Mining The Anthropocene
Mining the Anthropocene is an expedition that endeavours to tunnel into
today's quasi-tangible, mostly-incorporeal epoch. The word ‘Anthropocene’ describes today’s
geologic age, a period in which human activity has begun to irreversibly impact our planet’s ecosystem.
It’s our epoch.
This project is an experiment in visualizing the Anthropocene. Instead of leaving it ephemeral
and intangible, what if we made our epoch the timeless identifier of geologic ages – a stratum?
The gradient of the epochs the earth has passed through is visible in sedimentary strata – massive, polished, layered rocks.
The same model can be used to embody our current epoch; zooming into the idea both physically and conceptually.
The Anthropocene can hence be embodied in a rock fragment, with layers and compositions distinct.
Each layer is a reference to a decade. The Anthropocene has been hypothesized to originate in 1950, a time after
which human-induced changes were unmistakably vivid. Over 70 years have passed since this rumored
start, rendering a rock composed of 7 layers.
This project utilises a "darkroom" - a storage unit of frozen samples.
Photography, processing, & simulation hence become intrinsic to this expedition.
The Anthropocene is an organism in its own right.
Anything that contains organisms - living, breathing
entities - as a system feels like a living, breathing,
heaving body in itself. This organism is forming, growing,
from the shards of today captured in the darkroom,
blurring the line between fossil and creature.
Tara Mukund is a visual artist & student at Pomona College,
currently caught in the liminal space between Delhi and Seoul.
Her work is focused on technology-driven abstractions of nature,
which she renders in varying forms—including sculpture, animation,
3D modeling and printing, and design. Motifs that she is fascinated
by—and, by extension, themes central to her work—include the
Anthropocene, noise, place-creation and geology, posthumanism,
cyberspace, and the symbiotic relationship between nature &
technology. Even after ruminating about the digital hyperobject ad
infinitum, she remains just as mired in it as the rest of us.