential European geologists and natural historians reached to all corners of the empires including lutruwita/ Tasmania. In Hobart, the establishment of the first Royal Society outside of Britain which encouraged scientific exploration, documentation and discussion, signalled its status in the mid to late 1800s Hobart as ‘the’ scientific centre in the southern hemisphere. Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle came to lutruwita/Tasmania in 1836 and collected rock samples from the shores of the Derwent, which is located 200 metres away from where I sit and write. Geologic collections such as Darwin’s established natural history museums and solidified educational institutions as gatekeepers of geological knowledge and the ‘story’ of the Earth. The spread of geological knowledge using mineral collections and classification systems depended on the circulation of portable collections as educational resources for geologists and miners. My daily walks along the foreshore also pass by middens, permanent human inscriptions tracing many many thousands of years of Tasmanian Aboriginal history and culture in this land.

fictiōneering

The term ‘fictioneer’ which in the 19^th century was commonly defined as a ‘writer or inventor of fiction’, is reinvented here as a process of making-with the events of lived experience. A bringing into language the living experience of the event. We use the term ‘fictiōneering’ to look more closely at the invented state of fiction, taking it back to its Latin root of ‘fictiō’, meaning to make-with rather than to make up. This process of fictioneering, or making-with, is itself a process of ‘speculative eventing’.

fictiōnella

Where fictiōneering refers to a process, the fictiōnella is the making-public through printed books, live events, installations, performances and readings. Through the fictiōnella, A Published Event takes the novella back to its roots as a storytelling process based in lived experience. As the recording of news, the recounting of real-life events, it is a process very much activated in the oral tradition. Critically, the fictiōnella is a gesture of experiential and imperceptible telling.

Lost Rocks (2017–21) is a slow publishing conceptual artwork composed by 43 artists. The peripatetic journey of this artwork has brought into a growing ‘field of relations’ artists, writers, poets, curators, geologists, miners and prospectors world-wide, through a series of events as field trips, residencies, exhibitions, performances, bookfairs, excursions and a library of commissioned fictiōnellas.

Lost Rocks (2017-21) ROCKS. Photo: Peter Whyte

The trigger for Lost Rocks (2017–21) is a discarded rock specimen board found purchased at the Glenorchy Tip Shop nipaluna/Hobart for $4.00. Forty of the 52 rock specimens were missing, each leaving behind an absent trace, a hole, a shape where rocks used to be. Rather than filling the board with the missing Tasmanian rock specimens, we speculated instead about how we might recompose the board by inviting local, national and international artists from a range of creative practices to select one of the missing rocks or minerals from the board and compose a fictiōnella in response to their selected absence. Developing a slow-publishing process we release eight books per year over a five year time frame and will be complete in 2021. While the artwork Lost Rocks (2017–21) encompasses the library of fictiōnellas and its associated events, the conceptual framework can be conceived of as an expanded field of relations including:

a) a discarded rock specimen board that includes present and absent Tasmanian rocks and minerals.
b) a global network of 40 contemporary artists and their collective depth of creative practice.
c) the re-composing of absence.
d) a deep engagement with Tasmania’s environmental, social, geological and political locales.
e) an affinity with the more-than-human.
f) an engagement with geologic time scales.

 

absence

loss

As artists, publishers and writers our work is frequently marked by absences and loss. Lost Rocks (2017-21) starts with absences on the rock board, a classification system, inherited from natural history’s narrative of the history of the earth, a very particular kind of geological record. Without the familiar specimens intact it instead provides an absent narrative, and that creates an invitation, not to recompose this same narrative with rocks, but with speculative tellings that start first in absence, a library of holes.

Understood very literally each absent mineral is recomposed by a fictiōnella, with each book’s cover reading simultaneously as a hole and mineral silhouette. Rorschach patches of caneite, become living holes, creating interstitial gaps between geological and collective geosocial knowledge.

Lost Rocks (2017-21) Authors various. Digital webpress. 181mm x 111mm. Limited Edition/ 300. A Published Event. Hobart. Photo: Peter Whyte

loess

Deposits of silt laid down by aeolian processes over extensive areas of the mid-latitudes during glacial and postglacial times.

geo

According to Webster’s New English Dictionary 1955 edition, geō is a combining form meaning earth, or of the earth. It originates from gaia and gē the Greek root meaning the earth and combines as geography the study of the earth’s surface, geomorphology a study of landforms and as geology the earth’s crust.

Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan, editors of Political Geology, claim there is a new generation of social scientists and humanists whose scholarship in the history of the geological sciences seeks to understand how it came to be that the West understood what geology was, how the stratigraphic record became a narrative of the earth, and the role of geologists in shaping the imaginaries of what the earth is and how it works (5).

American political theorist and Philosopher Jane Bennett in her 2010 book Vibrant Matter signals a ‘geologic turn’ within the humanities, where for example, discourse in geopolitics is well developed. She writes ‘By making a geologic turn, we direct sensory, linguistic, and imaginative attention toward the material vitality of the earth itself. We come closer to entertaining the idea that matter is not passive’ (65). Her focus on the more-than human, and the vibrant matter of the earth, has troubled the distinctions of conventional science, where the life sciences are concerned with life (bios) and geological sciences concerned with ‘non-living (geos). Instead, Bennett emphasises the porosity between the geos and the bios (Bobbette and Donovan 6).

geo-sociality

geo-intimacy

geo-philia

geo-poetry

The geologic turn that Bennett describes can be linguistically traced whereby the attachment of the prefix ‘geo’ shifts from the earth-based sciences to the humanities and their poetic, social and literary vocabularies. Anthropologists Gisli Palsson and Heather Swanson use the term geo-socialities to describe an ethnographic approach which ‘attend[s] to the inter-twinings of bodies and biographies with earth systems and deep time histories’ (171). American artist Ilana Halperin, whose fictiōnella Fossil will be published in 2021, writes about ‘geologic intimacy’. She investigates the mineralisation of the body over time, how gall stones and kidney stones form and how blood vessels and bones calcify. Halperin proposes that trace fossils record not the organism itself or what palaeontologists regard as the moment of death, but they record the actions of life. She writes ‘We are autobiographical trace fossils’ (Halperin 2021). Medievalist scholar Jeffery Jerome Cohen in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman writes of ‘geo-philia’, the love of stone. Instead of assuming stone to be the most lifeless of substances he reminds us it is restless and forever in motion, and being ‘storied matter’, it invites us to apprehend the world in geological time and other than human terms. Canadian poet Don McKay in the lecture ‘Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time’ revives the term ‘geopoetry’ first coined by geologist Harry Hess, ‘who needed his audience, in the absence of much hard data, to speculate imaginatively, as if reading poetry’ (46).

McKay argues that geopoetry provides a bridging between the geologic and the poetic:

Geopoetry makes it legitimate for the natural historian or scientist to speculate and gawk, and equally legitimate for the poet to benefit from close observation, and from some of the amazing facts that science turns up. It provides a crossing point, a bridge over the infamous gulf separating scientific from poetic frames of mind, a gulf which has not served us well, nor the planet we inhabit with so little reverence or grace. (46)

Although geologically inspired, Lost Rocks (2017­–21) is not ‘about’ geology as such. Rather it is aligned with what Nigel Clark identifies as a new ‘“geologising” of social thought’ (139). The fictiōnellas and the speculative process of fictioneering resonate with McKay’s geopoetic bridges and Palsson and Swanson’s concept of geo-socialities as ‘an approach for attending to how geologic relations matter differently to particular entities in particular locales’ (149). The Lost Rocks (2017-21) artists and authors may invite us to think on planetary scales, deep time and geologic epochs, yet their fictiōnellas are also anchored in bodied and storied entanglements in specific locales based on lived experience and pivoting on a single event. As a form of geo-intimacy the artists hold their reader in close proximity. Intimate in scale the fictiōnellas are designed to be held in the hand, an invitation to hold a mineralogical telling.

signals

Rather than trace the debate within scientific communities as to whether the Anthropocene deserves to be incorporated into the geologic timescale, we regard the Anthropocene as an invitation for artists, scholars and researchers to inhabit the world differently. As the geological record of the present doesn’t yet exist, we can only be alert to its signals as a series of warnings. Signals from Anthropocene after all can be hard to detect and may in fact be present as absences, as gaps in the geological record, as losses in the biosphere in the form of deforestation and extinction of species and habitats, as exhaustion of mineral resources and emotional exhaustion. While we witness the rise of flood waters and temperatures, the retreat of glaciers and dead fish floating in our rivers, as oceans warm and acidify to the point that corals can no longer construct reefs, geologists tell us this will show up in the future geological record as a ‘reef gap’. As artists, writers and publishers we instead pay attention to the quixotic irreversible moments that have become signals in the register of the Anthropocene, signals of loss and extinction, moments between presence and absence, and the languages of inanimate and animate. Attuning, attending, sensing, distilling and listening are part of the process as well as overhearing.

overhear

To hear (someone or something) without meaning to or without the knowledge of the speaker.

To over-hear can also mean to hear way too much in the soundscape of the Anthropocene such as ‘The clashing music of the shopping mall, the automated voice, the shock jock, the celebrity, the power tools, the leaf blowers, the bulldozers, the mining blasts.’ This issue of fusion asks: ‘How might we listen out, or tune in, to the small, the subtle, the unnoticed, the dying, the unusual, the banal, the mad, the unexpected?’

eavesdrop

Overhearing becomes a useful strategy for attuning, in order to hear that which is not directed straight at us, where faint signals or the minute sounds of the more-than-human world might register. In 2018 A Published Event led a field trip for visiting artists and writers Jen Bervin and Fayen D’Evie who were researching for their work Cosmic Static in the 2018 exhibition Eavesdropping. We all stand in a paddock behind Kempton, as dark descends over central Tasmania, searching for traces of American physicist and inventor of radio telescope Grote Reber. His antenna farms constructed from poles and wires ‘listened’ in this southerly dark outpost to extra-terrestrial signals from non-human agents in the cosmic static. Vigilant to the signals from other species, and galaxies, this form of overhearing allows for the possibility that signals that might not be directed to humans, the mainstream, the expected. Leaning into the dusk we listen, and listen, for what we might overhear.

quietitude

Did I miss something?

I often ask myself what is the connection between hearing and listening? Some years ago I started to lose my hearing. Quietly, silently and indiscernibly to me, it was receding. I slowly entered a state of what I think of as ‘quietitude’, placed somewhere between solitude and quietness. This state softly enveloped me, where background noise became muted, conversations became distant and confusing and, without even realising, the sounds of birds, wind, traffic and waves stopped registering. Yet despite these changes, I was still listening – listening and hearing the deafening roar of silence, or the loud ringing of my ears. I had my hearing tested a few times and each time would leave with a small printout in my hand, graph lines tracing the ebb of my hearing against the lexicon of deafness, mild, moderate, severe, profound. Internally I was listening, but struggled to hear the threshold markers that declared a ‘moderate’ hearing loss of 40%. What does one do with such loss, when things slip away unregistered, unheard? And what does this mean for listening in the Anthropocene, an age marked by gaps of absences and loss?

listening

hearing

I’m now acutely aware that listening and hearing are separate endeavours and that listening doesn’t necessarily result in hearing. While many sounds fall below an audible frequency, no matter how hard I listen, it is often not quiet. Instead I hear internal sounds such as ringing or whooshing, that arrive through a form of ‘interior listening’. This concept was introduced to me by artist Fayen d’Evie in a recent workshop where she invited participants to shift attention back and forth from the sound of words in the air, and their vibrational shape in our bodies. d’Evie asks ‘what does it mean to allow porousness between interior and exterior listening?’ This awareness softens the boundaries of internal and external listening and allows for the possibility that listening might not always occur between the ears. As publishers we make public what is first felt as absence, or registered as vibrational matter or energy, or as the shape in our bodies of a word. As writers we are familiar with the process of turning inwards to ‘hear’ thoughts and ideas, and then committing this inner dialogue to written text. And while this internal dialogue is not outwardly heard, it is transformed from interior to exterior by the act of publishing, affixing ink to paper and pixels to screens, ready to be heard.

profound

sound

Words, their vibrations, their meanings and origins, can be ‘sounded’ to reveal new and unexpected depths as they poetically cluster in lexicons, transcending disciplines and forging bridges between internal and external worlds. Take the word profound for example, which has its origins in the Latin word profundus meaning ‘deep’. Profound also marks the state of extreme deafness and in the dictionary profound attaches itself to grief, to insight, thinking, intellect and silence. Aqua profundus is Latin for ‘deep water’. The bridge that connects the words ‘profound’ and ‘sound’ also traverses deep water. The verb ‘to sound’ refers to the act of testing the depth of water, while a sound is a narrow channel or stretch of water between the mainland and an island, or between two bodies of water, as in a strait. Such conduits form anticipatory poetic bridges between vocabularies allowing language-ing to occur, a re-composing of language that ‘rifts’ and drifts away from its original bedrock vocabulary. For us a process of bringing into language and then making-public through the act of publishing, underpins all of our work. Attuning, attending, sensing and distilling are part of this process, as well as listening.

mishearing

In overhearing there is a risk of slippage, mishearing, of hearing things you weren’t supposed to hear, or for getting things wrong. We have to allow for the possibility for overhearing to be both a productive and destructive act. In collaboration with poets, artists, writers and publishers, we make what is overheard – heard through the act of making public.

surge

quiesce

In the opening pages of Canadian Anthropologist Julie Cruickshank’s fascinating book Do Glaciers Listen? set in the Saint Elias mountains of Alaska, she establishes that in Athabaskan culture ‘there is no distinction between animate and inanimate and, hence mountains, glaciers, bodies of water, rocks and manufactured objects all have qualities of sentience’ (4). Local understanding of ecology regard glaciers as part of a responsive social world, and the oral traditions of the Tlingit and Athapaskan people that witnessed the North American Little Ice Age, a period of much colder winters between about 1300 and 1870 reflect this. Cruickshank writes:

Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions attribute to glaciers characteristics rather different from Science. Glaciers have long provided travel routes that enables human connections between coast and interior, and they are characterised by sentience. They listen, pay attention, and respond to human behaviour – especially to indiscretion (25).

There are parallels in mainland Australia and Tasmania when Aboriginal people lived through the last glacial maximum, which occurred between 16-25 thousand years ago. Noongar writer Cassie Lynch is researching Aboriginal memories of climate events such as fluctuating seas levels and ice ages. Currently glaciers are often regarded as markers of climate change and headlines such as ‘Glaciers in the Alps Could Lose Nearly All Their Ice by 2100’ in the newsletter Yale Environment 360 become all too familiar. If we consider that glaciers are sentient beings, organisms that smell, feel, listen that emit tangible signals of surging and quiescence, of pollen and pollution, and melting in response to global warming, we should be asking what we can learn from listening to them?

calving

The process of detachment of icebergs and smaller blocks of ice from a glacier into water.

surge

A short-lived phase of accelerated flow during which the glacier surface becomes broken up into a maze of crevasses. Surges are often periodic and are separated by longer periods of relative inactivity or even stagnation (cf. quiescence) (Glaciers online).

quiescence

Quiescence comes from the Latin ‘quiescere’, to rest or become quiet, a temporary cessation of activity, it is also the period in which a glacier is slow-moving or stagnant.

erratic

A boulder or large block of bedrock that is being, or has been, transported away from its source by a glacier (Glaciers online).

erratic ecologies

 In 2019 A Published Event were Ruth Stephan Research Fellows in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. We came to this research through a proposition of what we call, erratic ecologies and what it might mean to field guide the erratic. In this sense, testing the possibilities of erratics as; glacially-transported boulders, those rocks that were carried by advancing glaciers and deposited away from their bedrock when the glacier receded; a movement, known as wandering, eccentric and queer; and a metaphysical condition, we are referring to as erraticness. Our Beinecke fellowship enabled us to trace the history and etymology of the word ‘erratic’, which comes from the Latin errare, to wander or stray, and to better understand how it came to rest so firmly with geology. The movement of our research, surging from the ‘erratyk’ stars of Chaucer’s 16th century poem Troylus and Cressida, through the erratic motion of the planets in Copernican astronomy, Charpentier’s Terraine erratique of the Jura Mountains and Mark Dion’s fragments of travel, exploration and adventure. We can now see how this term, over time, has wandered and strayed through fields of astronomy, theology, cosmology, geology, glaciology, cardiology, psychology, literature and climatology. It is in this rich composite of knowledge and language that we field the concept of erraticology. A kind of conglomerate that is accessible beyond any one field. The Beinecke’s collection of work and artists books by contemporary writers and poets, Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, Susan Howe, Jen Bervin, Nancy Kuhl and Richard Deming, William Carlos Williams, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Mary Ruefle, also fed our growing vocabulary of erraticness that extended beyond its geological definition.

Published during our Research Fellowship the Erratic Ecologies Field Station, Or an emergent apparatus for speculative research (2019) is a tool or technique for developing a greater awareness and attuning to a given environment. Composed of a set of 62 unique field station cards each card is an episode, a daily tool for attuning to archive, site, and the confused circulations of the body using languages of metallurgy, deep time and materiality. The accompanying blueprint traces our journey through the holdings of the Beinecke library and across the landscapes of Connecticut and Massachusetts shaped in the wake of the Wisconsin ice sheet some 18,000 years ago. The granite block was sourced from the Stony Creek quarry, in Branford, Connecticut, famous for quarrying granite for iconic monuments and landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty.

 

 

Erratic Ecologies Field Station, Or an emergent apparatus for speculative research (2019)
Sixty-two copper-foiled episodes, two lengths of solid copper bar, one block of quarried Stony Creek Granite, one archival blueprint. A Published Event. New Haven, CT. Dimensions W 24cm X H 13cm x D 3cm. Photo: Peter Whyte.

Our Erratic Ecologies Field Station (2019) looks simple enough, but it also gives language to both the physical, linguistic and philosophical dimensions of our experience in Connecticut and is very much an emergent tool for speculative research. It offers the possibility of a new relational field that explores the erraticology of matter itself. While ‘striation’, names a glaciological term that refers to the scratches and marks left on rocks by the linear action of a glacier, indicating its direction and flow; our term, erraticology might come to name a far more complex and massive organism of deeply affected matter. When we talk about hardness, heft or specific gravity (geological terms that are used to describe rocks and minerals), we are re-claiming these qualities to articulate the physical and emotional materials of our more-than-human condition. What has become imperative to our work is to develop a shared language – what the architect Christopher Alexander would call a pattern language – that operates between these specialisations, enabling the erratic to expand our experiences of the more-than-human (1977).

In our fieldwork – speculative encounters with books, rocks, fractures, language and people – we practice this verb to ‘field’ as a kind of in-gathering with one’s body, a way of bringing into relation, ideas, objects and experiences, within reach of the sensing body. The collaboration of our sensing bodies includes a 40% loss of hearing in one and a 40% loss of heart function in the other. Because of this we are acutely aware of erratic episodes, sonic, cardiac, or otherwise. For us, any process of field guiding is inherently imbued with frictions and fictions of the erratic. To work this relational field is to focus intensely on what lies between. Between gravel and boulder, block and behemoth. Fieldwork is itself an erratic activity – a deliberate and intentional strategy to shift context, build new relations and attend to a material awareness of place. It allows one to be both in and out of place at the same time.

We find ourselves thrust into the terrain that inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff names as ‘corporeal geology’. For us, an erraticology of matter seems compelled to begin in the corporeal geology of the heart. It is what we might call, an apprehending of heart matter. What excites us about the direction of our research is that it allows us to draw language through the physicality of the body. For us, this listening, attending, attuning and digesting takes form through writing and the subsequent manouevering of this physical language through publishing, that is, the act of making public. As a process of research-creation, we always publish as we go. Listening in the Anthropocene, we register signals that seem erratic; erratic weather, erratic political behaviour and erratic health. How might signals of ‘erraticness’ call us to the present? And how might this calling prepare us to take action?

 

References

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bobbette, Adam and Amy Donovan. Political Geology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. University of Minnesota Press. 2015.

Clark, Nigel. The Anthropocene. in A Kobayashi (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. 2nd ed., Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2019 139-145.

Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? UBC Press, 2005.

Halperin, Ilana. Fossil (VI). A Published Event, 2021.

McKay, Don. ‘Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time’. Making The Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Punctum Books, 2013, 46-54.

Palsson, Gisli and Heather Anne Swanson. “Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics.” Environmental Humanities, Volume: 8 issue 2, November 2016, 150-171.

Yussoff, Kathryn. “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume: 31 issue: 5, 2013 page(s): 779-795

 

About the Author

Margaret Woodward is an artist, writer and publisher based in lutruwita/ Tasmania. With Justy Phillips she is co-founder of the collaboration A Published Event (APE) making long-term relational artworks through shared acts of public telling. Exploring chance encounter, constructed situations and the shared authorship of lived experience, Woodward and Phillips work with artists and writers, materials and ideas, writing, prose, book-works and performance. Recent works include Lost Rocks (2017–21), a five-year slow-publishing of absent geologies. In 2019, she was awarded the Ruth Stephan Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University and was a visiting artist at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA. In 2017, A Published Event were selected as collaborating artists in the Banff International Curatorial Institute’s Residency Geologic Time. Woodward’s publications, Crocoite and Fall of the Derwent were long-listed as finalists in the 2017 Premier’s Literary Awards, Tasmania, Australia. Woodward has a PhD in Design: Overlapping dialogues: the role of interpretation design in communicating Australia’s natural and cultural heritage (2009) from Curtin University of Technology. She is Adjunct Associate Professor and member of the Institute for Land, Water & Society at Charles Sturt University.

To cite this article

Woodward, Margaret. “Over-hearing in the Anthropocene.” Fusion Journal, no. 19, 2021, pp. 8-20. http://www.fusion-journal.com/Over-hearing in the Anthropocene/

First published online: March 2021