Haunting Marina

Marina Zurkow’s back in Houston, but I find myself thinking about Shakespeare. Don’t blame me: it’s what’s in a name.

To begin with, Marina Zurkow just last night delivered a magnificent inaugural lecture, “Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems” for Rice’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS). This will be the first of a few posts on Zurkow’s projects.

I’ve thought a lot about Zurkow’s work, and am thrilled to be part of a CENHS cluster presenting her work at Rice this year with Tim Morton, Aynne Kokas, and Derek Woods, including an artist’s meal about petrochemicals and geological time called “Outside the Work” in March 2014.

The other component of the project involves appearances of her 2012 software-driven animation “Mesocosm (Wink, TX).” The animation creates activity around a sinkhole in the Permian Basin in Wink, TX. A whole year of time plays out in 144 hours of unique events. At her talk, Marina told us the software was designed to treat all of unique figures–butterflies, birds, men in hazmats suits–all the same. Algorithms give each a chance of appearing in the landscape as clouds swirl by, seasons change, and water swirls endlessly in this man-made and yet natural environment that would not exist without the extensive drilling for oil in the Permian Basin. The sinkhole is a signature of devastation, but as Marina pointed out it is also a place where life blooms.

Here’s a still:

And here’s a link: Mesocosm.

Zurkow’s interest is in creating a language of re-enchantment around energy and the environment, an alternative to what she called the “dark polemical apocalypse” that characterizes much of the rhetoric around ecology right now. Enchantment is no easy thing. Humans are haunted by things both living and dead. And we are haunted by the consequences of our actions, as when a sinkhole, a signature of destruction, becomes a brilliant blue pool.

Here’s another image of the Wink Sink, as it’s called, around which Zurkow designed “Mesocosm”:

Swirling waters bring me back to Shakespeare. One of his weirdest plays, Pericles, features a hapless king washed from shore to shore. He seeks a bride and gets clobbered by a shipwreck. He gets married and has a child–named Marina–and gets clobbered by a shipwreck. Do we detect a theme? Here he is railing at his fate, just having washed up to shore from his first shipwreck:

“Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Wind, rain, and thunder, remember, earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to you;
And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.”

What humility in storm! One little “earthly man,” stripped of power, agrees to yield to the elements and obey them. Zurkow suggest something else in the face of forces and timescales beyond human ken. She wonders what it would be to practice friendliness, a Buddhist meditative practice called Metta, and sensory receptivity to all things: living or dead, bird or beast, canyon or sinkhole.

What’s better for meditative practice than “Mesocosm, Wink, TX”? In my next entries, I’ll say a little more about Zurkow’s lecture but I’ll also report my own results.

What happens when I look–closely, carefully, and slowly–at “Mesocosm” each day?