Poring The Ecocide

The viscous porosity between natural and human-made has become increasingly clear in recent decades, especially through palpable manifestations of climate change—including an upsurge in the frequency of droughts, storms, fires, floods, and hurricanes. Still, we often view nature as subdued through technology. This is a result of a one-sided view positing that human agency affects the natural order, instead of acknowledging that the opposite may apply—or that a constant interaction and porosity between the two is the likely reality.

Undermining any effort to make an ontological division between natural and cultural, blurring boundaries between virtual and actual, real and possible, this porosity allows for a permanence of interactions that gives life to phenomena in constant becoming. Computer-generated realities reflect this malleable and dynamic lifeworld. Despite their elusiveness they are inherently material and in dire need of energy—meaning earthly resources. Extraction of these has an immediate influence on the ecosystems in which we and such technologies are embedded.

Via one hundred and thirty pores, Poring the Ecocide reveals certain ecological disasters caused by the energy industry. The pores also connect various computer-generated spaces that users may ramble through, collecting evidence of individual incidents in form of pore-tokens and engaging with the symptomatic consumption of the ecosystem—the Ecophagy.

As described by Nancy Tuana, “porous events” are ecological disasters that penetrate the surface of our reality. In Poring the Ecocide, portals act as pores revealing information about such ecocidical events; entering the portal means activating the pore and exposing them.