Grounded, embeddedness, undisciplined

These three short texts were commissioned for Critical Making: A Lexicon (workingtitle, forthcoming at Valiz in 2022), a publication edited by Janneke Wesseling and Florian Cramer. They were written in and around Down Dwars Delà II at Bidston Observatory in the summer of 2021.

Grounded, Embeddedness, Undisciplined

Grounded

Yet another on-line meeting, in the fall of 2020. A festival will take place on the cusp of water and land, and the artists are preparing site-specific installations. As they present their projects to each other, one of them claims to be based in the particular area and persistently invites the artists calling in from remote locations to “come over for a boat trip, and stick their boots in the mud” because the best way to get to grips with the shifting grounds of the festival location, will be to step on site.

Physical presence, and direct contact with the specific muddyness of a terrain can be part of a situated knowledge practice, a powerful antidote to presumed positions of exteriority and views from nowhere. But it is also a proprietary gesture that essentializes territorial nearness. It counts on the privilege of individual experience, and relies on touch at first hand or boot, sticking to knowledge that can only be acquired by presence. Centering on what can be perceived from where one is standing is taking a risk to foreground what is here and now, and to negate interdependencies that operate at a distance. How long did it take for the sediment to be deposited? Where will the polluted soil from the estuary eventually end up? When did the seagrass become invasive, or start capturing carbon?

In their work on touch, feminist thinker Karen Barad propose that ‘being in touch’ is what allows experiments to become participative, rather than remaining at some remove. They invite us to explore queer ways of being in touch, which involve (inhuman) others besides ourselves:

Thinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human activity. Stepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out of bounds, off the beaten path — diverging and touching down again, swerving and returning, not as consecutive moves but as experiments in in/determinacy.

The kind of touch Barad propose is not counting on the legibility of what it steps into, nor on the reassuring effects of affection. As they remind us elsewhere, for a physicist, touch is but a sensation caused by electromagnetic repulsion.

How to be grounded, without getting stuck in the mud of personal experience? I guess I am trying to re-articulate ‘grounded’ as a ‘thinking-and-making-with’ that is always already part of what it steps into. A grounded practice that does not depend on knowing where the ground begins or ends, and can let go of pre-established notions of fore-ground and back-ground.

Ground and feet, land and movement, verticality and time, situatedness and axes: the more of them we take into account when giving account of the spheres we share, the more degrees of freedom we are going to endow our deterritorialized and reterritorialized lives with.

To be grounded means to be porous to remote impressions, to trust the touching done by (inhuman) others, and to take into account that which it is caught up with, especially when it is not understood, can not be felt or ever be intuited. Because however distant, our deterritorialized and reterritorialized experiences are simply always in touch.

Embeddedness

Embeddedness: a triple d word with tentacles in geology, surfacing every trouble possible from dependency to duress. There is nothing simple about this term: embededdness means to be attentive to multiple inter-operating spacetimes, to resonate with what is below as well as with what is above and delà, to resist extraction, and to account for remote implications.

In assembling ideas that are seemingly disconnected and uneven (the seabird and the epilogue, the song and the soil, the punch clock and the ecosystem, the streetlight and the kick-­on-­beat), the logic of knowing-to-­prove is unsustainable because incongruity appears to be offering atypical thinking. Yet curiosity thrives.

Embeddedness: to be set solidly into a mass

Ship merchants operating in the 19th century from the Liverpool docks needed their tides predicted and their clocks calibrated, so they commissioned The Bidston Observatory. The observatory was to be strategically situated on the highest point of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the river Mersey, the river Dee and the Irish sea. Completed in 1866, it was made out of sandstone extracted from the bedrock below, creating a cavity which now forms the observatories’ extensive basements. Around the building, a deep moat was dug to minimize interference from neighboring traffic.

The plinth in the picture is a ‘bedrock connection point’, located in the observatory sub-vault. Sheltered from temperature shifts and movements from elsewhere, the plinth provided a stable platform for a century of exacting earth observation.

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Cornwall, last fall. Suddenly they feel the ground tremble, and hear windows rattle. Afterwards, Dr. Ryan Law, managing director of Geothermal Engineering explains to the local press: 

As part of the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power testing, we did cause some micro-seismicity. Although this was within our regulatory limits, we are stopping operations until we understand the cause. The tremors are low scale and should not be anything to be afraid of.

Geothermal energy is produced by harnessing heat from the earth’s core. To produce power from this heat, extremely deep wells need to be drilled and water is pumped through them at high pressure. Since the Bronze age, Cornwall has been mined for tin, copper, arsenic and lithium. Tremors in the porous underground are set off as a result of the additional disturbance caused by geothermal boring. In the non-committal words of the general manager they sense all the troubles which wreck the earth: “we caused micro-seismicity” […] “within our regulatory limits” [...] “until we understand the cause” […] “not anything to be afraid of”.

Embeddedness: laying in a bed of surrounding matter

South or north of here, already more than ten years ago. It takes him many long days to level the driveway of his holiday home. Using a barre à mine, a forged iron bar originally used by miners to pound the ground and break the surface, his movements reverberate through the vally. Eventually, he hits an immovable piece of rock and the pounding stops. He points, and says: ‘look, the earth!’

Early on, the observatory installed a seismometer on the sub-vault plinth. Kept in the dark, it continuously auto-registered slight movements on light sensitive paper which corresponded with earthquakes experienced on the other side of the planet. A Milne-Shaw Vertical Tiltmeter was acquired in 1910, a precision instrument based on the same principle as the seismograph, where one part remains stationary and fixed, while another part moves together with the earth’s surface. The vertical tiltmeter lends its precision from using a rigid arm that points upwards, with a pendulum hanging down from it. The swinging of the pendulum, with its fulcrum fixed to the bedrock connection point, makes micro-seismicity observable by magnifying the actual motion of the earth. It was with this instrument that the phenomena of ‘tidal load’ could be observed, the oscillating north-south tilt of the Wirral peninsula due to the strain of the water weighing down the bedrock (and subsequently, the plinth itself) at high tide.

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A physiotherapist once told me about her interest in how bodies feel their way around with the help of instruments. She explained her fascination through the example of cooking a soup or a sauce. If you stir the bottom with a wooden spoon, she said, you will feel precisely at which moment it starts to catch. You do not need to put your hand into the hot liquid to touch the bottom of the pan.

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At the observatory, the so-called ‘ocean loading effect’ continued to be registered with increased precision until the early seventies, when the expanding data about earth tides from around the world started to show unexplained discrepancies in neighboring sites; the magnitude of the north-south tilt varied by twenty percent when measured in one end of its sub-vault, or the other. In an article called “Tidal Tilt Anomalies”, two scientists working at Bidston claimed that these inconsistencies could be explained by unknowable couplings between the landmass movement and the strain on the site itself. “A mine or a tunnel, in which tilt measurements are usually taken, represents a discontinuity in the Earth’s crust.” By comparing different types of instruments, they found that tiltmeters where extremely accurate but that they were measuring tidal tilt in combination with hyper local movements due to situated geological conditions. Tidal tilt observations where eventually abandoned due to non-compliant embedded data.

Embeddedness: trembling with the earth

As with many material evidences of techno-scientific progress, the appointing of stability, the fixing of a point zero wherever convenient, seems to require an entitled mode of being in the world. “Each point is merely a conceptual marker, which can be assigned and reassigned in the equation hierarchy as the ‘coordinating zero point’ and every line can be formed to be the ‘coordinating axis’.” Power arranges itself around such arbitrary vantage points, through which the movement of goods and people elsewhere can be controlled. Contributing to the reliable navigation of ships across the British empire, but also actively and continuously supporting the convenient fable of transparent observation, the Bidston Observatory aligned with different scales of capitalist endeavor, exploitation, colonialist and imperialist modes of worlding.

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He is being driven around his native island Martinique, pointing out the places that he grew up in and that vanished after the earthquakes. The island is part of an archipelago located on the crumbling intersection of two tectonic plates, which makes the geo-plasticity of the earth regularly interact with human activity.“We understand the world better if we tremble with it” he explains.

To be embeddeddepends politically nor epistemologically on a fixed locus of observation. It opposes systematic thinking without fear, because itis a mode of understanding the world which resonates with the multidimensional and multi-directional impact of being embedded, of its inherent instability. Embeddedness is to ‘tremble with the world’.

The image cutsback to the view from the car window, an undulating green landscape moving by under a bright blue sky filled with clouds. He continues:

The world trembles in every way. It trembles organically and geologically. It trembles even with the climate, poor me, as far as I know. But the world also trembles through the relations we have with each other.

Undisciplined

To define a term such as ‘undisciplined’ is probably a contradiction.

Undisciplined practice is too busy with proliferating sensibilities, issues, demands, requests, complaints, entanglements, methods and questions to bother with the inherent etiquette of disciplinarity. It insists on a mode of thinking and making that is situated and ad-hoc. It is anti-solutionist and motivated by the need for rigourous uncalibration and disobedient action research.

Undisciplined practitioners often operate collectively. They do not count on validated forms of expertise before interrogating existing ways of doing, and start experimenting with how to do things otherwise, right away. They smuggle techniques from one domain to another, contaminate ethnographic descriptions with accounts of software, mix poetics with abnormal visual renders and blur theoretical dissertations with case-stories.

Undisciplined practice materializes in the use of made-up terminology and uncommon writing, but also in a hands-on engagement with tools, merging high and low tech, learning on the go: active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, ex-titutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.

Femke Snelting, December 2021