Good evening everyone. First I would like to start with thanking the Vienna Viennale for the organization for inviting us. I am Aziza Hermel, I'm

Curatorial Assistant in Kunsthalle Wien. So tonight's panel is titled The Natural Technology which is a panel that has focused on practices and streams of thought that engage with rethinking the relationship between

nature and technology, reconfiguring our planetary connections through epistemological systems that undermine the extractivist logic that has long been facilitated by colonial legal mechanism and late capitalism. So we will discuss new mode of post-human feminist phenomenology that

understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separated from it. We will also focus on non-western and western methods of ecological management, more specifically traditional ecological

knowledge which describes indigenous and other traditional knowledge about local resources. I just would like to say a small word about program that we did also in the context of the Vienna Viennale which is titled Getting Wet which was organized by Kunsthalle Wien and tonight I should be standing here

with my dear colleague Laura Aman who unfortunately couldn't make it but we have been working on this together. So we also curated this program titled Getting Wet as well together with Laura Aman. And in this program we've been showing artists as Paula Baisa, Paella Mila, Sebastian Kaufocco,

Katharina Dashner, Devil Aprons, like Cara Kuntvat who's here and Trun Onsen, Patricia Dominguez, Denis Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neumann and Barbara Kaputa. And it was a program where we showed mostly movies

that were dealing with this idea of rethinking the notion of technology and shifting it from a mere apprehension of nature towards a deep attention to it. So the first speaker tonight will be Cara Kuntvat who's here tonight with us.

He's a visual artist born and raised in Tromsø and he's still based there. His work has a coastal landscape in Tromsø both as a frame of reference and as a home. Tonight he will be speaking about Stone Age science fiction,

brewing with seaweed, bacterial enzymes, CO2, sicken string, and dancing. And he will be also talking about real evaluation of traditional knowledge and practices in relation to his art practice. After that we will have

Lukács Likavicnam who is a philosopher focusing on technology, ecology, and visual cultures. He received his degree in philosophy and PhD in environmental studies in Brno in Czech Republic.

He teaches central for audio visual studies in Prague. And tonight his main theme is titled The Metabolic View and it's based on the idea of

image metabolism and this contribution will be focusing on ramifications of concept of metabolism in biology and ecological economics and it employs it as a philosophical device to index the continuum between the natural, technological, and the social.

And eventually we'll have Estride Nemanis who will be talking to us from Canada. She is a Canada research chair in feminist environmental humanities in the University of British Columbia in Canada. She's a cultural theorist

working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change and her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility,

and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. She will give a presentation titled Caring for Science that is an attempt to bridge epistemological divides between Western and colonial science on the one hand and other forms of non-extractive human relations with the non-human world. So care, love, and support. She will draw on her recent work

with the artist Pachi Change and scientist Alexia Nemanis and she will examine how the scientific practice of necropsy can be understood as a form of care for the stranded and how

scientists in turn require support for the care work that they do. Yes, so thank you very much all for being here and I'll give the floor to Koro.

So thank you Aziza for that lovely introduction. So I'm grateful to be here. This is the first time I'm traveling after the event so it's quite special for me to be here.

I will talk a bit today. It's quite an open sort of lecture. I will just start basically with a quote from Sadie Plant as she writes in her preamble to zeros and ones. One of the nest descriptions of a pre-age. No future, no past, an endless geographical plane of micro

meshing, pulsing, quanta, limitless webs of interacting, leavings, leekings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless,

careless, thoughtless, amok. We had no denition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to that time. Free exchanges, micro processes neatly tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders or boundaries. As I mentioned

on the phone, I'm working on a project that is based on the notion that all times exist in parallel, Stone Age and science fiction side by side. I think this is an exciting starting point as it efficiently breaks down classical hierarchies and notions of progress. It also opens up for a

reevaluation of traditional knowledge that is so grounded in nostalgia. Also in perspective where we do not see ourself at the top or end of a long development slash history. But

the perspective where we are as much before something as after something. But also today, like any story needs to start and this story starts with beer, a great many beers, as so many stories before. Maybe even the story of settled life and so-called civilization,

even though that might have been a bad decision. James C. Scott writes in his book, Against the Grain, a deep history of the early states. Agrarian life, sorry, that's not supposed to be sound. Agrarian life in the first pristine states came at

a price, disease, slavery, and et cetera. And this is like so many other decisions taken after a few too many you could say. And another anecdote I find really interesting in his assertion is that we have underestimated the power of fire as a landscape transforming technology

predating homo sapiens and that homo erectus widespread use of fire to transform the landscape could also be seen as a starting point of the Anthropocene. In any case, we complained about the price of beer in Norway. We talked about making our own

ingredients and all and quickly realized that everything except the water would be imported from England, Germany, et cetera. And this is typical of life in the North. We always get to rely on Eurasian, East, West technology and culture. And that usually means

the further south or north you get, the worse this technology works. And of course, the economy of scale and capitalism and all its relatives exacerbates this into perversity.

Buildings not adapted to the climate, chain stores selling summer couture in winter storms, language spoken for thousands of years, marginalized not taught in schools, state ownership of a majority of the land, a land seen as extractive resource not home. In any case,

we were fed up with this and also wanted cheap beer. And a vague memory of something I read poked the back of my mind, a story of Inuit making alcohol from seaweed. They vacuumed the

World Wide Web for references and information about brewing with seaweed but came up with pretty much, came up pretty much empty-handed. So we turned our attention to just go for it, collecting seaweed, trying, talking, failing, brewing, reading. And during this exploration,

we came across an old type of beer or yeast, you could say, called kvek. A farm yeast is still in use in some of the valleys of West Norway. The brewers would sometimes carve intricate logs

as vessels to keep the kvek in between brewings. And I think the implication of this is quite interesting in the sense that you have the brewer carving living machines or architecture for invisible beings that make beer. And in this relationship, I would say the agency or

sort of director of that relationship is pretty unclear. Is the brewer compelling the yeast to make beer or is the yeast compelling the brewer? And for us, this opened up a new line of thought,

sculptures or objects as architecture for the non-human. And I think the most like interesting piece with this is it sort of breaks with some of the ideas of what a product

or architecture could be in the sense that so much of what we do is based on extractive logic. And the logic there, in the moment something is finished, it also starts to break down. Whereas in a sort of symbiotic or mutualistic relationship between people or seaweed or yeast,

you get something else. We worked further with this and we made for Liev in 2019 sculptures

that were based on this sort of recognition for seaweed. So we tried to sort of get into the seaweed debate in Norway because it's quite a large debate and in most cases it's large

companies who's trying to sort of hijack seaweed as a means to greenwash the farming of salmon as sort of cleansing the salmon farming using that seaweed to sort of extract all the extra

nutrients they pump out into the ocean. And we just wanted to take it back a second and try to like make an intimate relationship between seaweed and people. So we made sculptures that also serve as sort of a small-scale seaweed farm for Bergen, an exhibition that opened at Bergen

Kunsthal last weekend. We continued this work and we were working with some ideas of a German architect from the 70s, a German-American architect, Wolf Helbritz. He did a seminal work

in the 70s on bio or sea concrete where you buy a process of electrolysis in seawater, can bind carbon that's floating in the ocean into chalk-like or carbonate compounds. And we

use this as a substrate on the sculptures. The idea is basically that you have two pieces of electrolysis and the cathode in this sense was the sculpture and it would bind the CO2,

manganese and other materials in the ocean into sort of a crust onto the sculpture which would be a perfect substrate for marine organisms. And the idea is that when you turn off the electricity, the natural processes of the ocean continues the growing. So you have

a material that is not decaying but it's actually continuing to grow. In doing so,

we also got some problems. This is the sculptures. They're made from 3D printed clay doped with a large amount of graphite to make them conductive. We wanted to do this because we wanted to sort of not rely so much on metal and the mining for metal but we actually ended up

in the same ditch. We needed graphite to do this and we sourced it locally from a graphite mine close to where I live which turned out to actually be owned by an Australian mining conglomerate. They sponsored this graphite and the same day we wrote this deal with them,

it actually came out that they were in conflict with the local reindeer herders which I also work for. And I think this is kind of an interesting and maybe one of the most important points there and it's that it's really difficult to avoid these situations.

We are so sort of nested in this system and how to proceed you could say. I don't know the answer to that but I know that working with it and acknowledging it is really important.

So I'm sorry I'm a bit nervous. Yeah, here we go. I also said I would be talking about dancing

and when I say dancing it's not really just dancing, it's sort of social projects.

What you're seeing now is a transport of a bike trailer sauna that we built. It's placed in a valley near where I live. It's a valley that has been traditionally used by the Sami

people. They're no longer there. They couldn't get to the valley after we closed the border on Sweden. They would be living in Sweden in the winter and Tromsø is valley in the summer and we have set up a camp there and we're doing workshops with the students at the Art Academy in Tromsø. What you're seeing now is the screening of a film called The Coconut

Revolution. It's based on the rebellion on the Borganville Island in the Pacific where they rised up against the mining company and actually waged war and had their sort of equal revolution based on coconut oil using whatever the mining companies had left, vehicles running

them on coconut oil, fueling actually a guerrilla fight. This is actual dancing. They're dancing on students dancing on wool, really like wool knot that was not meant to be used. It was

too bad quality so they were going to burn it and we used some traditional methods to felt it into large carpets by dancing on it. In our beer brewing we have experimented

with a wide variety of sort of traditional ways of processing seaweed, different ways of adding enzymes to it. In the beginning you saw a clip where we tried to use the enzymes in spit to process it to break out the starch. I would say luckily it didn't work.

It was a very interesting sort of social setting. Apart from this we've tried different types of bacterias and yeast like a Koji culture used to ferment soy and rice. At this point we

have actually solved the problem though we had to go to the industry. So we're using a potent enzyme which is extracted from a yeast culture, cellulase. So at this point the whole idea of

getting to brew with seaweed is kind of solved. With this method we can make beer or alcohol from just about anything, a wood table for that matter. What we're seeing here is a bird,

Krikje in Norwegian, that has sought refuge in the cities in the last few years. The reason for this is multifaceted, it's predation, it's global warming, it's safety in the city,

it's overfishing. In any case they have made their nests traditionally on large mountains and big colonies counting several hundred thousand birds. Now they're moving into the city and it's a conflict. And we have some suggestions there how to sort of facilitate the existing

architecture but also building new things, facilitate their existence in our cities.

Many people have like a sort of a romanticized image of the North and the indigenous population, that we are sort of closer to the earth or that we rely on traditional ways and methods.

But the truth is in a way that the Stone Age and science fiction lives side by side. This is from a couple of years ago. We work in the mountains in the corals and we mark and slaughter

reindeer. But due to sort of regulations and zoning of land use, we are not allowed to use, to take the reindeers down to the slaughterhouse alive because we would pass land that we can't. So we use helicopters to transport them. Thank you for listening

to me.

Hello, everyone. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you. That's perfect. You can start your presentation. All right. I'm going to share my screen now. And now we should be able to see the green color.

Yes, thank you. That's perfect. Yeah. So everything is set up. Can I start? I guess so. Okay. So hello, everyone. And thank you so much for the kind invitation Aziza and Mara. And also I'm really excited actually to present my research alongside such wonderful panelists

such as Cara and Astrida. And I mean, of course, thanks also for the invitation. And I mean, I'm extremely excited also to present this short contribution that you can take a kind of as a kind of exercise to hit up the engines of imagination and abstraction. And so my aim today is to explain a bit what that

means to look at the planet as a process, as a kind of metabolic flux, not as a static entity with well-defined borders. And this, I hope, speaks well to research of my two co-panelists, too, as my ambition is to demonstrate how to work with fluid ontologies as a basis of situational techniques of evidence

and testimony. So some underlying assumptions of the research I'm going to show you today are developed in my book, which is called Introduction to Comparative Bonatology, and which was published by Strelka Press two years ago in 2019. This book presents something that can be called an intertwined analysis

of geopolitics of climate change and visual as well as philosophical cultures of imagining the Earth. But there is also an update to the research done in this book, which exists so far only in a form of a series of exhibitions I have curated

for 11th edition of Photograph Festival in Prague and which has opened only two days ago. That is also the reason why I'm not joining you today in person, but only online, as the intense installation works didn't allow me to make even a short return trip to Vienna, despite I'm literally just a few

hundred kilometres from you now, because I'm based in Prague and speaking from Prague at the moment. And I'm going to make one more footnote before I'm going to introduce the topic a bit closer. And that's that the pictures that I'm going to show during this presentation are mainly of the artworks that are actually shown also or exhibited or featured in any other way at this

year's edition of Photograph Festival called Earthlings. So let me start with the literary parable of sorts in Jeff Vandermeer's novel called Annihilation, which is the first part of famous Southern Reach trilogy. The main character, which is critically entitled

The Biologist encounters an alien organism that intoxicates the biologist with its pores. That results in changing the perception of the biologist. It changes her perception of the environment affected by a sudden arrival of an extraterrestrial entity. At one point, she caused this perceptual

rotation, quote unquote, truthful seeing, a kind of ability to identify the slow and omnipresent mutation of the affected area into a sort of otherworldly habitat. At first glance, the mutation is subtle, almost imperceptible. It is only

occasionally announced by unidentifiable sounds and modified behavior of animals or plants. But if one's eye is trained to see it, suddenly the whole landscape resembles a giant breathing organism, a kind of behemoth. The landscape is intensely alive with its tentacles

moving in the background, camouflaged as an almost ordinary night sky. And so the reason why I begin my contribution with this parable is to make us acutely aware of how much perception, perspective and epistemology matters when it comes to understanding the intrinsic logics of the planetary

ecology. The design interventions that can restore biodiversity that can restore safe carbon concentration in the atmosphere or that can, for example, prevent a collapse of sensitive marine ecologies. Reading traces and indexes of the planetary metabolism is an indispensable starting point.

Metabolism is thus the central concept of my contribution. It indicates continuity of natural social technological nexus, and it invites us to employ epistemic techniques and aesthetic strategies that defy modernist

genres of representation. As an example, imagine the role of sound. In a documentary expedition to Iceland I have recently taken part in, we have traveled through infrastructural choke points such as this hydroelectric power plant. Here our team composed largely of field recorders and musicians

research the sonic landscapes that can sort of subvert the visual impressions of these places. These kinds of impressions hide the truth of the infrastructural processes under the mantle of innocent, visible, minimalist architecture. And so we have been made aware of the subversion of the

visual by the sonic, which indicated the pervasiveness of the environmental alteration by energy infrastructures, as well as how the visual objecthood of these infrastructures stands in sharp contrast with metabolic continuity of their sonic profile. In a way, we have been made to see truthfully

by first hearing truthfully through the techniques of listening. So to unpack the notion of metabolism a bit better now. Every organism can be imagined as a temporary clump of matter that aims to maintain its stable ordering by transforming the energy and matter it accepts from its surroundings.

In biology, this process is called exactly metabolism and it is usually divided into two parts. Anabolism, which is the process of creating more complex chemical substances through acquired energy. For instance, this process can be of anabolism, can be photosynthesis.

The second part then is catabolism, which is the breakdown of chemicals into simpler components. And that's a process that actually releases energy and examples of these processes are, for example, digestion or cellular respiration.

But the trick is that it is not just an organism that can be imagined as an economy, just as an organism maintains an intake of food from its environment, just as it decomposes food into basic energy carriers and nutrients, just as it builds new biochemical compounds out of these nutrients

and just as it maintains an output of waste and residual heat. So an economy can be imagined as a giant metabolism of sorts. And this idea was first formulated by Romanian born economist, Nicholas Georgescu Regan. He developed foundations of contemporary ecological economics

in his book, the entropy law and economic process from 1971. The picture he presents is one of ecological economics as a discipline that brings economic phenomena down to Earth by treating them as material and energetic flows into socioeconomic metabolism.

Georgescu Regan was inspired in his approach by Erwin Schrodinger and his thermodynamic definition of life, although one may, of course, hesitate to what extent this is too organicist and vitalist ontology of economics.

But be it that way or another, ecological economics now uses the metabolic perspective on society and economy, not just in a sort of metaphorical way, because it became the basic ontology of its analytic models, too. And of course, the idea of natural economy has been with us for a long time.

It was discussed by figures such as Carl Lina, Charles Darwin or Peter Kropotkin, and served as the foundation for diverse political positions and economic proposals. And today, however, it seems that the metabolic perspective is not merely the continuation of this historical line of thought through different means.

Instead, it shows us that a sort of permeability between the human and natural economies is actually the default norm to the extent that terms such as logistics or infrastructure can be applied equally well to industrial zones and ecosystems and also to the production and transport of goods as well as to photosynthesis or food chains.

However, we may perhaps take the metabolic perspective even further. What if we were to consider human culture and communication as merely continuations or prolongations of natural metabolisms?

Perhaps we will find that around us are animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, non-living objects, and entire communities of organisms that constantly speak to us, that constantly show us something or warn us before something. Could we then see the natural infrastructure and logistics not only in the areas of materials and energy,

but also in the way messages about the past, present, and future of our planet are relayed? Consider this. The Pencil of Nature from 1844 is a short book by William Henry Fox Talbot.

Here, the general public of the Victorian era first encountered the experimental medium known today as photography. In his introduction, Talbot claims that the images the readers will encounter bear no trace of human tampering. They are impressed by nature's hands, as he says.

They are the results of the mere action of light and chemical reactions on the surface of photosensitive paper. And when Étienne Gilmaré invented chronophotography in the second half of the 19th century, he also believed his images captured the language of nature, mirrored in the perfection of a landing pelican.

If the human plays any role here, it is only a supporting one. It ensures the existence of the photographic apparatus and pressing the shutter. To put it differently, I'm interested in whether photography is not a medium of the representation of nature,

but a sort of description of the medial character of nature itself, imprinting traces of biological, chemical, and geological processes into the photosensitive surface of the planet. Hence, I am interested in whether it is the case that we have rather discovered photography than invented it.

Satellite images, for example, would then no longer be photographs of the terrain of the Earth, but photographs of an archive formed by the planet itself. Photosynthesis would then be not only the elementary metabolic process of plants,

but also a metaphor of the photographic metabolism of the planetary system. And the idea of image metabolism is then but one of many instances of how to treat the planetary itself as a result of the metabolic ontology, the planetary as a generic space of encounter and of exchange.

A fortunate consequence of this perspective is that it allows to overcome the duality between the global and the local. The language of the local becomes just a clumsy way how to express that the situational is not contradictory to the planetary.

Instead, the situational is the primary site of the embodied observation of the planetary, or as goes a line from a text I have written with my colleagues at Digital Earth Fellowship program in the Netherlands. The planetary is hidden in every grain of sand.

And this perspective then may be complemented by appropriate evidentiary techniques. One example is an approach studied by Susan Shupley in her ongoing research project, Learning from Ice. Here, she explains how ice can be thought of as a natural memory medium,

saving traces of past climate conditions on our planet by trapping bubbles of air in the ice sheets of glaciers where they remain for millennia. Another example, one that fully unveils the indexicality of the climate aesthetics in the aftermath of the adduction of the metabolic perspective,

is the work of visualization theorist and designer Dietmar Offenhuber, who also contributed to the magazine that accompanies photograph festival I have mentioned at the beginning of my talk. Offenhuber developed the concept of quote unquote autographic visualizations.

Visualizations that are not some external representations of the phenomena, but they are their self presentations, self diagrammatizations, if you will. The rings of the tree are the index of its age. The movement of grass is the index of wind. Our lungs are the index of the polluted air in the cities.

Autographic visualizations are, according to Offenhuber, exactly what Étienne Gilmarais called the language of the phenomena themselves. And the design intervention here is not the one of creation, but of an evidentiary practice based on facilitation and on curating of the biosemiotic exteriority of the planetary.

So my hope is that accounting for evidentiary techniques changes also the status of artistic or architectural practice. These practices turn out to be primarily about elongation of knowledge and relaying of testimonies,

not about artistic individuality and egocentric gestures, because after all, art solves nothing. Art simply slowly grinds down, washes out, and adds precision to intuitions that arise from the everyday experience of the direct urgency of external reality.

The history of natural techniques of imaging, such as photography, shine a light on the path. And that's all from my side for now. And please, if you plan to travel to Prague, you can see the exhibitions of Photograph Festival until the end of October. Thank you so much.

Hi Lukasz, unfortunately I haven't had the chance to say hello. Thanks so much for the presentation. Thank you. Yeah, I'm sorry that I was too fast.

Is it okay if I stay online muted without the video? Yeah, sure. Thank you.

Hello. Can you hear us? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Okay, yes. Great. So you can start your presentation now. Okay, thank you so much. Hello. So, I am going to just minimize the zoom here a little bit.

And I was just watching, watching the other presentations on the live stream so that was wonderful to be able to be there, at least in that small way. So, hello everybody. Thank you Aziza for already introducing me earlier in the session and for inviting me to take part in this.

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that I am zooming into you today from the unceded silk territory in the Okanagan in Kelowna, BC, Canada. Today I want to share a short paper about an ongoing project that I'm working on with artist Patty Chang and veterinary pathologist Alexia Namenis.

I hope to offer it in the context of this panel as perhaps a slightly different way to think about scientific technology and practices of care in ways that perhaps trouble distinctions between scientific and artistic ways of knowing, particularly in relation to non-human beings.

I enjoyed the prior two presentations, but I suppose, you know, watching them I'm thinking, oh, science is so cool. And in my presentation, I'm going to be talking a little bit more about science, potentially as care.

So I'm not going to share my screen today I'm just going to talk, I think because of the short time that will be easiest. Let's begin. Prologue. 12th of May, 2021, 3.02 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Little girl, you are running your hands smoothly along the skin, moving from the head down the animal. You are feeling for net marks, bycatch, female, found in the beginning of March. Not emaciated, possibly poor condition. No other abnormalities.

Fingers pressing into Flint's side belly. Traffic is waking up, outside I could see the faint sparkle of the Big Dipper. 3.46 a.m. Scoring the blubber, stacking it up, someone is taking it from the table. Now I'm with you, I'm at the mammary gland, it looks pretty inactive.

I tried to express milk, but there was nothing there. There's a little bit of hemorrhage, base of the skull, back of the neck. Likely when the animal was caught in the net and was struggling. Remove the apaxial muscle, now I'm going to open the abdomen carefully.

It is a little girl with immature ovaries, which I'm going to remove 4.07 a.m. I'm using a new scalpel, you probably can't see me here, I'm just out of the field of vision, I'm slicing through the pancreas. Removing the tongue, ventrachea, popping out the epiglottis so I can remove the rest. The lung, the heart underneath it, the uterus, the ovaries, the bladder underneath.

4.51 a.m. Examine the respiratory tract, my daughter is calling, hello, yeah, yup, yup. Okay, liver. It's actually really beautiful, firm textured colour as it should be.

It is almost completely light, the birds outside getting louder. 5.17 a.m. The body is open like a mouth. We're getting closer to the end here. No other overt pathology, that's it, the table looks clean. That's it for today and for me.

6.23 a.m. Part one, when death is all around. We live in a time of almost unfathomable loss and we are called to respond. We are called to respond to that which we cannot fully understand. And we are called to understand why and how we are called.

These words begin in an essay by anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, written almost a decade ago, called In the Shadow of All This Death. Rose was a leading figure in the field of environmental humanities. Her later work in particular was interested in questions of death and extinction and how these phenomena reshape worlds.

Debbie died a handful of years ago, too early from cancer. Lately, I find myself returning to this work. There is so much death around us. This presents not only as the death of individual beings, but also as the end of

species, as the end of ways of life, the end of possibilities and the end of relations. As Deborah Rose suggested, even though death must be an important part of life, death is sometimes not only death, but double death.

In the sixth great extinction, which cannot be understood as separate from capitalism, colonialism, militarism, hetero-patriarchy and other violences, not only do individuals die, but their entanglement in other beings' ways of life dies, too. Patterns of embodied connection wither and shrink.

As you no doubt know, many marine mammals are among the many species currently dying. Whales, dolphins and porpoises, also known as cetaceans, breathe air like you and me, give birth to live young, take considerable time for peri-

those young for life on their own. They're highly intelligent with complex social lives and although their ancestors were once land-dwelling mammals, about four million years ago cetaceans forsook terrestriality for a more watery existence. Some made an admirable comeback after the decimation caused by large-scale whaling industries in previous centuries

but now cetaceans are imperiled anew by noise, hunger, garbage, traffic, and heat. Double death is thus also caught in the ocean's currents but this double death at sea is mostly occurring

beyond our field of vision. So how are we to respond? This talk draws on pilot project research I've undertaken with artist Patti Chang and wildlife pathologist Alexia Naimanis who leads a marine mammal disease surveillance program at the National Veterinary Institute

of Sweden or SAO. This project also has important contributions from our collaborators Dr. Jamie Wang in Hong Kong, Sue Reed in Australia, Tara Nicholson here in BC, as well as a number of scientists and activists who have generously given their time to speak to us.

This research concerns stranded cetaceans. On the frayed edges of the watery habitat they call home, these stranded animals have taken their leave among us, terrestrials, who are called on to respond. Some scientists respond with the western scientific practice of necropsy,

that is the post-mortem examination of an animal in order to try to understand its death. These scientists are afforded a rare opportunity for a kind of intimacy with these animals so this talk is an invitation to you to understand this practice as a complex form of care and as one kind of response to the stranded under conditions of climate catastrophe.

Part two, science as a form of care. Western science has a lot to answer for, fallacies of objectivity, excessive extraction, fraught intimacies with colonialism and capitalism

and other charges animate calls for science to be accountable. Yet those of us committed to feminist, anti-racist, decolonial and queer approaches to environmental urgencies might be ambivalent in advancing some of these critiques. Of course we want to question certain premises but we also recognize the urgent value of much scientific research.

This tension is even more palpable now in this so-called post-truth era where critique can be easily conflated with denials of all kinds, propped up by an absurdist knowledge scape where to say anything loudly and brazenly enough can apparently make it true.

So this presents a bit of a baby and bath water problem. No science is innocent or value-free. Of that we can be sure but where does that leave us? It leaves me for one curious, a curiosity

I brought to this project alongside more extensive research and interviews with animal pathologists and biologists. This pilot project centered on the observation of live-streamed porpoise necropsies conducted by Alexia in her lab in Uppsala and watched by Patty and me from

our respective homes in North America. We were curious what might these observations teach us about science scientists and care for the stranded. So let's begin again in the necropsy room. 12 48 a.m. liver unremarkable no parasites stomachs only four stomach opened mostly empty

except three to five milliliters of digestive slurry no parasites kidneys unremarkable spleen unremarkable adrenals possibly mildly atrophic cortex histo bladder small unremarkable repetition

repetition precision patience a necropsy can take half a work day or longer which does not include the preparatory labors nor the distribution and disposal of the remains about three hours into the first live stream I write in my notes I don't think there's

anything I do that requires this many hours of uninterrupted attention to something or someone else we talk a lot about the importance of protocol three slices one dorsal 18 one lateral 17 one ventral 21 2 dorsal 17 2 lateral 17

2 ventral 20 3 dorsal 16 3 lateral 17 3 ventral 17 4 dorsal 19 4 lateral 15 and then there's nothing 3 13 a.m to an outsider the practice might appear coldly surgical

but we learn that it is a deeply sensual affair I go a lot by feel to tell me where I'm supposed to cut you tell us other scientists we speak to talk about the smell you can tell which species you will be attending to by the scent of the room when you enter one tells us another mentions how in comparison to porpoises and seals the whale she sampled

smelled very different darker was the word she used all of the scientists we talk to repeat the importance of staying attuned to the animal as a question of respect

when I hesitatingly asked you about adopting an objectifying stance toward the animal you were taken aback and annoyed I don't do this for me you said everything that a body accumulates needs to be accounted for we do this for the animal this is for the animal the ones that came before the ones that will hopefully come after

so words are tricky we later spoke about the possibility of untethering objectification from mastery part three witnessing necropsy everything is so rotten it might be an exercise

and futility because the rest of the uterus is missing opening here everything has been washed away the diameter of the I don't know if you can see this the diameter of the uterus of the cervix indicates she's been pregnant before so yeah external bits bitten off this whole thing

has been contaminated okay okay there's nothing more I can do here as always patty and I are watching through the portals of our laptops we are hovering in the corner of your screen which we know is placed on a small trolley that attends you as you attend to this animal

thousands of miles away from us because of time differences for patty and me it's the middle of the night this rented townhouse is dark and quiet as you proceed through your protocols the birds outside here are getting louder soon traffic does too and all of a sudden the

sky is lit up my kids come downstairs for breakfast although this animal was already severely decomposed with many parts of it already scavenged the necropsy went ahead anyways there's nothing more I can do here you said but I'll do it just to say that I did during

these sessions you recite a running commentary out loud at first patty and I asked a lot of questions but now we're mostly silent I keep myself awake by taking freeform notes usually 20 or more pages per session I don't quite know why but it feels urgent to write down everything this ambition soon gives way to an aching wrist it's impossible to hold it all

any photography or recording of the necropsy room or the animal are not permitted so instead I watch patty watching you her hair is glossy black her facial expressions an index of what is happening on the table I often get absorbed in the rhythm of the note

taking focused on your voice my head stays down for two or three minutes I'm surprised to look back up at the screen and find the stainless steel table is mostly empty the animal components already removed a blue gloved hand hosing it down these animals are so elusive

your voice is still steady methodically working your way through your notes porpoise previously frozen parts of body female adult cannot determine body condition severely autolized sitting in the fridge so long suspected bycatch but undetermined

2 21 a.m as part of the project Jamie interviewed several scientists about the emotional aspect of this work one barely hesitated in her response when you look at their stomach contents she said it brings you back to the mundane life of the animal you can often see what they

were doing where they were swimming right before death I go over my notes from the first necropsy I watched it was night time for me but mid-afternoon for you your daughter called you on your cell phone I can't talk right now you told her I'm doing a necropsy you carefully checked

the organs of the porpoise for parasites you made notes this was a juvenile male good nutritional condition not yet weaned the animal's stomach still contained its mother's milk deborah bird rose writes that in living with the dying of others we bear the burden of witness

but more than that writes rose the ethical burden is a question of quote how we inhabit the death zone how we call out and how we refuse to abandon others against this vortex of death she asks what does one have to offer double death writes rose also doubles back to claim us

too even when the dead are not our kin we are tangled in the ecologies that made their life and their death even if only by proxy witnessing is a kind of response is thus strangely reciprocal what you give and what you get within a weave of life whose frayed fabrics

further unraveling we want to help stay this cannot be the only response to the violence that masks itself as inevitable but it is one response part four how to grieve in cetacean time

the dead are still waiting for us to catch up we lag behold into other times and other measures that's how perhaps a bit melodramatically I began my notes of the first necropsy I watched we were supposed to start at 2 a.m but there were delays on your end so we finally got going

around 2 45 and four hours after that we were done the time gets folded up and tucked into the night feeling the next day like either a dream or something that happened very long ago you tell us about the strange temporality of the work you do the manic rush to get things ready that falls

into the meditative slowness of being with the animal on the table during one of the necropsies you confess I had a hectic day I'm quiet now because I am enjoying just being with the animal the three of us have a standing Friday meeting although these meetings have been going on for

months none of us can ever remember what time they're at when are we meeting again one of us texts our whatsapp group we can never keep it straight cetacean time becomes our emergent shorthand for the way time keeps wrinkling and stretching folding in or slipping away

in another team meeting we talk about the freezer as a key technology of cetacean time one of the pathologists that Janie talked to described the importance of freezers necropsy of the stranded is enabled by the proximity availability size and quality of

freezers freezers seem to be a technology of suspension and by extension one of the modalities of cetacean time freezers holding cetacean time holding it in suspense before you begin each necropsy patty has asked you to take a photo of yourself with your hand on the animal this ritual is excessive you don't need to do it

but as the series of necropsies rolls on through the spring you tell me and patty about how you come to cherish this time in the freezer just you and the animal both a part of and in excess of scientific practice in may you show me an old photo you found of yourself

back in the bay of fundy from the 1990s when you were doing porpoise rescues with the research station there you were sitting in the boat a rescued porpoise quickly brought aboard before it could be safely returned to waters outside of the fishing nets your hand rests on the back

of its gray body deborah bird rose has also written about what she calls quote multi-species knots of ethical time this is when intergenerational time of the animal in the form of species kinships intersects with the now of the animal and its present

entanglements with non-kin species that nourish it in its lifetime so i think if the freezer is a technology of cetacean time it's also a habitat for the tying of a multi-species knot

but the kind that we insist on tying even and especially when death is all around us and finally part five caring for science caring for scientists who cares about these animals who are washed up on our terrestrial shores away from their own kin given the state

of our planet's oceans care here requires a commitment to these animals lives and to their ongoingness care requires a refusal to see their kind as already dead or their deaths as individuals or species as inevitable in the end a central question that our project asks is

this might science and the scientific practice of necropsy its unconventional intimacy its attentive protocols its strange suspensions in cetacean time might this also be a form of care this is not an obvious or simple proposition i am a swim in all kinds of tensions

instrumentalization objectification theoretical abstraction dangerous analogy all of this chafes against the desire for beautiful poetry and a satisfying ending just pay attention i have to keep telling myself instead of truth go for honesty in one of the necropsies i watch your

palm as it rests on little girl's back you are holding the animal but the animal's body is also supporting you literally i mean this is just a material fact the animal's body supports your

hand because it is no longer supported by the sea and succumbing to terrestrial gravity this body has now stranded on your table holding is complicated the project teaches us that nothing can hold everything we begin to understand that this kind of care requires not only the narrowing

of the aperture to see the animal in granular detail but also the capacity for concomitant pulling out to see the worlds that the animal holds and is held by or not these worlds are mostly a tangled mess but nor are they already dead but patty also asked in one of our last

meetings who cares for the scientist western science is no doubt flawed but we are also now watching all around us as science has co-opted for political gain and capitalist growth or worse

ignored and denied altogether under such circumstances what support can we extend to science and scientists in their extension of care to the stranded might science when understood as care be reconfigured might art patty suggested be for science a form of care

11 june 2021 i write in my notes strangely with each session these seem more like individual beings not less the stomach is full it's jam-packed full of food it means it fed just before it died otherwise in good condition in good health robust healthy lots of fluid in the

skin still intact on the animal i think we're ready to say 5 29 a.m and that's all thank you

uh for this beautiful presentations and also for accepting the invitations um it's really great to hear you all together um i would like to yes

yeah okay i would like to uh i will start with just a few questions but uh would be also wonderful if the audience wants to ask anything or participate in the conversation

i will start with this idea of the reparative reading that is common to these uh three presentations and that invite scientists to see their work in a different light and also

non-scientists to be part of it when i was reading this idea of reparative reading in the presentation of asrida i was of course thinking about um the idea of the paranoid reading and

the reparative reading and uh um how how the reparative reading undertakes a different range of effects and um and ambitions and risks and um and how we can learn from such practices that are perhaps um trying to extract sustenance from the objects of a culture

even of a culture who's of like who's evolved that desire has often not to sustain them so there is a contradiction between what you're defending and um and what you're criticizing

and maybe uh some of you can talk a little bit more about this desire to talk about this reparative reading in relation also to hope and to working towards the change without really believing in the change and and how uh how are the methods

for that um any one of you can start shall i start is that okay please okay uh thank you so much it's yeah it's a very nice thread that pulls the very the three presentations together

i mean i was thinking explicitly about reparative readings as you know aziza um and in some ways i think it's such you know this this is a a structure for those of you who don't know introduced by the theorist literary theorist eve sedwick where she talks about the reparative reading versus the paranoid one and although she wrote this you know many years ago it's just i

think such a parable for the times we are in you know particularly this choice of words do we want to repair or do we want to be paranoid um right now as we look at the world around us it just seems so apt i think you know particularly people who've gone through uh you know

western university training you know we've we've been so well trained to be good critics to sort of pick apart everything and find the gaps and find the flaws and find what's wrong with it and of course we need that and i think it's important to say that you know sedwick never said we shouldn't do critical readings she just said we also need to do reparative readings

um and so you know this project that i'm working on for example was very much about that you know i entered it with a bit of trepidation my sister is the scientist who i speak about and you know she's a biologist and a pathologist and you know we've always had a bit of tension you know as me the humanist and her the scientist and i had a bit of trepidation becoming

so intimately involved in her work because i was afraid i would just always want to be critical of it and what i found you know as a you know the sort of feminist decolonial critique of western science you know and what was so amazing by you know using this arts-based sort of focus of

attention to what she's actually doing in the room allowed us to both patty and myself from the artist and sort of humanist side and alexia herself to really come to see her work in a different light when you pay attention to what's there you see that of course we can critique all sorts of things but what is happening right on the table is an act of of love and hope and care

and tenderness and intimacy and we certainly don't want to throw that away and we certainly don't want to throw that away when this kind of scientific practice is also like it's also what we need it's not the only thing we need but we also need it i guess i can elaborate a bit on

what was just said uh and to perhaps approach the question of reparative reading a bit from perspective of how it mirrors certain evidentiary practices that i was trying to show in my presentation since they all show some kind of you know ethos or morality related to honesty

and fidelity to the event instead of this kind of paranoid attitude let's say so what reminded me one of the sentences from astrida's presentation about how to untether objectivity from mastery it directed me to this beautiful book by lauren dustin and

petri gallison about history of objectivity and how objectivity arised first in 18th and 19th century as let's say a moral category before it became a methodological category of western science it was related to this kind of male-dominated cultural field where actually

withdrawal from the event was the condition of discovering the truth and this kind of withdrawal i think there's something very toxic about saying that actually you have to detach yourself to actually invest in some kind of truthful seeing and that would be my kind of comment into that because to me i guess that there is a possibility to reinvent objectivity

outside of the scope of let's say the the mastery that astrida was called about what was talking about and to me that hope is also through the way how we can work with the visual and the sonic for example as i was talking about at the beginning of my lecture as a certain way how to subvert dominant modes of scientific aesthetics because in the end i guess that the

last 200 years or so of the modernist aesthetics trained us to see catastrophic as something that is beautiful or sublime and so there is an urgent need also to reconfigure this i mean that of analogy analogies and metaphors that happen between the registers of the scientific

perspective the aesthetic or the aesthetics of art and the other related fields of representation wow so i think i'm just going to derail a bit and comment a bit on i just thought

your presentation astrida was so beautiful and like especially sort of the autopsy description of little girl and i'm just going to comment a bit on that because it's as the the last sort of little video snippet i i showed of these reindeers flying away the place we flew them to

was actually the sort of home slaughterhouse and the sort of similarity between sort of an autopsy and the slaughter and also with the intimacy of the sort of putting your hands into the sort of still warm animal and also observing the life and i just remember especially one

young female reindeer calf which was two two years who had damages from an avalanche and how we noted that she had still milk in her glands even though she didn't have a calf

so the calf had been had been killed recently but just the sort of putting words to this sort of feelings this sort of care because there is also in in that situation when you're

decapitating and parting it and you're putting your hands in you're separating the skin from the body it's actually like hard work and you're struggling with it but it's also a form of care i would argue so my question is maybe would you like to comment on my claim that's so

beautiful thank you so much um yeah i think so right like uh part of i think part of what you're speaking to is an inability that many western societies now have to confront death

and to approach death as a part of life and i think you know things like this pandemic have shown that as well again so i mean i would be although of course i'm not very intimately

familiar with or witnessing of the kinds of practices you're talking about with reindeer i would you know venture to say yes you know any practice that is about you know helping a

good death or helping you know um usher a being across that threshold you know is is care and um and paying attention to how we're going to respond to endings and deaths of all kinds feels particularly urgent right now right you know so um yeah i'd love to hear more about

those those moments not right now it's not the time but uh that's really beautiful thanks for sharing that i was um also thinking about um again another common point which is this

first of all the poetics in these three presentations and like the importance of somehow the wording and finding other means to speak about this matters and i was gonna start with a sentence that i think you were saying lucash was the situational

is not contradictory with the planetary and how as in your text in in in hydro feminism uh where you speak that about the space between ourselves and our other is at once as distance as as the sea but also as close to our own skin i mean i'm

phrasing i think a bit but um also uh how in kona's work there is this idea of collapsing timelines and i think this reminds me also to uh dennis de selva um idea of a possibility

of a thought beyond uh determinacy and beyond uh uh separability so that that there is actually a possibility to approach uh nature our world uh not from from a from a point of view of being

separated and i think this this idea that comes of course from the enlightenment and from the modern thought that that the only possible human thought is related to being separate to these things or being separate to history or the times are of course dinner and that all

these things are collapsing is of course very complex and very difficult because we don't know how from where to start and how to deal with it but i feel there was an attempt in these three presentations to actually deal with this in a very attentive and still analytical and that does not obstruct the matter to a point that we are not able to talk about it and maybe

you want to say a bit more about this yeah i could try to formulate something um i think like speaking on my part you could also like reformulate it a bit and you could say

like if you go down to the like sort of core problem maybe it's this sort of duality of man nature and how this is such a bad tool in a way of understanding the world around us

and like a better formulation would maybe be that when i'm looking at nature it's nature looking back at itself in a way and and

be able to work with this perspective i think this is what i'm trying to do maybe on the more methodological note the poetics that we can talk about is also related to the question

of metaphor and the way how metaphor can be used as a wonderful cosmological engine that can actually you know produce associations that are otherwise impossible to trace so easily in a very analytic category categorically oriented framework and so to me many times also this

choice of the wording is the way how to perhaps everything that very fine web of topology that sits on top of thinking in that way that maybe for example talk about the planet in the categories of the global versus the local it immediately that invites a certain you know

scaling and zooming in and zooming out and that's already some kind of like topological you know register and to me like changing the wording using categories like the situational and the planetary that also means that no let's not talk about space it's not the right way how to approach the problem of the planetary instead let's talk about the time let's talk

about the continuity and the time scales that are implicated in let's say the geological durations and so on so to me that is important from the perspective of how actually a linguistic choice can lead to some kind of respectable rotation of sorts in the end one of my favorite philosophers is shotler he used to say that metaphors and diagrams are the two moments when

being is glimpsed smiling and i think it's a beautiful way how to you know talk about that cosmological productivity of the metaphor yeah this is a great question and i think you're absolutely right you know uh like all of the comments and aziza how you described this as a

sort of a legacy of the enlightenment and sort of newtonian sort of geometries and linear thinking and and sort of uh progressively divided time that moves forward you know all of these are you know habits right and they're habits that are deeply ingrained in the way we think but i think the good you know the good news is if we learn to them we can unlearn them

and we just need the methods and tactics and techniques to start slowly unlearning them and of course many you know i'm speaking as a western sort of educated person you know other societies don't need to unlearn them they're already there but for myself i think poetics is one

of those techniques and tactics that i can use i mean the language of artists is another one i'm not so skilled at but poetics is my tactic of choice and um here you know i years and years ago when i was reading uh the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty for the

first time one of my favorite passages in his work is about first order and second order language and you know first order language being when you can make language speak as though for the first time you know second order is just the habit when you just put all the associations that you already know but first order is when you can make language speak in an entirely new way

right and i think if that that is one way that we can train ourselves to unlearn these habits of separation and i think yeah denise's work on you know um difference uh without separability you know is is so important here yeah i agree maybe there is someone in the audience that

wants to ask something if not then i will continue with another question

i think i mean you already answered so much like through these two questions but i would like to maybe also move towards this idea of care and um which is like of course now a word that is has been used and also misused and and to also think about science as care it is really

like such a shift in the um you know in our way of looking at science as also like as its forms of violence but at the same time to acknowledge as well violence as part of the

process of life and that is also for instance a moment of an autopsy or a moment where helicopters taking reindeers up to the sky it is also a moment where um we are able as well to unveil the abstractness of violence the structural one into the into more concrete one

and just like for instance during a revolution there is a moment where for instance the the government the government's violence become become visible and how how this ethics in

relation to violence have to also somehow change in order to acknowledge as well certain practices um and that's uh care is also like it's not contradictory to a certain form of violence

and maybe you can something say something about this as frida or kora lukas i'll just briefly begin i mean by affirming i suppose what you've said i think you're right that you know we have to understand care as you know messy difficult labor you know um fraught and sometimes violent

and i also think you're right like i really like the way you you've started that by saying you know care is a word that you know we have this problem right if we find a good word and then we use it to death and um this again i think goes back to the previous question about

how can you make these words speak and you you know right now because of the state of the world it's almost impossible to evoke words now like freedom or um uh i don't know another one but you know like these words have just been so sullied and weaponized that um it's it's hard so i think

you know this i guess what we are all doing is this return to the material attention of these practices a refusal to let them slip into abstraction you know talk about the concreteness of how this word emerges rather than its kind of abstract uh sort of living in the world is is one way to try to hold on to some sort of honesty with these words so i would like to

say a bit about i think you used a really good word uh in your talk as rita the double death but it's not only the individual death but it's also the sort of the kin or specie and i think

one other like aspect of violence here which is not connected to the sort of individual death but to sort of of the death in a way of all that could have been in the sense of how we've sort of structured earth and that like i don't know if the number is correct but like

most of the ecosystem like the biomass we have sort of taken away the potential for that to be in our sort of domestication of the world and that our sort of animals our domesticated

animals have sort of taken away sort of the potentiality so so so to say of the biosphere and that there's so much violence also in like in this in a sense that it's not connected to sort of the moment of death in a way but this of depriving not only people but also animals

of the sort of potential to be in a way which i think is important one of the good entry points to the question of the relation between care and science can be also the yesterday's lecture

by holly jean back who is really great in making this kind of rotation from seeing certain practices of carbon capture for example as a mere technique or technology but instead looking at it as a kind of like cultural practice or cultural cultural project and i think that also

instructs us to see in a spirit of so much so many literature about anthropology of science to look at the science as a cultural practice and then the question of care becomes becomes more in a way i want to avoid that word but i guess it's it's fitting at this point it's

more natural to think about science as cultural practice and then also it's more natural to bring the question of care into thinking about science as a cultural practice then and so to me sometimes also the care is in this relation is a category that doesn't necessarily have to be individualized

or cyclogized it can be again seen as a sort of cultural collective way how to for example recon also with the extinction the question of extinction the way how to approach extinction was also a great problem for me when i was writing the book on comparative planetology

and i even decided to devise a special category of how to think about the planet as inhabited by ghosts this category of the spectral earth and things i mean thinking about these ghostly presences of the extinct species i that's also the way how we can see you know

the entities that actually instruct instruct us in some way how to care for what is remained how to even restore what was lost in the spirit of again hooligan hooligan bucks a book about geoengineering where she calls also where she calls some of these practices also the practices of climate restoration that can be also doesn't necessarily have to be violent technological

intervention it can also be about reviling of the territories that were taken up by extensive agriculture and other modes of artificial landscaping speaking also about the wonderful james's codes against the great book which i just recently read and extremely enjoyed

but like one of you has a question to each other or or you want to say something as a as a conclusion if there is such a thing

otherwise thank you so much for this it was really beautiful and happy that we had a chance to have a conversation and and hear you all and yeah hope i hope until very soon