Do we remember? Are we remembering? In 1978 the TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) on the Nimbus-7 satellite, a fruit of the technological advancements of the Anthropocene (an epoch referring to the commencement of substantial human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems), engaged a capturing/imaging of backscattered UV rays to generate the first comprehensive worldwide measurements of the stratosphere (1, 2). By 1979 we had seen what was then (and still) coined as the ozone hole, an aberrant absence of stratospheric flesh (O 3) metastasized by the obliterative conditions of our Humanism. On the series of seasonal scans the absence is blue in the summer, and purple—like a bruise—in the winter. The scientific studies that preceded/followed these nascent and proliferate images of the ozone-orifice had made apparent that its annual fluctuations could be ascribed to regular climate patterns, while its serial expansion indicated another, more frequent force. They revealed that the consequences of our terrestrial operations—eating, moving, living, doing business—were not solely earth-bound, and could sublimate and further manifest in the sky¹.

Such has historically been the problem of the chain of smoke, breath, chlorine, CFC, methane, acid rain, UV, etc., that tethers our digging of holes in the ground to the breeding of the holes in the sky. These are, after all, human holes. Perhaps the task, then, is not so much the taking of pictures from an external, voyeuristic position—outer space—as a witness of the surveillance of a TOMS, but rather, the looking up and outward from where we are on the ground, through the ozone hole, towards the extraterrestrial. It is here that i am reminded of the hypothesis of a futile dance between some blackhole and whitehole: upon perpetual, momentous revolutions, the former ejects matter while the other eats it. In the landfill, we form blackholes in the ground, and fill them, choke them until they expand past their event horizon, becoming whiteholes. In the stratosphere, the absence of ozone is a wormhole, both a deadly funnel for UV rays and a perceptual portal that embodies and professes the bleak future.

i want to have a fear of and fear for objects.

i am nervous when i think of the trajectory of the Anthropocene (A.C.). Perhaps because it is pervaded with what Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet call ghosts, remnants of landscapes devoured by the bulldozer and the specters of indigenous species extinct. Ghosts represent “ruptures in time,” indexes of past and potential histories (6). The book is one of many that attempt to reveal the agency of nature and matter as to engender or underpin a politics of ecology. Arts of Living performs a spiritual lens, fittingly, to discuss the destruction or absence of certain ecosystems.


The show, Blackhole at the Distance of the Moon (It follows you!), is bent on such fears, traumas, theories, innocuous misanthropy, and a vigilant devotion to materiality. The a402 drop-tile ceiling is a field toxic with UV, mythical asbestos, actual asbestos, and pernicious institutional histories. The a402 floor is ground / land, property, an excavation site teeming with corporate possibilities, littered with sculptures that assume a debased construction and affect akin to pathetic art², my emission-less vehicle.

The disemboweled parachute, stretched and left loose (as to show signs of struggle) across the ceiling, casts a surrogate stratosphere over A402, referencing the state of Earth’s atmosphere in 2006 (in which the ozone hole had climactically assumed an area of 27 million km^2). The hole in the parachute—a sort of orifice—siphons deadly rays of fluorescent light (an aspect inherent to the A402 ceiling, performing UV) toward sculptures/objects littered on the gallery floor. Does this orifice, therefore, weaponize fluorescence, affecting a mass destruction, or channel it, like an oracle? Did/Does ozone depletion in the stratosphere, manifest as a hole, an absence, embody a premonition? Does it call to us? What does it say? The parachute imbibes a second connotation: a barrier that keeps a pilot or skydiver safe from death, but in its compromised structure, its deflation, stripped of its proper function. It hangs over the gallery like an omen, an index of decease.

In the corner of the gallery, at a potentially orbital position, hangs Moon (displaced/eaten), of which a papier-mâché replica of the Moon (a sort of piñata) rests on a space-time plane composed of trampoline materials, so stretched/distorted as to accentuate an outstanding, violent tension and gravity. It envisages a pseudo-phenomena, a terrifying, pataphysical spectacle in which the moon is eaten, then displaced by a blackhole moving in towards Earth and us on it—a fantastical, outlandish proposition! Yet manifest tangibly in the close past as an ozone hole, landscapes obliterated, ghosts—they follow us everywhere.

Special thanks to Jessica Bronson, Casey Chan, Julia Chai, Jiayun (Angela) Chen, Harry Dodge, Michael Ned Holte, Tom Lawson, Alexandra De Leon, Cauleen Smith, Shirley Tse.

footnotes:

¹ Certainly with the global efforts of 197 countries in regulating the production and application of CFCs and the ratification of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, the ozone hole is showing signs of recovery. Yet the orifice does not close easy: the eradication of ozone depleting substances from the atmosphere is only more difficult in the face of their stubborn proliferation and release. With the rise of the right, globalization, and industrialization (still), the stratosphere, glaciers, wildlife, our skin are still, and ever the more at risk.

² Pathetic art is a term describing the inclinations of the works of artists Cady Noland, David Hammons, Mike Kelly, etc. in the 1990 seminal exhibition Just Pathetic, of which the mission was to create art-objects of such ill construction and conceptual deplorability as to affect/reflect a critical, institutional, capital failure. In Blackhole at the Distance of the Moon (It follows you!), pathetic art is activated to mimic, embody, remind of the human as the catalyst of global catastrophe.

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references:

(1) http://www.theozonehole.com/ozoneholehistory.htm
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
(3) Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017
(4) Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

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1. CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons)

The Chlorofluorocarbon was devised in 1929 by mechanical and chemical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. as a non-toxic alternative to the cooling agents (ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide) that had been in use since the 19th century (5). The molecule type was later altered, applied and distributed as Freon (dichlorodifluoromethane) in 1930 by American chemical company DuPont (1). Half a century later, in 1974, M.J. Molina and F.S. Rowland published a laboratory study demonstrating the CFC’s propensity to destroy/restructure the ozone molecule in the presence of UV light (See Fig. 1) (1).

2. PSCs (Polar Stratospheric Clouds)

In winter, Antartica experiences temperatures as low as -80°C (-112 °F), possessing conditions that enable the formation of PSCs (Polar Stratospheric Clouds), a nacreous (see Fig. 2) cloud with a surface on which certain heterogenous chemical reactions may ensue (1, 3). Ozone depletion occurs when free radicals of chorine in the stratosphere intercept, and subsequently destroy ozone (O3) particles upon PSCs, a process identical to the violent dance of UV and the CFC molecule. It is important to acknowledge that the various fluctuations in the ozone hole are partially characterized by seasonal climate patterns. However, with the advent of global warming, the fluctuations oscillate on a trajectory of carnage that is a direct result of human growth and activity. The smog of the troposphere, due to the ever increasing proliferation and pervasion of greenhouse gases, disrupts the conveyance of heat through the atmosphere into outer space. The result is a heating of the troposphere—by which the power of the Sun, absorbed by/released from Earth’s surface, becomes trapped within—and a cooling of the stratosphere—by which the lower temperature catalyzes the formation of PSCs.

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references:

(1) http://www.theozonehole.com/ozoneholehistory.htm
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene(3) http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/environment/atmosphere/polar-stratospheric- clouds
(4) https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/ozone-hole-and-gw- faq.html#.W98eineZOCQ
(5) https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-freon-4072212

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