The artist at the end.
Endless streams of matter push from your hand, expanding a memory that comes from the diary of a hundred thousand years of us.
You have no concept just a drive to set us into space.
Space occupied, leaving matter as a mark on the quiet planet.
“Power is transmitted through the repeated application of pressure on the body. The body reacts to the forces, manifest as shifting material alignments and changes in potential, and becomes not simply the receiver but also the transmitter or local source of the signal or sign that operates through it. It is this responsiveness of the body that makes it the e√ect and instrument of visualising technologies.”
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Durham: Duke University Press. P189
Fluid, motion, impermanence.
Geological glossary of terms.
https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/ks3/gsl/education/resources/rockcycle/page3451.html#c
Dynamic duress create flows, ebbing from the centre, pushing outwards composing our surface for touch. The slow degeneration of motion over ever lengthening spans of history, continuing existence decreasing, erosion determines weight and location is varied via force. Diminution and modesty is not the finality of existence, falling off the edge of perception into dust.
First there was dust, the drifting remains of stellar violence. Born of the stars, the dust was fused and expelled, over and over. Once again the dust was drawn towards the creation of another, a proto-star. Over billions of years and through the manipulations of invisible but immense forces the homogeneous cloud became a system. A star, with eight sizeable planets along with the usual compliment of comets, asteroid belts and moons.
They twirled and danced under the predictable, deliberating hand of gravity. Across the gas giants storms swirled and immense magnetic fields rippled. Across rocky planets crusts floated and crashed whilst cores cooled. The same mountains, valleys and trenches existed across them all, for they were subjected to the same forces and were composed of the same minerals or elements – the legacy ofthe interstellar dust.
On some, volcanoes raged and tectonics battered, never settling. Water from comets and meteors created vast oceans and within this soup, complicated chemicals passed some indefinable threshold and became life. Life, the dust made animate, spread across those same mountains, valleys and trenches oblivious to yet at the mercy of the forces of their creation. The plates ground on, forming islands and eroding coastlines at a steady rate, solid and measured unlike the explosive and ephemeral development of life.
Ice ages came and went.
Life sought to master the planet, adapting to live anywhere upon it. Thinking creatures arose, and mastered the environment in a way never before seen. Sprawling cities, immense quarries and engineering projects sought to reshape the very world on which they stood, so as to better suit them and their desires. Pushing into space, life has noted a similarity not just within its system, but across all systems, for they are all born of stars and stardust.
Life is still precariously perched in its survival. Any number of frequent or even likely events can occur that would erase life. Despite their believed mastery, they are but a blip on the vast timelines of the universe. Like the much longer lived planets and stars about them, they will return to homogeneity, for all is born from dust and to dust everything will return.
Harley McEvoy 2017
