ELAINE GAN + ANNA TSING

A FUNGAL CLOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN REPRESENTING TIME, 2012

Collaborating across the arts and sciences, we combine digital media to imagine history and temporality that take into account multispecies coordinations. Progress and modernity focus our attention on the unilinear teleologies of plans; without progress, we must look at landscape-making effects, that is, unintended design. This shifts our attention to more-than-human webs that scaffold human histories as the planning modules of progress dissolve into unplanned ruins.

Our clock offers three ways of studying coordinations between pine, oak, humans, and matsutake mushrooms. All three are simultaneous in any scene, yet we separate them to show how each shapes the others. We call them folds: phenology, or events timed to seasons; emergence, or transformations that arise from encounters across difference; rupture, or crystallization of a new epoch from unprecedented disturbance.

Presented at 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropology Association. This slideshow only represents a selection of screenshots from the browser-based piece. It is not the clock itself. An interactive prototype will be online soon.

← BACK TO MAIN

previous
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
  • clock
next