A Map of Planetary Systems For Collaborative Futures
View of Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s exhibition, Āmantēcayōtl: And When it Disappears, it is Said, the Moon has Died, at Canal Projects in spring 2024. Photo by Rachel TonThat.
On my way to anywhere, I see moments that call to me—the sunlit rim of a silver can or the color and texture of the water in late afternoon, fleeting moments that light transforms and only a painting or song might capture. The arts have always appealed to me as a way of examining “reality,” of holding fragments to the light, of slowing or traveling through time, and of looking through a nearly infinite number of realities and possibilities. These capabilities are more invaluable than ever in a time when so much seems to be shifting in the natural and technical systems around us.
In my early 20s, I visited cities with eager curiosity. Now I travel to see nature with new urgency, trying to experience ecosystems and geological features before they change, irrevocably, from their current forms. In April, I walked slowly uphill to view a Tibetan glacier moving as if through honey, the air at 5,560 meters (18,241 feet) thin and dry, while Chinese tourists snapping photos sucked in oxygen from silver canisters. It was the same month that Time published an exposé on the immense quantities of water cooling server farms in water-scarce states like Arizona, and over a year after the completion of the first underwater server farm off the coast of Hainan, China, its energy efficiency supposedly offsetting, in the minds of the local government, the unknown effect on surrounding marine ecosystems. In July, on the same day meteorologists recorded the world's hottest day—though the preceding and following days also broke last year's record—I looked down from an alp in the canton of St. Gallen thinking about the simple life of cattle herding related in the traditional Swiss folktales I was translating. It felt as if the technological realm and the environmental world were at odds, the expansion of one occurring at the expense of the other.
“It felt as if the technological realm and the environmental world were at odds, the expansion of one occurring at the expense of the other.”
Often, when I think of the architecture of our technological systems, I think of the “Internet of Things,” a term coined in 1999 that encompasses all devices that can communicate with each other. There is nothing more natural than this connectivity. Modern technology has grown to populate the earth almost as a new species, fashioned by our hands to be largely biomimetic, taking inspiration from the natural world.
Photo by Amy Elting/Unsplash
Within this system are the telecommunications cables whose sinuous lengths could circle the globe thrice over (or possibly many more times, as there is no known account of their sum)—ancient telegraph cables of centuries-old, now-oxidized copper wires with a latex coating from the gutta-percha tree, coaxial cables of yesteryears, and the rope-like submarine internet cables of today, as thick as a human wrist, or neck, or torso, made to withstand the cold, unrelenting pressure of the undersea. There are the satellites that gaze down at us and relay our movements and conversations. And there are the devices we carry with us and install in our homes to connect us to the warp and weft of it all, apparatuses akin to the biological systems of neurons and the roots of trees through which runs a mycelial network composed of branching fungi exchanging another kind of data.
Unlike that mycelial network whose microbes are a part of the earth, our synthetic network has its own unique interface. We created the internet to foster a greater connection than two people speaking on a line, to give us libraries at our fingertips, and new exchanges of information. It also produced an expansion of the physical world: scanned digital pages of a physical book, shops that represented physical products, and living virtual maps, apparitions of the real. In their 1998 paper, “The Extended Mind,” Andy Clark and David Chalmers presciently introduced the concept of “active externalism,” through which objects around us function as part of the mind.
Currently, the estimated number of people with a smartphone and access to a computer hovers around two-thirds of the world’s population, and whether these objects act as an extension of the mind or simply inhabit significant mental space is yet undetermined. They have become the lenses through which we view and connect to the world. Too often, we view nature through this glass. “In some sense, we think we are the most advanced culture,” psychologist Peter Kahn, who has written about the experience of nature through technology, says in his documentary, Forgetting Nature. “But in some other ways, we are more distant from the natural world than any other culture has ever been.”
Technology, broadly defined as “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes” in the Oxford English Dictionary, feels like an absolute, an indivisible wave of ever-improving products and their capabilities. Yet just as Kahn spoke about other cultures, Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui has written about “cosmotechnics,” or how technology is unique to each culture and its idea of the cosmos. His writing has become a reference in the work of artists and curators working around the decolonization of technology, including Sara Garzón, who curated Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s exhibition, Āmantēcayōtl: And When it Disappears, it is Said, the Moon has Died, at Canal Projects in spring 2024.
View of Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s exhibition, Āmantēcayōtl: And When it Disappears, it is Said, the Moon has Died, at Canal Projects in spring 2024. Photo by Rachel TonThat.
View of Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s exhibition, Āmantēcayōtl: And When it Disappears, it is Said, the Moon has Died, at Canal Projects in spring 2024. Photo by Rachel TonThat.
I have always had a sensitivity to space, the way an arrangement of a room might shift one’s demeanor, even subconsciously. Walking through the gallery door one afternoon in late May, I felt that change; the installation filled and balanced the room. In the center, facing the entrance, a large, iridescent serpent of gold foil and machinery poised over a mound of earth resembling a spider. Attending serpents moved back and forth along the four cardinal points, surrounded by flaxen-colored dried corn stalks. The slender pillars of the room only accentuated the likeness of a field, the desire of plants to root from the earth to reach for sun and sky. In simple and eloquent terms, Garzón, a New York–based Colombian curator, recounted the mythological story of corn, of how the coyote god Huehuecóatl laughed so hard that his stomach split, and from his entrails sprouted the first shoots of corn.
The exhibition underlined Indigenous technologies that work symbiotically with the land and wove them together with the contemporary technology of Palma Rodríguez’s robots in a reimagination of the milpa, a traditional crop system utilizing polyculture and other traditional practices. Polyculture, a technology that Indigenous cultures around the world invented, is present in the Americas in the companion planting of corn, squash, and beans. This planting was not static, and depending on elevation, climate, and soil, it could include other plants. Within the original trio, the cornstalk acts as a trellis for the beans; the beans draw atmospheric nitrogen into a usable, soil-based form that fertilizes the corn, and the broad leaves of the squash keep the soil moist and reduce weed growth. Polyculture fields sustain a more diverse insect population with a largely self-balancing ecosystem, mitigating the need for pesticides.
“Within the original trio, the cornstalk acts as a trellis for the beans; the beans draw atmospheric nitrogen into a usable, soil-based form that fertilizes the corn, and the broad leaves of the squash keep the soil moist and reduce weed growth.”
Palma Rodríguez’s robotic serpents also reference a second traditional practice: the relationship farmers had with snakes that they welcomed in the fields to help keep pests like mice in check. In his installation, they exist as guardians that move in conjunction with data from weather sensors in the Milpa Alta region outside of Mexico City, the site of both Palma Rodríguez’s hometown and farmlands that trace back to the height of the Aztec civilization.
Mythology, or more plainly, storytelling, is the thread that leads to the heart of a culture and to a deeper understanding of its value system. In Aztec tales, many gods shapeshifted between animal and human forms, such as the coyote god Huehuecóyotl who first brought corn and the jaguar lord Tezcatlipoca. The land itself, such as the Teuhtli volcano where the Indigenous people of the Milpa Alta region have grown their crops for centuries, was a sacred entity. There is also a Native American tale of The Three Sisters, in which the corn, squash, and bean plants appear as three women who travel and share their knowledge of farming with all.
In these stories, the animals, land, and plants are interdependent beings deserving of mutual respect. Contrastingly, the word “robot” first appeared in Karel Capek’s 1920s play, R.U.R., as the name of a new race of synthetic beings made to serve humankind. Since then, the vast majority of science-fiction stories, including Isaac Asimov’s iconic I, Robot, and Philip K. Dick’s novel-turned-film Blade Runner, have pitted man against machine, alternating between master and subaltern, with very few being able to envision a harmonious balance between the two.
In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reflects on the origins of our differing relationships with nature. “What lies at the root of these differences? On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by [the story of] Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all,” Kimmerer writes. “On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit she was banished from the garden . . . in order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.”
While thinking about Palma Rodríguez’s installation and Garzón’s curatorial work, I later came across artist Paula Gaetano Adi, who, alongside architect Gustovo Crembil, created a platform that reflects the spirit of polyculture. Their project, Mestizo Robotics, developed robots combining high and low materials in collaboration with artists and engineers from universities in the U.S. and Argentina as well as a local community in a village in the Peruvian Amazon. As Adi and Crembil write, “‘Mestizo Technology’ is a creative conceptual appropriation inspired by the legacy of two distant, and apparently unrelated occurrences: mestizaje not as the study of mixed-race people, but as a creative and transformative practice and cultural theory of resistance; and technology, alongside the rising interest in hands-on and critical making practices.” TZ'iJK, an early robotic prototype encased in mud and clay, references the Maya creation myth from the Popol Vuh, which tells of how the gods used mud to make the first beings, ungainly creatures who quickly fell apart. In this vein, Mestizo Robotics explored the notion of the primordial robot—autonomous and non-humanoid—outside of the cosmology of Western technology.
“And there are older, plainer ways of seeing, which perhaps we have left to the wayside but that we can still dust off and take up again.”
In a 2023 interview with the artist-run platform La Escuela, Garzón writes, “The power of art to transform or break open colonial and anthropocentric barriers to seeing lies in deconstructing the mechanisms of visuality that build and normalize a single way of being in the world.” Our technological monoculture, set apart from the natural world, stands in contrast to the richly cooperative model of land stewardship laid out in Palma Rodríguez’s Āmantēcayōtl or in the equally reciprocal production of Adi and Crembil’s speculative robots. Art’s capacity to build as yet imaginary worlds is one way to address this disconnect; among these many lenses lie keys for new solutions, glints of gold in incalculable creeks. And there are older, plainer ways of seeing, which perhaps we have left to the wayside but that we can still dust off and take up again.
At night, on my way home, I walk down the sidepath sheltered from the main road. To the left is a thick stand of trees of many kinds, a tiny suburban wood where hanging boughs intermingle, and I take off my headphones to listen to the wind in their branches. I walk to the opening in the hedge, mindful of other amblers—rabbits, believing themselves cloaked in darkness, pausing near the underbrush, or the neighborhood skunk shuffling around near midnight. When we cross paths we each wait for the other to pass at a comfortable distance—often in our own worlds and yet sharing one.
