A few notes about the themes, questions, hypotheses and methods behind Dust and Shadow.

Desertification

• Everything shrivels up and erodes into dust; desertification related to ecology and culture (intergenerational memory)
• Humans come and go
• (Engineering) mistakes cause large scale ecological transformations

Probabilistic Future Preparedness

• Phoenix holding onto permanence
• Civilisations with expiration dates (one moment or slow subsiding)
• Prehearsals of obsolescence
• Urban desert / urban wilderness

Attunement

• material wonder & wander
• layered time, massive scale
• beyond human relationships
• solitude and indifference
• (i)nertness
• naming
• conviviality with diverse entities, different lenses of interrelation

Zombie utopias

• Shadows
• Ghost towns
• Haunted utopias, vampiric utopias, parasitic utopias
• Troubled past
• Living but already dead (eg. Paradise City); planning for unsustainability

What are the (environmental) critical uncertainties in the region?

• What/how to extrapolate local conditions to other deserts and environments on their way to become deserts?

What does a thalient laboratory in the desert look like?

• How to translate animist attitudes into worldviews compatible with contemporary techno-materialist societies?
• How to (re)animate pre-modern sensibilities without dualisms of light/dark, good/evil, love/power?
• What arts, sciences and technologies become possible if we widen the 'sentience spectrum' and emphasize experience and interaction with diverse beings?
• Should we refrain from speech and use the visceral language of experience?
• How do we speak of relations as well as things?

What might urban futures in the American South West look like?

• How to turn or move from zombie/vampiric utopias to regenerative ('log') eutopias?
• What would a banishing ritual for haunted utopias be like?
• Why attempt to build cities in the desert?
• What would a pre-enactment for futures of Phoenix look like?

We can adapt or mitigate climate chaos (etc.) by changing mindset/worldview and their underlying myths.

• Art can initiate, amplify or test this change.
• We can draw inspiration from animism, panpsychism, shinto, shamanism, etc.
• Any technological solutions will be perverted by existing dominant ideologies (and vice versa)
• Myth-making and reactivating myths can animate inert geological and architectural markers
• We need a new form of geomancy
• There are sacred refugia and wild sanctuaries to uncover (explore/preserve)

We can become human receptors and listening devices

• We practice the craft of silence and heterogeneous hearing to help us attune to our surroundings.
• At all times there are other beings listening. We can hear each other if we pay attention.
• We tread lightly seeing with new eyes. We witness and weave threads of connection with other people and places (FoAM)
• Our language can liquefy
• We communicate to connect, not dissect

The desert invites unencumbered experimentation, yet the desert is also unforgiving

• It is possible to thrive in uncertainty
• Objectives obscure progress
• We should move from social contracts to natural contracts
• It is possible to transform zombie utopias into fertile compost for new eutopias
• Neo-reaction and new age are each other's flip-sides, collapsing complexity of uncertainty into platitudes

… vaporous thoughts condensed into propositions, commonplaces and fieldguides, by:

• seeing, listening, tasting, smelling, experiencing (sensing & activating)
• walking
• fieldwork
• inquiry (critical, embodied…)
• experiential futures and speculative design
• action research
• contemporary rituals and peak experiences
• contemplative practices and attunement
• writing