Nov/Dec 02017 by FoAM.Earth

Guests: Nik Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanovic (FoAM)
Hosts: Ron Broglio, Adam Nocek, Stacey Moran, Sha Xin Wei (ASU)

Read more about this field trip in Dust & Shadow Field Notes #2 on Medium

We spent two weeks at the ASU campus, inquiring about existing and potential relationships between people and the desert. We interrogated existing myths underlying contemporary lifestyles and re-imagined counter-myths that could be more attuned to the desert environment. From these myths we created a series of propositions to prototype as embodied experiences and publications in 2018.

This field trip was an immersion in the academic life in Phoenix, specifically ASU's Lab for Critical Technics and Synthesis Center. Our primary modes of exploring the field were structured and unstructured conversations and futuring. We developed concepts, experiments, and plans for publications. In an “Experiential Alignment Unconference” we explored the ideas behind Dust & Shadow using different modalities; collective reading (Quickening), systemic constellation; embodied listening; docufiction (The Last Angel of History), sacred objects and desert totems, listening to the The Imperative while sipping tequila after sunset…

Occasionally we would venture beyond campus, sometimes guided other times not. We wandered in the Superstitions and the Piestewa Peak, Papago and Moeur parks, the Superstition Mountain Museum and the Pueblo Grande ruins. We experienced a silent Full Moon Walk with the Museum of Walking and found a site for FoAM's audio-walk. Attuning to the academic environment inevitably involved paperwork, meetings with students and faculty, including Angela Ellsworth, Adriene Jenik, Luke Kautz and Heather Lineberry. We gave a lecture (adapted from In anticipation) and treated the visitors to a clandestine FoAM Apero.

Along with the various activities on campus, we were temporarily adopted into our collaborators' family life, which allowed us to experience (among many other things) our first Thanksgiving feast with the Moran-Nocek clan.

Further notes on: concepts | futuring | experiments | publications | resonances